TRAVELING IN STYLE : SPRING BREAK! : Sex, Beer, Sun, Stupid Pool Tricks--It’s an All-American Tradition

FOR THE AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENT there’s nothing quite like that annual week of vernal vacation intemperance called Spring Break. No subsequent European backpacking adventure or eight-day, seven-night Hawaiian package tour is ever as good, as liberating. For most of us, Spring Break is the first time we travel anywhere on our own. We make our own plane reservations, or map out our own route to drive. We decide where to stay and for how long. We figure out how much we have to spend and daydream endlessly about how to spend it. Going away to college doesn’t count. At college, there are people who can call your parents. On Spring Break, it’s unlikely that anyone will call your parents, unless it’s the police--in which case you will probably be glad to hear from them, or at least their bail bondsman.

I always looked forward to Spring Break myself, but I never enjoyed it. I looked forward to a suntan and the possibility of falling in love. Also, to buying a cool T-shirt with which to impress my classmates. I have trouble remembering exactly why I always had a lousy time. What I do remember, whether I was sunning in Palm Springs (1976) or Mazatlan (1978) or trying to pretend that I knew how to ski in Alta, Utah (1977), was this: I drank more than I wanted to, suffered bouts of excruciating boredom and was always left with the Friend of the Cute Guy when the Cute Guy sidled up to one of my sorority sisters, thereby casting me in the ignoble role of the Friend of the Cute Girl. Nonetheless, every spring I dutifully blew the money I’d earned waitressing during the rest of the year for the privilege of being miserable, not to mention growing one step closer to melanoma.

Although it’s been 15 years since my lips last touched a beer bong, the rituals of Spring Break apparently remain for the most part unchanged. Get a bunch of friends and drive/fly to some far-flung destination (let’s say Panama Beach, Fla.,--one of the newest hot spots) for a week of unchaperoned shenanigans--which include, but are not limited to, chugging beers until you can’t stand up, dropping your shorts in front of a crowd of slobbering strangers, engaging in what I’ll euphemistically call a romantic interlude with one of the aforementioned strangers and stealing or tossing off the balcony everything in your hotel room that is not nailed down.

I’m embarrassed to say that, apart from some occasional excessive beer-chugging, I never actually did any of those things. Had I, I’m sure, I would have had a better time. One year (Mazatlan, 1978), I did watch a guy from UCLA down a pint of tequila, then dive headfirst into the shallow end of the pool. He cracked his head on the bottom, but, like a cartoon character, he was back on the beach the next day with his head bandaged, a bottle of Corona in his hand.

THE COMPULSION TO CUT LOOSE IN THE SPRING IS BUILT INTO THE species. For the ancients, spring meant having survived another winter. Traditionally celebrated in May, the Roman festival of Floralia, called by St. Augustine “a licentious orgy of nude dancing and promiscuous behavior,” honored Flora, the Goddess of Spring. For the Celts, similar behavior marked Beltane, during which an effigy of winter was burned over the May fires. Until the 16th Century, the young of Central Europe spent their Spring Break fornicating openly in the plowed fields to motivate the crops. The Maypole itself was a phallic symbol, and the Puritans tried unsuccessfully to ban it in England in the 17th Century.

Even Easter, a more elevated celebration of the resurrection and rebirth of the human spirit, has its roots in pagan tradition. The Easter egg is a modern variation of the World Egg, from which all life was thought by the ancient Egyptians to proceed. The Easter bunny, sometimes mistaken for an invention of Hallmark, harks back to pre-Christian fertility lore. Rabbits were the most fertile animals around, even then, and represented the long-awaited abundance of spring.

Spring Break in its present form apparently originated after World War II. As a modern college institution, however, it owes its existence to a movie called “Where the Boys Are.” This morality play under the palms was released in 1960 and starred a lot of really great actors who never made it really big, among them Paula Prentiss, Jim Hutton, Frank Gorshin--and Yvette Mimieux as the doomed sex kitten who confuses lust with love. The multi-talented Connie Francis sang the theme song and starred as the Friend of the Cute Girl--played by Dolores Hart, who wooed the ascoted but curiously un-suntanned George Hamilton.

