'Greasy Lake' is a story about three college-age boys and what happens to them one night when they visit a local teen hangout, Greasy Lake. Greasy Lake Lyrics There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. Greasy Lake study guide contains a biography of T.C. Boyle, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. About Greasy Lake Greasy Lake Summary. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake. Through the centre of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, streetlights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. “Greasy Lake” is a story of transformation, of coming of age. To my understanding, Boyle’s short story draws the reader to reflect on their own lives of past imperfections that just like the boys in the story, had altered themselves into the individuals that implicate who they are today.
It’s about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88.
—Bruce Springsteen
There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parents’ whining station wagons out into the street, we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice. Tango, Thunderbird and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andrè Gide and struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.
Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, streetlights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. The Indians had called it Wakan, a reference to the clarity of its waters. Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the Air Force had strafed it. We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich scent of possibility on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets. This was nature.
I was there one night, late, in the company of two dangerous characters. Digby wore a gold star in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell; Jeff was thinking of quitting school to become a painter/musician/head-shop proprietor. They were both expert in the social graces, quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a tootsie-pop stick. They could lounge against a bank of booming speakers and trade “man’s’’ with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor as if their joints worked on bearings. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. In short, they were bad.
I drove. Digby pounded the dashboard and shouted along with Toots & the Maytals while Jeff hung his head out the window and streaked the side of my mother’s Bel Air with vomit. It was early June, the air soft as a hand on your cheek, the third night of summer vacation. The first two nights we’d been out till dawn, looking for something we never found. On this, the third night, we’d cruised the strip sixty-seven times, been in and out of every bar and club we could think of in a twenty-mile radius, stopped twice for bucket chicken and forty-cent hamburgers, debated going to a party at the house of a girl Jeff’s sister knew, and chucked two dozen raw eggs at mailboxes and hitchhikers. It was two A.M., the bars were closing. There was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon-flavored gin up to Greasy Lake.
The taillights of a single car winked at us as we swung into the dirt lot with its tufts of weed and washboard corrugations: 57 Chevy, mint, metallic blue. On the far side of the lot, like the exoskeleton of some gaunt chrome insect, a chopper leaned against its kickstand. And that was it for excitement: some junkie half-wit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend. Whatever it was we were looking for, we weren’t about to find it at Greasy Lake. Not that night.
But then all of a sudden Digby was fighting for the wheel. “Hey, that’s Tony Lovett’s car! Hey!” he shouted, while I stabbed at the brake pedal and the Bel Air nosed up to the gleaming bumper of the parked Chevy. Digby leaned on the horn, laughing, and instructed me to put my brights on. I flicked on the brights. This was hilarious. A joke. Tony would experience premature withdrawal and expect to be confronted by grim-looking state troopers with flashlights. We hit the horn, strobed the lights and then jumped out of the car to press our witty faces to Tony’s windows: for all we knew we might even catch a glimpse of some little fox’s tit, and then we could slap backs with red-faced Tony, rough-house a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.
The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was losing my grip on the keys. In the excitement, leaping from the car with the gin in one hand and a roach clip in the other, I spilled them in the grass—in the dark, dank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake. This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland’s decision to dig in at Khe Sanh. I felt it like a jab of intuition, and I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet.
The second mistake—and this was inextricably bound up with the first—was in identifying the car as Tony Lovett’s. Even before the very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots ripped out of the driver’s door, I began to realize that this chrome blue was much lighter than the robin’s egg of Tony’s car and that Tony’s car didn’t have rear-mounted speakers. Judging from their expressions, Digby and Jeff were privately groping toward the same inevitable and unsettling conclusion that I was.
In any case, there was no reasoning with this bad greasy character—clearly he was a man of action. The first lusty Rockettes’ kick of his steel-toed boot caught me under the chin, chipped my favorite tooth and left me sprawled in the dirt. Like a fool, I’d gone down on one knee to comb the stiff hacked grass for the keys, my mind making connections in the most dragged-out, testudinal way, knowing that things had gone wrong, that I was in a lot of trouble, and that the lost ignition key was my grail and my salvation. The three or four succeeding blows were mainly absorbed by my right buttock and the tough piece of bone at the base of my spine.
