http://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cDlbnaQZML

 

Write a specific, focused, thesis statement in

complex sentence form (dependent + independent clause

. that others in class might not agree with and that comes to a conclusion about how the narrator or Digby or Jeff’s behavior illustrates a point Orenstein makes about young men in her article,

“The Miseducation of the American Boy.”

This assignment requires you to submit only one sentence. Type your thesis statement in the text box. 

So what is a thesis statement, anyway?

A thesis statement is the point of your essay or response; it is why you are writing. It is a sentence that
usually comes at the end of the introduction. Here is a visual representation of the organization of an academic
essay:

The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of
the logic of your interpretation. An essay with a clear thesis will be focused and not stray off-topic.

Be sure your thesis statement does the following:

 Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and
should be supported with specific evidence (in the paragraphs of the body of your essay).

 Your thesis should directly answer the question asked of you; it is not the topic itself. In other words, the
topic of your history essay might be the Vietnam War. Your thesis must, then, offer a way to understand
the war.

 Because your thesis must offer a way to understand the topic, it should make a claim that others might
not agree with. For instance, regarding the topic of the Vietnam War, your thesis might be, “The Vietnam
War might have been prevented had America itself not supported a number of military dictatorships
before the Viet Cong rose to power.”

using evidence (in the form of embedded quotations) for support.

INTRODUCTION: introduce the topic generally,
then focus with the specific

THESIS STATEMENT

Paragraphs should all reinforce the thesis statement

and prove true the claims made in the thesis statement

CONCLUSION: tie together what you have
claimed in your thesis and proven in the body

of your essay and leave you reader with
something to think about

How to Tell a Strong from a Weak Thesis Statement.

1. A strong thesis statement is debatable, reaching a conclusion with which others might not agree.

Remember that your thesis needs to show your conclusions about a subject. For example, if you are writing a
paper for a class on fitness, you might be asked to choose a popular weight-loss product to evaluate. Notice the
marked difference in the following two statements:

 There are some negative and positive health aspects to the LessWeight Herb Tea Supplement. This is a
weak thesis statement. First, it fails to take a stand. Second, the phrase negative and positive aspects is
vague.

 Because LessWeight Herb Tea Supplement promotes rapid weight loss that results in the loss of
muscle and lean body mass, it poses potential health risks to consumers. This is a strong thesis
because it is debatable, as those who have lost weight without side effects from the supplement would
disagree.

2. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion.

Your thesis should indicate the point of the discussion; it should not be a mere observation. For an essay on
photojournalism, note the improvement in the second of the following two thesis statements:

 The photographs of Bosnian genocide victims were graphic and offensive to many viewers. This is a
weak thesis statement because, while true, it merely states an observation.

 Although controversial when they were first published, the circulation of photographs of the Bosnian
genocide victims who were raped and murdered was necessary to communicate the horrors of that
war to future generations. This is a strong thesis because it is controversial and generates strong reaction
and discussion. Readers will be interested in reading the rest of the essay to see how you support your
point.

3. A strong thesis statement is specific.

A thesis statement should show exactly what your paper will be about and will help you keep your paper to a
manageable topic. For example, notice the difference in specificity between the two thesis statements on an
assignment on world hunger:

 World hunger has many causes and effects. This is a weak thesis statement for two major reasons. First,
world hunger is much too broad a topic. Second, many causes and effects is vague. You should be able to
identify specific causes and effects.

 Hunger persists in Uganda because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely
profitable. This is a strong thesis statement because it narrows the subject to a more specific and
manageable topic, and it also identifies the specific causes for the existence of hunger in that part of the
world.

Information borrowed from: Indiana University Writing Center and Purdue U OWL.

2

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F

rench novelis

t and

cri

tic (18

5

9-1961) who

was

mu

ch con

ce

rned

with

unconventional beh

av

ior. ]

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nter

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cian/

hea

d­

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r

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T

h

ey

wer

e bot

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rt in

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with a sneer,

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e to

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tte

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ve w

hile

roll

in

g

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o

int

as

comp

act as

a T

oots

ie R

o

ll P

o

p sti

c

k. The

y c

ould

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gains

t a

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akers and trade

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ith th

e bes

t of them

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uick and they w

ore

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r shad

es at break

fas

t and di

nn

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hort

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rov

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y po

unded

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oa

rd and

sho

uted

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ng with T

oots

&

the

Maytals while Jeff

hu

ng his head out th

e

wind

ow and strea

ked th

e s

ide of m

y

mother

‘

s Bel

Air

with vo

mit. It

was

earl

y

Jun

e,

the air

so

ft as a h

a

nd on

your c

heek

, the

third ni

ght of s

umm

e

r v

a

cati

on.

