Fast Times at Ridgemont High (11 page)

T
he mood was somber around journalism class. Death—the idea of mortality—had struck close to home. Suddenly everyone was a close friend of Louis Crowley, had been talking to him
just that morning.
The word was he would be out of school for two to three weeks.

But two days later, there was Louis, back in journalism. Back at school. Blue down vest and all. It was amazing, and it was mystifying. A couple of students said something to Louis about how sorry they were, and Louis just kind of put his head down and nodded thanks. It was the quietest journalism class had been all year.

Then Jeff Spicoli showed up.

Spicoli bolted into journalism class holding the front page of the local newspaper. An amateur photographer had been loading his film, shooting pictures of the bridge, when he heard the crash, snapped his shutter a few more times, and caught a color photo of the Crowley car sailing off the El Dorado Bridge and into the ocean. The local paper had paid the photographer $500 for the shots and published the series on the front page in fire-blazing color.

“Look at these
bitchin’
photos of the crash,” boomed Jeff Spicoli. “You can see the people inside and
everything.”

Everyone froze. No one spoke. Louis Crowley hung his head and began to sob. It would be another month before anyone spoke to Jeff Spicoli again.

To Spicoli, that rejection was just typical of high school kids. They were so serious, so hung up on their social status. The whole routine reminded Jeff Spicoli of a long climbing rope. All these soshes had been shimmying up that rope since grade school, and by the time they got to high school they were holding on for dear life. They wanted to be popular, at all costs, and maybe they would get voted Most Likely to Never Have to Shit in the annual. They were just dying to get to the top of that rope. Most of Spicoli’s friends were still the junior high schoolers from Paul Revere. They knew how to have a good time.

Spicoli didn’t consider himself a troublemaker. All he wanted in life, he said, was to wake up in the mornings to a decent buzz and six- to eight-foot breakers with good shape. He didn’t care that most of the students around him were part of a fast-food world, talking about their hours and their assistant managers whenever they got half a chance. Spicoli was a surfer, proud to be the last of a dying breed around Ridgemont.

When Spicoli wasn’t on the waves or playing pinball down at the mall or even going to school, he was usually in his room. Spicoli’s room was his castle; he could spend hours in there. Located at the top of the stairs in his family’s split-level Ridgemont condo, Spicoli’s room was another world from the rest of the wicker-decorated house. The walls were covered with posters, almost all of them naked centerspreads from
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
There were a few token surf action photos, and several headshop posters with calligraphy sayings like “Be with Me,” “Come with Me, Now and Forever,” and “Love and Ecstasy,” but the room was mostly just a collage of fully nude women who confronted any visitor with a thousand melonous breasts. It was obvious that Jeff Spicoli’s parents did not enter this room.

Spicoli’s stepmother was a counselor at Clark Junior College, and his father owned a successful television repair business. Spicoli’s real mother, a teacher, left her family several days after seeing the film
An Unmarried Woman.
Jeff didn’t hold it against her, not as much as he held a grudge against his father for remarrying a woman with seven kids of her own. Jeff Spicoli carried on his self-imposed exile from inside his room. He didn’t even know all the names of his stepbrothers and stepsisters. He didn’t want to.

The only member of his family allowed into Jeff’s room, in fact, was his only real brother, seven-year-old Curtis. Jeff liked Curtis. Any kid who could spend entire afternoons doing gymnastic flips into plastic garbage bags was okay by him.

Curtis burst into Spicoli’s room early one morning, eight weeks into the school year. “Jeff, are you going to be taking a shower?” Curtis demanded of his brother’s sleeping form. He threw the door open. There was a stale biological smell about Spicoli’s inner sanctum.

“Ugh,” said Spicoli. He’d been out late partying at the mall the night before.

“Jeffareyougoingtobetakingashower?”

Spicoli was half in, half out of the covers, his behind facing the door. He groaned and scratched his back ferociously.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I’m moving into the bathroom. I’m sleeping in the tub from now on.”

“No you aren’t.”

“Dad
said.”

“What if I turn the water on?”

“BETTER NOT!” Curtis shrieked, and left without shutting the door. “BETTER NOT, YOU BUTTHOLE!”

Spicoli got out of bed and kicked the door shut. He had been having a dream. A totally bitchin’ dream.

He had been standing in a deep dark void. Then he detected a sliver of light in the distance. A cold hand pushed him toward the light. He was being led somewhere
important.
That much he knew.

As Jeff Spicoli drew closer, the curtains suddenly opened and a floodlit vision was revealed to him. It was a wildly cheering studio audience—for him!—and there, applauding from his “Tonight Show” desk, was
Johnny Carson.

Because it was the right thing to do, and because it was a dream, anyway, Spicoli gave the band a signal and launched into a cocktail rendition of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” When it was over, he took a seat next
to Carson.

“How are ya,” said Johnny, lightly touching Spicoli’s arm.

“Bitchin’, Johnny. Nice to be here. I feel great.”

“I was going to say,” said Carson, “your eyes look a little
red.”

“I’ve been
swimming,
Johnny.”

The audience laughed. It was a famous Spicoli line.

“Swimming? In the winter?”

“Yes,” said Spicoli, “and may a swimming beaver make love to your masticating
sister.”

That broke Johnny up. Spicoli recrossed his legs and smiled serenely. “Seriously, Johnny, business is good. I was thinking about picking up some hash this weekend, maybe go up to the mountains.”

“I want to talk a little bit about school,” said Carson.

“School.”
Spicoli sighed. “School is no problem. All you have to do is go, to get the grades. And if you know anything, all you have to do is go about
half the time.”

“How often do
you
go?”

“I don’t go at all,” said Spicoli.

