Greasy Lake

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1985

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Themes

Nature Versus Nurture and Male Violence

Content Warning: This section references violence, attempted rape, and drug use.

The idea of nature—both in the sense of “natural world” and of “what is natural”—permeates the story. The narrator opens with an assertion that links the two meanings of the word and frames the boys’ “bad” behavior as instinctive:

We went up to the lake […] 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 (9).

The passage implies that the boys see their own “badness” as completely normal—as much of a given as the frogs and crickets making their noises at the lake.

However, several details work to undercut this portrayal. First, the description of the lake lingers on its pollution: It is clearly not in its “natural” state but rather corrupted by human activity. The personification of the lake, as when T. C. Boyle describes its surface as covered in “scabs,” further encourages readers to identify the boys with the lake and to interpret their actions as societally driven. Then there is the fact that the behavior the narrator describes is so trivial. Drinking, getting high, and fantasizing obsessively about sex are all typical adolescent acts; if they are “natural,” that hardly proves that real “badness” is innate. Relatedly, much of the boys’ behavior is performative, and the frequent references to pop culture imply that it is learned. Even when he finds himself in a real fight, the narrator experiences the violence as though it were a movie: “I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear. The effect was instantaneous, astonishing. He was a stunt man and this was Hollywood, […] He collapsed” (11). The description highlights the boys’ alienation from the natural world, in which life and death are realities rather than performances. Having grown up amid fake violence, the boys might have become desensitized to the real thing.

If the boys’ initial “badness” is mimicry, however, their attempted rape of the young woman—an act of real evil—seems to spring from something more instinctive: “Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked with lust and greed and purest primal badness [...] There we were, dirty, bloody, guilty, dissociated from humanity and civilization” (12). Not only does the narrator frame his and his friends’ actions as a break from “humanity and civilization,” but he also slips into the first-person plural, as if they are part of an animal pack. At the same time, it remains difficult to disentangle the boys’ violence from cultural constructions of masculinity. In recounting their actions, the narrator again references pop culture—specifically, The Virgin Spring, a movie about a rape (though not one that glamorizes it). Perhaps the only thing that can be said with certainty about the boys’ descent into violence is that, regardless of its source, it scares them badly enough that they give up playacting badness.

Loss of Innocence

The narrator tells the story in retrospect, and the mocking tone he uses to recount the night’s events suggests that he now sees his and his friends’ behavior as naïve. Until that evening, the boys are implied to have lived sheltered existences safe from the kinds of violence they read about in books or saw in movies. Though they rebel in minor, often aesthetic ways—wearing torn clothing, smoking marijuana, etc.—their lives are essentially conventional and devoid of responsibility. Digby is attending college on his father’s dime, but the narrator doesn’t disclose any of Digby’s possible ambitions. Jeff’s ideas about the future are similarly blurry. The narrator does not disclose much of his own background, but as he worries what he will tell his mother about her vandalized car, his situation is presumably similar to Jeff’s and Digby’s.

The events of the night systematically reveal to the boys just how sheltered they are. When the “greasy character” picks a fight with the boys, it emerges that the narrator has not been in a fight since the sixth grade and that Digby’s experience is confined to a “course in martial arts for phys-ed credit” (10). Although the boys get the upper hand when the narrator hits the man with a tire iron, this in itself proves deeply disturbing to them. Horrified not only by the prospect of prison but by their “mindless, raging” actions, the boys lash out at the woman and attempt to rape her—an act that is even more “mindless” and that lacks even the justification of self-defense.

The episode that follows forces the narrator to confront not only the potential consequences of the night’s events but also those events’ implications with regard to who he is. His experience in the lake is a dark and disturbing encounter with both “nature” (human and otherwise) and with violence, in the form of the corpse. The narrator recoils from the idea that he has anything in common with the dead man or (what the narrator assumes to be) his shady lifestyle, framing his actions as mere chance:

[I] [u]nderstood, and stumbled back in horror and revulsion, my mind yanked in six different directions (I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the water-logged carcass of a second), thinking, The keys, the keys, why did I have to go and lose the keys? (13).

However, despite the narrator’s attempt to distance himself from his violent acts, it’s clear they affect him deeply. He is overjoyed to learn the man he believed he killed is alive, and in the morning, he and his friends respond fearfully to an offer to “party” with two women. Having learned what they are actually capable of, the boys have lost all interest in feigning worldliness via drugs and sex.

Capitalism and the Environment

Greasy Lake’s “greasy” appearance is the result of pollution, as evidenced by the fact that it used to look very different:

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 with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island 100 yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the Air Force had strafed it (8).

Although the story never specifies exactly what (or who) has contaminated the lake, this passage and others implicate capitalist culture writ large. The garbage littering the shores, for instance, speaks to US reliance on disposable, mass-produced goods like bottles and cans; later, the men who interrupt the attempted rape stuff the boys’ car full of trash that includes “candy wrappers” and “used condoms.” The reference to the air force, though figurative, hints at the intertwining of business and military interests, particularly in an era of American imperialism (i.e., involvement in Vietnam).

Beyond these specific indictments of US industry, the story implies that materialism and consumer culture create an atmosphere that facilitates environmental degradation. For one, the boredom of suburban existence fuels the characters’ reckless behavior, even driving them to the lake itself in an attempt to escape their malaise: “Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, […] trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake” (8). The passage evokes a longing for something other than “asphalt” and “shopping malls,” but because the characters are estranged from the natural world, they barely seem to recognize it, mistaking their polluting activities at the lake for “nature” itself. What’s more, the damage that has already been done to the lake combines with consumerism’s emphasis on instant gratification to encourage carelessness. If the characters lack a long-term perspective on the lake (or their own lives), it is perhaps because everything around them seems to be degrading, making indulging oneself in the moment seem reasonable.

However, the story’s final paragraphs suggest a shift in attitude. As the night passes, the narrator encounters a scene that is almost beautiful, at least in comparison to earlier descriptions of the lake:

By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature (16).

The repetition of “this was nature,” here in actual reference to the natural world, suggests a newfound appreciation for it. What’s more, though traces of capitalist society remain—e.g., the car—they no longer seem to threaten the lake. Rather, the comparison of the car to a relic of a “vanished civilization” suggests that it’s the car that’s in danger of being swallowed up by nature, hinting at the environment’s ability to outlast human destruction and regenerate.