The fir

s

t

tw

o night

s we

‘d

been

o

ut till da

wn, looking

for

some

thin

g

we n

eve

r

found

. O

n this

, the third night, we

‘d cru

ise

d the stri

p s

ixty

-seven

times, been in and

o

ut of ev

ery

bar and club we c

o

uld thin

k

of in

a twe

nty

–

mil

e ra

dius

, stoppe

d twi

ce fo

r bu

ck

et c

hick

en a

nd forty

-ce

nt hambur

gers, debated going to a

party

a

t the hou

se of a g

irl J

e

ff’

s s

ister

kne

w, and chucked

two d

oze

n

raw e

ggs

a

t mailb

oxes

and hit

c

hhiker

s. I

t was

2:00

A.M.;

the

bars w

ere

closin

g

. There w

as no

thing

to do

but

take a

bottl

e of

lemon

– flav

ored

gin up to Greasy

Lake

.

The ta

illi

ght

s of a s

ingle car winked a

t us a

s we s

wu

ng into

the dirt l

o

t with i

ts

tufts

of

wee

d and was

hboa

rd co

rrugati

on

s;

‘5

7 C

he

vy,

mint

, me

tallic

blue.

On

the

far

side

of the

lot,

lik

e the e

xos

keleton

of some ga

unt

chrome

inse

ct, a

chopp

er lea

ned against

its kick

sta

nd. And

that was it for

exci

t

eme

nt:

som

e

junkie h

a

lf

-wit

bik

er

and

a car freak pumpin

g his g

irlfriend . Whate

ver

it was we

were looking

for, we weren’t about to find it at

Greasy Lake.

Not that night.

But then all of a sudden Digby was fighting for the wheel. “Hey, that’s Tony Lovett’s 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 Tony’s windows; for all we knew we might even catch a glimpse of some little fox’s 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 grass-in the dark, rank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake . This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland ‘s decision to dig in at Khe Sanh.[footnoteRef:2] 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. [2: General William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. troops in Vietnam (

1

% 4–68). When the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in 1967 attacked Khe San (or Khesanh) , Westmoreland chose to defend an area of little military significance.]

The second mistake–and this was inextricably bound up with the first–was identifying the car as Tony Lovett’s. Even before the very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots ripped out of the driver’s door, I began to realize that this chrome blue was much lighter than the robin’s-egg of Tony’s car, and that Tony’s car didn’t have rear-mounted speakers . Judging from their expressions, Digby and Jeff were privately groping toward the same inevitable and unsettling conclusion as I was.

In any case, there was no reasoning with this bad greasy character–clearly he was a man of action. The first lusty Rockette[footnoteRef:3] kick of his steel-toed boot caught me under the chin, chip ped my favorite tooth, and left me sprawled in the dirt. Like a fool, I’d gone down on one knee to comb the stiff hacked grass for the keys, my mind making connections in the most dragged out, testudineous[footnoteRef:4] way, knowing that things had gone wrong, that I was in a lot of trouble, and that the lost ignition key was my grai1[footnoteRef:5] and my salvation. The three or four succeeding blows were mainly absorbed by my right buttock and the tough piece of bone at the base of my spine. [3: The Rockettes, a dance troupe at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, were famous for precision and for high kicking ] [4: turtle-like (here, slow)] [5: The holy cup that, according to tradition, Jesus used at the Last Supper. Legend says that the person who finds this object will be saved.]

