A P.R. problem.
Principal Gray’s first move was to take Del Taco, the nearest and most popular fast-food stand for ditchers, by force. On a lazy afternoon toward the end of school, as students crunched into third-period tacos, the doors were suddenly clamped shut from the outside.
Two county security officers swept in and rounded up twenty-two ditchers. Trouble was, as Gray would soon learn, all but two went to Paul Revere Junior High School.
Even though Gray made a big deal about busting the two Ridgemont High ditchers, it was a well-known fact—Principal Gray, as the man himself might say, was P.O.’ed.
The buxom message girl from the front office came swinging into English Literature with a blue slip, a slip that meant you had a personal meeting with the principal at that very moment.
She delivered the slip to the teacher with a flourish.
“Mark Ratner?”
The Rat walked up to the front, got the slip, and headed out the door. Nerves of steel. Now Ratner couldn’t imagine what Gray would want with him, what this was all about. He trudged down the hall. Maybe they wanted him to give a speech! Or better yet—of course—he was probably going to get the Debate Award. Who else would they give that to? Of course! This was what they did for the award winners. They let Principal Gray slip you the news.
Ratner was ushered into the principal’s office.
“Mr. Ratner?”
“Yes, sir. Nice to see you, sir.”
“This is the new annual.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Gray, “it is.”
“It looks excellent, sir. That’s pretty great. That you get them this early, sir.”
Definitely the Debate Award.
“Yes. We do get them early. It’s a very nice annual. I like it very much this year.”
Ratner nodded his head. Gray sure was acting strange. “Are you sure you wanted to talk to me, sir? I didn’t work on the annual staff or anything . . . even though I would have liked to. I was pretty busy with Debate.”
“I don’t believe I’m mistaken,” Gray said coldly.
Gray then opened the annual on his desk and flipped through it carefully, so as not to break its new binding. Finally he reached a two-page picture and spun it around to face The Rat. The title of the school group shot was What a Way to Go!
“Mr. Ratner, are you aware that you are posed obscenely in this year’s Rapier?”
The Rat began to get a deep acidic feeling that started in his groin and worked its way up into the very pit of his stomach. He was dizzy.
It was the school group picture, taken last October by Arthur Chubb.
“We have information that this is you, Mr. Ratner.”
Circled at the far right corner of the group picture was Ratner, his ass stuck out in the air. They’d printed it all right. No airbrushing for this year’s Rapier!
The Rat’s eyes immediately raced to the opposite side of the shot. There was Damone, smiling serenely in an Arrow sport shirt. His pants were on. His hands were in his pockets.
“It’s me.” The Rat’s teeth started to chatter as he confessed. “It was supposed to be a gag . . .”
An icy stare.
“I was a ham in my time, Mr. Ratner. It’s just that parents pay for these things and, once in a while, they like to read through their child’s annual. And when they see your butt, they might be a little curious. They might get a little P.O.’ed. And you know what? This phone on my desk rings. Quite a bit. And if they were to see this picture in those 1,500 copies sitting in the gymnasium, that phone would ring. A lot.”
“Are you going to expel me?”
“Well,” said Gray. “What I’m going to do is tell you a little secret, Mr. Ratner. A secret between you and me.”
“What is that, sir?”
“Those parents aren’t going to see your butt this year. Do you know why?”
“Why, sir?”
“Because we have arranged for you to spend this weekend in the school gym. And you will be doing the following. Without soiling or breaking the binding on any of these books—which is to say, VERY CAREFULLY—you will be erasing your posterior from every one of our new Rapier. As you can see, the bond is erasable.”
He demonstrated with the tip of a pencil.
“Thank you, Mr. Gray.”
“You will supply your own erasers. And, oh yes, Mr. Ratner. Don’t forget to sweep up after yourself. I don’t want eraser shavings all over the floor.”
The Rat drifted out of the office. Stunned. A whole weekend of erasing.
“We have information,” my ass. The Rat hadn’t told anybody anything. It could only have come from Damone.
Damone. The Mouth. Mr. All Talk. The Rat walked straight over to Youth and Law class, where he knew Damone would be. The Rat walked straight into the room and pulled Damone out of his seat. Outside the door The Rat began the first step of the high school prefight ritual. He threw his books down and beckoned to Damone. Even though Damone was stockier and in much better shape, Ratner went ahead and spoke the unretractable words.
