Residing is a small hotel on the west coast of Mexico, Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked Episcopal preacher, hides from his lecherous past. He finds work as a tour guide for a group of American teachers, but soon comes under criticism from their prudish leader when an 18 year-old in her care starts lusting after him. Shannon also receives a good deal of attention from the seductive hotel owner. He spends most of his time, however, with an idealistic spinster and her 97 year-old grandfather. This wheel chair-bound poet claims that he will expire upon the completion of his final manuscript -- a literary endeavor he has been laboring on for the last twenty years.