Meanwhile, Digby vaulted the kissing bumpers and delivered a savage kung-fu blow to the greasy character’s collarbone. Digby had just finished a course in martial arts for phys-ed credit and had spent the better part of the past two nights telling us apocryphal tales of Bruce Lee types and of the raw power invested in lightning blows shot from coiled wrists, ankles, and elbows. The greasy character was unimpressed. He merely backed off a step, his face like a Toltec mask , and laid Digby out with a single whistling roundhouse blow . . . but by now Jeff had got into the act, and I was beginning to extricate myself from the dirt,.. a tinny compound of shock, rage, and impotence wadded in my throat.

Jeff was on the guy’s back, biting at his ear. Digby was on the ground, cursing. I went for the tire iron I kept under the driver’s seat. I kept it there because bad characters always keep tire irons under the driver’s seat, for just such an occasion as this . Never mind that I hadn’t been involved in a fight since sixth grade, when a kid with a sleepy eye and two streams of mucus depending from his nostrils hit me in the knee with a Louisville slugger, never mind that I’d touched the tire iron exactly twice before, to change tires: it was there. And I went for it.

I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shaking, my heart turning over like a dirtbike in the wrong gear. My antagonist was shirtless , and a single cord of muscle flashed across his chest as he bent forward to peel Jeff from his back like a wet overcoat. “Motherfucker, ” he spat , over and over, and I was aware in that instant that all four of us–Digby, Jeff, and myself included­-were chanting “mother fucker, motherfucker, ” as if it were a battle cry. (What happened next? the detective asks the murderer from beneath the turned-down brim of his porkpie hat. I don’t know, the murderer says, something came over me. Exactly.)

Digby poked the flat of his hand in the bad character’s face and I came at him like a kamikaze, mindless, raging, stung with humiliation–the whole thing, from the initial boot in the chin to this murderous primal instant involving no more than sixty hyperventilating, gland-flooding seconds–I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear. The effect was instantaneous, astonishing. He was a stunt man and this was Hollywood, he was a big grimacing toothy balloon and I was a man with a straight pin. He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.

A single second, big as a zeppelin, floated by. We were standing over him in a circle, gritting our teeth , jerking our necks, our limbs and hands and feet twitching with glandular discharges . No one said anything. We just stared down at the guy, the car freak, the lover, the bad greasy character laid low. Digby looked at me ; so did Jeff. I was still holding the tire iron, a tuft of hair clinging to the crook like dandelion fluff, like down. Rattled, I dropped it in the dirt, already envisioning the headlines, the pitted faces of the police inquisitors, the gleam of handcuffs, clank of bars, the big black shadows rising from the back of the cell . . . when suddenly a raw torn shriek cut through me like all the juice in all the electric chairs in the country.

It was the fox. She was short , barefoot, dressed in panties and a man ‘s shirt.

“Animals!” she screamed, running at us with her fists clenched and wisps of blow­dried hair in her face. There was a silver chain round her ankle, and her toenails flashed in the glare of the headlights. I think it was the toenails that did it. Sure, the gin and the cannabis and even the Kentucky Fried may have had a hand in it, but it was the sight of those flaming toes that set us off–the toad emerging from the loaf in Virgin Spring[footnoteRef:6], lipstick smeared on a child: she was already tainted . We were on her like Bergman’s deranged brothers-see no evil, hear none, speak none- panting, wheezing, tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh. We were bad characters, and we were scared and hot and three steps over the line–anything could have happened. [6: Virgin Spring is a film (1960) by Ingmar Bergman. ]

It didn’t.

Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked with lust and greed and the purest primal badness, a pair of headlights swung into the lot. There we were, dirty, bloody, guilty, dissociated from humanity and civilization, the first of the Ur-crimes[footnoteRef:7] behind us, the second in progress, shreds of nylon panty and spandex brassiere dangling from our fingers, our flies open, lips licked-there we were, caught in the spotlight. Nailed. [7: primitive crimes]

We bolted. First for the car, and then, realizing we had no way of starting it, for the woods. I thought nothing. I thought escape. The headlights came at me like accusing fingers. I was gone.

