A certain poet was once described by a female associate as "Mad, bad and dangerous to know." The poet was, of course, the 19th-century Romantic, Lord Byron, the archetypal rebellious and ultimately self-destructive young man, the heroically alienated creative figure whose myriad incarnations include such iconic American pop culture characters as James Dean and Curt Cobain. Humanity's fascination with the dark and seemingly chaotic forces of the universe is ancient, and possibly primordial, as evidenced by the importance of chaos in the creation myths of so many human cultures. The point, ultimately, is that chaos is blended with and altered by the seed of order, but remains inherent in the fabric of the universe. In the short story “Greasy Lake,” author T. Coraghessan Boyle uses the story’s eponymous setting to evoke an impression of the squalid, libidinous recesses of the young male mind as it struggles for freedom and autonomy on the cusp of adulthood.
Boyle, who describes his own youth as that of a “sort of pampered punk,” describes his characters as rabble-rousing young college types who have abandoned “courtesy and winning ways” and who want nothing but to “snuff the rich scent of possibility in 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.” Anything missing here in the repertoire of standard youthful vices? Nope. It’s all there: the sexually-charged squalor, the boiling hormones steeped in sinister stimulants, the “incongruous” mixing of sounds. Boyle’s short sentence, “This was nature,” at the end of the second paragraph could be taken for irony but isn’t, really. This is the nature of “reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescent juices,” human nature, ringed with sharp broken glass and the remains of campfires. The story’s violent, danger-laden plot touches upon death, destruction and the darkest of human impulses but culminates in an exhausted but oddly optimistic moment of rebirth after the destruction: “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 vanishing civilization.”
The poet and essayist Annie Dillard wrote in her memoir A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that "nature loves death more than she loves you or me." What Dillard means is that destruction, dissolution and the forces of entropy, as frightening as they seem to us, are, in fact, essential components of the continuance of life. In “Greasy Lake,” Boyle acknowledges this need for chaos and violence as an intrinsic part of the maturation process, which is and always has been in various degrees “mad, bad and dangerous.”