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Becoming aware of the fragility of life is a rite of passage from childhood to maturity.
Boyle has said that the “beauty of ‘Greasy Lake’ is that we have all been there,” meaning that, as people mature and leave adolescence behind, they usually face the realization that life can be all too brief and that the forces that cut a life short are often unpredictable. For the narrator, Greasy Lake on a June night is the setting in which events shatter his sense of invulnerability and agency.
Coming to grips with the illusion of untouchability is a rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood. For the narrator, this rite of passage happens at the local teen hangout, where in the past he and his friends could join a party and, on a lucky night, watch girls skinny-dip. It’s a place that, because they know it well, is comfortable and predictable. On the night of the story, they arrive hoping to find the party scene they often participated in before college. But on this night, Greasy Lake is different. It’s nearly deserted. No one from the high school crowd is there, yet the friends still try to recreate the familiar. The prank that would have amused or embarrassed their high school buddy enrages the large man and unleashes a serious threat to their lives.
The stakes at Greasy Lake are suddenly much higher and the risks much greater than expected. The casual sex they enjoyed with high school girls morphs into the frenzied near-rape of the man’s girlfriend. The tame high school party scene, fueled by beer and marijuana, is replaced by the drowned dealer and the strung-out, tottering women. By the time the friends limp away from the lake at dawn, they possess an unsettling and more mature sense of how fragile existence can be and of how little control they have over other people’s potentially hostile actions.
Women are often treated as mere accessories in a testosterone-driven culture.
“Greasy Lake” may speak to universal fears and desires that humans share, but perhaps because it is told from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old man who is still an entertainingly immature and self-centered adolescent, the women in the story have small roles and limited agency. Even in these roles, they don’t come across as likeable or relatable characters.
Somewhere offstage, the narrator’s mom is still housing and feeding him, and he drives her car to its destruction. Somewhere in his knowledge of history, the Sabine women of Roman legend and Anne Frank, of all people, cry out against his near-rape of Bobbie’s girlfriend, “the fox.” She at least has some role in the story, but it, too, is as an accessory to men’s desires—to possess and protect her, to violate her, and then to avenge her. The two women who later arrive to look for Al—likely to buy drugs, but perhaps to party with him—repel the narrator and his friends. This disgust is a bit ironic since the girls, like Bobbie’s girlfriend, are dressed provocatively and vulnerable in their own way, hardly able to stand. They may serve to remind the three teens of the “Ur-crime” they came so near to committing. Digby urges the narrator to avoid these women, who are making themselves available to party. Other mentions of women go by in the story and reinforce the categorization of women as accessories to men’s desires: the narrator likes to go to Greasy Lake to “watch a girl take off her clothes” to swim, and the friends hope that, when they prank Tony, they’ll see “some little fox’s tits.” Always, the women provide something, from transportation to titillation, that the young men want.
Male friendship can thrive in a male-dominated culture.
“Greasy Lake” is a coming-of-age story but also a story about young men’s friendships. An interesting counterpoint to the narrator’s dismissive attitude toward women—who are relegated to minimal story roles of use or abuse—is the narrator’s descriptions of Jeff and Digby. He clearly admires them and is glad to belong to this trio of “dangerous characters.” The narrator identifies Digby as a student at an elite college while also implying that Digby, with his “gold star” earring, is above the college scene. He lists Jeff’s varied ambitions, cramming them together with forward slashes that suggest a lack of commitment to anything, fitting for someone who pretends not to care. Yet the narrator says nothing of his own plans or lack thereof.
The narrator describes in detail Jeff and Digby’s admirable “social graces,” their ability to drive fast while expertly rolling joints, the way they stand and say “man” and dance. They are “slick and quick” and wear mirrored sunglasses at all times—comic exaggeration that suggests he has something of a “bromance” with his friends. It’s possible that the narrator is seeking models of manhood as he moves out of adolescence, but their encounter with Bobbie, the “man of action,” suggests a darker aspect of their friendship. On the one hand, they team up to fight Bobbie. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that the narrator alone would have attempted to force Bobbie’s girlfriend against the hood of the car and rape her. Because he’s “in the company of two dangerous characters,” the narrator participates in what shortly afterward strikes him as a heinous attack on the woman, and when they are caught, the friends flee in different directions, leaving the narrator alone to suffer the shock of the bloated horror in the lake.
