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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. ”
    Then he would hand them hamburgers with patties he’d rubbed on his shoe.
    Being the main fryer at Carl’s meant that everybody had to be nice to you. The other workers depended on Brad for their orders. The only real problem came when company sales were down and the franchise added a “specialty” item, like a cheese-steak or The Hungry Guy (sliced turkey breast on a freshly baked roll with mayonnaise and butter). Forget it. That stuff took forever to make. And some recreation-center clown with a whistle around his neck would always come in and order fifteen of them.
    But Brad was the calmest guy in the building.
    “I need eight double-cheese, Brad!”
    “No problem.”
    “I gotta go. Can you bag them?”
    “Go ahead and take off.”
    When Brad was a sophomore, he wanted to be a lawyer. His parents were delighted. His school counselor set him up in an apprenticeship program with a local law firm. He was there three weeks and became disillusioned. He’d gone to a criminal law defense attorney and asked him a question: “If you got a guy freed on a little technicality, even though you knew he had committed a murder, wouldn’t that be on your conscience for the rest of your life?”
    “Why don’t you try corporate law,” was his answer.
    Brad spent the next week with a woman lawyer from Redondo Beach Gas and Electric. It was so boring that he’d taken up drinking coffee. He had decided not to think about what to do now that his “lawyer phase” had ended. Right now Brad was the best fryer at the best location around, and that was what was important at Ridgemont High School—especially for his senior year, and things like lunch court.
    The topic of conversation at the center of lunch court today was the Hand-Spicoli incident. Three periods later, it had been blown into enormous proportions.
    “He almost pulled a gun on Mr. Hand,” said Brad Hamilton. “Spicoli had a piece on him. He came right over to Mechanical Drawing and told us.”
    “Hey Brad,” said one of his Carl’s friends, “did he say ‘dick off’ or ‘suck dick’?”
    “He just got right in Mr. Hand’s face,” said Brad, “and he goes . . .” Brad contorted his face as he recreated the moment. “ ‘Yoooou fuckin’ DICK!’ And Mr. Hand didn’t do anything. Spicoli said if he’d tried anything, he would have pulled the gun. He was going to blow Mr. Hand away. But he came over to Mechanical Drawing instead.”
    “Whoa.”
    “He ain’t coming back here,” said Brad.
    But Spicoli would be back the next day in all his glory. The lure of lunch court was too great even for him.
    And while everyone was telling and retelling the “you-dick” story, few even noticed an even bigger Ridgemont event that had occurred quietly over the summer. The administration had hired a new dean of discipline. They had replaced Vince.
    There had never been much serious trouble at Ridgemont High. Every now and then there was a fight or a locker search, but mostly it was a calm, middle-class high school. Much of that peace, students figured, had to do with the presence of a 260-pound dean of discipline. His name was Vince Lupino, and one look at him