Fast Times at Ridgemont High

by Cameron Crowe

  Welcome to lunch court. That’s Spicoli over there, trying hard to unwrap a bologna sandwich. His eyes are still red-rimmed from the three bowls of dope he smoked after his morning surf. Stacy Hamilton doesn’t look any different even though she finally lost her virginity last night. Linda Barrett, Stacy’s best bud, wants to hear all about it. After all, she gives lessons. And here comes Brad Hamilton, king of the lunch court and prince of the fast-food employee hierarchy. Brad’s a guy who takes pride in his fries. Mike Damone takes pride in The Attitude, which he developed in Philly, his hometown, where “life is cheap.” And here’s that wussy Mark Ratner. Girls make him sweat. He’ll do more than sweat when he turns up in the yearbook class picture with something missing.

  These kids are, uh, the future of America. Cameron Crowe spent a year with them at Ridgemont High in Anytown, California, and if you can’t imagine or can’t remember (last week? last year? last decade?) what it’s like to have acne, bio lab, Saturday night car cruises, and the embarrassment of parents, Fast Times at Ridgemont High will bring it all home for you. It’s tense, traumatic and marginally insane—and just like high school, it’s poignant, entertaining and totally true.

  Copyright © 1981 by Cameron Crowe

  Published by Simon and Schuster

  A Division of Gulf & Western Corporation

  Simon & Schuster Building

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Crowe, Cameron, date.

  Fast times at Ridgemont High.

  1. Title.

  PS3553.R589S8 813’.54 81-8945

  ISBN: 0-671-25290-0

  0-671-25291-7 pbk.

  An excerpt from the lyrics of “Watching the Detectives,” by Elvis Costello, copyright © 1980 Plangent Visions Music, Inc., is used by permission of Warner Bros. Music. All rights reserved.

  An excerpt from the lyrics of “Landslide,” by Stevie Nicks, copyright © 1975, is used by permission of Fleetwood Mac Music/Welsh Witch Music. All rights reserved.

  For My Parents

  “ALL KIDS CAN’T GROW UP TO BE MOVIE STARS OR ROCK PERFORMERS. DON’T MAKE NOT WORKING EASY FOR THEM. IF AT FIRST THEY HAVE TO SETTLE ON JOBS THAT AREN’T INTELLECTUALLY FULFILLING, SO WHAT? HAS EVERY JOB YOU’VE EVER HAD BEEN ‘INTELLECTUALLY FULFILLING’?”

  —THE SURVIVAL KIT FOR PARENTS OF TEENAGERS,

  by David Melton

  Preface

  For seven years I wrote articles for a youth culture magazine, and perhaps not a day went by when this term wasn’t used—“the kids.” Editors assigned certain articles for “the kids.” Music and film executives were constantly discussing whether a product appealed to “the kids.” Rock stars spoke of commercial concessions made for “the kids.” Kids were discussed as if they were some enormous whale, to be harpooned and brought to shore.

  It began to fascinate me, the idea of The Kids. They were everywhere, standing on street corners in their Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts, in cars, in the 7-Eleven. Somehow this grand constituency controlled almost every adult’s fate, yet no adult really knew what it was nowadays—to be a kid.

  In the summer of ’79, I had just turned twenty-two. I discussed the idea for this book with my New York publisher. Go back to high school, he said, and find out what’s really going on in there with the kids. I thought about it over a weekend, and took the project.

  I had attended Ridgemont Senior High School in Redondo Beach, California, for a summer session seven years earlier, and those eight weeks had been sublime and forbidden days, even if it did mean going to school in the summer. I normally attended a rather strict Catholic school, and there were many of us who believed that all our problems would be solved, all our dreams within reach if we just went to Ridgemont public high school.

  In the fall of ’79 I walked into the office of Principal William Gray and told him the plan. I wanted to attend classes at Ridgemont High and remain an inconspicuous presence for the full length of the school year. The object, I told him, was to write a book about real, contemporary life in high school.

