Fast Times at Ridgemont High

by Cameron Crowe

  Talk suspended while a Bob’s Big Boy waitress arrived, took the girls’ order for coffee and Big Boy combinations, and then stood by the table totaling other checks. Linda and Stacy glared at her until she left.

  “I don’t think he’s a fag,” said Stacy. “He said he broke up with his girlfriend a few months ago.”

  “Well then, what are you waiting for? You’re good-looking. You’ve just got to learn to get what you want. I know it sounds hard making the first move, but think of it like this. Three years from now you’ll be eighteen and it won’t matter either way.”

  The words made sense to Stacy. Two nights later she called The Vet and asked him to meet her that night for a drive. It didn’t matter where they went, she said, she just had to get out of the house. The Vet agreed.

  She met him out in front of her family’s condominium complex, in the shadows next to the mailbox, where she was out of sight from the neighbors.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” she said, shivering despite her sweater. “I can’t wait until I move out.”

  “No problem,” said The Vet. “Where do you feel like going?”

  “I don’t know. Do you know where the Point is?”

  “The Point?” The Vet looked at Stacy curiously, and for a moment she was sure she had given away her age. The Point was a notorious make-out spot for Ridgemont teenagers with parents at home. “The Point sounds good to me!”

  They drove up Ridgemont Drive, past all the neon-lit fast-food restaurants, up the hill toward the campus of Ridgemont Senior High School. The parking lot was empty. The Vet found a space near the back corner. From there they walked across the baseball field to the cliff behind the Ridgemont High backstop. The Point.

  The Point was the best spot to overlook the whole town. The Point was dark and secluded, with only one drawback. The Ridgemont High Point was always covered with milk cartons. Hundreds of milk cartons. Milk cartons with the straws still stuck inside. Milk cartons without. Squashed milk cartons. Milk cartons still half full. More milk cartons than you had ever seen in any one place at any one time, ever. There was the usual smattering of premixed Mai-Tai cans and shattered Bacardi bottles, sure, but the emphasis was always on milk cartons.

  The Point was deserted. Only Stacy and The Vet stood there, arms touching, on their third summer date, looking out at the blinking lights of the condo developments below, listening to the distant sounds of the Pacific Ocean lapping up onto the shore of Redondo Beach.

  “Let’s sit down,” said The Vet. But there were only rocks out on the Point. The Vet was the type, as Stacy would later tell Linda Barrett, who could probably have a lot more fun if he didn’t wear slacks all the time.

  “We can sit over there,” said Stacy. “There’s probably a seat in the baseball dugout.”

  They cleared their way through a summer’s worth of trash, more milk cartons, and found a nice, concrete seat inside the visiting team dugout. Stacy and The Vet sat side by side. Above them shone a single light bulb. There was no view of the city from the dugout.

  “You look nice tonight,” said The Vet.

  “You do, too.”

  Silence. Stacy rearranged her hands in her lap.

  “It’s pretty warm out tonight.”

  “It is. It’s real warm. I wonder how long it will last.”

  The Vet leaned over and kissed Stacy on the cheek. Was that the first move? She sat quietly for a moment, her hands folded in her lap. It had to be the first move. She waited another moment. When I’m eighteen it won’t matter either way.

  She lunged for The Vet and kissed him squarely on the mouth. At first surprised, he held her there and kissed her even more deeply. She began to run her fingers through his blow-dry haircut.

  It was The Vet who spoke first. “Are you really nineteen?”

  “Yes,” said Stacy. “I am really nineteen.”

  She kissed him again.

  “I’d better take you home,” he said.

  “What about those other guys you live with?”

  “I mean back to your home.”

  But they made no moves in any direction. A few minutes later, The Vet had apparently resolved his inner conflict. He began tugging lightly at Stacy’s red corduroy pants. She looked down at his hand on the snap.

  This was it, Stacy thought. The Real Thing. A thousand schoolyard conversations and tips from Linda Barrett jumbled in her head. Would it hurt? Would it be messy? Would she get pregnant? Would they fall in love?

