Fast Times at Ridgemont High (15 page)

Linda Barrett and Stacy Hamilton, meanwhile, stood in the girls’ bathroom and listened to the talk at the mirror.

“We were sitting in the bleachers,” a girl was saying as she brushed her hair in long, savage strokes, “and he
really
had a boner. I was embarrassed ’cause you could see it and
everything.
”

“Are you talking about Dave Carpel?”

“Yes.”

“He walks around with a boner
all the time.”

“I think your tits are getting bigger,” said another girl.

Three girls turned around and said, “Mine?”

“So,
anyway,”
continued the brusher. “I thought it was going to
bust
out of his pants.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, Mr. Burke
shined the flashlight
on us. And David just
wilted.
And I got out of there quick.” She paused. “This school is so insane.”

“Did you know,” offered yet another girl at the mirror, “that Steve Shasta brought in booze.”

“That boy is
such
a good kisser.”

“You kissed Steve?”

“That boy is a fox and he
knows
it.”

“I know, but he’s nice.”

“I know,” commented the brusher. “It’s such a shame, isn’t it?

The Shame About Steve Shasta

S
teve Shasta walked into Child Development wearing his customary wraparound Vuarnet sunglasses. Cindy Carr was working in one of the minikitchens, making guacamole dip.

“What’s for dinner, snookums,” said Shasta, grabbing her waist from behind.

Cindy jumped slightly and pounded Shasta with little fists. “Steve,” she said. “There’s someone here to see you.”

Shasta turned around to see his visitor, a man in his late twenties, holding a notebook. Reporter.

“Hi, Steve,” said the visitor. “I’m Jim Roberts from the
Herald.
I found out at the office that you had a free period and might be here. I wonder if we could talk for an article I’m writing about high school soccer.”

Shasta didn’t flinch. He checked his watch and slipped into Steve Shasta mode. “Sure, Jim. I’ve got about twenty minutes. Want to do it in the cafeteria?”

It was not an uncommon sight on Ridgemont campus, Shasta walking across the commons with the media in tow. Local print and TV reporters flocked to him, and he had the media personality that they loved.

“You know, Jim, the thing I like best about soccer is that it’s not a
collisional
sport. You know what I mean? It’s very physical, but the emphasis is on ball handling. Nothing against the game of football, of course . . .”

Shasta could dish it right up. When most of the other kids were down at Town Center Mall, Shasta was indoors watching soccer games down on the far end of the TV dial. He loved the sport, and had it added to the athletic program at Paul Revere Junior High. He had developed strategies that would probably be in use at RHS long after he, or even Coach Ramirez, left. The All-Out Crush Offense? Forget it—that was Shasta. The Dogmeat Five, in which five players converged on a single opponent by surprise? That was Shasta’s, too.

Shasta was also a left-footed player, which made him doubly dangerous. He was nearly impossible to guard. He practiced his shots until dusk after school and all hours on weekends.

Last year he had been voted Most Valuable Soccer Player in the C.I.F. Shasta carried himself with a sort of disheveled dignity. He had those sloe-eyed just-woke-up looks. He wore shades almost all the time.

As he spoke with the reporter, Steve Shasta positioned himself with his back against the windows of the cafeteria. He was facing only the clock on the back cafeteria wall. Behind Shasta, Jim Roberts could see a small cluster of girls begin to gather, peeking and craning for looks through the cafeteria window behind him.

“I think last year it just kind of
clicked
as to what it was all about for me,” Shasta was saying, tipping back in his metal chair and tugging at his green shirt. “That’s why I started playing soccer better. All of a sudden I felt that confidence. Before that, I was just an average player—my coaches would tell you that. It was just
one day
it all popped into my mind what it was all about. On the soccer field it all seemed like everything was happening twice as slow. I’ve felt on top of the world ever since.”

It was a stock Shasta rap, already published in the
Herald.

“You practice quite a bit. Do you have time for friends, and girls?”

“Those things,” said Shasta, “are of little or no importance to me. At all.”

“Do you date at all?”

“Definitely.” Shasta grinned. “Definitely.” Shasta eyed the reporter carefully, as if to decide if he was okay or not, and then continued. “This is off the record, all right? My theory on girls—I’ve gone out with countless girls, and my motto is Don’t get involved or you get yourself in trouble. You know it’s true. As long as you don’t think it’s serious and you don’t let them think it’s serious, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. But these people who go out for two years and
propose
. . .” He spit out an imaginary chaw.

Shasta leaned toward the reporter, and his tone became even more confidential. “See those chicks behind me? They follow me everywhere. See that one chick with the permed-out brown hair?” Shasta didn’t even have to turn around to know she was there.

“I see her.”

“I’ll tell you, Jim. Girls are more aggressive than guys at this school. I went out with that girl
once.
She’s followed me around ever since. And her friends, too. I never even went out with any of them! I’ll tell you, Jim, these girls are all the same. They just want someone to go out with. You spend time with one of them, and it’s all around the school the next day.

“They call me all the time. There’s only one Shasta in the Ridgemont phone book so they know . . .” He sang it, like Sammy Davis, Jr.: “It’s gotta be me!” Shasta checked the clock. “And when I don’t go out with them, they start telling me off! It’s amazing.