  Principal Gray was a careful man with probing eyes. He was wary of the entire plan, and he wanted to know what I had written before. I explained that I had authored a number of magazine profiles of people in the public eye.

  “Like who?” he asked.

  I named a few. A president’s son. A few rock stars. A few actors. My last article had been on the songwriter-actor Kris Kristofferson.

  Principal Gray eased back in his chair. “You know Kris Kristofferson?”

  “Sure. I spent a few weeks on tour with him.”

  “Hell,” said the principal. “What’s he like?”

  “A great guy.” I told him a few Kris stories.

  “Well now,” said Principal Gray, “I think I can trust you. Maybe this can be worked out.”

  It was. Principal Gray called in an English teacher, Mrs. Gina George, and gave me a homeroom for the year. Four other teachers were also informed. I started school the next week as a seventeen-year-old senior.

  Walking the halls of Ridgemont was at first an unnerving experience. I wore standard Southern California attire—tennis shoes, t-shirt, and backpack, but as I pushed past the other students I began to wonder. Was I walking too much like an adult? Was there some kind of neon light blinking on me—Imposter?

  I was never found suspicious. In fact, for the first month, I was completely ignored at Ridgemont. I eavesdropped on conversations around me, made copious notes, winked at the teachers who knew, and made my way. I began to feel like a third-rate spy.

  One day after school I wandered into journalism class and saw a girl I’d noticed before but had not met. She was hunt-and-pecking on the typewriter, looking caught in the midst of writer’s block.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  “You’re not bothering me,” she responded. She switched off her typewriter.

  Her name was Linda Barrett, and she began asking rapid-fire questions, as if she was making a mental computer card out on me. Do you have a girlfriend? Where do you work? Who’s your favorite teacher?

  We talked until the janitors kicked us out, and then we sat in her car in the parking lot. She began pointing out campus notables through her windshield. She knew them all, and they knew her. Linda Barrett worked in the local mall, at a popular ice cream parlor.

  I soon realized what a valuable friend I had made. Through Linda Barrett I met her best friend Stacy, Stacy’s brother, Brad, and many others I would come to write about. It was the beginning of my social acceptance at Ridgemont High. As the year progressed, they became my group, and they were the characters I spent most of my days with. They were my friends.

  As it happens with any writer, the temptation was to continue the research forever. My entire lifestyle changed that year. I went to malls, to slumber parties, to beaches, to countless fast-food stands. I can’t remember all the times I left situations to “go to the bathroom” and furiously scribble notes on conversations and facts I’d just heard. Back at Ridgemont, no doubt, some still remember me as the guy with the bad bladder.

  I found it was all too easy to recapture one’s adolescence. The hard part was growing up again. I would return to my home in Los Angeles to visit former cohorts and old friends more and more infrequently. Their look was distant and puzzled.

  “Still alive?” they’d ask. “Still writing?”

  (Magazine journalists, like P.O.W.’s and Turkish drug prisoners, are presumed dea
d if not heard from over two major holidays.)

  Even my own mother looked at me sadly as I passed through the living room one day.

  “You used to be such a mature person,” she said. “I remember when things like cars and the prom didn’t mean anything to you.” She shook her head. “You’ve changed. What happened to you?”

  By the end of the school year I had become so accepted that even Principal Gray had forgotten about my project. I attended the prom and passed by his table near the entrance, where he sat with Mrs. Gray, greeting students and introducing them to his wife. When he saw me, a fleeting look of panic crossed his face. Nine months later it was as if he couldn’t quite recall my name or where he knew me from.

  “It was a great year,” I told him. “Thanks.”

  I returned to a prom table with a group of Ridgemont students and began to think. I had developed close friends and had come to follow their thoughts and movements so carefully, that I wondered exactly how important my own undercover scheme really was. I did not want to become yet another adult writing about adolescence and the kids from an adult perspective. This story, I felt, belonged to the kids themselves.