  “Do you really want to do this?” Stacy heard herself ask. “I mean, it’s your final decision.”

  “I think we both want to.”

  Slowly, awkwardly, Stacy reached down to help him. She unsnapped her pants, and suddenly The Vet needed no more reassurance. He tilted her backward onto the concrete dugout bench. They continued kissing, feverishly, his hand slipping up into her blouse. He massaged her breasts. Then he pulled off her shoes. Then her pants. Then his own pants. Ron “The Vet” Johnson was different from the other boys she’d made out with. He had Technique.

  “Is this your first time?” he whispered.

  “Yesssssssss . . .”

  As she held onto The Vet’s shoulders and felt a man enter her for the first time, Stacy looked up at the top of the Ridgemont dugout. She would always remember reading the graffiti above her:

  Heroin in the neck

  Lincoln was here—Sieg Heil

  Led Zeppelin

  Dan y Roberto (Disco Fags)

  Stacy Hamilton, fifteen, slipped back into her room at three that morning. Already her room felt different to her. Those frilly pillowcases, those Scholastic Book Services paperbacks she’d ordered in junior high, that bubblegum chain on the dresser . . . they all seemed out of place to her now.

  She was giddy, wide awake. She sat on the edge of her bed and examined herself in the mirror—no difference. Somehow it was just like Linda Barrett had explained it to her. Her first feeling would be one of relief, the second, that she would want to go out and sleep with all the cute guys in the world because it was so much fun. Stacy smiled and turned on her clock radio. Then she picked up the telephone extension and punched out a number.

  Linda Barrett answered her phone in a sleep-laden murmur. “Did you get him?”

  “Yes.”

  Linda laughed and cleared her throat. “Congratulations.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Stacy clicked off and dialed yet another number. This one was the request line for the local FM rock station.

  “Good morning. KXLY.” The disc jockey had her on a speaker box.

  “Hi!” said Stacy. “Could you play ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ by Led Zeppelin?”

  “Don’t you have that record by now?” It was nothing personal. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was just the most requested rock track of the last ten years. Any disc jockey knew it came with the territory. You answered the request line, chances were one in three it was some kid asking you to play “Stairway to Heaven.”

  “Yes. But the stereo is in the living room. And I like it better when you play it anyway.”

  The disc jockey must have liked the tone in her voice. “I’ll try and get it on for you,” he said.

  It was Stacy’s idea of the perfect touch—the supreme lullaby for her rite of passage. “Stairway to Heaven,” with all its mythic optimism and thundering guitar soloing, had been her favorite song since fourth grade.

  Stacy had already fallen asleep by the time KXLY played her song. She was dreaming of Swenson’s Ice Cream Parlor, and the rock star David Bowie. In her dream, David Bowie had walked into the Town Center Mall location Swenson’s and applied for a job. He was pregnant by the actor-comedian Chevy Chase, he said, and Linda Barrett had suggested he come in and see about busing tables. David Bowie was pleading for the position—“to support my baby”—when real life interrupted.

  Stacy’s clock radio clicked back on. She lay in her bed, face pressed into the pi
llow. It was 6:45 A.M.

  “Get up, Stacy honey,” came her mother’s voice through the door. “These are the best years of your life!”

  Green

  The Ridgemont Senior High School official colors were red and yellow. But anyone who had ever attended the school did not think of red and yellow when it came to Ridgemont. They thought of green.

  The whole place was green. Green walls in the gymnasium. Green classrooms. Green bungalows. Even the blackboards were green. New graffiti? Roll on some green. Crack in the wall? Slap on some green. It was a Ridgemont High joke that if all other disciplinary measures failed, they called in the janitors and painted you green, too.

  There was a problem on this first day of regular classes at Ridgemont Senior High School, a problem beyond even the reach of green. In the early morning hours after Stacy and The Vet had left the Point, someone else had paid the school a visit. Someone had taken the steel letters.

