Analysis Of Greasy Lake By T. Coraghessan Boyle

In the story “Greasy Lake” written by T. Coraghessan Boyle, there are three college aged boys who are on summer vacation and looking for trouble, as they want to be “bad”. We know that the boys are not in fact “bad” because one of the boys attends and Ivy League school, one wants to become a musician and they all three ride around in their mothers station wagon. The big symbol of “bad” in this story is a place called Greasy Lake. Greasy Lake is a deserted, filthy place on the outskirts of town that the boys go to after they have eaten and all the bars have closed. When they get to the lake the boys mistake a car for one of their buddies car and decide to screw around with it. In the midst of flashing the lights and sounding the horn, they quickly

All they are looking for is a girl and some physical activity. In the story we have Vic who is very out going with girls and his friend Enn who is just the opposite. The boys find trouble when looking for a party they lost the address to. While wondering, the boys stumble upon a house party that just so happens to be full of girls and decide to go in anyway fully knowing that it is not the one they were invited to. As usual, Vic instantly finds a girl (Stella) he runs off with and leaves Enn alone in the kitchen. Enn tries to start up conversation with some girls and quickly realizes he is surrounded by girls, he presumes are from a far away place. All of the girls Enn talks to have names he’s never heard of and speak of weird rituals and poems. In the midst of cozying up to one of the girls, Vic comes flying down the stairs and tells Enn it is time to leave. As they are leaving Enn sees Stella standing at the top of the stairs, clothes out of sorts with a smudged face, watching Vic with the angriest look he has ever seen. The boys run out of the house and run until they cannot run any longer. Vic turns to Enn and says, “you know…there is a thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn’t be you anymore? You’d be the person who’d done that? The places you just can’t go… I think that happened to me tonight.”(Gaiman, 102). From this, it is easy to presume that Vic tried to have sex with Stella which was not what she was expecting and she got so mad that Vic got scared and ran out. As normal teenagers, they were obviously looking for a hook up whereas the girls were looking for more of a connection. With everything that happened, I cannot say whether Vic deserved it or not, I think that this is just a normal thing that a teenager will face when he