of his coonskin cap
He said, "Trust some of this, it'll show you where you're at
Or at least it'll help you really feel it"

Billy and Davy are described at first as dancing in the moonlight and later taking part in a mud fight in the water. Finally, Crazy Janey tells them that it is time to go.  So, they say goodbye to Greasy Lake where they danced, sang, made love, fought, took drugs—all to the fairy dust and the spirits of the night.

“Greasy Lake”  by T. C. Boyle  describes three young men home from college and looking for something to do even if it is trouble.  The first person point of view employs the protagonist as the narrator.  Using a flashback, the main character looks back at a foolish incident and feels lucky that he survived. 

The author creates a setting that all teenagers recognize—the local make-out and beer bust place.  Beginning with a practical joke that goes terribly wrong, the protagonist believes that he has killed a man.  After that, the boys turn on the man’s girlfriend and would have raped her except for a car that pulls in the parking lot just as the boys attack her.

The girl screams for help, and the boys scatter.  In the lake, the main character discovers something that surprises and scares him into acknowledging that this was a stupid idea:

As I was about to take the plunge… I blundered into something unspeakable, obscene, something soft... When I reached out to touch it, it gave like flesh. 

Of course, he bumps into a dead body placed there by the man that he thought he killed. As the second car arrives, he sees the man in the lights from the car.

One of the main symbols is the lost key. When the narrator loses the key, he acts irrationally and tries to kill someone and almost rapes a girl. After he finds the body in the water, the narrator remembers the lost key. 

The narrator retreats from the girls who come in the other car when the boys return to their car. The dawn reveals the key shining like a “jewel” just where he had dropped it. As the narrator leaves Greasy Lake, he is emotionally and morally changed.

Greasy Lake is actually one symbol that both works share; as a location it represents the temporary loss of innocence, inhibition, morals, and good sense.

T. C. Boyle's short story starts with a Bruce Springsteen lyric as its epigraph and takes its title, "Greasy Lake," from the lake in the Springsteen song "Spirit in the Night." The story parallels the song in many ways and diverges in others—mostly by being specific where the song is vague.

The narrative of both the song and the story involve a group of characters on a wild night who decide to head up to Greasy Lake, and both song and story are told through a haze of intoxication. Both are told in the first person, as the narrator's night becomes progressively debauched.

In the Springsteen song, the night ends in the narrator "making love in the dirt" with "Crazy Janey," as other characters have a mud fight, pass out in the grass, and swim in the lake.

In the Boyle story, the night ends much worse, with the narrator and his friends provoking a fight, nearly murdering a man, and attempting to sexually assault a woman.

Both song and story use Greasy Lake as a symbol of the dark possibilities of a wild night, but the tension between the two is that Springsteen's characters lack the layer of ironic distance that Boyle's characters seem to have. The Boyle story diverges from the Springsteen song in part because Boyle's teenagers are mostly just bored college kids who wish they were actually "bad," and in their intoxicated malaise they end up in a fight they aren't prepared for.