Fast Times at Ridgemont High

by Cameron Crowe

  When Linda Barrett moved over to Ridgemont High, many of the same boys she had gone out with before the bust were still attending the school. The same boys who abandoned her in the mall pretended it never happened. They took one look at Linda Barrett, then fifteen and gorgeous, in full bloom, and they began crowding around her. They asked her out. They proposed. They complimented her until, as she told Stacy, they turned blue. Linda Barrett still would not go out with another high school boy. It made her more desirable than ever.

  As part of her Juvenile Hall rehabilitation program, Linda Barrett had joined a Christian youth organization called Campus Life. Campus Life met once a week during third period—no Algebra—and on irregular weekends for prayer outings at various sites around the county.

  Linda had been on a weekend retreat in the country, praying with a group of other girls under a tree, when she first met Doug Stallworth.

  “Hey,” said Doug Stallworth, “anybody seen a little gold chain around here?”

  Their eyes met. Linda Barrett gazed at a young man who was older than the high school boys, but not too old. He had a face that was a little too thin, a nose that was a bit too big, but he did have that one great asset of maturity. He had a beard.

  They began going out, Linda and her “older man.” Doug Stallworth was then twenty years old. He had just graduated Lincoln High School. Not only was he older, but he was also from the forbidden rival high school. To Doug, Linda Barrett was the complete fox girlfriend he had never had before. They fell in love, and had stayed that way throughout her entire sophomore and junior years at Ridgemont. Almost every day after her last class, Doug would be waiting for her out on Luna Street, on a break from his job at Barker Brothers Furniture. It was one of the sights Ridgemont students were used to.

  Pictures of Doug Stallworth filled Linda Barrett’s green Velcro wallet. She showed them to everybody. Doug, clowning. Doug, sexy. Doug, indignant. Doug. His name appeared on all of Linda’s Pee-Chee folders and notebooks and free pages of her textbooks. Douglas Raymond Stallworth. Mrs. Raymond Douglas Stallworth. Stallworth Raymond Douglas. Dougie. The names of their kids.

  And that was how Linda Barrett had come to be the retired sex expert of Ridgemont Senior High School, giving her young neighborhood friend, Stacy Hamilton, the many benefits of her years of field experience.

  One day last May, Linda had called Stacy to break the news. She and Doug were engaged to be married. Doug had just asked her on a drive-in date to see A Force of One, and she had accepted, and they were going to be married on an undisclosed date. The local papers printed a blurb with a picture.

  From that moment on, their relationship began a downhill slide. Other boys started slipping back into her peripheral vision. The engagement was still on, of course, but Christ, she didn’t know when.

  Lunch Court

  Finding the right spot at Ridgemont High’s outdoor lunch area was tougher than getting the best table at the finest restaurant. It was a puny swimming-pool-sized courtyard dominated by a stocky oak tree in the center, and it was always packed with students. Even by the first day, they had sectioned off into different cliques and staked out their lunch-court territory for the year.

  All this for a twenty-six-minute lunch period.

  The closer one looked at lunch court, the more interesting it became. The object had always been to eat near the big oak tree at the center, and in the beginning at Ridgemont it was the surfers and stoners who ruled this domain. Seven years later, they had moved to the parking lot and the cafeteria (which was twice the size of lunch court, but tainted with a reputation as an underclassmen’s hangout).

  Now each group clustered around lunch court was actually a different contingent of Ridgemont fast-food employees. Lunch-court positions corresponded directly with the prestige and quality of the employer. Why, a man was only as good as his franchise.

  Working inward from the outskirts of Ridgemont High’s lunch court were the lowly all-night 7-Eleven workers, then the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King crowd, the Denny’s and Swenson’s types, all leading to the top-of-Ridgemont-Drive-location Carl’s Jr. employees. And at the center of lunch court, eating cold chicken under the hallowed big oak tree, was Brad Hamilton.

  Brad was popular around Ridgemont. In the world of fast food, once you had achieved a position of power, the next sign of influence was to bring in your friends. Brad had paid his dues. He had loaded his Carl’s Jr. with buddies. And why not? He even helped train them.

  “No friend of mine,” Brad once said, “will ever have to work at a 7-Eleven or in a supermarket.”

  And for that Brad’s friends admired and respected him.

  Carl’s Jr. was at the top of the Ridgemont fast-food hierarchy for several important reasons. It had a fine location at the top of Ridgemont Drive. Anybody headed anywhere in Ridgemont passed that Carl’s Jr. It was clean, with a fountain in the middle of the dining area and never too many kids on their bicycles. Brad, like the other employees, even came there on his off-hours, and that was the ultimate test. By evening, Carl’s would be crawling with Ridgemont kids.

  But why Carl’s? Why not some other fast-food operation? Why not Burger King? Why not McDonald’s? Or Jack-in-the-Box?

  The answer was simple enough, as Brad himself would tell you. Their food wasn’t as good. And places like Burger King were always giving away glasses and catering to small kids who came whipping into the restaurant on their bicycles. McDonald’s was McDonald’s. Too familiar, too prefab, too many games. McDonald’s was good only if you had no other choice, or if you just wanted fries.

  Jack-in-the-Box was suspect because all the food was precooked and heated by sunlamps. It was also common knowledge that the whole Jack-in-the-Box franchise was owned by Ralston-Purina, the well-known dog-food manufacturer. Kentucky Fried Chicken was too boring, and Wendy’s was too close to Lincoln High School.

  The top-of-Ridgemont-Drive Carl’s Jr., on the other hand, had achieved that special balance between location and food quality. At Carl’s, the burgers were char-broiled. This crucial fact not only meant that the meal was better, but it returned a little bit of the fast-food power to the kid behind the counter. A guy like Brad Hamilton felt like a real chef.

  “Hey Brad,” people were always saying to him, “your fries are even better than McDonald’s.”

  “You know it,” Brad would say, as if they were, in fact, his fries.

  Brad had settled into a nice, comfortable pattern, in life and in work. In life, he had a petite and popular girlfriend named Lisa. Lisa was one of the intercom girls at Carl’s.

  Brad’s three best friends, his golf-cap buddies, also worked at Carl’s. They were David Lemon, Gary Myers, and Richard Masuta. When they weren’t hanging out at school together, they were either at Carl’s or driving around Ridgemont together in The Cruising Vessel.

  In work Brad had his own method, and at it he was the best. Working the fryer at Carl’s was a system governed by beeps. One high beep—the fries were done. One low—change the oil. But Brad didn’t even have to go by the beeps. He knew when the fries were perfect. He knew when to change the oil, and he knew his fryer.

  Normally quiet in class, once Brad got behind the fryer at Carl’s he was in command. He’d carry on a running dialogue with his coworkers. Or he would listen to the drive-up customers in their cars trying to decide what to order, not realizing the intercom was on and everybody in the kitchen could hear them.

  (“Look, do you want goddamn cheese or not, Estelle? Hey, quit that! I’m not your punching bag!”)

  Intercom customers killed Brad. Sometimes, when Lisa was working the intercom, she’d get some little Romeo trying to pick her up. She had a nice, cute voice.

  “Do you want anything else with that?” Lisa would say.

  “Only if you come with the food, babe.”

  Then the Romeo would drive up to the window and Brad would be standing there with a professional Carl’s smile.

  “Hi. How are you
tonight?” he’d say. “That’ll be $4 35.”

  “You know, you do sound like a girl on the intercom.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. Who was I talking to?”

  And Brad would count back the change. “You were talking to me, babe. ”

  Then he would hand them hamburgers with patties he’d rubbed on his shoe.

  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 w
ould 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

  Stacy 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.