Fast Times at Ridgemont High - A True Story

Linda Barrett

Stacy Hamilton’s second-period class was Beginning Journalism/School Newspaper, the only class she would share this year with her friend Linda Barrett. Ridgemont High prided itself in a strong and sophisticated school newspaper. The Ridgemont Reader covered world and school news alike, all in six pages. It was infrequent that an underclassman like Stacy was allowed to join the staff, but Linda Barrett had arranged that, too.

The teacher was a young woman in her early thirties, a slightly frazzled-looking brunette who wore her hair in a short ponytail. Her name was Mrs. Sheehan, but most of her returning students called her Rita. On the first day of class, Mrs. Sheehan was seated at one of the beige plastic desks arranged in a semicircle around her classroom. At the front of the room, sitting on Mrs. Sheehan’s desk and kicking her legs rhythmically against the front panel, was Angie Parisi, the student editor of the Ridgemont Reader. She wore a tight Black Sabbath t-shirt.

“Okay,” said Angie, “does everybody have their assignments for the first issue?”

A beefy kid in a red-and-yellow letterman’s jacket spoke louder than the others. “When do I have to have my column in?”

Angie cast a wicked sidelong glance at the rest of the class. “How about Friday afternoon? Like everybody else, William.”

“But football is this Friday, and I want to include some observations about the first football game. You know?”

Groans.

“Be grateful you have the column at all, William.”

The remark seemed to roll right off William. You got the feeling he was used to it.

“Okay,” continued Angie, “where is Alan Davidson?”

“Here.” He was short, and wore an oversized blue down vest, winter and summer.

“Alan, how is that piece coming on angel dust smokers out on Luna Street?”

“They don’t talk much. I ask them questions and they just kind of look at me . . .”

The class was disrupted by the arrival of Linda Barrett. Late, as always, she bustled through the door of journalism class carrying an armload of books. She headed straight for the empty seat beside Stacy Hamilton, and plopped her cargo on the desk. Everything stopped in journalism class—Linda was wearing tight jeans and a filmy blue blouse with three buttons undone.

“Well,” she said in a sparkling voice, “do you want to hear my excuse now or later, Rita?”

Mrs. Sheehan watched her with tired eyes, even on this first day. This was her third year with Linda Barrett.

“Please try and be on time, Linda.”

“But my locker broke, Mrs. Sheehan!”

“Just try and be on time, Linda.”

“I’m sorry, Rita.”

The class resumed.

Linda leaned over and punched Stacy’s arm. They had not seen each other yet this morning, and they hadn’t talked since the phone call at 3 A.M.

“God, you look so good,” she whispered. “Where did it happen?”

Stacy smiled.

“Where?”

“The baseball field.”

“The baseball field?”

“Well, not really the baseball field. The dugout.”

“The dugout?”

“Well, where else do you go?”

Linda punched Stacy’s arm again. “I don’t believe you. Is this serious?”

“Come on,” Stacy cracked. “It’s just sex.”

They both laughed, and Linda feigned great shock at her younger friend’s use of one of Linda’s favorite lines.

Somehow all roads at Ridgemont High led to Linda Barrett. Everyone knew her. She left an indelible mark on most students who came in contact with her. She was chronically exuberant, usually in a relentlessly good mood. She knew how to dress, and she knew how to walk.

Even as far back as grade school, other girls came to Linda Barrett for counseling. Her mother was a nurse at University Hospital, and somehow Linda knew all the facts of life before any other kid her age in Ridgemont.

Linda’s view of sex was, basically, that everyone had blown it way out of proportion. “A lot of girls use sex,” she had told Stacy Hamilton long ago. “They use sex to get a guy closer. To really nail him down or something. To say ‘I had sex with you, you owe me something.’ Well, that’s terrible. They’re not having sex to have sex. They’re having sex to use it as something. I’d hate myself if I did that.”

No question about it. Linda Barrett was an authority. While the other girls were just abandoning their tricycles, Linda was underlining and memorizing all the sex scenes from Shōgun. Some had Seventeen magazine in their lockers; she had The Hite Report.

Linda and Stacy had been sitting at a bus stop the winter before, when Stacy turned to Linda. “Linda,” she asked, “will you help me get birth control pills?”

Linda, then sixteen, turned all pro. “We’ll go down to the clinic and get them tomorrow.”

“You just go down there?”

“Yeah. They give them to you free. But you’ve got to need them first.”

“Linda,” Stacy had said with determination, “I’m getting ready to need them.”

The next day they ditched third period and took a bus to the downtown free clinic. They were too late for the noon session, so they walked around downtown for an hour. The two girls looked so young, not even the sailors bothered them.

