Immigrants Luigi and Lafayette work for Andreas Flaxman at his wax museum in Lower Manhattan. Luigi, an asthmatic middle-aged romantic, works as an artist/sculptor while the Lafayette functions as a jack-of-all trades for Flaxman, who is obsessed with Ancient Rome, a preoccupation that most of his exhibits reflect. Lafayette lives in a rat-infested basement some blocks away and carries a whistle with to scare the rodents, which seem to be endemic to the area. He also works as a stagehand for a feminist theater group in their Off-off Broadway theater where he suffers their sexist abuses including being forced to wear a leotard. Angelica, one of the beautiful actresses in the troupe is attracted to him, and they begin a relationship. At the same time Luigi comes across the 50 foot model of King Kong in a Hudson River landfill, apparently discarded after the 1976 movie version of "King Kong." There he finds an orphaned baby chimpanzee which he takes to be the giant simian's son. Allergic to animals, he gives it to Lafayette to adopt. Complications arise when Flaxman advises him to get rid of the monkey and Angelica becomes pregnant.