An old black man reliving his whimsical past as a circus artist wire-dances on a tenement clothesline, high above the heads of a cheering crowd. Two white cops called in to "control the situation" try to talk him down. When one of them, surly and impatient, pulls a gun, the old man gives, pivots on the wire, slips, and plunges to his death. The crowd erupts. The city becomes a war zone.

The cast of characters: Larry, a rookie cop who escapes the mob and finds refuge in an abandoned building, where he cowers, bleeding and terrified for his life. Arletha Mae, a fifteen-year-old black girl who has found redemption in the Gospel and her six-month-old baby, J.D., a death-tripping Vietnam vet tormented by visions of the war and the need for destruction.

Ben, an unemployed engineer embittered by divorce and plagued by ambiguous feeling about his damaged ten-year-old son - a son who disappears into the heart of the violence. Together and apart, these vivid characters take the reader on a scorching "ship of fools" ride through twenty-four hours in the minefield of modern urban America.