Fast Times at Ridgemont High (6 page)

Being the main fryer at Carl’s meant that everybody had to be nice to you. The other workers depended on Brad for their orders. The only real problem came when company sales were down and the franchise added a “specialty” item, like a cheese-steak or The Hungry Guy (sliced turkey breast on a freshly baked roll with mayonnaise and butter). Forget it. That stuff took forever to make. And some recreation-center clown with a whistle around his neck would always come in and order
fifteen
of them.

But Brad was the calmest guy in the building.

“I need eight double-cheese, Brad!”

“No problem.”

“I gotta go. Can you bag them?”

“Go ahead and take off.”

When Brad was a sophomore, he wanted to be a lawyer. His parents were delighted. His school counselor set him up in an apprenticeship program with a local law firm. He was there three weeks and became disillusioned. He’d gone to a criminal law defense attorney and asked him a question: “If you got a guy freed on a little technicality, even though you knew he had committed a murder, wouldn’t that be on your conscience for the rest of your life?”

“Why don’t you try corporate law,” was his answer.

Brad spent the next week with a woman lawyer from Redondo Beach Gas and Electric. It was so boring that he’d taken up drinking coffee. He had decided not to think about what to do now that his “lawyer phase” had ended. Right now Brad was the best fryer at the best location around, and that was what was important at Ridgemont High School—especially for his senior year, and things like lunch court.

The topic of conversation at the center of lunch court today was the Hand-Spicoli incident. Three periods later, it had been blown into enormous proportions.

“He almost pulled a gun on Mr. Hand,” said Brad Hamilton. “Spicoli had a piece on him. He came right over to Mechanical Drawing and told us.”

“Hey Brad,” said one of his Carl’s friends, “did he say ‘dick off’ or ‘suck dick’?”

“He just got
right
in Mr. Hand’s face,” said Brad, “and he goes . . .” Brad contorted his face as he recreated the moment. “ ‘Yoooou fuckin’
DICK!’
And Mr. Hand didn’t do anything. Spicoli said if he’d tried anything, he would have pulled the gun. He was going to blow Mr. Hand away. But he came over to Mechanical Drawing instead.”

“Whoa.”

“He ain’t coming back here,” said Brad.

But Spicoli would be back the next day in all his glory. The lure of lunch court was too great even for him.

And while everyone was telling and retelling the “you-dick” story, few even noticed an even bigger Ridgemont event that had occurred quietly over the summer. The administration had hired a new dean of discipline. They had replaced Vince.

There had never been much serious trouble at Ridgemont High. Every now and then there was a fight or a locker search, but mostly it was a calm, middle-class high school. Much of that peace, students figured, had to do with the presence of a 260-pound dean of discipline. His name was Vince Lupino, and one look at him stomping around campus made any student feel a little closer to the law.

But this year Vince was gone. Word had it that he had made friends with too many students, had pinched the wrong butt. Vince had had a weakness for eating lunch with the “older girls,” the ones who wore the most expensive clothes, ran for student offices like director of social activities, and always looked as if they’d just winged in from Acapulco with the son of Ricardo Montalban.

In Vince’s place this year was a different kind of disciplinarian altogether. His name was Lieutenant Lawrence “Larry” Flowers, and he let you know it by wearing a gold name plate directly over his left breast. He was a lean-and-quick-looking black man, and he wore dark blue police suits. He was also distinguished by a pencil-thin moustache, carefully clipped to a wisp. His overall appearance was that of Nat King Cole with a license to kill. The administration had brought in Flowers from some hellhole junior high in Pittsburgh. As he walked, his eyes darted in all directions, as if he half-expected some PCP-crazed teenager to leap at him with a machete.

Lieutenant Flowers passed through lunch court virtually unnoticed on the first day of school. That would soon change.

On the outskirts of lunch court sat Linda Barrett and Stacy Hamilton. Not too close to the inner sanctum, not too far away. Linda, cheese sandwich in hand, casually pointed out some of the Ridgemont personalities to Stacy.

“See over there,” she said. She nodded to a frizzy brown-haired boy accepting cash from a small crowd of students around him. “That’s Randy Eddo. He’s the Ridgemont ticket scalper. He probably makes more money than both of our dads put together.”

“Really? A ticket scalper?”

“He says he’s not a scalper. He says he provides a service for concert goers. And that the service costs extra money.”

“I see.”

Linda went on to explain. Although Led Zeppelin was still king of the Ridgemont parking lot after ten years, each new season brought another band discovery. A new group then influenced the set lists of the Ridgemont school dance bands, and usually one main-focus rock star dictated the dress code. This year that star was the lead singer of Cheap Trick, Robin Zander, a young man with longish blond hair cut in bangs just above his eyes. This year on Ridgemont lunch court there were three Robin Zander lookalikes.

“None of them talk to each other,” noted Linda Barrett.

A couple, arms around each other’s waists and oblivious to everyone, walked past her and Stacy.

“Now
that,”
said Linda, “is Gregg Adams and Cindy Carr.”

The school couple.

Gregg Adams was equal part sensitive drama student and school funny guy. He looked like a contestant on “The Dating Game.” Gregg’s jokes never got too dirty, his conversation never too deep. He just strode down the hallways, said hi to people he didn’t know, and methodically wrapped up all the leads in the school drama presentations. Everyone, including Gregg Adams, was sure he would be famous one day.

Cindy Carr was a clear-complexioned, untroubled Midwestern beauty. She was a cheerleader, coming from a part of the country where cheerleaders still meant something. She did not leave her room in the mornings until she believed she compared favorably with the framed photo of Olivia Newton-John on her wall. She was a part-time hostess in a Chinese restaurant where a singer named Johnny Chung King sang nightly.