“Well, Damone,” he said, “COME ON.”
“What’s going on, Rat? What are you doing? Why do I want to fight you?”
“Mr. GRAY just called me in to show me the new Calumet, which features my ass hanging out. You fuckin’ lied to me, Damone. You told me to play that joke on Chubb, and you told me it would be airbrushed. But it wasn’t, you asshole . . . SO COME ON.”
“I don’t want to fight you,” said Damone. “No way.”
“COME ON.” Ratner was as pissed as Damone had ever seen him. “I’ve got to spend the weekend erasing all the new annuals, thanks to you . . .”
“Is that all,” said Damone. “That’ll be a blast. We’ll do it this weekend.”
Ratner slowly let his hands down. “You’ll help?”
“No sweat,” said Damone. “It’ll be great.”
It was kind of funny, really. A good story for the grandchildren, The Rat figured. At the end of the Erasing Ass Weekend, as it would come to be called, Principal Gray had been so proud of the job The Rat and Damone did, that he rewarded them both with the right to go to Grad Nite. Everything, it seemed, was going their way.
The Exer-Gro Plus
The Rat had developed the habit of coming home and checking the mail before anyone else. It was just a little routine he’d gotten into six weeks, to the day, after he’d ordered the Exer-Gro Plus back in March. The Rat knew all the bills by heart, all the junk mail. By now he was sure they’d mailed it to someone else.
On this day toward the end of the year, The Rat walked back to his house after school. He said hello to the kids next door who were always building something in the garage, and casually flipped open the mailbox.
It was a small square package. He knew the instant he saw it what it was. This was it, just in time for Grad Nite, too. The Exer-Gro Plus.
The Rat set down his books, went to the bathroom, did everything he possibly could do to delay the pleasure of opening his package. He wasn’t sure what it would be. Perhaps some kind of stretching device, an exercise machine. Whatever, he just hoped it didn’t take too long.
Now, to use a penknife or just rip it open? Of course. Rip that thing open. The Rat tore into it, separated the newspaper wrapping that had been used to pack it, and there it sat. The Exer-Gro Plus.
It was a rubber dickhead.
No special formula, no exercise machine, no nothing. Just a rubber dickhead. Phony as hell.
There was a letter with it:
CONGRATULATIONS ON RECEIVING YOUR NEW EXER-GRO PLUS, THE EVER NEWEST IN OUR LINE OF SEXUAL-ENHANCEMENT ITEMS. NOW YOU CAN THRILL AND IMPRESS WOMEN EVERYWHERE BY WEARING THE EXER-GRO PLUS EVERYWHERE YOU GO, IN ANYTHING YOU DO. LIFELIKE, MADE OF QUALITY NONTOXIC MATERIALS, THE EXER-GRO PLUS IS GUARANTEED TO LENGTHEN THE DESIRABILITY OF ANY MAN BY AT LEAST THREE INCHES. GOOD LUCK IN YOUR NEW LIFE WITH THE EXER-GRO PLUS.
It was a three-inch-high nine-dollar rub
ber dickhead. The Rat couldn’t believe it. He went back and reread the ad. There was nothing that promised it would be anything else. But it was still a rip-off! And it wasn’t like he could write the Action Line about this one. Shit. Besides, it didn’t even work. The Rat wore it into Safeway once, and it fell down his pantleg.
Grad Nite
At the time he should have been leaving the house for Grad Nite, Mike Damone was still shirtless. He was in the bathroom checking himself out in the mirror.
By the time he finally arrived at Ridgemont, the five yellow buses parked along Luna Street were already filled with students.
“Aaaaaaaayyyyyy, Damone!” someone yelled. The Rat. “Glad you could make it. Where’s your date?”
“Your mama couldn’t make it.”
The Rat laughed and continued talking to a girl sitting in the seat next to him.
“You didn’t save me a seat!”
“The bus filled up.” The Rat shrugged. “There should be a seat somewhere. Ask Mrs. Franks.”
