John tries to make amends to ex-wife Carol and son Tony he ran out on.

At a drag show, John runs into his old college roommate, who's playing Marlene Dietrich; Mahalia is targeted anew by a blackmailer she thought she'd paid off.

Recovering alcoholic John Hemingway takes the job of night manager in a seedy bus station, where a robbery and a missing bus test his resolve to stay sober.

John's son tries to form a father-son relationship; Chester disappears and is found dead; John must deal with a battle to the death between Mahalia and her sister Linda, who stole Mahalia's first husband.

Officer Eggers develops a crush on John after he rescues her from a gunman; Dexter's business languishes after a customer puts a curse on the diner.

John's order to train his boss's harebrained nephew, who been in AA for a year but is still a basketcase.

Hemingway and Dexter get stuck together in a crummy motel with a cage full of chickens; when a baby is abandoned in the station dumpster, Officer Eggers kidnaps it.

It happened one night, nearly a decade ago. Or so says John, who recalls a visit he made to the bus station in 1987, when he first encountered Catherine and had a profound impact on his current friends.

A startled John begins questioning his sexuality after another male alcoholic visits to make amends -- by apologizing for seducing him.

Hemingway is feeling suicidal on his birthday, but discovers new meaning when the entire bus station is held host age by a gun-toting lunatic.

John goes 30 days without alcohol, and wants to get back together with his wife. Before he can reach her, she serves him with divorce papers.

John's mother, an inveterate con artist, begs him to bail her out of jail, and then becomes the obvious suspect when a batch of credit card slips goes missing from the bus station.

John takes stock of himself while helping a runaway teen realize that she can go home.

John's passionate love affair hits a snag when his perfect woman joins AA -- and must be celibate for six months.

John's girlfriend turns out to be married -- when her husband confronts John with a gun; Mahalia's estranged husband arrives.

Dexter is outraged when his sister strikes up a friendship with Hemingway, Mahalia is overjoyed to hear her first boyfriend is coming to visit, Carly reports to Hemingway that she was sent out on a house call -- to his son.

Dexter accompanies John on a visit to his boyhood home in Chicago -- where John learns his departed father never departed. Meanwhile, Hampton gets flowers from his male doctor.

John tells Catherine that she would love him if she could forget about their past together. Later, he logs onto an computer on-line service as ""Fitzgerald"" and types flirtatious messages to a user named ""Ella."" The two seem perfect for each other and arrange a date -- only to discover that ""Ella"" is of course Catherine. Meanwhile, Dexter tries to convince filmmaker Spike Lee to let him cater the meals for Spike and his film crew while they are in St. Louis. When the overzealous Dexter accidentally injures Spike, who ends up in the hospital, the film company hires Dexter to impersonate Spike in the film until he recovers. Also, John represents Mahalia during a deposition with an opposing lawyer in her custody battle for her children but does more damage than good, while Mahalia almost ruins her case by dating the lawyer.

Is it destiny that hooks up John with a pretty yoga instructor for a health spa vacation that he planned with Catherine? If so, why is Catherine on their train? Alone at first, Catherine meets her former high school boyfriend, Todd; and John, who has dumped the annoying Penelope, now does everything he can to keep Catherine from reuniting with Todd.

John's given food for thought when an old writer friend bases his first book on John's bacchanalian past, a neo-Nazi named Steve Hitler demands to charter a bus, with support from the ACLU, and a sleazy health inspector threatens Dexter with blackmail.

John's nephew Bobby learns the meaning of tough love when he shows up at the bus station for a wild evening with the man who taught him to drink.

John gives Catherine dancing lessons, but she won't let him lead; Mahalia and Carly gives Eggers a makeover to prepare her for a date; Dexter and Gene run the Raincheck Room for a night while arguing about who's in charge; Hampton challenges himself to survive an entire work shift without eating a donut; and the elephant recently seen marauding around the city makes its nocturnal home in the bus station.

John eagerly accepts when Catherine asks him to father her child, but it's a problematic plan. Meanwhile, Dexter is a housemate in a project similar to MTV's The Real World, a reality-based television show called ""Reality House."" He moves into a rent-free loft with six roommates that he has never met, and their actions are all recorded by an ever-present camera crew. However, Dexter violates the group's cardinal rule --always be ""real"" -- by repeatedly advertising his lunch counter.

Now that they're both free and clear, Carly and John agree to a date, but advice from Dexter keeps them apart -- at first. Later on, nothing can. No longer a bum, Oscar opens a shoeshine stand in the bus station. Unfortunately, no one is brave enough to sit under the giant shoe sign hanging menacingly overhead. Meanwhile, John's landlord, Mr. Soulaymanulo comes to the station to berate John for causing a high electricity bill with his electric car. Mr. Soulaymanulo and Mahalia are immediately attracted and begin dating. Later, John gets a huge rebate from the government for driving the electric car, and he pays his landlord extra. When John announces that he and Carly are getting married, everyone expects that some sort of disaster will prevent it. At the wedding, Hampton accidentally reveals that he is a homosexual. Then, after John and Carly exchange vows, Catherine arrives and tells Dexter that she is pregnant with John's child...

A fellow con artist from John's drinking days offers to cut him in on a lucrative real-estate scam; a bounty hunter is taking an incredibly naive Mississippi teenager to face a ten-year sentence.