“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.