Fast Times at Ridgemont High (36 page)

Linda had been accepted into Students International, the program that allows a select few to study in any college throughout Europe. Linda had thought about it for three seconds, Stacy told Brad, and decided it was exactly what she wanted to do. She started crying right there in her living room.

Doug Stallworth had come over from work at Barker Brothers right in the middle of her crying fit. The Barrett family told Doug the news, expecting him to get all excited for Linda, too. And Doug, unbelievably enough, did get excited. Even though he knew he’d been left behind. They probably would become friends now, Brad thought. Ridgemont guys for life.

“Life,” Brad had become fond of saying, “I just don’t know . . .”

It was a joke and it wasn’t a joke. These were the worst of times for Brad. He had now been reduced to the lowest position in teen life. He was right where, if he recalled correctly, he once said he wouldn’t let . . . well, a
dog
work.

He was the all-night man at the Ridgemont 7-Eleven.

It was a slow night and Brad was wide awake. He figured that was the best way to be, especially if you had the kind of job where they showed you where the
shotgun
was. He had too much time to think on this job. That was the problem. But, it was bucks. It was bucks.

Brad had taken to napping in the afternoons after school, and then powering down the coffee once he hit the 7-Eleven. He once said he hated the stuff, would never drink it. Now he couldn’t get enough. He reached for the pot without even thinking about it. Drank a cup without even realizing he had.

By 4:15, when Brad got home, he was ready to sleep. When friends asked him how he functioned on three hours’ sleep, he told them all the same joke: “I sleep my ass off.”

On this particular night he had been leafing through the magazines, listening to the Muzak.

It all happened very quickly. Two men pulled up in a black Camaro. One man in a nylon mask came running into the store and immediately spray-painted the automatic scanning camera above the door. Brad was too stunned to be scared. It had to be a joke.

It was no joke. In another instant, the nylon-masked man stood in front of Brad with a .45—just like in the movie
Dirty Harry.
“Give it to me,” he said. “Let’s GO.”

“They empty and close the big safe at midnight here. I’m just the all-ni . . .”

“BULLSHIT!” the gunman bellowed. “I know this store. I know where the safe is. Why don’t you just move over there, real slow, behind the donut case, and GET IT.” He waved the gun at the donut case.

It was true, about the hidden safe. Any big bills that came in after midnight—when they closed the big safe in the back—went into the hidden safe. And that was behind a panel at the back of the donut case.

Hamilton walked over to the donut case. He caught a whiff of the fresh coffee he made and felt nauseous.

“I’m instructed to tell you that we are on a video alarm system and there are other hidden cameras in the store . . .”

“JUST CAN IT, OKAY? GIVE ME THE MONEY OR I’LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS OUT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”

“Okay,” said Brad. His legs were now shaking uncontrollably. “I just started here, and they just taught me about this one thing. I don’t care if you take their money. Just let me figure this out.”

“MOVE!”

Brad opened the phony back of the donut case and fiddled with the strongbox combination. On his finger was the new class ring he’d picked up the other day.

“YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT, MR. HIGH SCHOOL . . .”

Brad was just about to get it open, just about there, when the phone rang. The gunman tightened.

“OKAY, ANSWER IT, QUICK!”

Brad looked up at the gunman. He wasn’t nervous. He was
pissed.
Pissed at everything. Pissed at life. All he had wanted was a decent senior year.
All he wanted.
All he wanted was to keep his job, his car . . . but that had been too much to ask. He got fired. He got caught beating off. Bad grades. And this guy! This asshole who waved a gun at him and called him Mr. High School.

Tears welled in Brad Hamilton’s eyes. “You motherfucker,” he said. “Get
off
my CASE!”

And then, just like it was the most natural thing in the world, Brad Hamilton reached for the hot, steaming coffee he had just made and poured it onto the gunman’s hand.

“AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!”

The .45 rattled to the floor. The gunman was still looking in horror at his red, swelling hand when Brad snapped up the gun.

The gunman’s accomplice, poised behind the wheel of the black Camaro, spotted the foul-up and screeched out of the parking lot.

“There goes your ride
home,
mister,” said Brad, gun trained on the 7-Eleven robber. “Look at the big man now! Look at Mr. I-Know-Where-the-Strongbox-Is!”

The gunman managed, in all his pain, to heave a carton of Butterfingers at Brad as he howled around the front of the store. But Brad was on a roll, now.

“Why don’t you just show me where the police alarm is now . . . come on,
guy.”

And that was the story of how Brad Hamilton got his old spot back on lunch court. There wasn’t that much time left to enjoy it, but it felt good nonetheless.

Even better was how the local reporters started hanging around, and Janine Wilson from local news, and all the stories started coming out. Even Mr. Hand told him he’d done The American Thing—when your back is against the wall, all you can do is fight. Brad won. And damn if that phone didn’t ring at the Hamiltons’ late one night.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Brad!”

“Yes? Who’s calling?”

“Bradley, this is Dennis Taylor down at the Ridgemont Drive Carl’s. Listen, I hope I’m not bothering you right now.”

“I’m pretty busy,” said Brad.

“Brad, listen, I’m going district here in a couple weeks, and I was wondering if you wanted to come back down here and work with us again. You can have your old fryer back. We’d love to have you here. Everyone wants you back, buddy!”

The nerve. The ultimate nerve of the guy.

“Last time I talked to you,” said Brad, “you wanted me to take a lie-detector test. Now it’s ‘Am I disturbing you?’ ”

“I know what’s eating you, Brad. That incident with the money. Well, that money turned up in the dumpster after you left. I am sorry. I should have called.”

“Yeah, you should have.” Brad paused. “And I probably would have taken your lousy job back if I hadn’t taken a district supervisor job myself—with 7-Eleven.”

