Greasy Lake and Other Short Stories by T. C. Boyle - Term Paper Example

 The author T. Coraghessan Boyle has written several other short stories but perhaps none brought the author more fame, expertise, and notoriety then from the Greasy Lake short story. Boyle has been writing short stories for many years. Other authors see Boyle as a master writer that brings a special twist of humor and reality that leaves the reader with a feeling of satisfaction. At what point does a boy become a man, at what point does the boy put away childish things in search for the ritualistic commitment that makes him an adult. T.C Boyle sets out to define these terms in his coming of age novel Greasy Lake. The book starts out with three teenagers trying to grasp and believe they understand the architectural motifs of becoming a man in 20 century. It is the third day of summer vacation and the three set out with venom coursing through their young veins. All three boys headed to Greasy Lake with the feeling of power, strength and a common belief of invincibility. They are not your typical teenage boys, oh no these boys are bad and they want the world to know it. "We wore torn-up leather jackets; slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue...we drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hoi. We were nineteen. We were bad." They were their own gang with their own initiation, with their own sense of morality as they stopped on the gas pedal up to Greasy Lake. They were dangerous and they knew it but their commitment to self was about to catch up to them in a destructive and revelatory way. To Greasy Lake with its murky and muddy banks filled with shards of broken glass glistening in the moons light. Their minds swimming with marijuana and alcohol as they pull into the parking lot only to see two vehicles “the exoskeleton of some gaunt chrome insect, a chopper leaned against its kickstand.” In addition, a, “57 Chevy, mint, metallic blue" No excitement, “expect some junkie halfwit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend.” All was lost they thought when they believe they see a friend's car. The night is now blossoming full of promise as they pull in behind the car and begin to honk the horn, flash the lights and yell obscenities like out of an old 50's movie. “For all we know we might even catch a glimpse of some little fox’s tit. And then we could slap backs with red-faced Tony, roughhouse a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.” Nevertheless, in their haste and excitement they do not realize this is not Tony's car and like medieval literature their enthusiasm and sense of adventure heightens as they take the keys and drop them in the grass. Underneath this climatic moment is a torrent of mistakes the narrator will soon recount. The owner of the car is far from amused and storms from the vehicle with fist flailing. Our narrator begins to grasp the danger he and his friends are in as they are soundly being beat-up. The path they have chosen is like a swords edge beneath their feet as he reaches for his tire iron beneath his seat. All tough guy's had tire irons beneath their seats but our narrator; though holding on to some childhood notion that he is still a bad character, recalls with consequence that he has only been in one other fight. “In the 6th grade, when a kid with a sleepy eye and two streams of mucous descending from his nostrils hit me in the knee with a Louisville slugger". (pg.127). The moment was like a tranquilizer draining the passivity of values as though they were actors on stage each chanting a war cry as though in unison motherf*****'*. His hands tighten around the cold steel of the tire iron as he consoled his arm to swing. The sickening sound of metal hitting bone hushed the moment as the tire iron dug into the skull of greasy booted character who owned the car. "They are standing over him in a circle, gritting their teeth, jerking their necks, their limbs and hands and feet twitching." Is this what T.S. Eliot was describing in the wasteland? A sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon these young men. Does the moment evoke any potentialities any physical courage or have they just witnessed the cursed values of modern society? A society without rituals, without spiritual and physical guides, is a society that has killed the exercise of service to the individual extinguishing the hope for many young lives. Had they killed him? The possibility was certainly there when they hear the cry of the girlfriend draw their attention. The moment was ripe with adrenaline, testosterone and flushed with this foxy stimuli. In harmony with their badness, they ascend upon her with the primal thought of her flesh as they attempt to rape her. “We are bad characters, and we are wheezing, tearing at her clothes, grabbing for her flesh. We are bad characters and we are scared and hot". Is this what the psychologist Maslow called the peak experience or rather what James Joyce called pornography as they tried to possess the object? Head lights from an approaching car touch the boy's faces interrupting the assault the peak experience like an anchor around their necks as they rush off down