They both have life-changing experiences that force them to grow up, see things from a different perspective, and knock them off their pedestals. In Greasy Lake, it is when the narrator sees the corpse found at the bottom of the lake. Al's corpse represents what could have happened to them if he had continued on the dark path he was on. The narrator describes his nightmare by saying, “I shot from the water like a torpedo, the dead spinning to expose a mossy beard and eyes cold as the moon” (Lake 299). Influenced by their purest emotions and the loss of civilization in the rotten bubble of Greasy Lake, the boys find themselves in a frightening situation from which they cannot seem to escape. If they're not careful, their future could look a lot like Al's. The boys wanted to be "bad" and the irony is that bad people end up in horrible situations. It was a glimpse of what their future could potentially look like