They Party Hearty in Palm Springs : Spring-Break Students Swarm Into Town

Heather Fox and Liza Gelber are temporarily camped outside of Fuddrucker’s restaurant on the main drag wolf-whistling at guys.

“They love it,” says Fox, a 20-year-old sophomore at UCLA. “It makes their ego go, y’know? It makes them feel good.”

“They love every inch of it,” adds Gelber, a 21-year-old UCLA English major. “And the guys here are excellent. All the good-looking guys come here. If they’re really cute, we tell them to meet us at a party. It’s going to be at the Bahamas.”

“We’ve invited, like, millions of people,” says Fox.

“But there’s no law involved,” Gelber adds, narrowing her eyes. “We’re here to party, party, party. It’s time to let go.”

Fox eyes the thousands of people snaking along Palm Canyon Drive, the main thoroughfare, and describes spring break this way: “Everyone knows everyone even though you don’t know them.”

The annual rite of spring break draws thousands of tan-hungry high school and college students to this desert resort where they trade cramped dorm rooms and all-nighters for overcrowded hotel rooms and all-night parties.

Neither harried hotel managers (whose room prices range from $40 to upwards of $180) nor the hordes of cops (the 80-plus member Police Department has hired 50 extra for the week from the CHP and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department) keep students from their appointed task.

Despite the soaring temperature, it is a relatively calm first weekend; the big influx of students began filtering in Friday afternoon. The mass riots of two years ago are so far only a memory: even the arrest numbers are down compared with last year--by Saturday night police had made 120 arrests, the majority for being drunk in public, and issued 544 citations, mostly for alcohol-related violations.

The size of the crowd is estimated into the tens of thousands. A police spokesman said the department used to be able to take a head count from the hotels, but some of the students now stay in their parents’ condos, 20 to a condo, or in surrounding towns as well as in the resort’s hotels.

From the minute you land in town, the routine is set. At night you cruise the strip, find a decent party or have one of your own. Then you crash with eight other people in a hotel room, wake up late, catch some rays, drink and when the sun sets, hit the strip again.

The strip, a relatively small stretch of North Palm Canyon Drive, the city’s main thoroughfare, has peculiar rituals all its own.

The students and cops stick to the east side of the street, strolling past window displays of polyester-blend pastel leisure wear and ice cream shops. The guys check out the girls, the girls check out the guys, the people on the sidewalk check out the people in the cars, the people in the cars check out the people on the sidewalk, and the cops watch it all.

Everyone travels in packs. Girls in ruffled acid-wash denim skirts and white high heels or tight Body Glove minis and midriff-baring tops with ratted blond hair give off attitude as they pretend to ignore the cat calls from guys in surfer jams, long hair and no shirts that show off built-up pecs. The girls look like Daisy May and the guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger wanna-bes.

They wear T-shirts that say Radical and Sweat and INXS and Hard Rock Cafe and Fido Dido and Pray for Beer and Come on Vacation, Leave on Probation.

From late in the afternoon until 3 a.m. the strip is packed, with traffic backed up for miles at night.

“Sonny Bono wants to be mayor of this place?” says one young man spotting a “Sonny Bono for Mayor” sign in a store window.

“Will you look at all the walking disease bombs?” shrieks a tough-looking girl with her hands on her hips as her friends turned around to see who she’s talking about.

“Take our picture!” squeal Amber Goodman and Nikki Moore, both 18, from Cal State Fullerton, as they sashay down the street.

“We just got here an hour ago,” says Moore excitedly. “It’s our first time here.”

“It’s awesome. It’s cool. It’s fun,” Goodman adds, assessing the crowd.

“What do we plan to do here?” Moore pauses. “Eat, drink . . . no, don’t say drink, my mom’ll kill me.”

“Write it down!” Goodman insists with a giggle.

“And meet lots of men,” Moore adds. “No, don’t put that down, my mom’ll kill me!”

“Oh, put it down!” Goodman says.

The music from car stereos is so loud, it makes windows in nearby buildings vibrate. They cruise to the beat of Salt ‘n’ Peppa. The music effectively drowns out a guitarist who is strumming folk songs on the steps of the Welwood Murray Memorial Library.

On the sidewalk a young man named Steve is demonstrating his foolproof method for meeting women.

“I just snap my fingers!” he boasts. “Watch.”

He runs into the street toward a red Mustang convertible, snaps his fingers at the two girls inside and tells them that the party is at the Oasis, villa No. 5. The girls giggle.

