Walter Paisley is a nerdy, clumsy busboy at a beatnik café, an outsider among the hip crowd, who hopes to win over his beautiful colleague Carla by sculpting a bust of her. His clumsiness ends up killing his landlady's cat, and Walter in a panic hides the body beneath a coat of plaster. Carla and her friends rave about the resulting piece, so Walter resolves to produce larger, more ambitious works by the same artistic method.