the embank into the cloudy dirty water of Greasy Lake. There a radiation a potential in this moment as it took on a life of itself separate from the point of choice. A contemporary model filled with growth and understanding that neither of the boys could grasp then retreating from this monster like a child does from their closets. These boys were coming to terms with the fact that they were not knights at the round table in search for the Grail. No these boys were impotent they were more like Icon's wings hoping to escape the Cretan labyrinth which they had created themselves. Little did they know these wings were made of wax and if you fly to close to the sun they will melt and you fall into the sea just like the poor Icons. They each had entered the dark forest at different points of reference, a unique phenomenon, as each boy now must confront his own demons alone. The narrator is clawing his way through thick weeds and muck, rattled and scared. Is that the police? A witness maybe, up there in that car. Is the boy they hit with the tire Iron dead? The mystery played with the dimensions of his senses. The experience had been operating on malice, sexual appetite and a symbolic imagery relevant to modern times. However, different divinities were at play now. Their minds raging and scared with fear, dominance, and yes, the sudden epiphany that neither he nor his friends were as bad as they lead on to being. “I’m 19, a mere child, an infant and here in the space of five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character.” As faith would have it and true to the experience at hand our hero stumbles over something down by the lakes edge. The imagery is serious and pokes upon aesthetic cruelty. The floating corpse of the dead biker, he must have been the one who owned that bike in the parking lot. Suddenly the fear squeezed him and the transformation took hold of his rattled nerves, this was the Mount Everest of the experience of this night. He himself could be a killer and potentially considered a rapist. He did not want to be bad anymore the door was wide open to the realization of his actions. Luckily, for him the person he hit with the Tire Iron was ok, “the son of a bitch is alive”. He could hear him and the car that had arrived was apparently his friends. Filled with a sense of relief as he listened to the thugs destroy his mother car. "The bad breath of decay is all around me," his thoughts linger around the imagery as though a sudden awareness awakened inside of him to the rhythm of this relationship. He was seeing each of the parts to the relationship of the whole; the dead biker, the "primordial ooze", the ache in his jaw and throbbing in his knees the simple beholding of ignorance and expected detachment from awareness and the truth of adolescence. What would he tell his mother about the car? He would think of something; what this night revealed to him was far greater “It’s dark side and the limitations of being bad” All he knows are he and his friends had a second chance as they emerge from the Greasy Lake. The consequence of what could have been hits them all like in arts striking paint to canvas. The boys felt as the car looked, torn battered and beaten. The realization that there were monsters on this earth that were more brutal and evil then they were. They begin to clean the car out, the way they would their old lives. They had faced the symbolic pair of opposites, ecstasy, desire, fear and death and the true difference between them. No one had guided them to understand this duality to help them identify with this state of consciousness. The manifestation of their choices of being bad now sacrificed to the art of this world and the balance between. A balance they would never quite grasp. This balance, transforming that there was always somebody stronger and nastier then the next. As the boy's minds swam with these emotions, two girls show up in a mustang obviously looking for the dead biker floating in the Lake. They see the boy's and offer them the fun they were searching for earlier. The girls wore tight jeans with a handful of pills. There is silence before Dig by declines the opportunity. The night's events have exposed an ugly truth that these boys's were not bad. As they drove off, they noticed this sheen of the sun on the lake, reflecting on the renewal of life and potentialities and the powers that evoke them. They may not understand this force completely or the hierarchy of its continued power but they understood, if just for a second the source of its mystery (Boyle, 1985). The beginning structure of the novel carries with it several significant points. However, the one undulating just beneath the surface of the black ink on the white page is the role society plays to the development of these young men and others like them. The story like so many others is a painting, if you will, tragic, beautiful and full of youthanism to behold and carry with you. T.C Boyle seemed to understand the social arrangement our society has today. A world where mythology is dying and the service of society is no longer there for the individual but the individuals required being there for society. It may not be readily