Most teenagers go through a point in their lives where they want to step out from what a successful member of society is supposed to be. During these teens’ phases, they experiment with different elements, such as drugs, drinking, and sexual exploration and become involved in various mischievous activities. As a result, teenagers grow up and figure out what route they want to take in life. Do they stay promiscuous, or do they mature and learn from their mistakes? It is proven that many teens first experiment during their high school years:

Greasy Lake An unnamed narrator, looking back on his past, recalls “a time when it was good to be bad,” when he and his friends, at nineteen years old, were desperate to be seen as “dangerous characters.”. I am doing a English paper on you and on Greasy lakes. I am taking Eng 102 and we have read some short stories. I decided to pick Greasy lake and yourself becaues out of all the short stories, your story happens to be the one that kept me interested and i could also relate a little to the characters.

Results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRLBS), found that 72.5% of high school students had at least one drink of alcohol during their lifetime, and 41.8% had at least one drink in the past 30 days. Additionally, this study found that 46.3% of students had tried cigarettes, and 19.5% had smoked in the past 30 days. Also, 36.8% of students had used marijuana in their lifetime, and 20.8% had used it in the past 30 days. Furthermore, this study found that 46% of students had sexual intercourse in their lifetime. (Dunn 24)

In the short story “Greasy Lake,” T.C. Boyle presents a group of male teenagers who go through the phase detailed above. Toward the end of the story, the protagonist makes a decision about what route to take in life because of an epiphany he has while was going through this common teenage phase.

During the story, the unnamed protagonist and his friends try to emulate what typical “bad boys” do. While trying to act “bad,” the boys figure out that they are not cut out for the rebel lifestyle. Boyle’s main point in the story is that being cool does not necessarily mean acting tough and getting into all types of trouble. Throughout the story, the teens go through a series of unfortunate events.

The story opens with the protagonist recalling his past of being a “bad boy.” There is foreshadowing in the beginning of the story when the narrators states, “There was a time when . . . it was good to be bad . . . We were all dangerous characters then” (Charters 164). Readers eventually find out that the narrator changes his perspective about the lake and past decisions he has made. Then, the protagonist states that he and his friends loved being bad and going against the norm. They listened to rock and roll music, smoked cigarettes, did drugs, drank, and spent time with girls at the notorious meet-up spot, Greasy Lake, which was where all the cool kids went. This was the place to be:

We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich sent 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. (Charters 165)

Here, the author compares the naturalness of teenagers doing mischievous things such as drinking and watching girls undress to crickets and frogs making noise at night.

Greasy Lake Short Story Full Text Online Text

One night in June, the protagonist picks up his friends, Digby and Jeff, “two dangerous characters” (Charters 165). They first go to a few bars, but it soon gets late, and all the bars are in the process of closing. Drunk and high, they decide to go to Greasy Lake. According to a study, “More teenagers start drinking and smoking cigarettes and marijuana in June and July than in any other months, U.S. health officials say” (Reinberg).

When they arrive at their destination, Digby thought he saw their friend, Tony Lovett, and his car. The protagonist starts to honk the car horn and flashes its lights at the other car to try and trick Tony into thinking they were state troopers and ultimately scare him. They soon find out it is not Tony. Instead, it is a very angry, tough guy. The narrator describes him as “a man of action” (Charters 166), which isn’t a comforting image. This man starts a brawl with the protagonist and his friends, and it is not pretty. The protagonist chips his tooth, and he and his friends have gashes on their bodies. The protagonist said, “I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shaking, my heart turning over like a dirt bike in the wrong gear” (Charters 166).

The worst of all was that the protagonist had lost the key to the car. He said “and that the lost ignition key was my grail and my salvation” (Charters 166). Wartune knight skill build. Here, the protagonist is saying that the car keys are his only way out of Greasy Lake. Without the keys, he is doomed and has to stay there. They decide to fight back with a tire iron, and their attacker eventually lies on the floor, unconscious. The main character was afraid that he and his friends may have killed the man. After seeing what had happened to her boyfriend, the attacker’s girlfriend came out of the car and started screaming in fear. The protagonist and his friends decided to take advantage of her and sexually harass her. A car pulls up and a man starts screaming at them, and they end up fleeing the scene by running.

If they had not been so intoxicated, they would have figured out that the car was not their friend’s car and would not have honked and flashed lights at a random car. This is one of the first moments in the short story when the protagonist figures out that he is not cut out for this lifestyle. When someone is intoxicated, they do not act like an upstanding citizen of society and probably will get into fights and other trouble.

If someone provokes us while we’re drunk, we don’t take other factors into account, such as the consequences of rising to the bait. This can lead to violent reactions from people who would usually shrug things off . . . Alcohol also reduces anxiety, which can be one of the reasons we enjoy drinking. But, according to Professor McMurran, anxiety actually protects us by telling us to avoid or escape certain situations. When we’re drunk, this warning system doesn’t work and this can put us in dangerous or confrontational situations. (Drinkaware)

Greasy Lake Short Story Full Text Online Version

After fleeing the scene of the fight and potential rape, the protagonist decides to hide in the lake in case the police arrive at the scene. While alone in the lake, he finds a dead man floating and wonders what happened to him. The protagonist said, “I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, obscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown” (Charters 168). He was probably just like the protagonist. The dead man acted tough and cool but most likely ended up in a fight and was murdered. The finding of the dead body sets up the epiphany the boy has after coming to the lake that night. He is frightened and this part of the story really makes him think about gravitating toward the side of growing up. He sees that if he stays immature and keeps girls, drugs, and alcohol as his top priorities in life, he will end up like the dead man in the lake.

After hearing his attacker scream “the greasy bad character was laying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees” (Charters 169), the protagonist thinks to himself, “My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents—a tree had fallen on the car” (Charters 169). Here, the character regrets going to the lake. He will