Fast Times at Ridgemont High - A True Story

Two Dudes from Richards Bay

The last football game of the regular season was to be played against Patrick Henry High School. It would be a tough game. If the Raiders won, it meant the first play-off berth in the school’s twenty-year history. Two days before the game, most of the players were already too nervous to go out and party. Not Charles Jefferson. He went out, partied, and broke into a Radio Shack with two men he’d met earlier that evening near the Richards Bay Information Tower. The police arrested Charles Jefferson later that night.

“Who were your accomplices?”

“I just went along with these two dudes! I didn’t know what they were going to do.”

“Two dudes? Can you identify them?”

“No.”

“Do you know where they might be?”

“No. They were just some brothers. I thought we’d go get Colt and . . .”

Charles Jefferson was sent to juvenile detention camp to await trial. He lost his scholarship. Ridgemont lost the game against Patrick Henry. Teachers quit calling Jefferson’s name for roll call. It was like he never existed.

“Charles Jefferson was an enigma,” wrote Louis Crowley in the Ridgemont Reader. “He passed through our lives like a shot in the dark.”

“Louis,” said Mrs. Sheehan, “don’t mix your metaphors.”