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T. C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” is a coming-of-age story whose protagonist and unnamed first-person narrator is forced into a mature perspective on life as he makes the transition out of a protracted, privileged adolescence. The protagonist experiences two painful epiphanies: that he is capable of true evil and that he is subject to mortality and less in control of his life than he naively assumed. These realizations transform his view of himself and of human experience.
The story’s exposition presents the narrator and his buddies, Jeff and Digby, home on college break. The three teens have time to burn—driving, drinking, dancing, and never questioning their entitlement to leisure. They exhaust their usual pastimes quickly but consider themselves too cool to admit that these activities now bore them. The narrator says they’re “looking for something” that they can’t articulate. After the bars close one night, they drive to Greasy Lake, a local hangout, searching for fun. A prank gone wrong leads to the story’s near-simultaneous inciting incidents. The pranksters plan to honk and flash the headlights at a car in which a friend is having sex and to laugh at his humiliation. The story’s conflict rages into existence because Digby mistakenly assumes that he recognizes the car in the dark. Then, as the narrator gets out of the car, he carelessly drops his keys. He knows, in a “jab of intuition,” that this mistake is somehow “damaging and irreversible.” The prank goes sideways when an enraged man in steel-toed boots bolts from the car and begins kicking the narrator. Chance events and harmless mistakes have transformed an evening of routine cruising into a night of violence that nearly evades the narrator’s ability to comprehend.
At first, the narrator believes that he controls the moment, but his belief is a juvenile fantasy. It’s based on immature ideas, such as that Digby, having taken one martial arts class, is skilled enough to fight off the large, muscled man. The tire iron gives the narrator a temporary advantage, but it figures into his fantasy “bad character” self-image as someone who uses a tire iron to fight, not to change a tire. Even as the fight happens, the narrator feels that the events are like something out of a Hollywood production. Then, after the large man falls, fear of the “gleam of handcuffs” and a jail cell out of a TV procedural drama possesses the narrator. Shock and adrenaline play into his reactions, but he is so unaccustomed to violence that he processes the fight as if it were fiction.
When Bobbie’s girlfriend confronts the narrator and his friends, however, the comforting distance provided by the film fantasy vanishes. They are suddenly overcome with “greed and lust” that cuts them off from a common feeling of humanity. The narrator believes that he has committed murder and is “dirty, bloody, guilty.” Bobbie’s sudden collapse is almost comically unreal, but the woman pinned against the car is viscerally real, and the narrator knows that he has lost control of himself and of the situation. Even when he’s forced to run, not even in this act is he truly in control, chased by imaginary hounds and imagining that he can swim the entire lake and disappear forever into the woods. When the narrator bumps into the corpse, he loses his control completely, splashing, yelling, and giving away his location.
By the time the “bad character” revives, the narrator’s brush with death has impressed on him his own vulnerability to accident or, if Bobbie can reach him, being thrashed. The narrator, now utterly out of control of the situation, can only observe as Bobbie uses the tire iron to smash the car in a frenzy of vengeance. Before Bobbie leaves, he flings the tire iron “halfway across the lake,” marking his dominance, ending the narrator’s belief that he and his friends are powerful, and the story’s climax. The narrator can hardly move as escapist thoughts and excuses ping in his head. He thinks that of all the world, only the drowned man has it worse than he does. This is because, having admitted his potential to do truly bad things, he now faces another terrifying realization. Not only is he at the mercy of randomness—or what the author elsewhere calls life’s “dark incidents”—but he is as vulnerable as the drowned man had been.
In the falling action, the friends inspect the shattered car as the sun rises. The narrator wants to vomit or cry; he wants to return to his childhood home and climb into bed. These reactions reflect his desire to deny what the night’s epiphanies have revealed and to return to a childlike state of innocence. But he can’t unlearn what he now knows. In a coda that underscores the night’s violence, two women drive up, looking for Al, the motorcycle’s owner, likely a drug-dealer-turned-corpse. When one offers the excitement that the friends ostensibly came to Greasy Lake to find, the teens—tired, injured, and in the narrator’s case disillusioned—drive away.