“When you get in there,” Linda had advised, “you tell them that you have sex twice a week.”

Stacy nodded.

“If you tell them the truth, they won’t give you the right pills. They’ll try to talk you into a diaphragm or something, and that might really hurt. You’ve got to hold out for the pills.”

It took forever. The free clinic, Stacy thought at the time, was like anything else—they made you wait a long time for what you really wanted. First, three nurses led the group of girls into a high-ceilinged “rap room,” public service jargon for a room with bean bags instead of chairs, and proceeded with a half-hour presentation of Responsibilities of Sex. They used the same diagrams Stacy had seen in eighth- and ninth-grade sex-education classes. Then, finally, each girl waited for a private examination and prescription from one of the free clinic doctors.

When Stacy Hamilton finally reached her examination room, a nurse sat her on a steel table and asked her to wait a moment for a Dr. Betkin. Fifteen minutes later Dr. Betkin breezed into the room.

“Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

He gave Stacy the once-over. “You look a little young. Why are you here?”

Stacy responded with all the spontaneity of a war prisoner under interrogation. “I have sex twice a week.”

“Twice a week? How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

The doctor nodded once. He took out a pad. “Uh-huh. Well, I’m going to start you on Norinyl 1 Plus 50s. I’m giving you three months’ worth. Now what I want you to do is please, and this is very important, wait thirty days before you have sex again. Okay? That’s not impossible, is it?”

“No. Thank you, doctor.”

Dr. Betkin paused before he left the room. “Are you a virgin?”

Stacy almost admitted it. “Sort of.”

Dr. Betkin nodded and left the room.

On the way out of the free clinic, Linda and Stacy passed a donation box.

“Do you have any change?”

“No,” said Linda, “we’ll get it next time.”

Linda and Stacy hadn’t been friends in junior high. Stacy was in sixth grade and worked in the attendance office. Linda was a haughty eighth grader who hadn’t had time for the likes of Stacy.

Linda Barrett always had a score of boyfriends. She acted as if she didn’t know why, which only compounded the jealousy of girls like Stacy. Linda was the first girl at Paul Revere Junior High to get tits. Large, full-grown breasts. Even at twelve, she would pull a sweater over her head like she was Ursula Andress.

Linda began dressing out of Vogue, wearing stylish raincoats on sunny days. She developed a distaste for males in the same age group. Linda went out with high school boys then, and she logged long nights out in the parking lot of Town Center Mall. One of her boyfriends turned her on to smoking pot, and Linda pursued it with her typical uninhibited zeal. She began buying and selling whole kilos out of her room. Then she added speed and coke to the trade. The only drugs Linda Barrett, then thirteen, never sold were heroin and LSD.

But it was not as if her activities as a junior high drug kingpin suddenly changed Linda. She was the same freckle-faced Linda. There was just no way she was ever going to save up for her dream car—a red Chevy Ranchero—with household chore money. No way could she buy make-up, food, clothes, and records . . . forget about records. Everything was too expensive. So she sold dope. And she went out with high school boys who paid for everything.

One Saturday night Linda and a gang of Ridgemont High boys planned a visit to the Regal Theatre to see a midnight showing of Jimi Plays Berkeley, the famous Hendrix concert movie. Linda sneaked out of her house and met the boys in the alley behind the Ridgemont Bowl.

Standing in the alley, Linda and the three boys smoked some hash and drank a little tequila from the bottle. A kid named Gary drove to the Regal. They all bought tickets and went inside.

Five minutes into Jimi Hendrix’s first guitar solo of the film, two of Linda’s friends let loose with bloodcurdling war cries. “AAAAHHH-WOOOOOOOOO!!!!! RIGHTEOUS!!!!!”

As their howls continued, paper cups and boxes began to fly at them from all sections of the theatre. Someone threw a bottle. A scuffle broke out around Linda and her friends. They were all kicked out of the Regal.

At ten minutes after twelve there was not much to do around Ridgemont. The kids sat in Gary’s car in the parking lot, and Linda plucked from her purse some finely ground speed. She laid out four lines on a pocket mirror, and each of them snorted it through a Carl’s Jr. straw. Then they finished off the rest of the tequila. It was quite a car party.

Someone got the idea to return to the Town Center Mall parking lot, and Gary fired up the car. Halfway back to the mall, Linda Barrett tapped on Gary’s shoulder. Her voice was soft, shaking. “I think I’m going to get sick.”

“Open the window! Stick your head out and you’ll feel . . .”

Linda had the window down halfway when it hit. It was the most ungracious thing she had ever done. She vomited down the inside of the door of Gary’s car.

“GODDAMN IT!” shouted Gary. “This is gonna stink for days!”