  Over the next summer I visited many of the students I’d lived with that school year. I told them the story of my project. Their reaction was almost always the same.

  “A book?” they said. “About Ridgemont?”

  I later interviewed the main characters extensively, corroborating stories and notes from the previous year. I have tried to capture the flow of day-to-day high school life, as well as the life that begins as soon as the last bell rings. It was my intention to write of the entire business—from academic competition to the sexual blunders—of teenage adulthood. In all cases the people I have written about have been given names other than their own. I have taken the liberty of changing superficial identifying characteristics, but all the incidents are true.

  It was an experience that will forever change the way I perceive the word kids. The only time these students acted like kids was when they were around adults. What follows is a year in the life of Ridgemont High.

  —Cameron Crowe

  February 1981

  The Night Before

  Stacy Hamilton lay under the covers, still fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere in the course of the long and uneventful summer she had come to an important decision. There was no way she was going to start senior high school still a virgin.

  She listened to the noisy floorboards above her bed, following her parents throughout their entire ritual of preparing for sleep. Every night at 11:30 precisely, off went the upstairs television. Then all the lights. Then came the rattling of the bathroom pipes. Finally, Frank and Evelyn Hamilton came to rest on their upstairs mattress with two resounding thuds. They were grateful, heavy sleepers. Stacy’s brother, Brad, liked to say that nothing short of a ballistic-missile test in the living room could raise their parents after those last two thuds.

  On this night, Stacy rolled out of bed and tied on a pair of tennis shoes. She took a red wool sweater for the cold night air. Soundlessly, she slid open her bedroom window and hopped out.

  This was to have been Stacy Hamilton’s Summer of Wild Abandon. Just turned fifteen, she was the youngest hostess at Swenson’s Ice Cream Parlor—the prestigious Town Center Mall location. Stacy’s friend Linda Barrett, who was two years older and a senior at Ridgemont High, had found her the job. She’d come to Stacy last April and put it to her plain and simple—come to work at Swenson’s and your life will change.

  Well, it was now September. She’d been imprisoned all summer long in a hot, floor-length Peppermint Pattie hostess dress. Maybe her life had changed, Stacy figured, but it sure wasn’t from seating the same immature boys she’d known since grade school, and it definitely wasn’t from listening to all the parents jacked up on coffee and telling their kids to “just stop playing with the ice cream.” No, if anything, Stacy’s life had changed by listening to all the twelfth-grade waitresses in the back kitchen at Swenson’s.

  The Swenson’s waitresses, most of whom went to Ridgemont, were not allowed to chat among themselves in the main dining room. Talking was permitted only in the kitchen area. It was a Swenson’s tradition that whenever anything interesting happened, whenever an eligible male sauntered into the place, the waitresses would discreetly disappear into the back kitchen. Once in the back kitchen, the Peppermint Pattie act went right out the window. The Swenson’s girls got down to business.

  “Did you see that guy in B-9?”

  “That’s Bill from Toys ’R Us. He still lives at home.”

  “Really?”

  “Christie went out with him and said he’s a mama’s boy.”

  “Pass. Is that Tuna Melt up yet?”

  From the back kitchen talk at Swenson’s, Stacy Hamilton had learned that the world of girls could be divided up into two distinct groups—those who spent the weekend with their parents, and those who spent it with Allen or Bob. The latter group was a special sorority. They spoke of their older boyfriends in a certain way. Their accounts of dates ended at a certain point, with a smile and a click of the tongue. The message was clear enough—there was fun, and then there was sex.

  Stacy Hamilton was not yet a part of this group. She sensed that all the other waitresses knew, but accepted her anyway. Stacy was just a hostess and no threat to anyone’s tips. She listened quietly. She was Linda Barrett’s friend. The girls at Swenson’s all liked Stacy. Sometimes they would even pat her on the head.