Meanwhile, Digby vaulted the kissing bumpers and delivered a savage kung fu blow to the greasy character’s collarbone. Digby had just finished a course in martial arts for phys. ed. credit and had spent the better part of the past two nights telling us apocryphal tales of Bruce Lee types and of the raw power invested in lightning blows shot from coiled wrists, ankles and elbows. The greasy character was unimpressed. He merely backed off a step, his face like a Toltec mask, and laid Digby out with a single whistling roundhouse blow. .. but by now jeff had got into the act, and I was beginning to extricate myself from the dirt, a tinny compound of shock, rage and impotence wadded in my throat.
Jeff was on the guy’s back, biting at his ear. Digby was on the ground, cursing. I went for the tire iron I kept under the driver’s seat. I kept it there because bad characters always keep tire irons under the driver’s seat, for just such an occasion as this. Never mind that I hadn’t been involved in a fight since sixth grade when a kid with a sleepy eye and two streams of mucus depending from his nostrils hit me in the knee with a Louisville slugger, never mind that I’d touched the tire iron exactly twice before, to change tires: it was there. And I went for it.
Most teenagers go through a point in their lives where they want to step out from what a successful member of society is supposed to be. During these teens’ phases, they experiment with different elements, such as drugs, drinking, and sexual exploration and become involved in various mischievous activities. As a result, teenagers grow up and figure out what route they want to take in life. Do they stay promiscuous, or do they mature and learn from their mistakes? It is proven that many teens first experiment during their high school years:
Results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRLBS), found that 72.5% of high school students had at least one drink of alcohol during their lifetime, and 41.8% had at least one drink in the past 30 days. Additionally, this study found that 46.3% of students had tried cigarettes, and 19.5% had smoked in the past 30 days. Also, 36.8% of students had used marijuana in their lifetime, and 20.8% had used it in the past 30 days. Furthermore, this study found that 46% of students had sexual intercourse in their lifetime. (Dunn 24)
In the short story “Greasy Lake,” T.C. Boyle presents a group of male teenagers who go through the phase detailed above. Toward the end of the story, the protagonist makes a decision about what route to take in life because of an epiphany he has while was going through this common teenage phase.
During the story, the unnamed protagonist and his friends try to emulate what typical “bad boys” do. While trying to act “bad,” the boys figure out that they are not cut out for the rebel lifestyle. Boyle’s main point in the story is that being cool does not necessarily mean acting tough and getting into all types of trouble. Throughout the story, the teens go through a series of unfortunate events.
The story opens with the protagonist recalling his past of being a “bad boy.” There is foreshadowing in the beginning of the story when the narrators states, “There was a time when . . . it was good to be bad . . . We were all dangerous characters then” (Charters 164). Readers eventually find out that the narrator changes his perspective about the lake and past decisions he has made. Then, the protagonist states that he and his friends loved being bad and going against the norm. They listened to rock and roll music, smoked cigarettes, did drugs, drank, and spent time with girls at the notorious meet-up spot, Greasy Lake, which was where all the cool kids went. This was the place to be:
We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich sent of possibility on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets. This was nature. (Charters 165)
Here, the author compares the naturalness of teenagers doing mischievous things such as drinking and watching girls undress to crickets and frogs making noise at night.
One night in June, the protagonist picks up his friends, Digby and Jeff, “two dangerous characters” (Charters 165). They first go to a few bars, but it soon gets late, and all the bars are in the process of closing. Drunk and high, they decide to go to Greasy Lake. According to a study, “More teenagers start drinking and smoking cigarettes and marijuana in June and July than in any other months, U.S. health officials say” (Reinberg).
When they arrive at their destination, Digby thought he saw their friend, Tony Lovett, and his car. The protagonist starts to honk the car horn and flashes its lights at the other car to try and trick Tony into thinking they were state troopers and ultimately scare him. They soon find out it is not Tony. Instead, it is a very angry, tough guy. The narrator describes him as “a man of action” (Charters 166), which isn’t a comforting image. This man starts a brawl with the protagonist and his friends, and it is not pretty. The protagonist chips his tooth, and he and his friends have gashes on their bodies. The protagonist said, “I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shaking, my heart turning over like a dirt bike in the wrong gear” (Charters 166).
The worst of all was that the protagonist had lost the key to the car. He said “and that the lost ignition key was my grail and my salvation” (Charters 166). Here, the protagonist is saying that the car keys are his only way out of Greasy Lake. Without the keys, he is doomed and has to stay there. They decide to fight back with a tire iron, and their attacker eventually lies on the floor, unconscious. The main character was afraid that he and his friends may have killed the man. After seeing what had happened to her boyfriend, the attacker’s girlfriend came out of the car and started screaming in fear. The protagonist and his friends decided to take advantage of her and sexually harass her. A car pulls up and a man starts screaming at them, and they end up fleeing the scene by running.