Based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout, the movie followed four “good” girls from a small Midwestern college who bomb down to Ft. Lauderdale in their convertible and spend the entire week trying not to give in to the temptation to “go all the way.” The benign antics include a student directing traffic in his pajamas and 5’10 1/2” brunette Paula Prentiss trying to pass as a 5’3” redhead on a fake ID. The charmingly goofy event that lands our young vacationers in jail involves their leaping, fully clothed, into the tank in which Lulu the Underwater Nymph is performing her Esther Williams-inspired swim routine at a supper club. Even in an inferior 1984 remake of the film, the girls’ lawlessness is innocuous: One ofthem drives recklessly into the pole that holds up the hotel awning. It would be campy if it wasn’t so poignant. Was the world really so innocent then?

From a historical standpoint, the most important aspect of the film was the prologue, in which, as the camera pans over the sugar sands of Ft. Lauderdale, a narrator intones: “For 50 weeks of the year this is a small corner of tropical heaven, basking contentedly in the warm sun. During the other two weeks, as colleges all over the country disgorge their students for Easter vacation, a change comes over the city. The students swarm to these peaceful shores in droves, 20,000 strong. They turn night into day, and the small corner of heaven into a sizable chunk of bedlam. The boys come to soak up the sun, and a few carloads of beer. The girls come, very simply, because this is where the boys are.”

The phenomenon thus defined and codified, Spring Break grew steadily in size and cultural importance throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. In Ft. Lauderdale alone, the “20,000 strong” had swelled to several hundred thousand by 1985. Other hot spots included Palm Springs, the Colorado River and Newport Beach in the West, and, increasingly, Daytona Beach in the East. The students invaded every spring, like so many revved-up swallows returning to Capistrano. Local merchants, residents and cops tolerated them, provided they abided by the law.

In the latter ‘80s, things turned ugly. “Breakers,” as they were now called, were partying with an enthusiasm--or desperation--never before seen. Maybe it was the simple fact of being young and single in the age of AIDS, or maybe it was the need to let off the enormous amount of steam generated by the pressure of succeeding in a sinking economy but reports from all fronts were unsavory and sad. Harmless, rowdy fun had degenerated into alarmingly rowdy sleaze.

The year 1989 was a particularly gruesome one. Eight people fell or leaped from balconies in Daytona Beach, resulting in one death. Ten rapes were reported on South Padre Island, Tex., another popular Spring Break locale. Another South Padre Breaker, who took a side trip to nearby Matamoros, Mexico, was abducted and murdered. In 1986, in Palm Springs, an impromptu street party quickly became a riot, resulting in a full-scale police crackdown. In Daytona Beach, there were 18,000 Spring Break arrests in 1989 and 1990 alone.

This presented a problem. The hotel owner whose softdrink machine was dumped into the swimming pool might be irritated, but the perpetrators were still his bread and butter. Breakers may have ravaged Ft. Lauderdale in 1985, but they had enriched the city that same year to the tune of $140 million. The various responsible adults at tourist bureaus and hotel associations wanted Spring Break business, but, on the other hand, they were eager to curb the irresponsible drinking that seemed to lead inexorably to young women tearing off their bikinis and young men breaking up the furniture.

Perhaps the most publicized civic reaction to the excesses of Spring Break came in Palm Springs in 1991, under then-Mayor Sonny Bono: a ban on the thong bikini. It wasn’t just the sight of so many buttocks being exposed on the sidewalks and at poolsides, but also because many of the women so garbed had taken to cruising around on motorcycles. Traffic schmaffic. Tourist officials were afraid that the sight might inflame male passions to the flash point, turning an already volatile situation into an orgy of sexual assault.

This year, to further circumvent some of the anarchy, the Palm Springs City Council is hosting its first Desert Harvest Days and Wildflower Festival, designed to attract “families and adult vacationers” exactly during Spring Break, from April 1-11. “Old Time Sidewalk Entertainment,” a wildflower festival, even a writers conference are planned. (I’m not quite sure what “sidewalk entertainment” means, but, as an adult vacationer, I have to say that it would take more than a barbershop quartet strolling along Palm Canyon Drive singing a medley from “The Music Man” to get me anywhere near Palm Springs in April.)

