Spring Broken

Things Fall Apart

I'm writing this on ny phone from the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. Spelling and grammar may be more unchecked than usual.

I am eating a smash burger at King's Highway, which is the poolside restaurant at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, and it is goddamn delicious brioche bun, a proper crust on the patty, the kind of burger that makes you tolerate the kinds of conversations swirling around me about a boutique mezcal factory in Oaxaca, and who's headlining the Sahara tent at Coachella this weekend.

Forty years ago this place was a Howard Johnson's with sticky carpets and housekeeping standards that raised questions you did not want answered. In March it was ground zero for one of the great American debaucheries, a spring break scene so out of control a mayor, Caltrans, and 4,500 tickets in a single year just to shut it down.

Today, there are succulents in concrete planters, a serious looking DJ and guests with more ink than cuttlefish risotto.

Collectively, Angelenos refer to the cities in the Coachella Valley as the desert, starting somewhere around the Hot Springs and stretching out past Indio. But in the 80s, the epicenter of Spring Break madness was Palm Springs.

We drove out from San Pedro in a yellow Volkswagen Bug, four guys with backpacks stuffed with tank tops and cigarettes, looking for girls, Coors Light and bad decisions. We were sixteen or seventeen, invincible, and certain.

I had a broken arm from surfing on top of the same car the week before, which tells you everything you need to know about our decision-making process.

The strip in Palm Springs was a loop on Palm Canyon Drive and it was packed with cars cruising. We would spend hours driving, playing music too loud and yelling out the window.

Sometimes we took turns jumping out of the car and letting girls take our seats for a lap around. We'd wait on the sidewalk, which was packed, with whomever couldn't fit in the little Bug. I waited with a girl once while her friends jumped in the car. She signed my cast, while we smoked. In the brightest marker it said Summer Love with her last name, followed by a 619 phone number. I never called, but I'm guessing that wasn't her name.

The Strip was like an unpermitted carnival, and Palm Canyon Drive was filled with lifted trucks so high you couldn't see the driver. Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles darted through traffic carrying girls on the back wearing G-strings, holding on for their lives and dignity. There were squirt guns and hidden beers, and the whole scene smelled like Hawaiian Tropic and exhaust.

It was loud and dumb and alive and we loved it.

Further down the strip, there was the Sorority Row of motels like Howard Johnson's, the Travelodge, the Caliente Tropics, the Desert Lodge, the Westward Ho, every pool decks packed from morning until the police showed up, balconies draped with wet towels and college kids.

Spring Break meant these places were taken over entirely, after spending the other eleven months of the year catering to salesmen on per diem, adulterous couples, and Canadians. The room rates soared, which meant that mayhem was tolerated until it wasn't.

We were in high school and we had no rooms. We packed into our buddy's parents condo, lounged at the pool after we hit Gilligan's Island Liquor, which had a lackadaisical ID policy, and enough college kids to spot beer for us if we got carded.

We drove the strip with open beer cans between our knees, and sometimes it felt like we were watching the whole scene unfold like a movie we were too young to get into. Because of our age, we experienced the entire thing past it's maddening peak.

We'd see a truck packed with kids in the bed pass us by, something you don't see anymore. Riding in the back of a truck was an exquisite pleasure that has been lost to good sense and personal injury attorneys.

The wind wrapped around the truck's body and your own, and you sat on top of the wheel well, and looked at the world behind you. It was coming towards you, chasing you, not the other way around. Out in the desert, with its warm wind and good light, it was a moment of pure possibility.

But another thing happened in the truck beds on Spring Break In his excellent Palm Springs Life piece, Winston Gieseke reports that men jumped into truck beds and ripped off women's tops while the crowd cheered. They threw rocks. A police officer took a beer bottle to the head and went down. Women were sexually assaulted in the street. All of the freedom they carved gave way to something darker.

That assholes ruin everything is the second law of thermodynamics. When frivolity gives way to endemic violence, everything is broken and you don't get to keep the things you break.

On March 29, 1986, police made hundreds of arrests, with some estimates running over 500, and the city had been outnumbered and humiliated and it knew it. In the subsequent years, the police were aggressively writing tickets, as many as 4,500 in a single season. The crowd had started to thin by the end of 80s when we graduated high school, but the City elected a new mayor, Sonny Bono, to finish the job.

I went back for a last hurrah in 1990 with a different crew, high school friends who had Nissan 300ZXs and abs. We were finally old enough to rent a motel room, which we did at the Best Western, and it smelled like chlorine and condensation with patterns designed to hide everything the room had seen.

The parties stayed close to the motel of the Row, hoping to avoid the strict policing of the Strip. This idea worked well, until it didn't. Drunk logic cannot be reasoned with. A few dozen shirtless revelers wearing backwards caps and Oakley blades decided that mid-century styled swimming pool needed all of the patio furniture in it. Every chair, table and every umbrella, all of it into the water. When the cops came and the crowd went vertical, up onto the roof of the patio restaurant, drunk and sunburned, and filled with good reason.

Rule number three of thermodynamics is you can't stop shit. The roof came down and people got hurt and arrested as I stood there watching gravity do its thing, high on Bacardi and Sunny Delight.

Palm Springs finished what it started. By the nineties spring break was a memory, and today the families that come here bring a curated version of the things. There are schedules and Instagramable moments, but at least those come without felonies and assault.

I am finishing my burger now and the music is low and someone has strong opinions about cold brew. If you don't know neither do I, and that's the point.

But nobody is throwing furniture and nobody is on a roof and the desert air is warm and the succulents are thriving.

Everybody grows up eventually. Even spring break, I suppose.

xAP