Damone straightened his tie, smoothed his three-piece suit, and approached Mrs. Franks, PTA liaison for Grad Nite. She was walking in tight little circles on the sidewalk next to bus 1.
“Mrs. Franks,” Damone asked politely. “Where’s my seat?”
“There’s an extra seat on bus 5,” she said briskly. She was lost in thought.
Leslie Franks was once president of the PTA. Her kids had long since grown up and moved (as far away as possible, no doubt), but Mrs. Franks still came back once a year to take the helm at Grad Nite. It was like Jerry Lewis and Muscular Dystrophy, Leslie Franks and Grad Nite. She took it seriously, and something was seriously wrong right now.
“Go try bus 5.” She shooed Damone away.
But there was no seat on bus 5. So Mike checked all the other buses. They, too, were filled.
“Mrs. Franks, I hate to bother you again. But I can’t find a seat.”
“Did you check the other buses, young man?”
“Yes.”
“Joseph?” She called out. “Where is Joseph Burke? Please help this boy find a seat! Count students if you have to.”
Joseph Burke, ever the subservient A.S.B. advisor when it came to Mrs. Frank’s imperious presence on Grad Nite, did so. He counted all the students until they had once again come back to bus 5. Burke counted, and sure enough . . .
“Go ahead,” said Burke. “There’s an extra seat in there somewhere.”
And while The Rat sat in bus 3—The Cool Bus—talking to some girl, Mike was walking down the aisle of bus 5. They looked like ex-convicts on bus 5. He was looking for a seat, anything resembling a seat.
The last available seat on bus 5 was next to a familiar face—Charles Jefferson. He was back for Grad Nite.
“Is this seat taken?”
Jefferson ignored Damone.
“Hey, Charles, is this seat taken?”
After a time, Charles Jefferson looked down at his own muscular legs, which were bowed out to take up the entire spare seat. He moved one of his legs slightly, an indication that Damone could have the corner. He took it.
Meanwhile, Vice-Principal Ray Connors was visiting each bus before it took off. He reached bus 5 and stood in the stairwell.
“Can I have your attention,” he said. “Can I have your attention way in the back?” He waited for quiet. “All right, people. We’re going to be leaving in another minute. I just want to remind you that we are from Ridgemont High School. We’ve been going to Disneyland for ten years, and the next class would like to go, too. We’ve never had any real trouble with Ridgemont students . . . and we’ve always been real proud of that. So let’s continue with the program, and we hope you all have a real good time. We’ll see you here next week.”
And there was thunderous applause, but none of the buses began their journey just yet.
Outside, still pacing the sidewalk, Mrs. Leslie Franks was muttering to herself. The crisis was now obvious—the driver of bus 5 had not arrived.
And then . . . a figure appeared on the horizon.
“Look. Look.” Mrs. Franks sighed heavily. “Oh, thank Jesus.”
The driver held a sleeping bag across her chest and walked toward the Ridgemont buses. From the distance she looked like a sumo wrestler.
She was a professional bus driver, and her name was Miss Navarro. She greeted Mrs. Franks, PTA liaison to Grad Nite, like this: “Ever year I say no more Grad Nite. And ever yet I end up doin’ it again. All I ask is that you don’t wake me ’fore five. ’Cause I sleep right there on the aisle. Alrighty?” And with that, Miss Navarro instinctively hopped behind the wheel of Big Number Five and gunned her up.
It was just past eight. Time to get this caravan on the road. The five yellow buses lumbered onto the freeway for the two-and-a-half-hour trip down the coast to Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland. It was another Ridgemont ritual, like salmon swimming upstream. Grad Nite. Bad sex, troubled relationships, grades, hassles at work—they all went out the window for Grad Nite. Time out for adolescence!
For twenty bucks, a junior or senior and date had the complete run of Disneyland from 10 P.M. to 5 A.M. All the Magic Kingdom asked in return was that the Grad Nite students follow two simple rules: First, boys were to wear a suit and tie; girls, a formal gown. Ties were to be worn at all times. (They probably figured the last thing any kid in a three-piece suit wanted to do was raise hell and ruin the suit.) Plus, as Disneyland officials stated in the rule sheet that came with a Grad Nite ticket, any display of school colors or clothing would “suggest rivalries . . . and would be entirely unacceptable.”
