Greasy lake tc boyle pdf

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No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road-an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.

T.C. Boyle T. CoraghessaJl Boyle was 170m ill 1948 ill Peekskill, New York. He re- ceived an M.F.A. from the .lowa Writers' Workshol) and a Ph.D. ill Nilleteenth Century British Literature from the Uniuersitv of Iowa. His 17 books of fiction illelude Tooth and Claw (2005), The Inner Circle (2004), the National Book Award Finalist Drop City (2003), The Road to Wellville (1993), and the Pen/Faulkner Award-wil1lling World's End (1987). lit his essay "This Monkey, My Back," he discusses the ways ill which his writing habit is stronger than any drug: "I can see how my books and stories are tied inextricably, how the themes and obsessions- the search for the father, racism, class and community, predetermillation versus free will, cultural imperialism, sexual war, and sexual truce-keep repeating. I can see this, but only ill retrospect. That's the beauty of this addiction-you baue to move 011, no retirement here, look out ahead, though you can't see where you're going. First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something. Something new. Something of value. Something to hold up and admire. And thell? Well, you've got a [ones, haven't you? And you start all over again, with

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Creasy IJalzc 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 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,

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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 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 grhn-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, rough- house a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.

The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was los- ing 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. I felt it like a jab of in- tuition, and I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet.

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 dri- ver'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