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An unnamed narrator situates the story he tells in his past, when he was a stylishly cynical nineteen-year-old leaning toward adulthood. The year isn’t clear, but given historical details, the events must occur after the early 1970s. The story begins as the narrator and two friends, Digby and Jeff, start their summer break after the first year of college. Digby is back from Cornell, Jeff is thinking of dropping out of school, and all three are already bored and looking for fun. They spend their days drinking, cruising the strip through town, dancing, and driving to Greasy Lake in hopes of finding some action. Greasy Lake was once clear and pretty, but it is now polluted, trashed, and muddy.
On the third night of summer vacation, the friends have already exhausted their usual pastimes. By two in the morning, they are drunk, stuffed with fast food, and out of petty mayhem to commit, so they head to Greasy Lake in the narrator’s mother’s car. One car is already parked in the dirt lot by the lake—a well-maintained ’57 Chevy—and a motorcycle stands by the shore. The narrator is disappointed, but Digby thinks he knows the driver of the Chevy, in which, the friends can tell, a couple is having sex. They decide to prank the driver, Tony, by pulling up quietly to the Chevy’s bumper, blaring the horn, and flashing the headlights, as if they were cops. They hope to catch a glimpse of Tony’s date’s breasts, laugh with him, then go on to a new adventure. But as the narrator gets out of the car carrying the gin they brought to drink, he drops his keys in the “dark, rank, mysterious” grass by the lake and, at nearly the same moment, realizes that the parked Chevy is not their friend’s car.
A large man wearing jeans and heavy boots gets out of the car and attacks the narrator who, because he’s kneeling in the grass to find the keys, takes a kick to his chin. As the large man kicks at the narrator’s back, Digby, who took a martial arts course at college and fancied himself skilled, comes to the narrator’s defense. The “greasy character,” as the narrator calls him, knocks Digby away with one punch. Jeff jumps on the man’s back and bites his ear as the narrator grabs a tire iron from his car—a tool he’s fantasized about using in a fight—and feels a combination of “shock, rage, and impotence.”
