Alexander Vine is a young man who lives in New York and works as a doorman at the city's most exclusive restaurant. He hails cabs with his whistle, tips his hat with grace to the restaurant's wealthy patrons, and when he opens limo doors, he fantasizes that a rich widow laden with pearls will emerge to seduce him.
Entering into Manhattan's erotic underworld, he willfully sets out to endanger himself. He lives in a place of devastation, the Lower East Side of his Jewish immigrant roots. There he consorts with the inhabitants of the down-and-out neighborhood, in its back alleys and bars.
In the same dark sidestreets where he courts his self-destruction, Alexander is on a journey that can - or win him - his soul.
