Fast Times at Ridgemont High (9 page)

The tone was set for a great day. Brad bounded through his classes, went home for an hour, and then drove to work at Carl’s.

Brad got along pretty well with his boss, Dennis Taylor. Dennis Taylor had been the assistant manager (the real manager had a desk job at the big Carl’s building downtown) for as long as Brad had been there. Taylor was thirty-three and still lived in his family’s guest room. He was obsessively clean. His Datsun was absolutely immaculate; he washed and waxed it constantly. Dennis would even walk around Carl’s with a Windex bottle. Sometimes Brad got the idea that Dennis bolted out of bed in the middle of the night wondering if he might have missed double-checking the shake machine.

A lot of people made jokes about Dennis around Carl’s. But those were the people whose hours he’d hacked, or the people who just didn’t know Dennis. You had to know Dennis, the way Brad looked at it, to realize that he was a pretty simple guy. He was just a franchise man, all the way. He was the type of guy born to wear plastic pen holders and carry bundles of keys. Don’t get him in trouble and he loved you.

Dennis Taylor was in a bad mood that night when Brad showed up. It was a Tuesday night, slow night, and just the guys were on duty. No Lisa at the intercom. There was a problem with the carbonation, and Dennis got more and more upset trying to fix it himself. He didn’t like calling in another franchise man.

There was also the matter of new uniforms—brown-and-white country-style uniforms for Bar-B-Cue Beef months. Girls were required to wear bandanas. Boys were asked to wear string ties.

“A string tie?” Brad balked. He hated wearing a tie unless it was something like prom or Grad Nite.

“We get older clientele in here, too, Hamilton. They like to feel they’re getting something special. Something they don’t get at home.”

“Hey,” said Brad. “Why not. I
love
looking like a golf caddie.” He turned to his buddies with the wild grin of a kid who doesn’t often think of such lines until two, three days later. “I love it!”

Dennis Taylor spun off to the back office, where assistant managers like to stay until they hear their title called for.

To any fast-food employee, an irate customer was an I.C. There were usually about two I.C.’s a night, at least on Brad’s shift. Brad had a philosophy about I.C.’s. It was all ego. Everybody was trying to impress someone. Everyone has to be a big man
somewhere,
and an I.C. was someone who had no better place to do it than in a fast-food restaurant, at the expense of some kid behind the counter.

The first I.C. of this night came into Carl’s Jr. at 9:30
P.M.
Brad knew she was an I.C. the minute she started to inspect the food before paying. She was an older woman with a silver-gray wig. She tried the fries last.

“These fries taste like metal,” she announced.

“I’m sorry,” said David Lemon, the clerk, following the customer-is-always-right party line. “I’ll get you some new ones.”

“No,” said the woman. “No. They tasted the same yesterday. They’ll taste the same tomorrow. I want to speak to the manager!”

Bingo. Dennis Taylor was out of the back office like a nine ball.

“What’s the problem, ma’am?” Even the irate customer was always right, Dennis liked to say. He would do anything to keep a complaint from reaching the franchise office downtown. One complaint and they called Dennis himself on the carpet.

“I
said
these fries taste like metal.”

Taylor looked at Brad, who had the duty of frying the potatoes. “Did you drain the grease yesterday before you started work?”

“Yes.”

“Have you changed it since you came in, on the hour?”

Brad was getting indignant. It wasn’t just ordinary frying, it was his specialty. “I change it,” he said,
“every
hour. And I
always
make sure that the potatoes are fried in new grease. I can tell by the color.”

Hamilton turned to the woman. “May I taste?”

The woman recoiled with her white-and-yellow Carl’s Specialty sack. “Are you calling me a liar? I’ll go to the head of the company if I have to.”

She had pushed a button with Dennis “Mr. Franchise” Taylor. The words
go to the head of the company
struck him at the very marrow of his corporate aspirations.

“Ma’am,” said Dennis through a Carl’s Jr. smile. He rang open the register and scooped out the exact change. “Here’s your money, ma’am, and I’m sorry you had a problem. The whole meal’s on us!” Dennis laughed, as if it were party time, but the I.C. was still shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “No, that won’t do. That’s not enough. I want that boy fired for calling me a liar. That boy right there.”

