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.
Lunch Court
Finding the right spot at Ridgemont High’s outdoor lunch area was tougher than getting the best table at the finest restaurant. It was a puny swimming-pool-sized courtyard dominated by a stocky oak tree in the center, and it was always packed with students. Even by the first day, they had sectioned off into different cliques and staked out their lunch-court territory for the year.
All this for a twenty-six-minute lunch period.
The closer one looked at lunch court, the more interesting it became. The object had always been to eat near the big oak tree at the center, and in the beginning at Ridgemont it was the surfers and stoners who ruled this domain. Seven years later, they had moved to the parking lot and the cafeteria (which was twice the size of lunch court, but tainted with a reputation as an underclassmen’s hangout).
Now each group clustered around lunch court was actually a different contingent of Ridgemont fast-food employees. Lunch-court positions corresponded directly with the prestige and quality of the employer. Why, a man was only as good as his franchise.
Working inward from the outskirts of Ridgemont High’s lunch court were the lowly all-night 7-Eleven workers, then the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King crowd, the Denny’s and Swenson’s types, all leading to the top-of-Ridgemont-Drive-location Carl’s Jr. employees. And at the center of lunch court, eating cold chicken under the hallowed big oak tree, was Brad Hamilton.
Brad was popular around Ridgemont. In the world of fast food, once you had achieved a position of power, the next sign of influence was to bring in your friends. Brad had paid his dues. He had loaded his Carl’s Jr. with buddies. And why not? He even helped train them.
“No friend of mine,” Brad once said, “will ever have to work at a 7-Eleven or in a supermarket.”
And for that Brad’s friends admired and respected him.
Carl’s Jr. was at the top of the Ridgemont fast-food hierarchy for several important reasons. It had a fine location at the top of Ridgemont Drive. Anybody headed anywhere in Ridgemont passed that Carl’s Jr. It was clean, with a fountain in the middle of the dining area and never too many kids on their bicycles. Brad, like the other employees, even came there on his off-hours, and that was the ultimate test. By evening, Carl’s would be crawling with Ridgemont kids.
But why Carl’s? Why not some other fast-food operation? Why not Burger King? Why not McDonald’s? Or Jack-in-the-Box?
The answer was simple enough, as Brad himself would tell you. Their food wasn’t as good. And places like Burger King were always giving away glasses and catering to small kids who came whipping into the restaurant on their bicycles. McDonald’s was McDonald’s. Too familiar, too prefab, too many games. McDonald’s was good only if you had no other choice, or if you just wanted fries.
Jack-in-the-Box was suspect because all the food was precooked and heated by sunlamps. It was also common knowledge that the whole Jack-in-the-Box franchise was owned by Ralston-Purina, the well-known dog-food manufacturer. Kentucky Fried Chicken was too boring, and Wendy’s was too close to Lincoln High School.
The top-of-Ridgemont-Drive Carl’s Jr., on the other hand, had achieved that special balance between location and food quality. At Carl’s, the burgers were char-broiled. This crucial fact not only meant that the meal was better, but it returned a little bit of the fast-food power to the kid behind the counter. A guy like Brad Hamilton felt like a real chef.
“Hey Brad,” people were always saying to him, “your fries are even better than McDonald’s.”
“You know it,” Brad would say, as if they were, in fact, his fries.
Brad had settled into a nice, comfortable pattern, in life and in work. In life, he had a petite and popular girlfriend named Lisa. Lisa was one of the intercom girls at Carl’s.
Brad’s three best friends, his golf-cap buddies, also worked at Carl’s. They were David Lemon, Gary Myers, and Richard Masuta. When they weren’t hanging out at school together, they were either at Carl’s or driving around Ridgemont together in The Cruising Vessel.
In work Brad had his own method, and at it he was the best. Working the fryer at Carl’s was a system governed by beeps. One high beep—the fries were done. One low—change the oil. But Brad didn’t even have to go by the beeps. He knew when the fries were perfect. He knew when to change the oil, and he knew his fryer.
Normally quiet in class, once Brad got behind the fryer at Carl’s he was in command. He’d carry on a running dialogue with his coworkers. Or he would listen to the drive-up customers in their cars trying to decide what to order, not realizing the intercom was on and everybody in the kitchen could hear them.
(“Look, do you want goddamn cheese or not, Estelle? Hey, quit that! I’m not your punching bag!”)
Intercom customers killed Brad. Sometimes, when Lisa was working the intercom, she’d get some little Romeo trying to pick her up. She had a nice, cute voice.
“Do you want anything else with that?” Lisa would say.
“Only if you come with the food, babe.”
Then the Romeo would drive up to the window and Brad would be standing there with a professional Carl’s smile.
“Hi. How are you tonight?” he’d say. “That’ll be $4.35.”
“You know, you do sound like a girl on the intercom.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Who was I talking to?”
And Brad would count back the change. “You were talking to me, babe.”