Greasy Lake Summary & Analysis

From an unknown point in the future, an unnamed narrator looks back on his “dangerous” youth. He describes a time “when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, [and] it was good to be bad.” He and his friends, he says, “cultivated decadence like a taste.” In order to appear “bad,” they wore torn and tough clothes, raced their parents’ station wagons, and “struck elaborate poses to show that [they] didn’t give a shit about anything.” The baddest thing of all the bad things they did, the narrator says, was going up to Greasy Lake.

The narrator recalls that Greasy Lake was located “through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls.” Greasy Lake was once clear and beautiful, but by the time of the narrator’s youth, it was “fetid and murky,” littered with trash and refuse, and the island at the center of it was “stripped [and] strafed” of vegetation. The allure of Greasy Lake, the narrator recalls, was the fact that “everyone went there.” At the lake, there was always a “rich scent of possibility on the breeze,” the possibility being the opportunity to “watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk” or to get drunk, high, and “howl at the stars against the primeval [noises] of frogs and crickets. This,” the narrator says, “was nature.”

The narrator reflects, in particular, on one night at the lake. He was there, he says satirically, “in the company of two dangerous characters,” with his friends Digby—who wears a “gold star” earring and “allow[s] his father to pay his tuition at Cornell”—and Jeff, who is “thinking of quitting school to become a painter/musician/head-shop owner.” Both of the narrator’s friends are comfortably middle class, as he himself is, and, to demonstrate their desire to be seen as bad, they wear “mirror shades at breakfast and dinner [and] in the shower.”

The narrator, in his mother’s Bel Air, drives Digby and Jeff out to Greasy Lake. It is the third night of summer vacation, and the boys are restless, having been out “looking for something [they] never found” two nights in a row. After having “cruised the strip sixty-seven times” and stopped in “every bar and club in a twenty-mile radius,” the boys have decided that there is “nothing to do” besides getting drunk on gin up at Greasy Lake.

As the boys pull into the dirt lot at the edge of the lake, they notice a metallic blue ’57 Chevy in mint condition parked there. “On the far side of the lot,” the narrator observes, there is an abandoned “chopper.” The narrator is disappointed to find only “some junkie biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend,” and he and his friends realize that they are not “about to find whatever it was [they were] looking for at Greasy Lake.”

Digby exclaims that the Chevy is “Tony Lovett’s car,” and honks the Bel Air’s horn. The narrator, at Digby’s suggestion, turns on the brights. The boys revel in the hilarity of their prank, excited to catch Tony with his pants down and give him a fright. The boys all jump out of the car, hoping to scare Tony and maybe “catch a glimpse of some little fox’s tit, [and then] go on to new heights of adventure and daring.”

The narrator interrupts the story’s flow to highlight two of his major mistakes. The first, he says, “was losing [his] grip on the keys” and dropping them in the “dark, mysterious nighttime grass.” The second “was identifying the Chevy [in the first place] as Tony Lovett’s.”

A “very bad greasy character” emerges from the Chevy—which is a “much lighter” blue, the boys realize, “than the robin’s-egg of Tony’s car.” The Bad Character was “clearly a man of action,” the narrator recalls with more than a hint of sarcasm, detailing how the man immediately began doling out “lusty Rockette kick[s]” as the narrator crouched in the grass, looking for his missing keys.

While the Bad Character kicks the narrator savagely, Digby steps in to deliver “a savage kung-fu blow,” employing a move he learned in a “course in martial arts for phys-ed credit.” The Bad Character, “unimpressed,” flattens Digby with one blow. Jeff then leaps onto the Bad Character’s back, savagely biting his ear. The narrator reaches into the Bel Air for the tire iron he keeps under the driver’s seat “for just such an occasion as this,” despite never having been involved in a real fight and having only ever used the tire iron to actually change tires.

Though “terrified,” the narrator brings the tire iron down on the Bad Character’s head. “The effect [is] instantaneous,” and the Bad Character, like a “balloon [up against] a man with a straight pin, collapse[s.]” The narrator, Digby, and Jeff stand silently over the Bad Character’s unconscious body. The narrator can “already envision the headlines, the gleam of handcuffs, [his] cell.”

