Fast Times at Ridgemont High - A True Story

The Attitude

It was one of the cruel inevitabilities of high school, right up there with grades and corn dogs. After thirteen, girls tended to mature at a rate of two- to three-times faster than boys. This led to a common predicament around Ridgemont High. Two kids were in the same grade. The girl was discovering sex and men. The boy, having just given up his paper route, was awakening to the wonders of gothic-style romance. High school could be murder on a guy like Mark “The Rat” Ratner, sixteen.

He was not blessed with the personal success or the looks of a Brad Hamilton. To junior Mark Ratner, high school girls were mystical, unattainable apparitions. So close and yet so far away.

“I am in love,” said Mark Ratner. He clutched his heart, spun in a circle, and landed on his buddy Mike Damone’s bed. It was after school, three weeks into the school year. “In looooove.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” said Ratner. “This girl is my exact type. It’s her. It’s definitely her.”

“It’s definitely your mama,” said Damone distractedly. He was in the middle of his after-school ritual. Every day, Mike Damone came home, set his books down, mixed himself a tall Tia Maria and cream, and blasted Lou Reed’s live Rock and Roll Animal album on the family stereo.

“Damone, you gotta listen to me.” Ratner turned serious very quickly. In high school everyone had a coach. For Ratner this was Mike Damone, and Damone wasn’t even paying attention. “Come on, Damone.”

They were both juniors, and both lived in Ridgemont Hills, but Ratner and Damone were nothing alike. Mark “The Rat” Ratner, a pale kid with dark hair that tilted to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, had lived in Ridgemont all his life. He had grown up in the same house and gone to all the same neighborhood schools, of which Ridgemont High was one. Ratner was even born in University Hospital, just across the street from his house.

Mike Damone was darker, with longish black hair parted down the middle and a wide, knowing smile. He was a transfer from Philadelphia, “where women are fast and life is cheap.” Damone and The Rat had a perfect relationship. Damone talked, and The Rat listened.

“All right,” said Damone. “All right.” He straddled a chair in his room facing The Rat. “Tell me all about it.”

“Okay,” said The Rat. “It started out just a typical day. I had to go to the A.S.B. office to get my student I.D. I was thinking about other things, you know, and then I saw her. She was incredible! She was so beautiful! She’s a cross between Cindy Carr . . . and Cheryl Ladd! And she works right in the A.S.B. office!” The Rat shook his head in awe. “This is going to be such a great year!”

Damone sat listening to the story, waiting for more. There was no more.

“Is that it?” said Damone. “You didn’t get her name or anything?”

“No. It’s too soon.”

“It’s never too soon,” said Damone. “Girls decide how far to let you go in the first five minutes. Didn’t you know that?”

“What do you want me to do? Go up to this strange girl and say, ‘Hello! I’d like you to take your clothes off and jump on me!’ ”

Damone shook his head. “I would, yeah.”

“Fuck you.”

“I can see it all now,” said Damone. “This is going to be just like the girl you fell in love with at Fotomat. All you did was go buy fuckin’ film; you didn’t even talk to her.”

“What do you do, Mike? Tell me. You’re in a public place, and you see a girl that you really like. Do you just stand there and give her the eye? Or do you go up to her and make a joke or something? I mean you’re a good-looking guy, you know these things.”

“Okay. Okay.” Damone sighed, but he loved it. “Here’s what I do.” He got up and began pacing his room, an orderly little cubicle with one huge speaker, a large poster of Pat Benatar, and a newspaper photo of a mortician’s utensils. “Usually I don’t talk to the girl. I put out a vibe. I let her know. I use my face. I use my body. I use everything. It’s all in the twitch of an eye. You just send the vibe out to them. And I have personally found that girls do respond. Something happens.”

“Yeah, Damone, but you put the vibe out to thirty million girls. You know something’s gonna happen.”

“That’s the idea,” said Mike Damone. “That’s The Attitude.”

You hear about it under a multitude of names. The Knack. The Ability. The Moves. The Attitude. In any language it is the same special talent for attracting the opposite sex, and Mike Damone appeared to have it.

They met at Marine World, the famous marine amusement park outside of Orange County. Ratner had gone in, applied for a job, and they had given him Dining Area Duty, an auspicious-sounding responsibility that consisted of scraping the birdshit off the plastic outdoor tables. He didn’t think it was that bad, though. It was fun for Ratner at Marine World, and there was a real spirit among the young workers. All the employees got together for functions like beer-keg parties and softball games, and everything would be just fine until someone asked The Rat what his department was.

“Hi. I’m Leslie from the Killer Whale Pavilion. Who are you?”

“I’m Mark from Dining Area Duty.”

“Oh.” And the same look would inevitably come over the other Marine World employee’s face, a look that said, so you’re the guy they got. “Well, Mark, uh, I’ll see you over there sometime. Bye!”

The Rat always had trouble recovering after that. Making new friends, it seemed, was not his particular forté. Girls had been out of the question most of his life.

It seemed to The Rat a matter of fate when Marine World personnel dropped Mike Damone into Dining Area Duty as his new partner. On the first day, The Rat didn’t speak to Damone and Damone didn’t speak to him. On the second day, The Rat broke the ice.

“Hot day today.”

Damone looked up from the table he was scrubbing and smiled. “Sure is.”

Then his eyes glazed over. He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. Damone turned pale and fell over backward, landing on a lawn area. He appeared to go into shock, beating his head on the grass and making tongueless noises with his mouth. Several customers gathered around.

“Someone do something!”

“He’s having a fit!”

