This Boy’s Life: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

In West Seattle, Jack and Rosemary take up residence in a boardinghouse. They spend their time wandering the streets of their new city, pointing out nice houses and dreaming of living in them one day. Their actual room at the boardinghouse is small and mildewy. Rosemary befriends two women there—a pregnant woman named Kathy, who seems to be on her own, and the housekeeper, Marian, a large and boisterous woman. Jack and Marian dislike one another—she believes he is a troublemaker, and Jack resents her for thinking so.

Jack makes two friends in school, Terry Taylor and Terry Silver. All three boys have single mothers, and they spend their afternoons stealing cigarettes, bumming about town, and staring in the windows of pawn shops at guns and televisions which play documentaries about the Second World War and the dangers of fascism. Terry Silver, who is a clever but cruel child, owns a Nazi armband that he made himself and often prank calls people with Jewish-sounding last names to speak to them in fake German. He treats the other Terry and Jack like his lackeys, and the three of them together spend a lot of time practicing “looking cool.” Despite all their efforts to comb their hair just right and wear their pants slung low, all three boys are plagued by inescapable “uncoolness.”

Many afternoons, the boys watch The Mickey Mouse Club on television and lust after one of the beautiful cast members, Annette. Jack begins writing fan letters to Annette in the same vein as his letters to Alice, describing his wild and adventurous life with his father, a captain who owns a fleet of fishing boats. When his letters receive lukewarm responses, Jack’s fantasies of Annette veer towards the violent, and he imagines being injured in a terrible accident, which Annette witnesses, and is so moved she decides to help nurse Jack back to health.

Some afternoons, after The Mickey Mouse Club, the boys go up on the roof of Silver’s apartment building and throw eggs down at passing cars on the street below. The boys often hurl insults along with eggs—one afternoon, they pelt a cool teenager in a Thunderbird with eggs while Terry Silver screams “Yid!” at him again and again.