Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
GREASY LAKE AND OTHER STORIES
T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of the novels A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, East Is East, Worlds End (Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Budding Prospects, and Water Music . His short story collections include After the Plague, T. C. Boyle Stories, Descent of Man, Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey , and Without a Hero . His short fiction regularly appears in major American magazines including The New Yorker , Harpers, The Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire , and The Atlantic Monthly . He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T. C. Boyles Web site is www.tcboyle.com.
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1985 Published in Penguin Books 1986
Copyright T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Boyle, T. Coraghessan.
Greasy Lake & other stories.
I. Title. II. Title: Greasy Lake and other stories.
PS3552.0932G .54 85-25993
eISBN : 978-1-101-46218-8
The author wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support.
Page 230 constitutes an extension of this copyright page .
Set in Caledonia
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Greasy Lake
Its about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parents whining station wagons out into the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andr Gide and struck elaborate poses to show that we didnt give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.
Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. The Indians had called it Wakan, a reference to the clarity of its waters. Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it. We went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich scent 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.
I was there one night, late, in the company of two dangerous characters. Digby wore a gold star in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell; Jeff was thinking of quitting school to become a painter/musician/head-shop proprietor. They were both expert in the social graces, quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick. They could lounge against a bank of booming speakers and trade mans with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor as if their joints worked on bearings. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. In short, they were bad.
I drove. Digby pounded the dashboard and shouted along with Toots & the Maytals while Jeff hung his head out the window and streaked the side of my mothers Bel Air with vomit. It was early June, the air soft as a hand on your cheek, the third night of summer vacation. The first two nights wed been out till dawn, looking for something we never found. On this, the third night, wed cruised the strip sixty-seven times, been in and out of every bar and club we could think of in a twenty-mile radius, stopped twice for bucket chicken and forty-cent hamburgers, debated going to a party at the house of a girl Jeffs sister knew, and chucked two dozen raw eggs at mailboxes and hitchhikers. It was 2:00 A.M.; the bars were closing. There was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon-flavored gin up to Greasy Lake.
The taillights of a single car winked at us as we swung into the dirt lot with its tufts of weed and washboard corrugations; 57 Chevy, mint, metallic blue. On the far side of the lot, like the exoskeleton of some gaunt chrome insect, a chopper leaned against its kickstand. And that was it for excitement: some junkie half-wit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend. Whatever it was we were looking for, we werent about to find it at Greasy Lake. Not that night.
But then all of a sudden Digby was fighting for the wheel. Hey, thats Tony Lovetts car! Hey! he shouted, while I stabbed at the brake pedal and the Bel Air nosed up to the gleaming bumper of the parked Chevy. Digby leaned on the horn, laughing, and instructed me to put my brights on. I flicked on the brights. This was hilarious. A joke. Tony would experience premature withdrawal and expect to be confronted by grim-looking state troopers with flashlights. We hit the horn, strobed the lights, and then jumped out of the car to press our witty faces to Tonys windows; for all we knew we might even catch a glimpse of some little foxs tit, and then we could slap backs with red-faced Tony, roughhouse a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.
The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was losing my grip on the keys. In the excitement, leaping from the car with the gin in one hand and a roach clip in the other, I spilled them in the grassin the dark, rank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake. This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmorelands decision to dig in at Khe Sanh. I felt it like a jab of intuition, and I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet.
The second mistakeand this was inextricably bound up with the firstwas identifying the car as Tony Lovetts. Even before the very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots ripped out of the drivers door, I began to realize that this chrome blue was much lighter than the robins-egg of Tonys car, and that Tonys car didnt have rear-mounted speakers. Judging from their expressions, Digby and Jeff were privately groping toward the same inevitable and unsettling conclusion as I was.