  The first sight any student saw upon turning off Ridgemont Drive into the school parking lot was Ridgemont High’s green brick vanguard. Built as a memorial to the Ridgemont students slain in the Vietnam War, the vanguard was meant to spell out the school’s name with “honor and omnipotence.”

  But on this first morning the steel letters said only: IDG MON SEN OR HI HO.

  There was more. The rest of Ridgemont High was wrapped in toilet paper. Toilet paper, that most versatile of high school vandalism weapons. Toilet paper wafted from the trees out front and tangled in the branches where it was virtually impossible to remove without a janitor on a ladder having to unhook each piece. Toilet paper had been applied to the 200 Building windows with an egg-and-wax mixture that adhered to it with true permanence. There was even toilet paper strewn through the yards of those unfortunate homeowners across the street from Ridgemont High, on Luna Avenue. Someone had really done a job. And the toilet paper was green.

  A spray-paint message had been left along the side of the front office building: LINCOLN SURF NAZIS.

  Lincoln High School, located several miles inland, was Ridgemont’s crosstown rival.

  “I know who did it,” said Brad Hamilton, seventeen. “It was those little fuckers. They’re wild. They come up out of Paul Revere Junior High, and they’re out to ruin our senior year.”

  Standing by the A-B-C-D-E registration counter in the gymnasium, waiting to pick up his red add card on the first day, Brad Hamilton had the unmistakable aura of Important Man on Campus. He stood surrounded by four buddies, all of them dressed in the same ventilated golf caps with brand logos like CAT and NATIONAL CHAINSAW on the front. They all nodded vigorously at everything Brad said. They all worked together at the same Carl’s Jr. hamburger franchise on Ridgemont Drive, where Brad was head fryer.

  “They ought to just waste those guys,” said Brad, “one by one, as soon as they leave junior high.”

  Every June, Paul Revere Junior High held a graduation procession for the outgoing ninth graders. Several hundred of the fourteen-year-olds crossed Ridgemont Drive en masse, a symbolic passage toward higher education. Ridgemont High School upperclassmen usually launched water balloons at them from strategic locations. For them, the Paul Revere procession was like a dirty river about to empty into their backyard.

  The kids from Paul Revere would find that things change quickly in high school. Suddenly it was considered in bad taste to continue adolescent behavior into tenth grade. High school brought on new responsibilities and a whole new set of priorities. It was different from what it had been ten, or even five years earlier. One of the most common phrases heard in high school was now: “I went through my drug phase in junior high.”

  Once in high school a kid could drive, and a car necessitated a certain cash flow. An allowance from your parents was not only demeaning, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t take long for a kid to see the big picture—you were nothing unless you had a job. But well-paying teen jobs were scarce, especially since the abolishment of training wages.

  Ah, but there was always one bastion of teen employment left. That one business where a guy like Brad Hamilton was king.

  “I’m in fast food,” Brad would say with professional dignity.

  Brad’s job as chief fryer at Carl’s Jr. was no trifling matter, but what was particularly impressive was Brad’s location. He worked at the Carl’s Jr. at the very top of Ridgemont Drive.

  Like most of his friends, Brad worked six days a week. School was not a major concern. Actually it was fourth on his list, after Carl’s and Girls and Being Happy. School was no problem, especially this year. Brad could have graduated as a junior last year—he had enough units—but why do that? It had been a major task to reach a social peak in junior high and then work up again through high school. After two years at Ridgemont, Brad was on top. He knew practically everyone, and he was well liked. For Brad, the best part of school was being with his friends and seeing them every day.

  This, as Brad had been saying since last year and all summer long at Carl’s, would be his Cruise Year. He had selected only four classes—Mechanical Arts, Running Techniques, Advanced Health and Safety, and Public Speaking. He wanted to enjoy the year, take it easy, and not rush things.

  “Hi, Bradley!” It was his sister, Stacy, a sophomore.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  “Sor-ry,” said Stacy.

  “Who do you have fifth period?” Brad asked.

  “U.S. History. Mr. Hand.”

