The Dream Mechanic is a Southern Gothic journey back to the Me Decade of the 1970s when credit card debt was tax deductible and businesses that lost money were profitable. After graduating from the University of Urban Failures (UUF), Wilbur Dobbs takes a job as a dream mechanic setting up waterbeds at Wetbedders, a small business and tax write-off for Dave and Margo Hamilton, so that he can pay back his National Defense Student Loan from UUF and the Record Club of America for three hundred copies of In The Court of The Crimson King, his favorite album. Wilbur is fed, clothed, liquored, stoned, entertained, loved, hated, and abused by a variety of people from the Me Decade as he enters the inner sanctums of their bedrooms for several hours that make indelible impressions on his overactive mind. The reader is in for a real treat as Dobbs meets weird and wonderful characters from up and down the social ladder reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole's, A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, and James Purdy's, MALCOLM. One of them is a thirty million dollar soda pop heiress married to a personal injury and divorce lawyer who added his name to all the stock she inherited. They live in a three story house but she is restricted to a remodeling account that her husband controls. She is immediately smitten with Dobbs who lives in a second floor apartment with low ceilings above an elderly couple with a mynah bird named Sam that knows the whereabouts of some stolen loot. Wilbur inherits Sam and tries to smoke the information about the loot out of him by getting him stoned. It doesn't work until one night there is a knock at the door and the heiress appears. They end up making love in his pile of dirty laundry but not before discovering the whereabouts of the loot.