Both Adams and Carr were masters of the teeth-baring smile. This, more than anything else, was the true sign of a high school social climber known as the “sosh.” The teeth-baring sosh (long
o
) began as a glimmer in the eye. Then the sosh chin quivered, and then the entire sosh face detonated into a synthetic grin. Usually accompanied by a sharp “hi,” it was an art form that Adams and Carr had taken to its extreme.

The Gregg Adams–Cindy Carr story was thick with tales of overwhelming devotion. When one was sick, the other spent every in-between period on the pay phone, talking to the one at home. Every day they paraded across lunch court, cuddling and holding each other. They were the king and queen of the Public Display of Affection, or P.D.A. Every lunch period they would take their prescribed seats on lunch court and gaze longingly at each other for whatever was left of the twenty-six minutes.

“If there’s one thing that never changes,” commented Linda, “it’s a cheerleader.”

“Think they’re actually doing it?”

“No way they can’t be doing it.”

“I just can’t picture it,” said Stacy with a shrug. “They’re too much like my parents.”

“They’ve got to be doing it,” said Linda, “or else Gregg would be blue in the face by now.”

“I see a little green, but no blue.”

Linda Barrett bit into her cheese sandwich. “Everything starts to look green around here after a while,” she said.

Biology Class

S
tacy Hamilton’s next class was Biology II. Most classes at Ridgemont were notorious for one reason or another—perhaps the teacher was someone like Mr. Hand, or the room was lopsided, or the students were allowed to grade themselves—but none had quite the macabre lure of Biology II with Mr. Vargas.

Walking into the room, Stacy was at first struck by the all-white interior of the biology lab. Each student was to sit at his own lab/workshop, complete with Bunsen burner, around the perimeter of the room. Stacy took her seat. Then she noticed something odd. There was a large formaldehyde jar sitting on the windowsill in front of her, and it contained a strange bug-eyed animal that was staring directly at her. She looked at the label: Pig Embryo, 6 months.

Stacy moved to another seat and found yet another formaldehyde jar poised directly in front of her. This one wasn’t as menacing—just a baby squid. She looked around the room. There was a jar on every windowsill, facing every student.

Stacy began to key into all the student conversations around her. Everyone seemed to know one thing going into this class. Somewhere, sometime toward the end of the year, the class was going to be taken on a mandatory field trip to the bottom floor of nearby University Hospital. It was there that Biology II culminated in the display and study of human cadavers. Cadavers were said to be the private passion of Mr. Vargas, the biology teacher.

Even before the third bell rang on the first day, there was only one topic of conversation around the room.

“I’ll tell you right now,” a girl two seats up was saying, “I’m not going to go. I’m going to get sick or something. I’m not going into a room with a bunch of dead bodies.”

“You’ll go,” said the boy next to her.

“Have you heard what they do, Mike?”

“What?”

“I’m serious. Have you heard?”

“What?”

“The bodies are dissected, Mike, and Mr. Vargas pulls out parts of the dead body and
holds them up.
Okay?”

“You mean he reaches in and pulls this stuff out?”

“Yes.”

“Like a heart?”

“Like a heart.”

Mike beamed.
“Bitchin’.”

Mr. Vargas arrived in the classroom, a diminutive man with an inscribed coffee mug in hand. He looked nothing like his ghoulish reputation.

“Good day,” said Mr. Vargas in sprightly tones. “I just switched to Sanka. I’m running a little slow today.” He pulled on a smock. “So have a little heart.”

Mike turned and faced the students behind him, eyes wide with mock terror, as Mr. Vargas began passing out his own purple mimeographed assignment sheets.

So this was high school, Stacy thought. Weird, exotic teachers and a lot of purple mimeographed sheets. It was enough to make her long for Swenson’s Ice Cream Parlor.

A School Night

W
hen Stacy Hamilton arrived home from school, her brother, Brad, was in the driveway washing his LTD sedan. He called the car his Cruising Vessel. Some went for a sporty domestic like a Camaro, others went straight for a Datsun or Toyota. Brad liked to drive to work at Carl’s in a nice big clean American machine, even if the car ate up most of his fast-food money. It was a small price to pay for style, as far as he was concerned.

“So how do you like high school?” asked Brad.

“Some pretty strange teachers,” said Stacy.

“You’ll get used to it.”

Stacy stood there for a moment, watching Brad lovingly polishing the windows of his car.

“Brad,” said Stacy, “how come I never see you with Lisa anymore?”

“Jesus,”
said Brad. He threw a chamois rag onto his windshield. “Everybody wants to know about Lisa. Everybody is such
big friends
with Lisa . . .”

“Sorry I asked.”

“You got some flowers,” said Brad. “They’re right inside the door.”

Stacy went inside. There, sitting on the living room coffee table, their fragrance cascading throughout the Hamilton home, was a summer floral arrangement. Stacy read the attached note, marked “personal”: Memories of You, Ron Johnson.

Stacy’s heart quickened. This was a perilous situation, one that set off all her inner alarms. This involved her mother, the notorious Evelyn. For Mrs. H., the word
strict
was weak. First she had refused Stacy a bra, then, two years later, she wouldn’t let Stacy out of the house
without
one. She banned any mention of alcohol or drugs in the house. Allowing rock music in the Hamilton home was enough of a battle. Once Evelyn threw away a copy of AC/DC’s
If You Want Blood
album because there was blood gushing from the lead guitarist’s mouth and chest on the cover. She wouldn’t even consider discussing the subject of dating until Stacy had reached the age of sixteen.