  “You are really going to be beautiful,” they told her, “someday . . .”

  Stacy was a sweet-looking girl with long blond hair and only the last traces of adolescent baby fat. An interesting thing had happened over the summer. She had caught the flu and had lost weight and slimmed down to what her mother constantly reminded her was a “voluptuous figure.” Stacy was not quite used to it yet. She had noticed increased attention from boys, but, as Linda Barrett pointed out, boys didn’t count. The idea was to interest men.

  Stacy had been working the cash register on the August night that The Vet first walked into Swenson’s. He looked to be in his early twenties. He sat down alone at table C-9, clasped his bandless fingers in front of him, and ordered a French-dip sandwich. Stacy watched as the main-floor waitresses all vanished into the back kitchen. He was kind of cute, she decided, in a blow-dry sort of way.

  He kept staring at her. It wasn’t Stacy’s imagination. Even the other girls noticed. The man finished his sandwich, by-passed any ice cream order, and walked directly over to Stacy with his check.

  “So,” he said with a ready smile, “are you working hard? Or hardly working?”

  Stacy smiled back—they were supposed to enjoy all customer jokes unless obscene—and punched up the amount.

  “Working hard,” she said with studied indifference. She took his ten-dollar bill. “Out of ten.”

  “Listen,” the man said, “my name is Ron Johnson.”

  She counted back his change. “I’m Stacy.”

  “You really look like someone I’d like to know. I never really do this, but . . .” He pulled a business card from his wallet and wrote his home number on the back. “Why don’t you give me a call sometime. I’d love to take you out for dinner. What do you say?”

  Caught by surprise, Stacy reverted to the tone and phrasing she usually reserved for customers asking for substitutions on to-go orders. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I look forward to hearing from you.”

  “Okay. Thank you, and have a nice evening.”

  As soon as he walked out of Swenson’s, three waitresses beelined for Stacy.

  “What’s his name? What’s his name?”

  “What a total fox!”

  “Does he work in the mall?”

  They crowded around the business card he’d left behind. He worked at a veterinary clinic in nearby Redondo Beach. His name was Ronald M. Johnson, but from that moment on he would always be known aro
und Swenson’s as The Vet.

  On the advice of Linda Barrett, Stacy waited an appropriate three days to call The Vet. She reached him at home, where he lived with two college-buddies-turned-stereo-salesmen. They had a pleasant conversation about Swenson’s, ice cream parlors in general, and veterinary school. Ron Johnson was very smooth about working in his key question.

  “So,” he said, “you look like you could still be in high school.”

  “I know,” said Stacy, who was due to start high school in three-and-a-half weeks. “Everyone says that.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five,” said The Vet. “Think we can still be friends?”

  They had been on two dinner-and-movie dates before Stacy called her friend Linda Barrett for a special consultation. They met at Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant. The issue—Stacy’s Vanishing Summer of Wild Abandon.

  “I’m depressed,” said Stacy.

  “About The Vet?”

  “I guess,” said Stacy. “I like him. He’s a nice guy. He’s good-looking. We go out, we have a fun time, but . . . nothing happens.”

  “I don’t believe this guy,” said Linda. “You know what he reminds me of?” The words fell from her lips like spoiled clams: “A high school boy. Haven’t you figured men out yet, Stacy? Most guys are just . . . pussies. For years I chased after every guy I thought was cute. I thought if I was nice to them, they’d get the idea and call me up. Well, guess what? They didn’t call. I got impatient. So I started making the first move, and you know what else? Most guys are just too insecure and too chicken to do it themselves.”

  Stacy nodded. You didn’t argue with Linda Barrett. Their two-year age difference made a world of difference. Linda was taller and quite striking, with dark, perm-styled hair and an always skillful make-up job. Linda knew men, and she knew how to carry herself. She had what she called “a sexual overview.”

  “I don’t care who he is,” Linda continued. “Two dates is enough. Are you sure he’s not a fag?”