The audience howled again. He is Carson’s favorite guest.

“I hear you brought a film clip with you,” said Carson. “Do you want to set it up for us?”

“Well, it pretty much speaks for itself,” said Spicoli. “Freddy, you want to run with it.”

The film clip begins. It is a mammoth wave cresting against the blue sky.

“Johnny,” continues Spicoli, “this is the action down at Sunset Cliffs at about six in the morning.”

“Amazing.”

A tiny figure appears at the foot of the wave.

“That’s me,” said Spicoli.

The audience gasps.

“You’re not going to
ride
that wave, are you Jeff?”

“You got it,” said Spicoli.

He catches the perfect wave, and it hurtles him through a turquoise tube of water.

“What’s going through your mind right here, Jeff? The danger of it all?”

Johnny,’ said Spicoli, “I’m thinking here that I only have about four good hours of surfing left before all those little clowns from Paul Revere Junior High start showing up with their
boogie boards.”

The audience howls once again, and then Spicoli’s brother—that little fucker—woke him up.

Coach Ramirez

O
n a hot October afternoon twenty years earlier, the late great rock and roll star Ritchie Valens had stood at the very spot where biology lab was now and sung his two hits of the day, “La Bamba” and “Donna.”

A local disc jockey had corralled Valens into making the personal appearance. Valens showed up at high noon on the day of the inaugural Ridgemont High School homecoming game against Lincoln. He brought no guitars or amplifiers. Valens simply stood outside on the hot concrete and sang a cappella.

“That’s for the Ridgemont Raiders!” Valens shouted. “The best darn football team in the West!”

Ritchie Valens was killed four months later in the same tragic plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper.

It could be argued that in the twenty years of Ridgemont football played since that day, the Raiders had enjoyed an only slightly better fate than Ritchie Valens. Once, the football team had a season in which it won more than lost. That event’s ten-year anniversary was coming up.

In recent years other sports had taken the spotlight at Ridgemont, particularly soccer. Ridgemont’s soccer team had gone to the C.I.F. (California Interscholastic Federation) playoffs the year before, mostly owing to the spectacular efforts of junior Steve Shasta. Shasta had brought so much attention to himself, and to soccer, that Ridgemont football players went virtually ignored on campus. They thought it was a travesty! A kid grew up playing football, hoping,
expecting
some of that fabled high school f-ball glory. Then he got to Ridgemont and found he was lucky to be able to
meet
Steve Shasta.

At the helm of Ridgemont football these days were Mr. Vincent Ramirez and his assistant coach, Les Sexton. Ramirez spoke in sharp yelps. And he had a favorite phrase: “Take a lap.” Depending on the inflection, it was alternately an insulting punishment or a symbol of his respect. If you were goofing off in class, talking with some girls, he might bark, “Take a lap, Casanova.” Or if you had impressed him with a nice play on the football field, he might call for a command performance. “Take a
lap,
my friend.”

Coach Vincent Ramirez knew he faced an uphill battle from the moment he arrived at the first budget meeting of the year. He had been placed last on the agenda.

He sat and waited while the head of the drill team argued for and won more school-purchased uniforms.

Coach Ramirez appeared supportive while the band teacher, Mr. Fletcher, presented a $387 request for new instruments. It was seconded. Fletcher then gratefully added that, to help repay the budget, he would sell mouthpieces to students for a dime profit. “And I thank you all.”

Coach watched while Commissioner of Spirit Dina Phillips presented her report that the Sophomore Sockhop would require either a live disc jockey playing records ($125 an hour, but he supplies everything) or a band like Ridgemont’s favorite, the T-Birds ($500 for the whole night). A budget was passed allotting $750 for the entire evening, to include entertainment and security. There were a few outraged whistles.

“Come on, now,” said speech teacher Gina George. “The kids need to get out of the house.”

“I think they manage just fine without our help,” said Vice-Principal Ray Connors.

“There just isn’t enough money in the till for all the worthy causes,” said Mr. Haynes, a counselor.

“Come on, lighten up, Harold.”

“I think Hal has a point,” said Connors. “These kids already have the off-campus lunch, and they already have self-grading classes on campus, why
pamper
them any more?”

Through it all, watching his chances for a big killing with the board ebb, sat Head Coach Vincent “Take a Lap” Ramirez.

“You’re next, Mr. Ramirez.”

Coach stood.

Whenever he was off the field, people were always telling him to talk slower. Most of the time he did not pay attention to these people. It was enough, Ramirez thought privately, that he had learned English at all. English was a damn tough language. When Ramirez went home he still spoke rapid-fire Spanish.

“I’ll tell you why we need money for the athletic department,” Ramirez said slowly. “Because I’m out there every day watching our teams. I know the difference between the Raiders and a championship ball team.” He paused, just as he had in practicing the night before. “The difference is $1,895.”

More outraged whistles.

Ramirez whipped out a piece of paper. “We need new jerseys, nice red-and-yellow jerseys. They run $1,100 total. We also need helmets for these boys. I don’t want any brain-damaged ball players. Not when I know we can replace the cracked plastic ones we have now for $300.”

Coach Ramirez held his coat together and gestured with the other hand. “I think you all know it’s dog-eat-dog in the C.I.F. And if we want to do
anything
at all, we need to keep up. We need what everybody else already
has.”

He looked into the eyes of the board members.

“We need movie cameras,” he said. “We need to take and review films like all the other teams in the C.I.F. Then we will be a complete
winning
football department. Don’t we owe these kids that much?” Ramirez let his hands drop to his sides. For a moment it appeared that he had gotten through to his audience.

“Mr. Ramirez,” said Vice-Principal Connors, “before we vote on this matter, I’d like to say something before this panel.”