The second rule, for which Disneyland heaped on the special security every Grad Nite, was no alcoholic beverages or drugs.
There were horror stories, told by friends of friends, about that second rule. Rex Huffman’s older brother, Mark, who was busted at Grad Nite several years back, had a tale to tell. Mark had smuggled five joints of marijuana into Disneyland in his sock and felt good enough about it to head straight for It’s a Small, Small World and light one up.
Halfway through the ride, just as the boat compartment was entering the French sector, an attendant literally swung out of the Disneyland shadows on some kind of security rope and into the compartment. The attendant handcuffed Mark Huffman to the boat and later led him into a Disneyland holding tank for questioning.
And here was the best part—the holding tank, according to Mark, was beneath Disneyland. It looked just like the end of “Get Smart.”
Once in the holding tank Mark was given the sternest of lectures. What it boiled down to, according to Huffman, was, “You-Can-Fuck-Around-with-Anything-in-This-World-but-You-Can’t-Fuck-Around-with-Disneyland.” He was kept there until his parents made the three-hour drive from Temple City to take their pothead son away. On Grad Nite, there was nothing more humiliating.
Mike Damone was not about to be that stupid. The Disneyland holding tank was a fate for small-timers. Damone had studied up; he was playing smart odds. Tonight he would operate like a fine piece of machinery.
It so happened that the Girls’ Chorus, which featured the angelic-looking Laurie Beckman as one of its lead vocalists, had sung at the Disneyland Pavilion for Grandparents’ Day two afternoons before. Damone had written everything out very carefully—the directions to the perfect hiding spot that Damone’s brother, the Toyota salesman, had given him. And Mike had given Laurie the special knapsack containing a fifth of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.
She had hidden it under an oath of secrecy, in exchange for Damone’s telling her Steve Shasta secrets. (Damone shared the same P.E. class with Shasta.)
Sitting there on bus 5, bouncing up and down with the rumbling bus, Damone knew everything would be fine. Just fine.
“Can I SMOKE?” Charles Jefferson yelled suddenly, with a force unequaled since Malcom X’s Lincoln Park speech in ’62.
No one answered.
“I said, can I SMOKE?”
The bus 5 chaperone, someone’s mother,
stood up and shakily turned to face Charles Jefferson. “Uhhhh . . . I’m afraid smoking is not allowed on the school bus. I’m very sorry.”
This suited Charles just fine, and he sat back with rare satisfaction as he knocked out a Kool and had a nice long smoke.
“Hey, turn on the radio,” someone yelled.
Miss Navarro turned on the radio and found a rock station. She pushed the volume way beyond the point of distortion, to the level where the two small speakers rattled ominously from either side of the bus. Everyone sang along with a vengeance.
At the back of the bus Damone could hear everything that made a 150-foot school bus move down the highway. Every gear shift. Every grind and shudder. The noise lulled Charles Jefferson to sleep, and after a few minutes his leg snapped back open to push Damone even further into the aisle.
After a while Damone made his way to the front of the bus in search of a familiar face. He found a cluster of students gathered around a kid from Bio 3-4.
“. . . and so Walt Disney had this friend in Japan,” the guy was saying. “This scientist was experimenting with the freezing of cats. He would freeze them, seal the animals in a vacuum-insulated capsule of liquid nitrogen for a few weeks, and then thaw them out. And the cats would be alive!
“So later Walt Disney contracts cancer and knows he’s going to die, right? What does he do? He calls up his friend in Japan and says, ‘Freeze me!’ ”
“Total bullshit,” said Damone.
Two girls glared at Mike, and that hurt.
“This is all in the medical journals, Damone. You’re just showing your ignorance.”
Damone went back to sit with Charles Jefferson. Lit-up drive-ins and neon restaurants whizzed by. By the end of hour one, most of the male students had dozed off. Somebody’s girlfriend had switched the station to The Mellow Sound. The girls were all singing along to a Billy Joel ballad.
Something jarred Charles Jefferson awake.
“TURN THAT SHIT OFF!” he demanded.
Miss Navarro turned the station back to rock.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High Page 22