Ram-barn-barn, across the parking lot, past the chopper and into the feculent undergrowth at the lake’s edge, insects flying up in my face, weeds whipping, frogs and snakes and red-eyed turtles splashing off into the night: I was already ankle­deep in muck and tepid water and still going strong. Behind me, the girl’s screams rose in intensity, disconsolate, incriminating, the screams of the Sabine women[footnoteRef:8], the Christian martyrs, Anne Frank dragged from the garret. I kept going, pursued by those cries, imagining cops and bloodhounds. The water was up to my knees when I realized what I was doing: I was going to swim for it. Swim the breadth of Greasy Lake and hide myself in the thick clot of woods on the far side. They’d never find me there! [8: Women of an ancient tribe in Rome, raped by Romans and carried off to be their wives.]

I was breathing in sobs, in gasps. The water lapped at my waist as I looked out over the moon-burnished ripples, the mats of algae that clung to the surface like scabs. Digby and Jeff had vanished. I paused. Listened. The girl was quieter now, screams tapering to sobs, but there were male voices, angry, excited, and the high­pitched ticking of the second car’s engine. I waded deeper, stealthy, hunted, the ooze sucking at my sneakers. As I was about to take the plunge–at the very instant I dropped my shoulder for the first slashing stroke–I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, obscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown. A patch of weed? A log? When I reached out to touch it, it gave like a rubber duck, it gave like flesh.

In one of those nasty little epiphanies for which we are prepared by films and TV and childhood visits to the funeral home to ponder the shrunken painted forms of dead grandparents, I understood what it was that bobbed there so inadmissibly in the dark. Understood, and stumbled back in horror and revulsion, my mind yanked in six different directions (I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second), thinking, The keys, the keys, why did I have to go and lose the keys? I stumbled back, but the musk took hold of my feet–a sneaker snagged, balance lost–and suddenly I was pitching face forward into the buoyant black mass, throwing out my hands in desperation while simultaneously conjuring the image of reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescing juices. “AAAAArrrgh!” I shot from the water like a torpedo, the dead man rotating to expose a mossy beard and eyes cold as the moon. I must have shouted out, thrashing around in the weeds, because the voices behind me suddenly became animated.

“What was that?”

“It’s them , it’s them: they tried to, tried to . . . rape me!” Sobs.

A man’s voice, flat Midwestern accent. “You sons a bitches, we’ll kill you!”

Frogs, crickets.

Then another voice, harsh, r-less, Lower East Side: “Motherfucker!” I recognized the verbal virtuosity of the bad greasy character in the engineer boots. Tooth chipped, sneakers gone, coated in mud and slime and worse, crouching breathless in the weeds waiting to have my ass thoroughly and definitively kicked and fresh from the hideous stinking embrace of a three-days-dead-corpse, I suddenly felt a rush of joy and vindication: the son of a bitch was alive! Just as quickly, my bowels turned to ice. “Come on out of there, you pansy mothers!” the bad greasy character was screaming. He shouted curses till he was out of breath .

The crickets started up again, then the frogs. I held my breath. All at once there was a sound in the reeds, a swishing, a splash: thunk-a-thunk. They were throwing rocks. The frogs fell silent. I cradled my head. Swish; swish, thunk-a-thunk. A wedge of feldspar the size of a cue ball glanced off my knee. I bit my finger.

It was then that they turned to the car. I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound of the headlights shattering–almost a good-natured sound, celebratory, like corks popping from the necks of bottles. This was succeeded by the dull booming of the fenders, metal on metal, and then the icy crash of the windshield. I inched forward, elbows and knees, my belly pressed to the muck, thinking of guerrillas and commandos and The Naked and the Dead[footnoteRef:9]. I patted the weeds and squinted the length of the parking lot. [9: World War II novel (1948) by Norman Mailer.]

The second car–it was a Trans-Am–was still running, its high beams washing the scene in a lurid stagy light. Tire iron flailing, the greasy bad character was jaying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp-whomp. The other two guys­-blond types, in fraternity jackets–were helping out with tree branches and skull­sized boulders. One of them was gathering up bottles, rocks, muck, candy wrappers, used condoms, pop-tops, and other refuse and pitching it through the window on the driver’s side. I could see the fox, a white bulb behind the windshield of the ’57 Chevy. “Bobbie,” she whined over the thumping, “come on.” The greasy character paused a moment, took one good swipe at the left taillight, and then heaved the tire iron halfway across the lake. Then he fired up the ’57 and was gone.

