One night last year Shasta had a talk with his sister.
“I feel something terrible happening,” Shasta had said.
“What do you think it is, Steve?”
“Well,” said Shasta, “it’s not really one thing . . . it’s all the girls that I want to go out with. I don’t know, Mia, I just think it’s all gotten in the way of soccer. And when I don’t have my soccer confidence . . .” Shasta looked at his sister woefully. “I don’t feel like I’m worth anything.”
“Wow.”
“So I’ve made a decision.”
“What’s that?” She was eating it up.
“I’m becoming celibate.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Mia.
There was a long silence. “Do you know what that is?” asked Steve.
“Are you becoming bisexual or something?”
“Fuck you, Mia, I’m not becoming a fag! I’m just abstaining from sex. It’s called being celibate, and Mrs. George says more and more people are doing it. It’s just . . . something I have to do. I’m going to be celibate during soccer season.”
“But you’re always saying that soccer is a year-round sport.”
Shasta let his head fall into his hands.
The word had spread quickly and efficiently. Steve Shasta alone was responsible for the word celibate becoming part of the standard vocabulary of Ridgemont girls. It placed him at a distance from all the little boppers, he figured, and at the same time it made them want him more.
“Steve Shasta doesn’t sleep with girls,” they buzzed. “What a shame about Steve Shasta.”
But it was a plan for which Steve Shasta considered himself a genius. It allowed him to be selective, and, as he once explained to the guys in his P.E. class, “I get a lot of blow jobs, too.”
Changing
It had finally happened. Mark Ratner had gotten a C. Up until ninth grade he had a perfect A record. Then a few Bs had crept in. His mother had warned him when he took the job at Marine World, “If you let your grades slip, it’ll be on your record forever. No college wants an average student.”
Then, last week, the mimeographed copy of first-quarter grades came in the mail. Mr. Vargas had dealt The Rat a cruel blow. He’d given him a C in biology. Mr. and Mrs. Ratner were more surprised than anybody. They wanted to know what was wrong with their son. All year long, they said, he’d been changing . . . and The Rat had to agree.
Mark Ratner had always wanted to be an entomologist, a bug scientist. All throughout junior high at Paul Revere, he was the kid who brought insects to school in a jar. For years, little glass display cases full of stuffed-and-tacked specimens hung on the walls of The Rat’s room.
A few nights earlier, The Rat had come home, and it had all looked pretty ridiculous to him. He unhinged the display cases and stashed them in the garage. Now what do I want up there? The Rat replaced them later that night with about a hundred empty Elvis Costello album covers he’d fished out of the trash bins behind Tower Records.
“All year long you’ve been changing.” The words rang in his ears.
“I don’t know,” Ratner reasoned later to his friend Mike Damone at one of their after-school sessions. “The more they start talking about the romanticism of Beowulf and Milton . . . Jesus, I just go to sleep, you know. I can’t wait to get out of there. That stuff is so boring. It just doesn’t enter into anything. I don’t see why they try to get up all this respect for the fourteenth century. Does the guy at the checkout stand at Safeway go, ‘Hey, before I give you this food, you’ll have to tell me about the metaphorical content of fourteenth-century literature in the Romantic Age’?”
“I think teachers get a bang out of it,” said Damone. “It’s just like mandatory P.E. I once asked Ramirez why we had mandatory P.E. He said, ‘What would we do with all the out-of-work coaches?’ ”
“I guess I’m just depressed,” said The Rat.
“Why are you depressed?” asked Damone, holding up his Tia Maria and cream. “I thought you were in looooooooove.”
“I’m totally depressed,” said The Rat. Today, he had almost considered having a tall one himself. “Every time I go by the A.S.B. office she’s talking to guys. Today I went there and she looked right through me.”
“It’s her loss.”
“I don’t know. I start out real confident, and then I see her and I feel chickenshit all over. It just kind of creeps up all over me. Especially when she doesn’t even say hello.” He paused, listening to the Lou Reed album blasting over the Damone family stereo. “I guess I shouldn’t expect her to just go wild whenever she sees me.”
“I would,” said Mike Damone. “So tell me. Do you still like her?”
“Are you kidding? She’s the only girl worth going for this year.”
“Then just start talking to her,” said Damone. “Just go up to her and ask her out. If she can’t smell your qualifications, forget her! Who needs her! But that won’t happen. Just go up there and ask her if she wants to go get a burger. That one has worked for me, personally.”
“What if she’s a vegetarian?”
Damone looked at his friend with scorn. The Rat just wouldn’t learn.
“I know. I know. We’ve been through this before.”
“About a million times,” said Damone.
Braking Point
It was always a special treat for Stacy to round the corner of the 200 Building and see the blinds drawn in Health and Safety class. It meant that Mrs. Beeson was showing a film. It meant a break from the regular clock-watching routine.
The next question, of course, was how long is this film? And that was answered easily enough on this day with one look at the spool. Today’s film was popping off the end, it was so full.
“Let’s all settle down quickly,” said Mrs. Beeson. “This is a long driver’s-ed film. It’s been a few years since we had it on campus. It’s called Braking Point. Carl? Would you get the lights, please?”
Mrs. Beeson had gone through almost every title in every audio-visual catalog. She had seen them all, several times, and once she got a film rolling in her class, Mrs. Beeson usually spent the period in her cubicle at the back of the room.
More than a few students in Health and Safety had mastered the technique of checking the film spool, waiting for Mrs. Beeson to retreat into her cubicle, then slipping out the door only to return minutes before the film ended. Mrs. Beeson would be happy—her class was always refreshed and invigorated when the lights came back on after a film.
Sometimes even the hardcore truants stayed in class if the film was interesting enough to them. The last Health and Safety film had been a vintage antidrug movie narrated by Sonny and Cher. It was called Why Do You Think They Call It Dope? In the dramatic high point of the film, Sonny and Cher appeared as themselves and addressed the camera.
“You think marijuana is harmless?” asked Sonny Bono, as the camera picture grew fuzzy and nondescript. “How would you like it if your doctor took a smoke before operating on you? How would you like it if your mechanic smoked a joint before working on your car? How harmless is it then?”
When the lights came back on, a few guys from Auto Shop were deeply affected.