are truly bad characters.Lying in the water next to the dead biker, he feels as bad as his surroundings. “The bad breath of decay [is] all around me, my jacket [,] heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. My jaws [ache], my knee [throbs], my coccyx [is] on fire,” (117) the narrator not only feels the physical side effects of his wild night of badness, he feels it emotionally as well. The weight of what he and his friends did rest heavy on him like his coat. The “breath of decay” (117) is his feelings of death, the death of an image, and the death of ideals, of who he thinks he is. The “primordial ooze” (Boyle, 117) is the feelings of regret, ugliness of what they have done. As he lies there, he also has to figure out what he is going to tell his parents about the car. “A tree [fell] on the car, I was blinded by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals got to it while we were playing chess at Digby’s” (117) “If he is truly bad, he would not care his Mother’s car is damaged, and no car arriving would have stopped the rape. The dead body would not bother him. He would not fear getting out of the water and being beaten up. He would not need to question whether he is bad or not.” (Mr. Panza, 25 Nov. 2000) As he is sitting, there something about the nature of life is revealed to him, “It’s dark side and the limitations of being bad” (a posting by T.C. Boyle at www.tcboyle.com, Boyle’s homepage)When they finally come out of the woods they go over the to the car and cannot believe what they see. The narrator feels, as the car looks, all battered and smashed, broken, destroyed a wreck. They go to the car and start cleaning it out. This is symbolic of what they need to do with their own lives. They need to clean up their images, they need to pick up the pieces and start ove...
