Fast Times at Ridgemont High - A True Story

Lieutenant Flowers

It was a typical late May morning. The sun was shining. The sound of second-semester typists wafted across the lunch court. Jeff Spicoli was parked out in the Adult School parking lot smoking from his bong. He held a long hit in his mouth, then expelled it slowly, luxuriously, through the window of his blue Malibu.

The billow of smoke caught the eye of Lt. Larry Flowers, who was walking the halls nearby. Pot. He decided to investigate this matter, even if it was the Adult School lot. Even if Ridgemont High offered it up pretty much as a free zone. He was going to do something about it.

Lieutenant Flowers saw Spicoli lounging in the driver’s seat of his car. He cut straight across the dirt lot.

Someone yelled Spicoli’s name. There was something in the tone and urgency that made Jeff instinctively reach down to chuck the bong under his seat. Lieutenant Flowers saw the movement.

“FREEZE!” he shouted.

Flowers advanced rapidly on the car and arrived at the driver’s window just as Spicoli had completed the action of flicking the glowing bong well under his seat.

Flowers reacted in a single motion. He pulled his pistol right out of the shoulder holster and jammed it through the crack at the top of the window. With the other hand he grabbed a handful of Spicoli’s hair and pulled him up against the window.

“Whatthefuc . . .”

Flowers was cramming cold steel at his head.

“Just get out of the car,” said Flowers with a smile.

“Move.”

Flowers took him to the office and wrote him a referral. When Spicoli told his parents and friends the story, they decided to sue. And sue they did. A quarter-million dollars worth, against Ridgemont and against the Education Center.

Flowers came back from a motorcycle ride one morning two days later and found a gray school board envelope waiting on his doorstep.

“My life was in danger,” was the way he explained it to the board’s investigators. “That kid could have had a shotgun under that seat. I did what came naturally, what they taught me in Chicago.”

“How many students have you seen with a shotgun in your years of education?” they had asked him.

“You only have to see one,” said Lt. Flowers.

He was fired by the school board, banished from the California Educational System. He now works a late-shift security job at Knott’s Berry Farm.