One of the other boys came to Linda’s defense. “Just shut up, asshole, and pull into a gas station. We’ll clean it up.”

“What am I running here,” said Gary. “A Barf Mobile?”

“Just pull into this Arco.”

Through it all, Linda stayed in the back with her head on the side armrest.

Gary and his Ridgemont High buddies were just driving into Town Center Mall when they noticed Linda wasn’t speaking any more. She wasn’t making any sound at all.

They tried to slap her awake, and when that didn’t work the boys started to panic. They tried discreetly walking her around the mall parking lot. They tried cold water on her face. They pressed the nerve in her shoulder. Nothing. Then Linda’s high school friends arrived at their solution. They propped Linda up against a closed jeans store and called Town Center Mall Security, just before tearing ass out of there.

The mall security force referred the call to the Ridgemont Police Department, and when the police arrived, the first thing they did was search Linda Barrett’s purse. The Ridgemont police then called Mr. and Mrs. Barrett at two in the morning and informed them that their daughter was not safely asleep down the hall, but instead on her way to University Hospital to have her stomach pumped, with a charge of amphetamines, crystallized speed, and marijuana possession.

Linda Barrett awoke to a scene out of TV drama. Mrs. Barrett was standing over her daughter’s bed, screaming at the ceiling as if it were the heavens.

“Where did I go wrong? Oh, GOD IN HEAVEN, where did I go wrong with this child?”

Linda looked up feebly. Her first words were, “I don’t know why they pumped my stomach. I already threw up everything.”

Her mother fell silent for a moment. Then she started screaming at the ceiling again. “DEAR JESUS IN HEAVEN . . .”

Linda Barrett told the complete story to her parents. It had happened for the best, she told them. Now she knew how immature boys were, and how immature she had been. Linda took all the blame herself and promised to change.

Amazingly enough, she did.

Linda set about courting the straightest girl she knew, Stacy Hamilton. Stacy, who lived in the same condominium complex, worked in the attendance office of Paul Revere. Linda began dropping by, making conversation. She called Stacy constantly. She wrote Stacy notes. She sat next to her at lunch. And slowly, very slowly, Stacy Hamilton, a somewhat plump and prudish young honor student, came to view Linda Barrett as a friend.

When Linda Barrett moved over to Ridgemont High, many of the same boys she had gone out with before the bust were still attending the school. The same boys who abandoned her in the mall pretended it never happened. They took one look at Linda Barrett, then fifteen and gorgeous, in full bloom, and they began crowding around her. They asked her out. They proposed. They complimented her until, as she told Stacy, they turned blue. Linda Barrett still would not go out with another high school boy. It made her more desirable than ever.

As part of her Juvenile Hall rehabilitation program, Linda Barrett had joined a Christian youth organization called Campus Life. Campus Life met once a week during third period—no Algebra—and on irregular weekends for prayer outings at various sites around the county.

Linda had been on a weekend retreat in the country, praying with a group of other girls under a tree, when she first met Doug Stallworth.

“Hey,” said Doug Stallworth, “anybody seen a little gold chain around here?”

Their eyes met. Linda Barrett gazed at a young man who was older than the high school boys, but not too old. He had a face that was a little too thin, a nose that was a bit too big, but he did have that one great asset of maturity. He had a beard.

They began going out, Linda and her “older man.” Doug Stallworth was then twenty years old. He had just graduated Lincoln High School. Not only was he older, but he was also from the forbidden rival high school. To Doug, Linda Barrett was the complete fox girlfriend he had never had before. They fell in love, and had stayed that way throughout her entire sophomore and junior years at Ridgemont. Almost every day after her last class, Doug would be waiting for her out on Luna Street, on a break from his job at Barker Brothers Furniture. It was one of the sights Ridgemont students were used to.

Pictures of Doug Stallworth filled Linda Barrett’s green Velcro wallet. She showed them to everybody. Doug, clowning. Doug, sexy. Doug, indignant. Doug. His name appeared on all of Linda’s Pee-Chee folders and notebooks and free pages of her textbooks. Douglas Raymond Stallworth. Mrs. Raymond Douglas Stallworth. Stallworth Raymond Douglas. Dougie. The names of their kids.

And that was how Linda Barrett had come to be the retired sex expert of Ridgemont Senior High School, giving her young neighborhood friend, Stacy Hamilton, the many benefits of her years of field experience.

One day last May, Linda had called Stacy to break the news. She and Doug were engaged to be married. Doug had just asked her on a drive-in date to see A Force of One, and she had accepted, and they were going to be married on an undisclosed date. The local papers printed a blurb with a picture.

From that moment on, their relationship began a downhill slide. Other boys started slipping back into her peripheral vision. The engagement was still on, of course, but Christ, she didn’t know when.