Post by MaxQuad on Jan 19, 2006 5:29:48 GMT -5
Greasy Lake
“It's about a mile down on the dark side of route eighty-eight”
Bruce Springsteen’s words are the first we read at the beginning of Greasy Lake, a short story written by T.C. Boyle in 1981.
Greasy Lake provides the destination for Crazy Janey and Wild Billy in song and the destination for Jeff and Digby in story. Both song and story have unnamed narrators who recount a night at Greasy Lake, each with different outcomes.
T.C. Boyle’s story focuses on a small group of friends, college age, seeking experiences on an early June evening to match the image they have built for themselves: “dangerous characters.” Their search is initially unsuccessful (“The first two nights we’d been out till dawn, looking for something we never found.”), but the third night eventually brought exactly what they were looking for – a dangerous situation for dangerous characters.
“Oh, you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night (all night), in the night (all night)
Stand right up now and let it shoot through you” (Bruce Springsteen)
The spirits in the night of Boyle’s story infuse the three friends with a violent response after stumbling into an unexpected confrontation with a couple in a car, a car they thought would contain another friend, Tony, with “some little fox.” The initial violence is recounted with images of Rockettes and Bruce Lee, images that make you smile about a prank gone bad, but suddenly a tire iron swung by the narrator fells the “bad greasy character” who took exception to their prank. Time stops as they assume he is dead, killed instantly by the blow to his head. “The effect was instantaneous, astonishing…He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.”
They are brought back to the moment by “a raw torn shriek,” a scream from “the fox” as she ran at them in rage. The blood lust of the situation heightens. All three are described as being in the grip of “the purest primal badness” while grabbing her, tearing at her clothes with the intent of raping her. The arrival of another car halts the attack and the friends scatter, the narrator running toward Greasy Lake to make another horrific discovery in this horrible night. While attempting to swim the lake, to escape from whoever arrived at the scene, the narrator stumbles upon a body floating in the lake, later surmised to be the owner of a nearby motorcycle, “a bad older character come to this.”
We later discover that the tire iron did not deliver a fatal blow. We are privy to the description of the distant sounds of the narrator’s car (his mother’s car) being destroyed with that same tire iron: windshield, headlights, taillights, and body. The greasy character and his friends take their leave, having extracted some semblance of revenge for the events of the night.
As dawn approaches, our original group of friends gather around the battered car, still in running condition, but a visual testament to the chaos of the night, a night in which they were caught up in the badness they sought at Greasy Lake.
Just as they are to leave, two drunken and stoned young women arrive in a car, calling out the name of the biker, whose body is floating in the lake, the body discovered by the narrator during his night of terror. The disappearance of Al, their biker friend, lifeless in Greasy Lake, is quickly forgotten. Rather, they see an opportunity; an opportunity to share some “tablets in glassine wrappers,” an opportunity “to party.”
Wild Billy said, "Trust some of this it'll show you where you're at, or at least it'll help you really feel it" (Bruce Springsteen)
Throughout the story, knowing that they had found what they were looking for, the narrator’s only stated epiphany is the realization that the “obscene…soft, wet, moss-grown” object he stumbled upon in the lake was a corpse, the “waterlogged corpse” of the biker. We never witness what insight he may have gained, even in retrospect (since the story is told from his perspective many years later). We are left to wonder if he found anything other than horror that night, anything other than the fear of being caught or the fear of creating a believable story as to what happened to the car. This point is brought home in his response to the young girls who inquire about Al. “Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed…’We haven’t seen anybody,’ I said.” He doesn’t immediately face up to the consequences of the night. We hear no regret as he tells the story years later. We don’t know if he really felt it at all.
“So we closed our eyes and said goodbye to gypsy angel row, felt so right” (Bruce Springsteen)
The characters in Bruce’s song felt so right at the end of their night at Greasy Lake. Boyle’s characters are numb, “zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.” Like one of the girls at the end of the story, we are left in a daze, “standing there…shoulders slumped, hand outstretched” hoping they learned something. I can hope, but I don’t believe they did.
