In Jesus' Son, the nameless narrator recollects a dozen episodes from his life on drugs. Mirroring the narrator's mental state of drug-induced dreaming, they are not in chronological order, and each of them make more sense the more the reader progresses through the book.
The first story is about the narrator getting into a car to hitchhike through the U.S. even though he knows they would have an accident--indeed, he barely survives a head-on collision shortly after.
In section two the narrator and some of his friends try to bring a mute man to his home after a long night at a party, but the whole endeavor becomes an odyssey until they drop him off at a house full of shady people, where the narrator learns that the mute man was once a successful football player.
In the third story, a man called Jack Hotel dies from a drug overdose, while in the fourth chapter he helps a gunshot victim while smoking hashish.
The next episode is about the narrator and Wayne, a man he knows from a bar called the Vine, ripping out copper wires from an abandoned house which Wayne dubiously calls his own. After selling the wires, they both return to the bar to spend their money on drinks. When he sees a red-haired woman who used to be Wayne's wife, he feels nostalgic about the women he has been with, particularly his mother, who the reader infers has contributed significantly to his mental state.
A few episodes take place at hospitals, where the narrator either goes for treatment, works with the hospital newsletter, or buys drugs from crooked nurses. Once he goes on a road trip with one of his coworkers and ends up in a drive-in movie theater during a blizzard, mistaking the actress on screen for an angel because of his intoxication.
By the end of the book, the narrator is in detox trying to get his life back on track. He has a job at a home for the elderly where he interacts with people who are rejected by society; however, he still has not given up on his urge to peep through windows.
