It's 1982. Rodney Pepper, a socially inept college drop-out, heads to New Orleans seeking to engulf himself in despair and abject misery in the belief this will lead him to Wisdom: Until that point, he derived his understanding of life from watching television and misreading psychoanalytic literary criticism.

Barely off the bus, a man claiming to be his long-lost Uncle Gambi accosts Rodney and bestows on him an unexpected and unwanted pirate legacy. As he looks for work and moves between dilapidated downtown rooming houses, he is preyed upon by agents of the city’s underworld and bears witness to ancient buccaneering atrocity. Mayhem and skullduggery, self-imposed or otherwise, follow him every step of the way. Can he decipher a dead man's code and locate what lays hidden before he too is swallowed up by violence?