“Can anyone help that boy?”

Ten more Marine World visitors arrived to gawk at the young worker flailing on the ground. The Rat rushed over to Damone’s side and bend down to ask how he could help. And then, just when Damone had a huge audience, he popped back up again. He was the picture of complacency.

“I’m just not myself today,” he said. It was Damone’s special stunt.

Damone was fired after only three weeks at Marine World, but not before he had made fast friends with Mark Ratner. To The Rat, Damone was a one-of-a-kind character. But it was beyond the Twitching Man acts that Damone used on occasion to rip up whole restaurants and shopping malls. To The Rat, Damone was someone to study. He was a guy with a flair for living life his way, and that particularly fascinated Mark Ratner.

What was his secret?

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Damone said. “It’s The Attitude. The Attitude dictates that you don’t care if she comes, stays, lays, or prays. Whatever happens, your toes’ll still be tappin’. When you are the coolest and the crudest, then you have The Attitude.”

To Mike Damone of Philadelphia, everything was a matter of attitude. Fitting into a California school was no problem for him. Once you had The Attitude, Damone said, success was never again a matter of luck. It was simply a question of whether or not you behaved as if it were yours already.

The Attitude. The Rat and Damone had been sitting in fourth-period biology a couple of days into the new school year. Damone leaned over. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Starved,” said The Rat.

“Wouldn’t you love a pizza right now?”

“Don’t torture me.”

A few minutes later, there was a knock at the front door of the classroom. Mr. Vargas had been giving a lecture. He paused to answer the door.

“Who ordered the pizza?” asked an impatient delivery man for Mr. Pizza.

Damone waved his hand. “We did back here.”

The class watched in amazement as the delivery man took his steaming pizza to the back of the class and set in on Damone’s desk. Damone paid for it, even pressed fifty cents into the delivery man’s hand. “This is for you,” he said.

Mr. Vargas looked on, bewildered, while Damone and The Rat began eating pizza.

“Am I the only one who thinks this is strange?” Mr. Vargas asked.

The Attitude.

Damone had put on a classic display of Attitude the day after hearing of The Rat’s dream girl at the A.S.B. counter. Ratner chose to watch from behind the bushes on Luna Street while Damone cruised by for an official check-out.

He had meant only to look, but Damone went right up and said hello to the girl. The Rat’s girl. She and Damone had a three-minute conversation that The Rat couldn’t hear. Then Damone had tapped his hand on the A.S.B. counter once and turned to leave. He walked back over to The Rat.

“She’s cute,” said Damone, “but she doesn’t look like Cheryl Ladd.”

“Fuck you, Damone.”

“Her name is Stacy Hamilton,” he said. “She’s a sophomore, and she’s in Beginning Journalism. What more do you need to know?”

“She just told you that?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll tell you something,” said The Rat. “I really think something could happen between this girl and me.”

“You ought to meet her first, you wuss.”

(“Wussy” was a particularly expressive word that had sprung up in Paul Revere Junior High and taken a foothold in the Ridgemont lexicon. It was the handy combination of wimp and pussy.)

The next day The Rat had it all planned. He waited until the period he knew she would be working at the A.S.B. office. He walked slowly over to the 200 Building, down the hall to the corner office. It was a green counter, with a glass window in front.

And there she was! Stacy Hamilton. Both she and Mike Brock, the football jock, were finishing up with two students. There was only one other kid in front of The Rat. It was a fifty-fifty chance. A crap shoot!

Mike Brock finished first, and the other student went to his window. Fantastic, The Rat thought. Then Stacy Hamilton finished and looked at him.

“Next.”

But just as The Rat stepped up, Stacy Hamilton’s A.S.B. phone rang. She picked up the receiver and held a single finger up to Ratner. It was a call from the front office, and the conversation stretched on. The third attendance bell rang, but The Rat stayed.

Mike Brock finished with the other student. “Over here,” he said.

And what could The Rat say? No, you thick asshole. No, you stupid jock. I’m already being helped, you penis breath. No. The Rat didn’t say any of those things. He chose the wussy way out.

The Rat shrugged and went over to Mike Brock. He asked Brock something ludicrous, some lame thing off the top of his head.

“I was wondering where the Spirit Club meets,” he mumbled.

“I don’t know,” said Brock. “You oughta look on the big bulletin board.”

“Thanks,” said The Rat.

He turned to go.

“Oh, sir?” She had gotten off the phone and called out to him. “I think the Spirit Club meets on Tuesday after school in room 400.”

“Thanks,” said The Rat. He turned around again. “See you later.”

She called me sir! He was overjoyed. The way The Rat figured it, she would never have done that if she wasn’t interested in him.

Mike Damone shook his head sadly as he heard the whole story, incident by incident, over Cheetos on lunch court. “Is that it?”

“It’s better than yesterday.”

“Yeah, Rat, but you just opened the door a little bit. And then you let it slam back shut again. You gotta talk to the girl.”

“Tomorrow!”

“You can’t do it tomorrow,” said Damone. “Tomorrow makes you look too eager.”

“I know,” said The Rat. “I know. I’ve got to have The Attitude.”

But for a guy like The Rat, the idea of waiting another two days was criminal. He felt there was nothing he could possibly do to fill up the dead time. What was good enough on TV? What was interesting enough down at Town Center Mall? What record or book could ever be interesting enough to take his mind off her?

In Spanish class the next day, someone offered The Rat a vocabulary lab listening headset. He was a zombie.

“You know what?” said The Rat. “I don’t give a shit what happens to Carlos y Maria.”