Fast Times at Ridgemont High (33 page)

Grad Nite

A
t 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.

“The Skating Ramp!”

Heads began to pop up all around. This was an important landmark in the journey to Disneyland. Indeed, there were five times the normal amount of power lines strung along the freeway. All that juice could only be headed for one place.

There, in the distance was the snow-peaked cap of the Matterhorn Mountain and . . .

“The Orange Drive-In!”

The cheering drowned out the rock music. The buses rattled onto a freeway knot that shot vehicles out onto Disneyland Drive. The first glimpse of Disneyland was a truly amazing sight.

Hundreds upon hundreds of yellow buses, all with black lettering on the side, filled the Disneyland parking lot. The parking lot was almost bigger than Disneyland itself. There were buses for miles, for days, all converging into a mass of yellow.

“DISNEYLAND!”

Bus 5 pulled up to a red parking-lot light alongside a bus from Las Vegas. The kids all peered at each other. Some pried their windows open and yelled.

“Meet me at Monsanto, midnight!” Damone blew some brunette a kiss as the buses pulled away.

The five Ridgemont High buses pulled into their predetermined parking spaces. All the students were instructed to stay put while Mrs. Franks visited each group for another lecture.

“You are to be back here at your bus in your
seat
at 5
A.M.
exactly.”

“HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FIND THESE BUSES AGAIN?”

“You’ll find these buses,” said Mrs. Franks with weary resignation, “right here in lanes 121-126. We’re not leaving this spot all night. If you get lost, go to the chaperones’ lounge on Main Street. But try to remember Lanes 121-126. Any other questions?”

No more questions.

“Okay, please remember the rules, people,” said the Grand Dame of Grad Nite. “And have a great time. We’ll see you tomorrow morning at 5
A.M.
”

You had to respect a place like Disneyland.

At first not even his business-manager brother would loan Walt Disney the money to build the park. It was too far-reaching, too self-indulgent, they told him. Too much “the world’s biggest toy for the world’s biggest boy.” But in the afterglow of Disney’s successful
Snow White,
he went ahead and built it anyway.

At five-eighths the size, Disneyland is a re-creation of all facets of life on earth—Disney-style. Every continent, every body of water, even the highest and lowest points in the world are all represented just as Walt wanted them.

Employees of the park all attend a special school to learn the Disney policy (“We get tired, never bored”). Even the anxiety of waiting in long lines is eased through the deception of a mazelike series of right-and-left turns that gave a guest (never the word
customer)
a sense of accomplishment. Disneyland today is a study in absolute, almost eerie perfection. Today, many years after Disney’s death, the place is still run as if Walt Was Watching.

There was one last lecture, from Vice-Principal Ray Connors, as his students prepared to enter the Magic Kingdom.

“I don’t want you getting into any trouble out there tonight. If there’s any problem, you tell them to come find me, but I don’t anticipate something like that happening. Have a good time, and we’ll see you at five. And thanks for leaving your contraband behind.”