Set in Mexico City, specifically in an urban middle-class neighborhood in the 1960s, the novel covers in detail three days in the life of the main character, an unnamed young man who is going to enter high school.

By the novel's end, the reader has felt what is like to be X, and reads a kind of wild dream of his future as boyfriend of Queta and student leader, and of his past as a tiny baby in his mother's arms.

His friend Ricardo is timid and naive, having bold ideas he never dares put to practice, and when he does, he usually makes a joke of himself.

No one can think that Ricardo has a crush on X, but he has an absence in the father figure pattern, substituting X even if he tortures him all the time.

X meets many kinds of people: a fledgling music group about to make their first record (Los suásticos) and their homosexual manager, a young and rich female singer (Queta) with which he have an affair, his flamboyant and cynical neighbor Octavio, who does not have any aspirations but only to be a rock star even though he does not belong to a band, his intellectual cousin (Esteban) who fights X' for his conventional lifestyle and more characters, most with some artistic or intellectual aspiration, including student leaders, highly politicized (a future vision of events that will happen in the next five years in Mexico).