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Sherry, the girlfriend of the former “Don Juan,” successful older businessman Don Johnston, ends their relationship. At around the same time, he receives an anonymous pink letter revealing to him that he has a nineteen-year-old son, but he has no clue as to who the mother might be. Don’s friend and neighbor ,Winston, an aspiring “Sherlock Holmes,” compiles a list of Don’s former girlfriends and presses a plan for a cross-country trip to meet each of them and subsequently learn the identity of the son. A reluctant and emotionless Don, armed with flowers, first visits the widow, Laura, preceded by her teenage daughter, Lolita, who affronts him by appearing naked in an asexual context in a show of emancipation at his expense. Laura herself, however, is the one person in the film who treats him humanely and as a sexual being. Then he meets the successful real estate agent Dora and her husband Ron and they have an uncomfortable dinner together, with Don as a third wheel. He next takes flowers to the office old flame Dr. Carmen, now a writer on the psychology of pets and a communicator with animals, (based on her ‘relationship’ with a deceased canine.) Her much younger secretary gives Don a markedly icy reception supposedly because of his unannounced arrival. He unapologetically imposes on Carmen’s schedule, but despite his best efforts he can not penetrate her armor. And the secretary, as an afterthought, returns the flowers. Lastly, he plies his charms with Penny, yet another example of resentment, living in the woods with a pair of younger motorcycle toughs, one of whom, on the pretense of gentlemanly concern about what he makes out to be insensitivity towards Penny, cold-cocks Don Johnston. Johnston wakes up in his car with the flowers broken. A little desperate now, he makes the brief acquaintanceship of a young, kind-hearted lady florist, Sun Green, who begins to show some inclination towards tenderness, although she finds his name, Don Johnston, impossibly quaint. Back on the street, unshaven and looking increasingly like a bum, Johnston has a brief encounter with a young male hitchhiker for whom he buys a sandwich, but then makes an awkward comment how the hiker, who has been brought up in a Fatherless setting, must think Don is his Father! This goes over about as poorly as every other attempt at expression by Johnston throughout the film. It now becomes clear that while Don’s perception of everyone from his past as blatantly neurotic is pretty accurate, Don Johnston himself, with the romantic supports of his youth withdrawn and standing lost perilously in traffic, is also himself a pretty spurious and expendable character in the eyes of the world, or at least for the moment his odyssey has brought him to that pass. Don ultimately returns home without solving the mystery but realizing that his past is lost irretrievably.
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