Greasy Lake Response

The short story "Greasy Lake" by T.C Boyle recounts the night that a group of teens spent up at Greasy Lake. While in the opening, the writer depicts the boys forcibly and almost comically trying to be "bad characters." While they live in the suburbs, drive their parents' station wagons, drink cheap liquor and try to look like they aren't trying, things escalate out of their control on that night. While the writer implies that they do little more than innocent, adolescent shenanigans,  that night they go on to almost kill a man, rape a girl and find a dead body.

    The boys act the way they think they are suppose to and respond to situations not because they are necessarily bad or without morals but because they constantly strive to be “bad characters.” Even the phrase, “bad characters” is forced and kind of bumbling and awkward. The phrase is often repeated and reinforces the image that the boys have of themselves and this weak image they try to project themselves as. When they get in the fight with the man who they thought was in Tony’s car, digby uses the tire iron which he keep under the driver’s seat. He admits that he had only ever used it to change tires and had only been in a fight once before in sixth grade though he kept it there to seem tough and grabs for it instinctually, pushed by his determination to be a bad character.

A quote that stood out to me the most was “I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of the five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second.” Digby recognizes that he is a child and that while he has been trying to act older, even though he is on the brink of his teenage years and feels like he is above everything else, he is still innocent and inexperienced. I love the parallel comparison of the greasy character, the man who they fought with, and the “waterlogged carcass of a second”, the lake. The imagery is fantastic and portrays the lake as a putrid, disgusting body of water, though dead because it is a carcass.

I wonder if the three boys would actually have raped the girl. It was a shocking twist to me because while the fight with the man was more of a reaction, the rape was preemptive. The scene is hectic and jumbled, and while they are in a passionate impulse it seems like they might actually do it. I wonder if they would have carried on with it had they not been caught first.

At the end of the story, the boys turn down an opportunity to party with some girls. By the end they are shaken and don’t want to get into any more trouble. All the want to do is sneak back into bed and the safety of their homes. The night’s events made Digby realize his innocence but it is unclear if he has learned his lesson.