apparent, but the realization becomes clear when you see the roles totally reversed and when that happens, we present a position of young men in the service of society. This presented the fact then that society may now have a monster on their hands. Boyle possesses the ability to write about a character in a way that the reader can actually feel what those boys felt when showing up at Greasy Lake. Often Boyle compared, to authors such as John Updike, James Joyce, and Katherine Anne Porter. The theme may be the failure of moral nerve that has become a commonplace in contemporary fictional stories. Using yet another analytical comparison, we could consider this tale to be one of the post modern. If that being the case than we need to use elements such as self-consciousness and intersexuality but we must not become to accustomed to the ubiquitous breaking of the proscenium that is the hallmark of clever for the author. Post-modernity holds fast to some sort of family values the new avant-garde of post-modern fiction. This is in the grip of self-images that transcends, detailed by the lake of adult guidance. Banal as these beliefs maybe there is not necessarily a limited parody. At times, it attempts satire, but because it lacks any moral standards, its exaggeration and self-absorption that can only serve as frenetic substitutes for a moral point of view. The counter-view point could be established that there is nothing to be learned, nothing to be revealed there is simply an endless circle of plot and character, the zanier, the more discordant, the more violent the better. Boyle's fiction however goes even further to parody the revelatory nature of the violent behavior in the male youth in the 80's. In conclusion, the story is a simple one of three friends who are bad characters. They all run into a situation at a local hangout point called Greasy Lake. Because the teenagers look badly and act badly the teenagers soon find-out that acting and looking badly demonstrates that in the 80's male youth related to violent behavior as being cool. The violent behavior generated by the bad habits of what they wore, the torn jackets, the slouching around, toothpicks hanging out of their mouths and wearing those shades morning, noon and night. Boyle's short story captures the reader's attention by sharing with them that the boys had some very bad habits. They drank, they smoked dope, they sniffed glue and they drove their parent's vehicles too fast. The lake itself is fetid and murky. The lake has muddy banks and covered in broken glass, beer cans and the remains of bon-fires from previous bad parties. The scene continues to unfold with a 57 Chevy and a chopper leaned on against the kickstand. Someone makes notice that it is nothing but a junkie halfwit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend. Not lost when the three think they see one of their friend's cars. In all the excitement it does not become aware to them this is not their friends car. However, make the first of several mistakes by taking the keys out and dropping them in the grass. The actual owner of the car comes back his car and finds this not to be very funny. This greasy booted dude flies out of the car with fists flying and feet kicking. They have really met a bad character now. This bad man beats the tar out of these teenagers. This is was not enough for them not to see that they were bad. Suddenly the only thing that becomes important is survival. The use of a tire iron comes down on the head of the greasy character. There is a cry and see the greasy character's girlfriend in the car. The adrenaline is really pumping and they ascend on the girlfriend tearing at her flesh. A rape is about to occur until headlights interrupt them. They bolt realizing they are not so invincible as they think. One of the boys goes into the murky waters of the lake. Just when he thinks matters could not get worse he feels a lifeless body of dead man in floating in the water. The narrator is alone. He has no idea where his friends are. All he knows is that he is scared, he is alone in the dark and his new companion is a dead biker. His jacket becomes so heavy and the stench of decay hits him. Then he hears the smashing noise of metal against metal and knows it is his Mother's car. Somehow, the narrator of this short story realizes the nature of life. When the teenagers see the car, a light bulb goes off. This is a time for a reevaluation. This group of teenagers may look and act like bad characters but they are not. The three friends learn valuable lessons in this short story. Never judge a book by the cover; never underestimate the opponents and there is a vast difference from being truly bad to being a bad character want to-be. The story is brief overview of this period of youth in the 80's. The role society plays to the development of these young men and others like them. The story like so many others is a painting, if you will, tragic, beautiful and full of youthanism to behold and carry with you. T.C Boyle seemed to understand the social arrangement our society has today. Reference: Boyle, T.C. (1985). Greasy Lake and Other Short Stories. Viking Publications, 1985. Read More