When Joe Pepitone, slugger for the New York Yankees, gives 12-year-old Doug Swieteck his cap in 1968, it is "the first thing I ever owned that hadn't belonged to some other Swieteck before me." It lasts less than five months before his older brother, Christopher, offers to break his arm if he doesn't give it up. Thanks to his father, a drunk who regularly gets fired from jobs for telling his boss exactly what he thinks, and his other brother Lawrence, now off in Vietnam, Doug spends half his time acting like "the biggest jerk" and the other half worried that not to be a jerk is to be a "chump." But when he moves to a small town in upstate New York, he makes friends, gets a job as a delivery boy, and discovers that not only does he love to look at the birds in an Audobon guide, but he can draw them, too. As the boy dealt a bad hand struggles to become a good man, he does his best to show the other big jerks around him that the nice guy isn't always a chump.
