His bartender friend, Chris DeBoer, youngest offspring of the late prime minister, announced that he had written a book.

“So you, what, wrote some sort of nasty novel about women, is that it? Well no wonder no one wanted to publish it. Plenty of books never get published. The vast majority of books never get published.” (pg. 86)

But DeBoer’s friend, Melanie, told Purdy it was going to be published, but not by a Canadian publisher.

“No offence, Chris, but six weeks isn’t really a great deal of time to output a finished manuscript, former prime minister’s son or not.”

“Look, the publishers up here rejected it for all the wrong reasons, just as you knew they would.”

“What, and the Americans accepted it for all the right reason?”

”Actually no, they accepted it for all the wrong ones,” Chris said.

I must admit I was altogether thrown by that. And in truth it suddenly occurred to me that I was asking all these questions under the mistaken notion that these people had something to gain from their contribution.

”I must be missing something here,” I said, “because this really makes no sense whatsoever.”

”Well there’s something else you should probably know, Billy. Something the others — don’t.”

“Good Christ, there must be.”

”I took it word for word from your father’s book.”

”Lovestiff Annie? Are you serious?”

”Yup.”

He looked at me a long time. He was waiting for me to say no, I suppose.

Purdy didn’t say no.

From this point, Needham has Purdy perusing nearly every bar in Canada along with his so-called friend DeBoer and a number of other shady characters who help contribute to Purdy’s abuse. Needham’s characters and description are so real; the readers will find themselves sitting on bar stools, sniffing the stagnant smoke-filled, booze-infiltrated air.

Mitch was overweight, not so overweight as to mention it twice perhaps, but in my mind still overweight, with small, soft, almost feminine hands forever fluttering up around his chubby face, receding jaw and cauliflowered ears, one hand telling the story, the other hand underlining all the important words. Penance, no doubt, for the sin of being a pimp, Mitch always seemed to be sporting some rather large oval sweat stains under the arms of his dress shirts, and his soft feminine hands (devoid, like the rest of him, of any and all suspicion of bone), when not fluttering up around his ears, were either aggressively engaged with his chubby, sweating glasses of overproof run and Coke or else squeezing the last vestiges of life from a perpetually dying smoke.

Needham has Purdy gallivanting with DeBoer; following him, keeping an eye on him, and discussing the book. He takes the reader on a tour from one Canadian bar to another, and when he and his friends run out of bars in Canada, they leave on journeys to peruse other watering holes. They skipped from bars in New York, San Jose, Vancouver, and Prague, with a stopover in Amsterdam, a “milk-run” from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Guatemala City, then to Costa Rica, and ending in Puerto Limon for the Columbus Day festival.