But Steve isn’t as lucky. A cop spots him, pulls him back to the sidewalk and gives him a ticket. Steve glances over his shoulder and shrugs.

On the fifth floor of Maxim’s hotel, 20-year-old Robert Heckenkamp and a few friends survey the crowd from their balcony.

“Hi!” says Heckenkamp as he opens the door, adding a few seconds later, “My grandfather is H. L. Hunt. Have you heard of him?”

Heckenkamp, who is studying business law at USC, says he has paid for lodging for his friends. Suites at Maxim’s start at $180 per night. “My mom said I could invite a bunch of friends,” he says casually. “I’ve got the money, I might as well spend it on them.”

His buddy, Erik Grochowiak, a 19-year-old UCLA student, responds by throwing his arm around Heckenkamp. The two say that after graduation they’re going into business together.

“Making money is Priority One, “ says Grochowiak emphatically.

It is midnight at the Bahamas Hotel, but the promised party is not in sight and the few students hanging out by pool side don’t know anything about it. Down the street the party continues to rage on North Palm Canyon.

Pool side at the Regent Hotel Saturday afternoon. Scott Morielli, 19, is engrossed in a Glamour magazine article titled “What Men Hate About the Women They Love.”

Morielli spent the night sleeping by the pool, because with eight people in the room, the air conditioning wasn’t working too well and it was cooler outside.

“This is a nice place to meet girls,” says Morielli, explaining why he has chosen to spend his fourth year in a row in Palm Springs. “It’s a total release.”

Matt Auer, Morielli’s friend since they were growing up in the San Fernando Valley, says that while many of his San Diego State classmates have opted for Mexico, he came here. “This is a lot more fun,” he says, clutching an empty gallon jug that was filled with margaritas a few minutes ago. “Here I get more of an opportunity to meet people from different schools.”

“And it’s cheaper,” Morielli quickly adds. He has budgeted $200 for his eight-day stay. “That’s $25 a day. Today I’ve only spent $15 so far so I’m on track.” He smiles.

“The bottom line is: We’re relaxing, whether we’re scammin’ or drinking.”

And just how is the girl situation this year?

“OK, I’ll be honest,” he says, turning solemn. “The girls are kinda stuck up. But if you try, you can get along with ‘em.”

The time-tested lines to pick up girls, he and Auer explain, are “Hi, are you having a good time? Where are you from? How long are you going to be here?”

And as long as there are friends with real or fake IDs, there is a steady supply of beer, and just about everyone is happy. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” Auer explains.

Julie Wells, a 20-year-old student at Pierce College, leads the way from the pool up the stairs to a room that normally sleeps two, but now holds eight. Clothes are strewn everywhere, empty beer cans litter the floor and there is a makeshift mattress on the floor. The closet is empty.

Wells shakes her head, looking at the mess. “I’m the responsible one, quote unquote,” she says.

Down by the pool a guy named Larry has bitten into a beer can and is drinking the contents. “That guy is crazy,” Morielli says gravely. “We just met him here. He can also crack a beer can by putting it between his forearm and biceps and squeezing.”

Larry switches his attention from beer cans to throwing girls in the pool.

Mary Liu has owned this hotel for only four months after giving up her Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. She ventures out onto the Astro Turf outside and shakes her head, surveying the scene. This is her first spring break.

“I don’t like when they drink too much,” she says as a Frisbee sails across the pool and hits a sliding glass door.

By 3 p.m., North Palm Canyon is already crowded, more students having arrived today. Students spray each other with water pistols to relieve the heat.

Two guys abandon their pickup truck and dive in the back seat of a sports car while the two girls in the front seat laugh. The tag on the license plate reads, “I have more fun with my top off.”

By nightfall the street is packed to capacity again, and the crowds make their way up and down, down and up the strip. It seems less rowdy than the previous night, although bigger crowds were expected. Even the police seem more relaxed as they wave to photographers snapping their picture and eat ice cream on duty.

Morielli and a friend are strolling, having left the comedy club where they had planned to spend the evening. “We got there, and the first thing the guy says is, ‘Don’t you hate teen-agers? Don’t you just wanna shoot them?’ So we left.”

They are busy recruiting people for a party they plan to have later at the hotel.

But the party is short-lived. Sunday morning, they don’t look happy. The manager told them to take their boom box and their beer and call it a night. “And look what happened!” says Dean Axotis, an 18-year-old freshman business major from USC who asked that his age be listed as 21.

“Someone painted my toenails!” he screeches as he peels off his sock to reveal bright-red toenails. “I’m passed out by the pool and when I wake up I find this.”