ABOUT THE TIME WHEN SPRING BREAK STARTED TO GET OUT OF HAND, MTV began broadcasting an annual “Spring Break in Daytona” program, live from Daytona Beach. Since this meant cameras, and cameras meant the possibility of product placement, corporations began to see Breakers as not just a bunch of kids running wild, but as a huge, relatively captive target audience. College students, after all, are said to have at their discretion about $9 billion in disposable income a year.

Cut to 1992: Instead of lolling all day on the beach getting drunk and disorderly, the energetic Breaker in Daytona Beach, South Padre Island and other Spring Break hot spots may now choose to enter events such as the Jeep Eagle Three-on-Three Basketball Challenge or the Chrysler-Plymouth Volleyball Challenge. For those with an artistic bent, there is the U.S. Sprint Sandcastle Building Contest. Weider Publications-Shape Magazine sponsors a bikini contest and, perhaps to avoid accusations of sexism, a Muscle Fitness Male HotBod Contest as well. Movie studios hire people to wander the beaches giving out passes to preview screenings, hoping to generate good word-of-mouth for forthcoming films. Booths on the beach offer Breakers free samples of assorted health and beauty aids. Daytona Beach hosts two competing Spring Break trade shows aimed at college students, displaying merchandise and offering freebies from more than 100 companies.

It’s better to spend an afternoon being part of a giant human Chrysler logo than it is to plunge to your death off a hotel balcony. That, anyway, is the not unreasonable rationale supplied by marketing wizards when detractors decry the commercialization of Spring Break. Richard Tarzian, president of New Jersey-based Intercollegiate Communications, the largest Spring Break marketing firm in the country, last year said: “Let’s say there is some kid who would have had 10 beers a day. If I can create enough activities in a day so that he only has five beers, I have done my job.”

Now I’m the kind of tense, task-oriented person who would probably like the new improved Spring Break, with contests to enter, prizes to win, movies to see, samples of styling gel and potato chips to collect and squirrel away. But there’s something vaguely creepy about the trend. All those corporate-sponsored tug-of-wars and volleyball tournaments and sing-alongs remind me of the quilting bees foisted upon girls of an earlier era--whose purpose was to keep their hands busy and thus out of trouble, away from idleness and temptation. At least those girls got a quilt out of the deal. All Breakers get is a chance to help make Sony richer.

Indeed, however much sensible grown-ups might decry the drunken debauchery of a Spring Break, it is good to remember that there is a tradition of misbehaving embedded in the rites of spring the world over. In Ghana, during the festival of Apoo, for 13 days anyone can say anything they want about anyone else with complete impunity. In India, during the festival of Holi, celebrating the triumph of Vishnu, young students lurk on roofs and balconies wielding syringes filled with red, yellow and green dye, waiting to zap an unsuspecting friend or relative strolling below. Lithuanians and Iranians, Brazilians and Albanians, Buddhists and Zoroastrians--everyone, everywhere, come spring, has a societally sanctioned time of eating, drinking, dancing and casting all good sense to the wind. Even the staid Emily Dickinson admitted that “a little madness in the spring is wholesome, even for the king.”

Unfortunately, the perfect Spring Break destination--where Breakers can wreak havoc without wrecking anything, including their lives--does not exist. If it did, it would probably be a long, thin tongue of sand curling onto the sea, allowing for single-story bungalows built cheek by jowl on both coasts (no balconies). There would be no cars, save for the 24-hour cab service to and from dozens of reasonably priced bars, pubs, restaurants and clubs--all of them, incidentally, selling hip 100% cotton T-shirts (no 50/50s). The hotels would be collegian-proofed, in the same way family homes are child-proofed: Hoteliers would leave out a few things they didn’t care about, knowing they would be destroyed, thus allowing Breakers to feel the necessary sense of power and abandon. On the beach, there would be free beer, a volleyball net and a huge state-of-the-art, though expendable, sound system with no sharp edges.

Oh boy. Party on.