In “Greasy Lake”, by T. C. Boyle, the main protagonists who are wannabe badasses are put in a situation that really tests if they are ‘hard’ and ‘bad’. They prove to be rather tough characters, but they do not have the stomach to be really “bad”. They are forced to be rather brutal in their reactive fight, as they had mistaken the identity of a scary man for their friend, and so their brutality can be understood. Everyone has a reactive and survival instinct in them if they are in danger, so the boys just did what they had to to save themselves, and they fact that they were shocked and scared about their actions goes to show that they weren’t bad in their nature. They had just been fighting to save themselves from being beaten up by the man. The rush of adrenaline and fear, however, does not serve as an excuse for what they tried to do after. Their “primal badness” is just an euphemism for attempting to rape the “fox”, and it is truly inexcusable and disgusting, no matter what experience they had just gone through.

Then, interrupting their attempted sexual crime, comes a car with two men in it that are sympathetic with the man they had just “murdered”. They scatter in all directions, scared of the jail time they face for committing two felonies, and horrified of what they had done and that it had been witnessed. The whole essay is interspersed with humorous lines such as he “streaked the side of my mother’s Bel Air with vomit”, I “chipped my favorite tooth”, and the humorously bad excuses he thinks of giving his parents for the state of himself and the car such as “a tree had fallen on the car, I was blindsided by a bread truck, [it was a] hit and run, [and] vandals had got to it”. These pockets of funny interjections help the story in the relief it gives to the other serious things that are going on at the same time.

Greasy Lake seems the perfect place for all this to happen, as it is described as a place of lawlessness and a place with a potential for exciting events. The presence of a dead biker floating in the lake conjures up images of a similar scene occurring earlier, but with a different ending. Alcohol and drugs are associated with everything, as the boys themselves have smoked pot earlier that night, the lake is host to many acts of drug usage, and the girls looking for Al are wasted or high. He also mentions the phrase, “This was nature.” in the exposition and ending of the descriptional essay, to tie the story together and call to attention that nature is chaotic and raw and rough, we as a society have just grown civilized and soft. All the acts committed that night really are caused by natural feelings and desires, let loose with no restraint and executed, as nature is.