If they had not been so intoxicated, they would have figured out that the car was not their friend’s car and would not have honked and flashed lights at a random car. This is one of the first moments in the short story when the protagonist figures out that he is not cut out for this lifestyle. When someone is intoxicated, they do not act like an upstanding citizen of society and probably will get into fights and other trouble.
If someone provokes us while we’re drunk, we don’t take other factors into account, such as the consequences of rising to the bait. This can lead to violent reactions from people who would usually shrug things off . . . Alcohol also reduces anxiety, which can be one of the reasons we enjoy drinking. But, according to Professor McMurran, anxiety actually protects us by telling us to avoid or escape certain situations. When we’re drunk, this warning system doesn’t work and this can put us in dangerous or confrontational situations. (Drinkaware)
After fleeing the scene of the fight and potential rape, the protagonist decides to hide in the lake in case the police arrive at the scene. While alone in the lake, he finds a dead man floating and wonders what happened to him. The protagonist said, “I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, obscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown” (Charters 168). He was probably just like the protagonist. The dead man acted tough and cool but most likely ended up in a fight and was murdered. The finding of the dead body sets up the epiphany the boy has after coming to the lake that night. He is frightened and this part of the story really makes him think about gravitating toward the side of growing up. He sees that if he stays immature and keeps girls, drugs, and alcohol as his top priorities in life, he will end up like the dead man in the lake.
After hearing his attacker scream “the greasy bad character was laying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees” (Charters 169), the protagonist thinks to himself, “My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents—a tree had fallen on the car” (Charters 169). Here, the character regrets going to the lake. He will be in huge trouble when he goes home and shows his mom that her car is completely damaged. He is even thinking of making up a fictitious story about a tree falling on the car. He does not even want to be an adult about the situation and tell his mom the truth, yet he wants to do grown-up things such as having sex and drinking. However, he cannot even do the simplest grown-up thing, telling the truth. In this instance, the reader is blinded by his immaturity.
As readers, we see a huge change in the main character at the end of the story. He has an epiphany after being in the lake and suffering damages. Maybe he should not try to act so tough and bad, and maybe he should mature and act as an ideal 19-year-old. All he wants to do is go home where he is safe from the “monsters” that reside in Greasy Lake.
That morning after all of those crazy events that took place, two women come up to him and his friends asking if they want to drink and do drugs with them. The two women said “hey, you guys look like some pretty bad characters – been fightin’, huh?” (Charters 171). Little do the girls know, the boys are not bad. The main character turns them down. This is a huge moment in the story because before, when trying to act all big, bad, and tough, the main character would have said yes. After all of that, he decides that partying with these girls would be an extremely bad thing. Along with asking to party with them, the girls ask if the protagonist and his friends have seen the girls’ friend. None of the boys said they have, but the protagonist thought to himself that their friend was dead and lying in the river. He was terrified of this, and he did not have the courage to tell them about the dead body.
In conclusion, I believe that because of those horrible events that took place that night, the protagonist will become a much better person in his coming years. All of his mistakes lead him to his epiphany at the lake, which is a great thing. The quote in the beginning of the story indeed shows that the protagonist and his friends changed for the better. Boyle writes “We were all dangerous characters then” (164). William Berman summed up how mistakes lead to success perfectly, “Making mistakes is not only part of human nature, but an important part of how we learn” (Berman 115). I believe this quote is perfect for the protagonist’s journey.
Greasy Lake Full Story Episodes
Works Cited
Greasy Lake Text
- “Alcohol and Aggression.” Alcohol and Aggression. Drinkaware, n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.
- Berman, William. “When Will They Ever Learn? Learning And Teaching From Mistakes In The Clinical Context.” Clinical Law Review 13.1 (2006): 115-141. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.
- Charters, Ann. “Greasy Lake.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983. 164-71. Print.
- Dunn, Michael, and Cathy Kitts. “Effects of Youth Assets on Adolescent Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana Use, and Sexual Behavior.” Journal of Alcohol & Drug Education, Dec. 2011. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.
- Reinberg, Steven. “Summer Is Peak Time for Teens to Try Drugs, Alcohol: Report.” Summer Is Peak Time for Teens to Try Drugs, Alcohol: Report. Health Day, July 2012. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.