Greasy Lake Summary

A young man sat in a small lonely prison cell contemplating his future. Twenty years to serve was the sentence. Twenty years of his life locked up in a prison was the price for the choice made in one split second. The young man pondered how his life would be different if he had just made a different choice on that one fateful night. This young man was in the same situation as so many young men in our society. Prisons overflow with young men whose bad choices landed them behind prison doors. Many young men have found themselves charged with crimes because the trouble they got into was a result of choosing to hang with “bad characters such as Digby and Jeff.
In the short story by T.C. Boyle called “Greasy Lake,” three young men, nearing the end of their teenage years embark on an evening of destructive behavior and bad choices that were common for the time in which they lived. The story begins with the protagonist being proud of being bad. “We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks
He realizes that he is not one of those “bad characters” that he considered himself as in the beginning of the story. He thought of committing suicide thinking how he was going to tell his parents about the car being destroyed. He thought of if this was how he wanted his life to be about. He knew he got away with things that he could have been in prison for. The young men collect their thoughts and reflect on the events of the night, yet another car pulls into Greasy Lake. The narrator realizes who they are looking for but says nothing about the body in the lake. The girls offer drugs, something that they would not have turned down just a few short hours before. But, they do turn down the good time being offered to them by the girls. They leave in a broken down, beat up car. They leave with a new outlook on life and the