Chapters 5 and 6 Summary

The following summer, the narrator's mother flies to Europe and leaves him the keys to her apartment and enough money to buy groceries, but not enough to really live on. He gets a job loading transport trucks and, as his musculature develops, he starts spending his free time at the beach. There he discovers a group of older gay men who go there regularly and which includes wealthy advertising executive Lou, who happens to live in the same apartment building as his mother and with whom the narrator begins a relationship. As the two spend more time together, the narrator develops a greater sense of the homosexual hierarchy as Lou defines it, discovers that being homosexual isn't automatically an entirely bad thing and is instructed on how to be both a better lover and a better writer. The narrator describes how...