It’s jail.
Everybody gets busted, at least once. Rite of passage, you say – part of being on the planet, you say – part of being a kid, you say.
You and your friends – one of you with a car. All of you plotting and scheming since Christmas to put Spring Break in a headlock and turn it into a monument – Ode to Knuckleheads.
But at the time you only had two things on your mind; getting laid and getting crazy.
Getting crazy was the easy part – you raided liquor cabinets – begged people over 21 – pretended you were old enough to know better – put together enough Johnnie Walker and Peppermint Schnapps to make a hangover envious. Had that one friend who who supplied a jar of Dexamyl and a baggie of marijuana. You were set.
Getting laid was the long-shot – you had fantasies – you had hopes – you had a pocket full of rubbers. You had a list of rejections that would fill a phonebook. There were also three other guys with the same idea – on top of every guy who showed up at every Motel Pool on Palm Canyon Drive with a fistful of Zinc Oxide and a festival of worn-out lines. You had competition and you were flabby.
Somebody forgot to get a Motel room – somebody forgot half the student population of Southern California was pushing Palm Springs to the limit.
The best it was going to be was a microscopic room with a single bed on the outskirts of town, on the way to Desert Hot Springs.
Four guys – lots of plans – enough booze to open a liquor store. Surrounded by fossils and Desert rats. Baked prunes stuffed into bikinis – the air filled with Jerry Vale and Mantovani. No mistaking, you were the enemy. Nobody at Paradise Spa was under the age of 60.
But it was a bed and a room and buckets of ice and blazing sun.
By the time sunset rolled around you were all sloshed and ready for action.
Palm Canyon Drive looked like Ventura Boulevard on any weekend; wall-to-wall cars – wall-to-wall people. Cruising and watching – looking for possibilities – looking for signs – looking for a parking space.
See people you think you know. You lean out and yell. Four of you become eight of you. One of them drags out a joint and lights it – the car fills with smoke and getting loaded is now sharing space with being sloshed and by the time you actually find a parking space you are rapidly on your way to becoming comatose.
Still, you’re dead-set on getting out of the car and looking for love.
Rubber legs and a desperate attempt at looking cool. The best you all can do is locate a retaining wall and hunch over like vultures, handing boozy glints at passersby. The chances of you getting anything remotely resembling laid are zero at best. But you still manage a lame excuse for a grin at anyone female, and are immediately met with perplexity and snorts of laughter.
You’re all so intent on basking in the hot breeze of a Palm Springs night that you completely miss the flashing red lights in the general direction of the car.
With all the agility of rubber legs mixed in concrete, you do a slow-motion lope down the street just in time for a Palm Springs Police Department Tow Truck to pull up and prepare.
The cops are not amused. They check eyes and I.D’s and ask your friend to open the drivers side door.
So if parking in a tow-away zone was a hint, the cloud of stale marijuana smoke and the clatter of empty Budweiser cans and Seagrams bottles spilling out on to the street was a dead giveaway.
Your new “best friends” claim to not know you and have faded into thin air while the cops are joined by several others while you are cuffed and carted unceremoniously off to jail.
Seems that Public Drunkenness, underage drinking, possession of marijuana and an expired license plate are real things, and you all get to spend the weekend in jail before court opens on Monday.
There went Spring Break; 1978.
Lucky for you somebody has a radio on – as your face is plastered on the metal bunk surface, the faint sounds of Ten-Q waft into your scrambled brain.
And to remind you, 45 minutes of The Real Don Steel from April 9, 1978 on KTNQ-FM