Blond head nodded at blond head. One said something to the other, too low for me to catch. They were no doubt thinking that in helping to annihilate my mother’s car they’d committed a fairly rash act, and thinking too that there were three bad characters connected with that very car watching them from the woods. Perhaps other possibilities occurred to them as well–police, jail cells, justices of the peace, reparations, lawyers, irate parents, fraternal censure . Whatever they were thinking, they suddenly dropped branches, bottles, and rocks and sprang for their car in unison, as if they’d choreographed it. Five seconds. That’s all it took. The engine shrieked, the tires squealed, a cloud of dust rose from the rutted lot and then settled back on darkness.

I don’t know how long I lay there, the bad breath of decay all around me, my jacket heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. 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, I was blindsided by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals had got to it while we were playing chess at Digby’s. Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was. I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back. The owner of the chopper, no doubt, a bad older character come to this. Shot during a murky drug deal, drowned while drunkenly frolicking in the lake. Another headline. My car was wrecked; he was dead.

When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.

I was circling the car, as dazed and bedraggled as the sole survivor of an air blitz, when Digby and Jeff emerged from the trees behind me. Digby’s face was crosshatched with smears of dirt; Jeff’s jacket was gone and his shirt was torn across the shoulder. They slouched across the lot, looking sheepish, and silently came up beside me to gape at the ravaged automobile. No one said a word. After a while Jeff swung open the driver’s door and began to scoop the broken glass and garbage off the seat. I looked at Digby. He shrugged. “At least they didn’t slash the tires,” he said.

It was true: the tires were intact. There was no windshield , the headlights were staved in, and the body looked as if it had been sledgehammered for a quarter a shot at the county fair, but the tires were inflated to regulation pressure. The car was drivable. In silence, all three of us bent to scrape the mud and shattered glass from the interior. I said nothing about the biker. When we were finished, I reached in my pocket for the keys, experienced a nasty stab of recollection, cursed myself, and turned to search the grass. I spotted them almost immediately, no more than five feet from the open door, glinting like jewels in the first tapering shaft of sunlight. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: I eased into the seat and turned the engine over.

It was at that precise moment that the silver Mustang with the flame decals rumbled into the lot. All three of us froze; then Digby and Jeff slid into the car and slammed the door. We watched as the Mustang rocked and bobbed across the ruts and finally jerked to a halt beside the forlorn chopper at the far end of the lot. “Let’s go,” Digby said. I hesitated, the Bel Air wheezing beneath me.

Two girls emerged from the Mustang. Tight jeans, stiletto heels, hair like frozen fur. They bent over the motorcycle , paced back and forth aimlessly, glanced once or twice at us, and then ambled over to where the reeds sprang up in a green fence round the perimeter of the lake . One of them cupped her hands to her mouth. “Al,” she called, “Hey, Al!”

“Come on,” Digby hissed . “Let’s get out of here. “

But it was too late. The second girl was picking her way across the lot, unsteady on her heels, looking up at us and then away. She was older–twenty-five or six–and as she came closer we could see there was something wrong with her: she was stoned or drunk, lurching now and waving her arms for balance. I gripped the steering wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet, and Digby spat out my name, twice, terse and impatient.

“Hi,” the girl said.

We looked at her like zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.

She smiled, her lips cracked and dry. “Listen ,” she said , bending from the waist to look in the window, “you guys seen Al?” Her pupils were pinpoints, her eyes glass. She jerked her neck. “That’s his bike over there–Al’s. You seen him?”

Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed. Digby poked me in the ribs. “We haven’t seen anybody,” I said.

1

“
Grea
sy Lake
”

b
y
T.C. Boyle

It
‘
s

a
b
o
ut

a

m
il
e

down

on

the

dar
k

si
d
e
of

R
ou
t
e

8
8.

–

Bruc
e

Sp
ringste
en

There wa
s a
time
w
h
e
n
co
urt
esy a
nd winnin
g
way
s we
nt
o
ut
o
f
s
tyl
e,

when it wa
s
g
ood

to
be bad
,
when you
cu
ltivated de
c
adenc
e
lik
e
a taste. W
e
were
a
ll dange
ro
u
s
charac
te
r
s

then.