“But what else do you want to know about soccer?”

Steve Shasta had an ingenious way of solving his abundant problems with high school girls. He had used a convenient tool, the biggest gossip at Ridgemont, his sister Mia. Anything he told her was immediately dispatched to a large network of girls who regularly pumped her for information.

One night last year Shasta had a talk with his sister.

“I feel something terrible happening,” Shasta had said.

“What do you think it is, Steve?”

“Well,” said Shasta, “it’s not really one thing . . . it’s all the girls that I want to go out with. I don’t know, Mia, I just think it’s all gotten in the way of
soccer.
And when I don’t have my soccer confidence . . .” Shasta looked at his sister woefully. “I don’t feel like I’m worth
anything.”

“Wow.”

“So I’ve made a decision.”

“What’s that?” She was eating it up.

“I’m becoming celibate.”

“Are you
kidding
?” asked Mia.

There was a long silence. “Do you know what that is?” asked Steve.

“Are you becoming bisexual or something?”

“Fuck you, Mia, I’m not becoming a
fag!
I’m just abstaining from sex. It’s called being celibate, and Mrs. George says more and more people are doing it. It’s just . . . something I have to do. I’m going to be celibate during soccer season.”

“But you’re always saying that soccer is a year-round sport.”

Shasta let his head fall into his hands.

The word had spread quickly and efficiently. Steve Shasta alone was responsible for the word
celibate
becoming part of the standard vocabulary of Ridgemont girls. It placed him at a distance from all the little boppers, he figured, and at the same time it made them want him more.

“Steve Shasta doesn’t sleep with girls,” they buzzed. “What a
shame
about Steve Shasta.”

But it was a plan for which Steve Shasta considered himself a genius. It allowed him to be selective, and, as he once explained to the guys in his P.E. class, “I get a lot of blow jobs, too.”

Changing

I
t had finally happened. Mark Ratner had gotten a C. Up until ninth grade he had a perfect A record. Then a few Bs had crept in. His mother had warned him when he took the job at Marine World, “If you let your grades slip, it’ll be on your record
forever.
No college wants an
average
student.”

Then, last week, the mimeographed copy of first-quarter grades came in the mail. Mr. Vargas had dealt The Rat a cruel blow. He’d given him a C in biology. Mr. and Mrs. Ratner were more surprised than anybody. They wanted to know what was wrong with their son. All year long, they said, he’d been changing . . . and The Rat had to agree.

Mark Ratner had always wanted to be an entomologist, a bug scientist. All throughout junior high at Paul Revere, he was the kid who brought insects to school in a jar. For years, little glass display cases full of stuffed-and-tacked specimens hung on the walls of The Rat’s room.

A few nights earlier, The Rat had come home, and it had all looked pretty ridiculous to him. He unhinged the display cases and stashed them in the garage.
Now what do I want up there?
The Rat replaced them later that night with about a hundred empty Elvis Costello album covers he’d fished out of the trash bins behind Tower Records.

“All year long you’ve been changing.” The words rang in his ears.

“I don’t know,” Ratner reasoned later to his friend Mike Damone at one of their after-school sessions. “The more they start talking about the romanticism of Beowulf and Milton . . . Jesus, I just go to sleep, you know. I can’t wait to get out of there. That stuff is so
boring.
It just doesn’t enter into anything. I don’t see why they try to get up all this respect for the fourteenth century. Does the guy at the checkout stand at Safeway go, ‘Hey, before I give you this food, you’ll have to tell me about the metaphorical content of fourteenth-century literature in the Romantic Age’?”

“I think teachers get a bang out of it,” said Damone. “It’s just like mandatory P.E. I once asked Ramirez why we had mandatory P.E. He said, ‘What would we do with all the out-of-work coaches?’ ”

“I guess I’m just depressed,” said The Rat.

“Why are you depressed?” asked Damone, holding up his Tia Maria and cream. “I thought you were in
looooooooove”

“I’m totally depressed,” said The Rat. Today, he had almost considered having a tall one himself. “Every time I go by the A.S.B. office she’s talking to guys. Today I went there and she looked right through me.”

“It’s her loss.”

“I don’t know. I start out real confident, and then I see her and I feel chickenshit all over. It just kind of creeps up all over me. Especially when she doesn’t even say hello.” He paused, listening to the Lou Reed album blasting over the Damone family stereo. “I guess I shouldn’t expect her to just go
wild
whenever she sees me.”

“I would,” said Mike Damone. “So tell me. Do you still like her?”

“Are you kidding? She’s the only girl worth going for this year.”

“Then just start talking to her,” said Damone. “Just go up to her and ask her out. If she can’t
smell
your qualifications, forget her! Who needs her! But that won’t happen. Just go up there and ask her if she wants to go get a burger. That one has worked for me, personally.”

“What if she’s a vegetarian?”

Damone looked at his friend with scorn. The Rat just wouldn’t learn.

“I know. I know. We’ve been through this before.”

“About a million times,” said Damone.

Braking Point