  “Hey-yo,” said Brad.

  “Hey-yooooooo,” said his friends in the ventilated golf caps.

  “You’d better get to class,” Brad instructed. “The show begins after the third bell.”

  After Stacy left, one of Brad’s friends turned to him. “Your sister is really turning into a fox.”

  “You should see her in the morning,” said Brad.

  Mr. Hand

  Stacy Hamilton took her seat in U.S. History on the first day of school. The third and final attendance bell rang.

  He came barreling down the aisle, then made a double-speed step to the green metal front door of the U.S. history bungalow. He kicked the door shut and locked it with the dead bolt. The windows rattled in their frames. This man knew how to take the front of a classroom.

  “Aloha,” he said. “The name is Mr. Hand.”

  There was a lasting silence. He wrote his name on the blackboard. Every letter was a small explosion of chalk.

  “I have but one question for you on our first morning together,” the man said. “Can you attend my class?”

  He scanned the classroom full of curious sophomores, all of them with roughly the same look on their faces—there goes another summer.

  “Pakalo?” It was Hawaiian for Do you understand?

  Mr. Hand let his students take a good long look at him. In high school, where such crucial matters as confidence and social status can shift daily, there is one thing a student can depend on. Most people in high school look like their names. Mr. Hand was a perfect example. He had a porous, oblong face, just like a thumbprint. His stiff black hair rose up off his forehead like that of a late-night television evangelist. Even at eight in the morning, his yellow Van Heusen shirt was soaked at the armpits.

  And he was not Hawaiian.

  The strange saga of Mr. Hand had been passed down to Stacy Hamilton by Brad. Arnold Hand, Ridgemont’s U.S. history instructor, was one of those teachers. His was a special brand of eccentricity, the kind preserved only through California state seniority laws. Arnold Hand had been at Ridgemont High for years, waging his highly theatrical battle against what he saw as the greatest threat to the youth of this land—truancy.

  According to Stacy’s brother, you had to respect a teacher like Mr. Hand. Hand was one of the last teacher teachers, as Brad had put it. Most of the other members of the Ridgemont faculty subscribed to the latest vogue in grading, the “contract” method. Under the contract system a student agreed to a certain amount of work at the beginning of the year, and then actually signed a
legal form binding him to the task. The contract teacher argued that he or she was giving the student a lesson in Real Life, but in fact it was easier on the teacher. Grades were given according to the amount of contract work done, and such matters as attendance didn’t matter to the contract teacher.

  Mr. Hand wanted no part of the contract system. The only thing worse than a lazy student, he said, was a lazy teacher. Even the hardcore truant cases had to agree. The last thing they wanted to see was somebody up there looking for loopholes just like them. For them, Mr. Hand was one of the few surviving teachers at Ridgemont who still gave a shit about things like weekly quizzes or attendance slips—who gave a shit, period. That’s what Brad had told Stacy.

  Mr. Hand’s other favorite activity was hailing the virtues of the three bell system. At Ridgemont, the short first bell meant a student had three minutes to prepare for the end of the class. The long second bell dismissed the class. Then there were exactly seven minutes—and Mr. Hand claimed that he personally fought the Education Center for those seven minutes—before the third and last attendance bell. If you did not have the ability to obey the three bell system, Hand would say, then it was Aloha Time for you. You simply would not function in life.

  “And functioning in life,” Hand said grandly on that first morning, “is the hidden postulate of education.”

  At age fifty-eight, Mr. Hand had no intention of leaving Ridgemont. Why, in the last ten years he had just begun to hit his stride. He had found one man, that one man who embodied all the proper authority and power to exist “in the jungle.” It didn’t bother Mr. Hand that his role model happened to be none other than Steve McGarrett, the humorless chief detective of “Hawaii Five-O.”

  First-year U.S. history students, sensing something slightly odd about the man, would inch up to Hand a few days into the semester. “Mr. Hand,” they would ask timidly, “how come you act like that guy on ‘Hawaii Five-O’?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”