We

w
o
re

tom
–
up

le
a
ther

j
ac
kets
,

slou
c
hed

around

with

t
oo
thpicks

in

o
ur

mouth
s
,

sniffed

g
lue

a
nd eth
e
r
a
nd

wh
a
t
so
mebod
y
cl
a
im
e
d

w
as
c
oca
in
e.
Wh
e
n w
e

wh
ee
led

our par
e
n
ts
‘
whinin
g s
tation

w
ago
ns out in
to

the
str
ee
t we left
a

patch
o
f

rubber

hal
f a

block

lon
g
.

We

drank

g
in

and

gra
pe

juic
e,

T
a
ngo,

Th
u
nderbird

,

a
nd

Bali

H
a
i.

We

wer
e

nineteen. W
e

wer
e

b
a
d
.
We re
a
d Andre Gid
e
1

and stru
c
k ela
bora
te pose
s

t
o

s
how th
a
t

we

didn
‘
t

g
i
ve

a

shit

abo
ut anythin
g
.

At

ni
g
ht
,

w
e

w
ent

up

to

Gr
easy

Lake
.

Throu
g
h the
ce
nte
r
of t
o
wn , up

th
e s
trip, p
as
t
t
h
e

hou
s
in
g
dev
e
l
o
pments

a
nd

shoppin
g
m
a
lls,
s
tr
ee
t
lights
g
iving w
a
y t
o
the th
i
n streamin
g
illumin
a
tion

of

th
e

h
e
adlight
s
,
t
r
e
es

c
row
ding the
as
phalt

in
a

black

unbroken

w
a
ll:

that

was
the w
ay

out t
o

Gr
easy

La
k
e. T
h
e
Indi
a
n
s
had
ca
ll
e
d

it W
a
k
a
n
,
a
r
e
fer
e
n
c
e t
o

th
e

clari
ty o
f

its water
s
.
N
ow it w
as
f
e
tid

and murky,
t
h
e
mud
ba
nks

glitt
er
ing with b
ro
ken

gl
ass

and strewn with be
e
r
c
ans and th
e
cha
rr
ed
remain
s o
f bon
fir
es
. Ther
e
w
a
s a sin
g
l
e

ra
va
ged

i
s
l
a
nd

a

hund
r
e
d

ya
rd
s
fr
o
m
s
h
ore
,
s
o

st
ripped

of

v
ege
t
a
ti
o
n

it l
o
oked

as

if the ai
r fo
r
ce
had
st
r
a
f
e
d it. We
w
ent

u
p
t
o
the l
a
k
e
becau
se ev
eryon
e we
nt th
ere
,

because
we
wanted
to
snuff th
e
rich sc
e
nt of

pos
si
bility
on

the breez
e
, w
a
tch a
g
irl

tak
e

off

h
e
r cloth
es

a
nd

plun
ge
into

th
e

feste
rin
g

murk
,
d
rink

be
e
r
,
s
moke

p
o
t
,

h
o
wl at

th
e s
tars
,
savo
r

the

in
co
n
g
ruou
s

full
–
th
roa
ted

ro
a
r
of

ro
c
k and

ro
ll a
g
ain
s
t

th
e

prime
va
l

susu
rru
s

o
f

fro
gs

a
nd

cri
c
k
e
t
s
.

Thi
s

w
as

natur
e
.

I wa
s

t
h
e
re

on
e

night, l
ate,

in th
e

c
ompan
y o
f

two

d
a
nge
rou
s c
haracte
r
s
.

Di
g
by w
o
r
e

a
gold
s
t
ar
in hi
s

r
ig
ht ear

a
nd

a
llo
we
d

his fathe
r
t
o

pay hi
s

tuition

a
t

C
o
rnell
;
J
e
ff

w
as thinking

o
f

quitting
sc
h
oo
l

to b
eco
me

a

p
ai
nter
/
mu
s
i
cian/
h
ea
d­
shop

prop
r
ietor.