The Last Bell

O
n the last day of school, Mike Damone stood at his locker and cleaned out the last mimeographed sheet crammed into the back corner.

“If this paper could talk,” he said.

Standing next to him was The Rat. “Well, Damone. In the end, it looks like it comes down to just you and me.”

“Looks like it.”

Damone clanged the locker door shut. “A very touching moment,” he said, “I feel like I just ripped my heart out. A whole year I spent in that little box. It’s like a brother to me.”

“You could get the same locker next year.”

“I considered it. It’s a pretty good location. I’ll have to see where my classes are. This is a good sosh area, though. You get a good crowd that comes by.”

The school was all tank tops and t-shirts, red faces and Frisbee discs. You knew it was almost over when people actually saved the last issue of the
Reader.
For once it wasn’t blowing all over campus.

“Stacy wants you, you know,” said Damone. “You should go for it.”

“No way, man,” said The Rat. “I can’t wait to get my car and head for Flagstaff.”

“She should come to you,” said Damone.

“Says who?”

“Says The Attitude.”

“The Attitude,” said The Rat, “is only good until you meet the right girl.”

“Whatever you say, Rat.”

Students were still signing their annuals, hanging lazily out the windows, and talking with friends. Mr. Bates was playing his ukulele in social studies class. On this day, school was a countdown.

There were many rumors of an elaborate end-of-the-year stunt for the last day. But the fact was, given the chance of staying and pranking or getting out . . . Ridgemont students
went.

Across the commons, Damone saw Steve Shasta striding down the hallway in all his glory. Shasta had been selected for a Yale scholarship, their first for soccer. They had pulled him out of class to tell him, and his mom was sitting there in the office and everything. Teachers were giving him investment advice. They had given him the treatment in the local press, too.

Now, Damone wasn’t in the habit of asking a lot of people to sign his annual, but it
was
Shasta. You couldn’t help but yell something at the guy.

“Hey, Shasta! You hear about the big party on Marine Street?”

Shasta caught a look at who was calling his name. “Yep,” he said.

Mike Damone trotted up with The Rat following behind. “Sign my annual, Shasta.”

“Yeah,” said Shasta, bored.

“Bet you’re happy.”

“Yep.”

Shasta opened Damone’s annual to a soccer shot and signed, right under his picture: “Best wishes, Steve Shasta.”

Damone laughed as if it were a joke. Okay, he felt like saying, now sign it for real. But that was it. Shasta was already a big soccer star. No time for personal messages that might be worth something someday.

“Thanks,” said Damone.

The Rat had to go to class, so Damone sat out on lunch court for a time. Brad Hamilton was sitting out there too, finishing an assignment for Mrs. George’s Project English class. It was the ten-year letter she asked all her seniors to write. The letter was meant for yourself, and Mrs. George was going to mail it back to you (at your parents’ address) in ten years. “Be relaxed,” she’d said. “Be natural. Say exactly what’s on your mind today. This is one paper that will not be corrected for grammar.”

Damone decided to take a walk by the 200 Building, where Mrs. G. taught class. What he found was no real surprise at the end of any semester. It was a full speech class. They were all there on the last day, the last-chance students appearing to get their grades. Damone took a seat by the open door.

The final on this last day was a five-minute career speech, to have been prepared on 3x5 cards. The speech was meant to hit on all the points listed on the board in Mrs. George’s neat script.

1.  What is my career?

2.  Do I like my career?

3.  What are its financial rewards?

4.  What kind of schooling does it require?

5.  Did I enjoy this class?

Damone watched as Jeff Spicoli, the last of the Ridgemont surfers, stood at the front of the class reading from a three-page manuscript. It was a speech about the sixties, which was the wrong topic, and it had probably seen more than one teacher this year, but Spicoli read it with passion. He read it, in fact, like it was the first time he’d had a chance to look at it.

“Everything was going great in the sixties,” Spicoli said. “Diseases were being cured. We were winning the space program.” He looked up, for eye contact. “Then everything went off balance. A president was assassinated. The divorce rate approached one marriage in two. A president was caught in an attempt to lie and cover up with more lies. A nation was shocked and dismayed.” He looked up again and appeared to ad-lib. “It was awesome.

“What has happened to the generation or two earlier that was dedicated to answering all the unanswered questions? For the latter part of the seventies it appeared America gave up asking.”

Some clapped, but the speech was not over. Spicoli had just lost his place in the manuscript.

“With the care-free life of the fifties and the problems of the sixties and all the even larger problems of the seventies and eighties, who knows what will happen in the future? With nuclear power and gas shortages and many other problems, I doubt that it can get much worse. Hopefully the past has taught us we should not give up before finding the solutions.”

Spicoli mumbled a last line, but it was drowned in applause. The clock was inching closer to the 2.00 mark that meant The End of School.

“And I really like this class, Mrs. George.”

“Thank you, Jeff,” said Mrs. George. “But you didn’t say anything about your career.”

“Well, I’m glad you asked me about that,” said Spicoli. “It just so happens that I was going to go to Mexico this summer. I had it all planned and everything. But the time came around, and I looked at the bottom line, and you know what? I just didn’t have the bucks. It was a total drag. So I had to go find a place to work. And I just want to warn you that you may see me this summer . . .” He gulped, threw his hair out of his eyes. “Working at Alpha Beta.” He paused. “And it’s only for six weeks, so don’t hassle me.”

Mrs. George smiled. “Is that the truth, Jeff?”

“Any amount of money,” said Spicoli, holding out his hand.

“Okay, well thank you for your speech. Have a nice summer, Jeff.” Spicoli took his seat, bowing to applause. “Now where’s Valerie?”

“Oh,” said a girlfriend of Valerie’s. “She went to Mission Viejo’s prom last night. She knew she wouldn’t be here today.”