A scream rips through the silence of the dark night—it is The Fox, emerging from the Chevy “barefoot [and] dressed in panties and a man’s shirt.” She runs, with clenched fists, toward the boys, calling them “animals” for attacking her partner, the Bad Character. The narrator takes in her silver anklet, her painted toenails, and her blow-dried hair. “It was the toenails that did it,” the narrator says, before describing how he, Digby, and Jeff leapt upon her, “deranged, panting, tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh. We were bad characters [at last.]”

A car “[swings] into the lot,” catching the boys in their state of “lust and greed and primal badness.” The boys run to the Bel Air, but they quickly realize that, due to the missing keys, they have no way of starting it. Digby and Jeff bolt, and the narrator runs across the dirt lot to the lake’s edge. He can hear The Fox’s screams in the night. He pushes on into the water, planning to “swim for it” to the woods on the other side of the lake. Once he is waist-deep, he feels something “obscene, soft, [and] wet” in his path; he reaches out to touch it, and “it [gives] like flesh.” Realizing that he has encountered a water-bloated dead body, the narrator “stumble[s] back in horror,” overwhelmed by the increasingly dangerous events of the night, and lamenting his loss of the keys. The narrator loses his balance and falls onto the corpse, then leaps from the water, but not before catching a horrific glimpse of the corpse’s face.

The narrator, realizing he has made some noise with all his thrashing, hears The Fox telling someone: “It’s them: they tried to rape me!” A voice with a Midwestern accent screams out a threat; “then another voice, harsh[ly]” screams out, “Motherfucker!” The narrator realizes, with great relief, that it is the voice of the Bad Character; he is not dead after all. The Bad Character continues to shout curses into the night.

The narrator stays hidden in the underbrush, and listens tensely as the sound of “door[s] slam[ming] and headlights shattering” fill the silence. He peeks through the underbrush and realizes that the Bad Character is, with the narrator’s own tire iron and with the help of two blond men, destroying the narrator’s mother’s Bel Air. The Fox begs the Bad Character to stop, pleading with him and calling him “Bobbie.” Eventually he listens to her, gets into the Chevy with her, and drives off. The two blond men, left behind and seeming spooked by their own destructive actions, get back into their Trans Am and depart as well.

The narrator lies in the grass and “primordial ooze” for an indeterminate length of time. He “contemplate[s] suicide” and tries to think of “an excuse to give [his] parents.” After lamenting his own dire circumstances, the narrator’s thoughts turn to the dead body. He realizes that the dead body is “worse off” by far, and that he must have been “the owner of the chopper, a bad older character, another headline.” The narrator realizes that even though his mother’s car is destroyed, he still has his life.

As dawn begins to break, the narrator stands and returns to his mother’s car. He takes stock of the extensive damage, and Digby and Jeff “emerge from [their hiding place in] the trees.” Both boys are beaten badly, and their clothes are torn. Jeff begins to clean broken glass out of the front seat of the car, and Digby remarks that “at least they didn’t slash the tires.” All three boys work to clean out the car’s interior. The narrator does not mention the dead body in the lake, or his belief that it is the body of the man who owns the motorcycle parked nearby, while they clean in silence. He reaches into his pocket for the car keys once some of the damage has been cleaned up, and remembers with a “nasty stab of recollection” that they went missing. He spots them, though, “no more than five feet” away, “glinting like jewels.” The narrator sits in the driver’s seat and starts the car up.

A “silver Mustang with flame decals” pulls into the lot. Digby and Jeff get into their car and close the doors. The Mustang parks next to the motorcycle, and Digby urges the narrator to drive away, but he remains frozen.

Two girls step out of the car, dressed in “tight jeans [and] stiletto[s.]” They inspect the motorcycle and call for someone named “Al.” Digby again presses the narrator to drive away. Just then, one of the girls—the narrator thinks she looks “older”—walks unsteadily toward the boys; the narrator observes that there is “something wrong with her: she [is] either stoned or drunk.”

The Older Girl asks the boys if any of them have seen “Al,” and they tell her that they haven’t—the narrator cannot bring himself to speak up about what he believes “Al”’s fate to be. The Older Girl tells the boys that they “look like some pretty bad characters,” and she then offers them a handful of unmarked tablets, asking if they want to “party.” The narrator, feeling as if he is about to cry, doesn’t answer her. Digby, on all three of the boys’ behalves, refuses the drugs. The narrator then puts the car in gear and begins to drive away. As he does, he looks back in the rearview mirror and sees the Older Girl “still standing there, her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched.”