The
y
wer
e

bo
t
h exp
e
rt in

the
socia
l gra
ces,
quick

w
ith

a

sn
ee
r,

abl
e

to

m
a
n
a
ge a

F
ord

with

l
ous
y sho
c
k
s

o
ver

ru
tte
d

and
g
utt
e
d

blackt
o
p road

a
t

ei
g
h
ty
–
fi
ve w
hile rollin
g
a j
o
int
as
comp
ac
t a
s
a T
oo
t
s
ie R
o
ll P
o
p sti
c
k. The
y c
ould

lounge a
ga
in
s
t a
b
a
nk

o
f bo
o
min
g
spe
a
k
e
r
s
and

t
r
a
d
e
”
man
”
s w
ith th
e

b
es
t of them

or

roll

ou
t

ac
ross

th
e

dance

fl
oo
r

as

if

th
e
ir

joints

wo
rked

o
n

b
e
arin
gs.

T
hey

w
ere

s
li
c
k and

q
uick and they w
o
r
e
their mi
rro
r shad
es a
t
bre
ak
fas
t and

d
i
nn
e
r
,
in th
e

sh
ow
er
,

in

cl
os
ets

a
nd

c
a
v
e
s.

In

s
hort
,

th
ey

w
er
e

b
ad.

I d
rov
e. Digb
y
p
o
unded

th
e
dashb
oa
rd and
s
h
o
uted

a
l
o
ng with T
oo
ts
&
th
e

Maytals while Jeff
h
u
ng his head out th
e
wind
o
w
a
nd str
ea
ked th
e s
ide of m
y

mother
‘
s Bel
Air
with
vo
mit. It
was
earl
y
Jun
e,
the air
so
ft as a h
a
nd on
you
r
c
heek
,
th
e

third ni
g
ht
o
f
s
umm
e
r v
a
cati
o
n
.
The fir
s
t tw
o
night
s we
‘
d
been
o
ut till da
w
n
,
lo
o
kin
g

for somethin
g
we n
e
v
er
found
. O
n this
,
th
e
third ni
g
ht
,
w
e
‘d cru
ise
d the stri
p
s
ixty
–
s
eve
n

times, been in and
o
ut of ev
ery
bar and club we c
o
uld thin
k
of in
a
tw
e
nty
–
mil
e

r
a
dius
,
s
t
o
pp
e
d twi
ce fo
r bu
c
k
et c
hick
e
n
a
nd forty
–
ce
nt hambur
g
ers
,
de
ba
t
e
d g
o
in
g

t
o

a
party
a
t the hou
se

o
f a

g
irl J
e
ff’
s s
i
s
t
er

kne
w
,
an
d
c
hu
c
k
e
d

two d
oze
n

raw e
ggs

a
t mailb
oxes

and hit
c
hhiker
s. I
t was
2:00
A.M.;
t
h
e

bars w
ere

closin
g
. There w
as

n
o
thing

t
o

d
o

but

t
a
k
e

a

bottl
e

o
f

lemon
–

fl
av
ored

g
in

up

to

Gr
ea
sy

Lake
.

Th
e
t
a
illi
g
ht
s of a s
in
gle
ca
r
w
ink
e
d
a
t us a
s
we
s
wu
n
g
int
o
the dirt l
o
t with i
ts

tufts
of
wee
d

and

was
hboa
r
d

co
rrugati
o
n
s;
‘
5
7 C
he
vy,
mint
,
m
e
tallic
b
lu
e.
On

th
e

far

side

of

th
e

lot,

lik
e

the

e
xos
keleton

o
f

some

ga
unt

ch
ro
m
e

inse
c
t,

a

chopp
e
r

l
ea
ned against

its kick
s
t
a
nd. And

that was it for
exci
t
eme
nt:
so
m
e
junkie h
a
lf
–
wi
t

bik
e
r
and
a car freak pumpin
g
hi
s g
irlfriend . Whate
ver
it
was
we
were looking

1

Andre Gide:

French novelist and critic (1859

–

1961) who was much concerned with unconventional behavior.

1

“Greasy Lake”

by T.C. Boyle

It’s 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 tom-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 Andre Gide

1

and struck elaborate poses to

show that we didn’t 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/ head­shop proprietor. They were both expert in the social graces,

quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over 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 “man”s 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 mother’s 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 we’d

been out till dawn, looking for something we never found. On this, the third night, we’d 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 Jeff’s 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

1

Andre Gide: French novelist and critic (1859-1961) who was much concerned with unconventional behavior.