MQ
(Written while listening to the music of Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad in a Doha, Qatar coffee shop 19 January 2006)
“It's about a mile down on the dark side of route eighty-eight”
Bruce Springsteen’s words are the first we read at the beginning of Greasy Lake, a short story written by T.C. Boyle in 1981.
Greasy Lake provides the destination for Crazy Janey and Wild Billy in song and the destination for Jeff and Digby in story. Both song and story have unnamed narrators who recount a night at Greasy Lake, each with different outcomes.
T.C. Boyle’s story focuses on a small group of friends, college age, seeking experiences on an early June evening to match the image they have built for themselves: “dangerous characters.” Their search is initially unsuccessful (“The first two nights we’d been out till dawn, looking for something we never found.”), but the third night eventually brought exactly what they were looking for – a dangerous situation for dangerous characters.
“Oh, you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night (all night), in the night (all night)
Stand right up now and let it shoot through you” (Bruce Springsteen)
The spirits in the night of Boyle’s story infuse the three friends with a violent response after stumbling into an unexpected confrontation with a couple in a car, a car they thought would contain another friend, Tony, with “some little fox.” The initial violence is recounted with images of Rockettes and Bruce Lee, images that make you smile about a prank gone bad, but suddenly a tire iron swung by the narrator fells the “bad greasy character” who took exception to their prank. Time stops as they assume he is dead, killed instantly by the blow to his head. “The effect was instantaneous, astonishing…He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.”
They are brought back to the moment by “a raw torn shriek,” a scream from “the fox” as she ran at them in rage. The blood lust of the situation heightens. All three are described as being in the grip of “the purest primal badness” while grabbing her, tearing at her clothes with the intent of raping her. The arrival of another car halts the attack and the friends scatter, the narrator running toward Greasy Lake to make another horrific discovery in this horrible night. While attempting to swim the lake, to escape from whoever arrived at the scene, the narrator stumbles upon a body floating in the lake, later surmised to be the owner of a nearby motorcycle, “a bad older character come to this.”
We later discover that the tire iron did not deliver a fatal blow. We are privy to the description of the distant sounds of the narrator’s car (his mother’s car) being destroyed with that same tire iron: windshield, headlights, taillights, and body. The greasy character and his friends take their leave, having extracted some semblance of revenge for the events of the night.
As dawn approaches, our original group of friends gather around the battered car, still in running condition, but a visual testament to the chaos of the night, a night in which they were caught up in the badness they sought at Greasy Lake.
Just as they are to leave, two drunken and stoned young women arrive in a car, calling out the name of the biker, whose body is floating in the lake, the body discovered by the narrator during his night of terror. The disappearance of Al, their biker friend, lifeless in Greasy Lake, is quickly forgotten. Rather, they see an opportunity; an opportunity to share some “tablets in glassine wrappers,” an opportunity “to party.”
Wild Billy said, "Trust some of this it'll show you where you're at, or at least it'll help you really feel it" (Bruce Springsteen)
Throughout the story, knowing that they had found what they were looking for, the narrator’s only stated epiphany is the realization that the “obscene…soft, wet, moss-grown” object he stumbled upon in the lake was a corpse, the “waterlogged corpse” of the biker. We never witness what insight he may have gained, even in retrospect (since the story is told from his perspective many years later). We are left to wonder if he found anything other than horror that night, anything other than the fear of being caught or the fear of creating a believable story as to what happened to the car. This point is brought home in his response to the young girls who inquire about Al. “Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed…’We haven’t seen anybody,’ I said.” He doesn’t immediately face up to the consequences of the night. We hear no regret as he tells the story years later. We don’t know if he really felt it at all.
“So we closed our eyes and said goodbye to gypsy angel row, felt so right” (Bruce Springsteen)
The characters in Bruce’s song felt so right at the end of their night at Greasy Lake. Boyle’s characters are numb, “zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.” Like one of the girls at the end of the story, we are left in a daze, “standing there…shoulders slumped, hand outstretched” hoping they learned something. I can hope, but I don’t believe they did.
MQ
(Written while listening to the music of Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad in a Doha, Qatar coffee shop 19 January 2006)