Greasy Lake

Summary: "Greasy Lake" centers around three characters; Digby, Jeff, and the narrator whose name is not revealed in the story. The framework is the narattor retelling the story of a night that happened at the beginning of the boys' summer vacation.

The boys pull up to a car by Greasy Lake and they believe it belongs to their other friend, Tony. Naturally, they assume that he's having sex with his girlfriend in the car and to make fun out of a boring night in a boring town, they start honking and flashing their headlights at the car. It is then revealed that the car belongs not to Tony, but to one of the town's hoodlums. He exits has car and insitgates a fight with the boys. The skirmish results in the narattor hitting the hoodlum in the head with a tire iron; he appears to be dead.

Grotesquely, the alleged murder satisfies the boys. They decide to continue the path of crime by raping the hoodlum's girlfriend, but this plan is halted when another car pulls up by the lake, thus forcing the boys to run away and hide. While in hiding, more hoodlums exit the new car and the original person that the narrator had thought he killed regained conciousness. They destroyed the car that the boys came in.  Once the scene was seemingly clear, another car with two girls pulled up. The girls were extremely high on unknown drugs. Seeing the boys as the "badasses" that they always wanted to be, the girls offered them some of their drugs. The narattor declined the offer and got back into his beaten up vehicle to drive home.

Analysis: "Greasy Lake" is a commentary on typical teenage boys striving to be seen as something that they really are not. In this case, T.C. Boyle weaves the concept of comitting crimes into the evening of four boys that were truly innocent at heart.

Boyle uses murder to exemplify the extremes that people will go to for recognition, whether that might be as a scholar or as a rebel. Near the end of the story, two girls experiencing extreme euphoria recognize the boys as the fellon-like humans they strived to be viewed as. Boyle uses girls on drugs as the people to respect the boys as a symbol that going beyond all innocent norms leads to respect that is not even desirable.

Another interesting point is to consider whether the boys would have raped the hoodlum's girlfriend if they had had the chance to. The narrator "kills" him by accident. Are the boys really prepared to intentionally rape an innocent girl?