---------------Longing for the college revelry
|------------------ he never had, a young man goes undercover
|----------------in the land of spring break.

BY ROLF POTTS | A couple was writhing in the surf about 15 yards down the beach from me. The guy appeared to have his pants around his ankles, but it was too dark to tell whether he and the girl were actually having sex in the Clintonian sense of the word.

Given the fact that there were about 30 other people in the immediate vicinity, all semblance of "From Here to Eternity" romance was pretty much lost.

The Panama City Beach police officer who was with me at the time didn't seem at all fazed by the spectacle of public fornication. "Spring break," he said, giving the couple a cursory glance as he wrote me up for carrying an open bottle of beer. "It's a different set of rules here." He handed me my warning citation. "If you're gonna drink on the beach, buy cans. Right now you'd better take those bottles back to your hotel room before I give you a real ticket."

I thanked the officer and took off up the beach.

The fact was, I didn't have a hotel room. And -- since I'd graduated from college a few years earlier -- I wasn't even there for spring break. Technically, I was in the process of delivering a Ford Taurus from Kansas City to Key West. I'd only stopped at Panama City Beach late that evening out of voyeuristic curiosity. After all, MTV (which has developed into a kind of youth-culture Vatican) had decreed Panama City Beach to be America's spring break destination of choice, and I was dying to see what all the fuss was about.

Since I'd gone to college in the Pacific Northwest, all my personal memories of spring break were fraught with Dionysian inadequacy. While the hipsters of my generation were out venting their bacchanalian urges on the MTV-approved beaches of Florida, Texas and Mexico, I shivered away my spring breaks backpacking in the Oregon Cascades. I always enjoyed myself, but I secretly longed for a spring break that more closely resembled the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, a rap video or a cable-TV movie about an endearingly wacky fraternity vacation.

This auto-delivery stop-off in Panama City, I figured, was the perfect chance to redeem myself.

Unfortunately, it's hard to be a loner in the land of spring break. When I'd first arrived that evening, I'd made the mistake of bar-hopping along the main highway. Every single beer hall felt like a starter culture for middle-aged barflies -- each catered to the ideal of sunset-hued cocktails, superficial camaraderie and the suggestion of anonymous sex in sandy-floored hotel rooms. I sat alone with my beer at a succession of bars and watched tables full of beefy, sunburned college boys suck down drinks, whoop at each other and peer around at the token females. I tried to strike up a few conversations, but the guys stuck to their groups and the girls seemed preoccupied with glancing around and sizing up other possibilities.

It was a Tuesday, the fourth night of a cycle that begins each Saturday when a new wave of tour-package charter buses roll in from places like Wisconsin and Georgia. Already, the storied drinking-holes of Panama City Beach were exuding a bored, vaguely desperate atmosphere of grim hedonism. Everyone I talked to, it seemed, was merely looking for something tangible and meaningless to happen -- something to recall years later, perhaps, when they could look back on it and call it their youth.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Infiltrating the frat pack