She was pointing at Brad.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Dennis Taylor, “but Brad Hamilton is one of our best employees.”

Brad was impressed. He found himself saying, “Thanks.”

“Brad Hamilton,” said the I.C. She reached for her purse. “Brad Hamilton.” She rummaged through it until she found a pen. “Brad Hamilton.” And a piece of paper. “Brad Hamilton.” Then she wrote his name down. “Brad Hamilton.”

Now the odds that the I.C. would actually write the letter were slim at best, everybody knew that. Most people were happy to have gotten a little attention; they usually forgot the hassle before they even arrived home. But the threat, even the
threat
of a letter, and the thought of having that letter sitting in
his
franchise file . . . well, you could see it ring up on Dennis Taylor’s face like a big No Sale sign.

“Hamilton,” he barked. “Go clean up the bathroom.”

It was an insult, sure, but that’s how Dennis Taylor worked these things out. Brad knew it was no big problem. Dennis took over the fryer. In five minutes he would beg Brad to come back and work it.

“I’m really sorry,” Brad said, and grabbed a scrubbrush. He went to attack the new graffiti: I Eat Big Hairy Pussy.

Life, Brad marveled there in the john, is like a chain reaction. Someone gets pissed and then takes it out on the next guy down the ladder. Everyone has to piss on somebody.

Later he went home, called Lisa, and broke up with her.

Child Development

O
ne of Stacy Hamilton’s interesting new classes at Ridgemont was Child Development. Child Development was a new-age tax-cut class that combined bachelor arts and home economics into one big jamboree, “attempting to guide young adults past the hurdles of adulthood.” The class met in a double-sized room complete with fifteen miniature kitchens. The teacher was a fidgety woman named Mrs. Melon.

It was a typical contract class. On the first day Mrs. Melon divided all the students alphabetically into tables of four. She passed out purple mimeographed assignment sheets and signed each table to their contract of work.

Mrs. Melon had a nervous habit of rubbing her forearms while she talked. The more nervous she was, the redder her forearms. Today she was rubbing harder than usual.

“You are grownups,” she said, “and you live in a grownup world. Most of you already know we’ll be going into forms of sexuality, birth control, domestic problems, and divorce in this class. I’m going to need these state-required forms filled out and signed by your parents.”

She began dropping more piles of the purple sheets on the alphabetical tables. Most of the students had already received their parental consent forms, including the sex-ed forms, with the thick green Ridgemont High School Rulebook sent out in August. And the school gave out more of the same forms with the first-day registration papers. Now Mrs. Melon was rubbing her arms and passing out even more of them. Somewhere along the line a student could get the idea Ridgemont was nervous about sex education.

Mrs. Melon’s class was out of control most of the time. Students came, students went. Everyone seemed to feel adequately developed as a child, so they used the class as a free-zone study hall. Most students simply brought in all their work from other classes and saved their evenings by doing it during Mrs. Melon’s lectures.

This would be the third consecutive year that Stacy Hamilton would be taking a sex-ed class. She felt she had seen most of the films, looked at all the cutaway diagrams; she
knew
what went on. But even Stacy couldn’t deny that it was valuable to run through sex-ed one more time. There were always some kids getting it for the first time, and they were always entertaining to watch.

There had been a guy in the seventh grade whose mother told him women had teeth in their vagina. The boy must have believed it. He stood up in sex-ed class one day—Stacy was there—and asked, “Do very many men get their penises cut off?”

The kid quickly got himself the nickname Jaws, and, didn’t come back to Paul Revere Junior High the next year. Someone called his home and was referred to a number in Alabama.

Stacy herself had learned about sex from her mother, in a supermarket, in the feminine-hygiene section. “There is a certain thing that adults do after they are married,” Mrs. H. told her. “The purpose is to have children.” She went on to explain the sexual process in such cold clinical terms that Stacy’s first question was, “Does a doctor perform the operation?”

