Content Warning: Jesus’ Son includes depictions of sexual assault, murder, substance use disorder, racist language, stalking, self-harm, abortion, and death by suicide.

This story begins with the unnamed narrator waking up under an overpass in the rain in the midst of prophetic visions of an upcoming car wreck. The setting is outside Bethany, Missouri, and the narrator walks down the highway, trying to hitchhike. Earlier, he’d been given a few rides, during which he received drugs. Now, the narrator is picked up by a family in an Oldsmobile. Despite his visions of the car crashing, the narrator decides that he doesn’t care, and he gets in. The narrator goes to sleep as the father drives the car, and the narrator gets lost in strange dreams.

During the narrator’s nap, the car has a violent rollover crash. The father and mother are both injured, but their baby and the narrator are unharmed. The narrator grabs the baby and gets out of the car to find that they hit another car head on. A semi-truck approaches, and the narrator asks him to get help. When the driver says that he can’t turn around, so they’ll have to wait, the narrator is “relieved and tearful” because he’d “thought something was required of [him], but […] [he] hadn’t wanted to find out what it was” (7).