Chicken — the word is slang for a young male prostitute — revisits this year of living dangerously, in a narrative of dazzling inventiveness and searing candor. Shifting back and forth from tales of Sterry's youth — spent in the awkward bosom of a disintegrating dysfunctional family — to his fascinating account of the Neverland of post-sixties sexual excess, Chicken teems with Felliniesque characters and set pieces worthy of Dionysus. And when the life finally overwhelms Sterry, his retreat from the profession will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds and hearts.

I walk all the way up Hollywood Boulevard to Grauman's Chinese Theatre: past turistas snapping shots; wannabe starlets sparkling by in miniskirts with head shots in their hands and moondust in their eyes; rowdy cowboys drinking with drunken Indians; black businessmen bustling by briskly in crisp suits; ladies who do not lunch with nylons rolled up below the knee pushing shopping carts full of everything they own; Mustangs rubbing up against muscular Mercedes and Hell's Angels hogs.

It's a sick twisted Wonderland, and I'm Alice.

Here is a story like no other: The unforgettable chronicle of a season spent walking the razor-sharp line between painful innocence and the allure of the abyss. David Sterry was a wide-eyed son of 1970s suburbia, but within his first week looking for off-campus housing on Sunset Boulevard he was lured into a much darker world — servicing the lonely women of Hollywood by night.

Chicken — the word is slang for a young male prostitute — revisits this year of living dangerously, in a narrative of dazzling inventiveness and searing candor. Shifting back and forth from tales of Sterry's youth — spent in the awkward bosom of a disintegrating dysfunctional family — to his fascinating account of the Neverland of post-sixties sexual excess, Chicken teems with Felliniesque characters and set pieces worthy of Dionysus. And when the life finally overwhelms Sterry, his retreat from the profession will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds and hearts.

But nothing prepared him for the next step he took — into the world of teenage prostitution. On his first night in Hollywood he is brutally raped by a street hustler who'd offered to help him; a few weeks later he is offered a job as a chicken — a prostitute to the lonely, rich, bored housewives of Hollywood. At first he's intrigued by the job: sexually precocious, conditioned by his mother to understand and want to please women, he's more than happy to make a few extra hundred bucks a week servicing them. But the longer he is exposed to the underbelly of 70s Hollywood — the drugs, the blank-eyed women, the decadent orgies — the more disoriented and disaffected he feels...until a series of events gradually persuades him to give up the life forever.

Chicken is a book like no other. Bleak and sexy, starkly honest and surprisingly funny, it alternates between flashbacks to Sterry's uncomfortable suburban childhood and his time as a chicken — nights spent as a hired stud in "nuthugging elephantbell" pants and Hendrix t-shirts, days spent masquerading as a perfectly normal freshman going to classes and falling in love. Through its unforgettably playful narrative voice, and the very strangeness of the story itself, Chicken conveys something fresh, and unexpectedly uplifting, about what it means to suffer through the American Dream and make it out alive.

DavidHenrySterry has worked as an actor, a marriage counselor, a screenwriter, a comedian, and an athlete. Also the author (with Arielle Eckstut) of Satchel Sez: The Wit, Wisdom, and World of Leroy "Satchel" Paige, he lives in San Rafael, California.