“No,” said Mrs. H., “your father and I did it ourselves.” In the years that followed, Mrs. Hamilton never mentioned the subject again. Not even a word. Stacy’s mother seemed to consider sex an unmentionable obligation performed in unspeakable situations. Sometimes she’d say something like, “You watch out for boys with beer breath; you know what they want.” And that was it. So Stacy was grateful for sex-ed, even if it was old territory.

As Mrs. Melon droned on this afternoon, three weeks into the school year, Stacy decided the time was right to open the note from Linda Barrett that she had been saving since period break.

Stacy carefully unfolded the notebook page:

DEAR STACY,

HI STACE. HOW IS EVERYTHING GOING
?
WHAT
’
S NEW
?
ISN
’
T MY WRITING JUST WONDERFUL
?
ALL I HAVE IS THIS EYE-LINER PENCIL THAT I NEVER USE.
(She switches here to a pen)
SO HI
!
I HAVE REALLY GOT TO TALK WITH YOU. ABOUT SOME SERIOUS STUFF. STACY, I CAN
’
T BELIEVE THAT THE VET ACTUALLY CALLED YOUR HOUSE AND TALKED TO YOUR MOM
!!!
HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN EVELYN GAVE YOU THE MESSAGE
?
PRETTY WEIRD, HUH
?
FIRST HE SENDS FLOWERS, THEN HE STARTS CALLING YOU UP. THIS GUY SOUNDS DANGEROUS. WE HAVE GOT TO TALK. WRITE ME AND TELL ME HOW MUCH YOU LIKE THIS GUY.

I WISH YOU WEREN
’
T WORKING EVERY SATURDAY
!
I WAS THINKING THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF WE GOT TOGETHER THIS SATURDAY, BUT I GUESS WE CAN
’
T. UMMMMMM . . . I GOTTA GO NOW. I
’
LL SEE YOU IN ABOUT
52
MINUTES. I HAVE TO REWRITE AN ESSAY NOW
!
BYE STACE
!
WRITE ME
!

YOUR BUD, LINDA

Stacy withdrew a clean sheet of paper from her Pee-Chee folder. She wrote:

OH LINDA OH LINDA OH LINDA,

I DON
’
T KNOW WHAT TO DO. MOM IS OKAY. I NEVER KNEW I COULD THINK OF SOMETHING SO FAST. SHE GOES,
“
WHO IS THIS RON JOHNSON THAT CALLED YOU
?
HE SOUNDS LIKE A MAN
!”
I
’
M NEARLY SHITTING, RIGHT, BUT I GO,
“
HE
’
S JUST THIS GUY FROM SCHOOL WHO WANTS A JOB AT SWENSON
’
S.
”
SO THEN I ASK HER WHAT SHE TOLD HIM, AND EVELYN GOES,
“
I TOLD HIM THAT YOU HADN
’
T GOTTEN HOME FROM RIDGEMONT YET.
”
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE VET THINKS
?????
I TOLD HIM ONCE I WAS GOING TO JUNIOR COLLEGE. AND THAT I WAS
19.
HE
’
S PROBABLY SO MAD AT ME
!
I LIKE HIM. I FEEL KIND OF SECURE WITH HIM. I THINK WE SHOULD GO OUT SOME MORE
!
BUT I SHOULD TELL HIM THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW OLD I AM. WHAT DO YOU THINK
?

YOUR BUD, STACY

About ten minutes before the end of Child Development, while Mrs. Melon was working her way around the room with enchilada recipes, Stacy noticed the class disrupted by the appearance of a buxom young office worker in a tight red dress.

She had come to give Mrs. Melon a mimeographed office memo, but the simple act became a much larger production in the hands of this girl. She
swung
through the doorway and scanned the room with two mighty whips of her head. She took a long while to separate the top sheet from her stack of other mimeographs pausing once to shake out her hair. Then she swung back out again. Somebody applauded.

The bell rang, and Stacy found Linda Barrett on her way to the next class.

“Here,” said Stacy, handing her the note. “Write me back next period.”