Walter Dinsmore's annual January breakdown begins shortly after he leaves his mother's apartment. He is delivered by caesarian section [or through a hysterectomy?] of 189 ten-dollar bills, an accumulation which is the result of swallowing a nickel when he was a child. Psychoanalysis proves of little help to him inasmuch as he sees nothing wrong with being in love with his mother. Death offers no solution; Heaven promptly rejects Walter and sends him back to Earth, whereupon he is sold as a pop art creation. He takes an acting job as a policeman in an underground film but finds that "all the action takes place behind the camera." After the movie project folds because someone knocks over the camera, Walter keeps his policeman's uniform, directs traffic at Times Square, and accepts bribes from pornography peddlers. He helps cater potato salad at a Bar Mitzvah and meets a woman who is hiding under a table. When their rooftop orgy is interrupted by the caterer, Walter flings him to the street below. Walter's cousin, in a telephone call from the Dixie Hotel on 43d Street, complains that Walter has made her pregnant. He throws her from the window, and she lands on a theater marquee, gaining instant "star billing." After becoming a rock and roll singing sensation with a song entitled "In Your Black Leather Negligee," Walter returns home and finds that his father has died. Walter marries his mother, becomes a proud father, moves to the suburbs, and lives happily on welfare. [The order of events is uncertain.]