Spring Break Is Still Decadent and Depraved — and Awesome, Dude!

His friends gathered around him to point out the various blue works of art on his body. Across his forehead were the words "I HAVE AIDS." Around his neck was a mock prison-style tattoo that read "THUG LIFE."

"Oh my God, look at his eyes," said Jessica, one of his friends. "Close your eyes, Kacey: Oh my God, look!"

On his eyelids someone had carefully drawn small eyeballs. When Kacey blinked, it looked like the tiny eyes were winking.

Kacey looked dazed. No doubt that was at least partly a result of the alcohol in his blood. All the ink seeping into his skin may have had something to do with it, too, but more than anything Kacey seemed dazed because that's the goal of a true spring breaker: to get so blasted on vodka and rum and bourbon (plus a bowl or two of the chronic that he and his pals brought from Kentucky) that the world spins with fantastic fuzziness and all the problems of an American college student melt away.

Kacey squinted. Blue and all, he was having a great time. "And I know everyone responsible for this," he said, pointing to a blue penis that had been drawn on his chest. "I'm not mad, but I will get revenge. Oh yes I will."

"That's what spring break's all about," said his buddy Brad. "You fuck with people when they're passed out, they fuck with you back. You won't catch me passing out around these fuckers."

Brad was referring to his Kentucky friends, of course, but by extension "these fuckers" also clearly encompassed all the vacationing kinds of college students that Fort Lauderdale has been trying to shake for 20 years, the ones who drive 18 hours straight to get here and pile six-to-a-room into cheap motels, the ones who pound watery beers on the otherwise calm beaches. They're the young people that then-mayor Robert O. Cox said were no longer welcome when he went on Good Morning America in 1987 to declare the end of a decadent era in the place that invented spring break.

City elders say there's no place for them in the new Fort Lauderdale, an affluent oasis composed of towering condos and upscale shops. They'd like to think such groups now head for Panama City, or Daytona, or maybe Cancun. But they've carved out a place here for themselves.

Brad and Kacey and their crew, among an estimated 13,000 college students who still pick the city as their spring break destination, did not come for the fine dining and shopping. They came for the inexpensive party town of legend, with easygoing police officers and easier-going girls. They came for the Fort Lauderdale logged in decades of American cinema, the birthplace of the wet T-shirt contest, where hard bodies and binge drinkers come together with soft beaches and reliable birth control.

The Saturday after most schools in the country released their students for a week's vacation, the Miami Herald ran a story about the new spring break in Fort Lauderdale under the headline "Girls Gone Mild." The students quoted in the story claimed they came to Fort Lauderdale to get away from party places. The debauched days are over, says Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. "It took a long time and a lot of hard work to get rid of that element. Now we're about families snorkeling and young couples dining at trendy cafés or a group of girlfriends getting away for a 'shop and spa' splurge. Seeing a mother dabbing sunscreen on a baby's nose doesn't exactly bring out the wet T-shirt side of people."

Kacey, blue, was still wearing only a towel at the Premiere amid a swarm of bathing-suit-clad, male and female breakers. From an open door spilled even more young, toned Kentucky girls. Kacey put his arm around Jessica, a freckled strawberry blond wearing a red bikini and a white beach dress. "Aren't Jessica's boobies great?" he said, motioning as if he were going to squeeze her breasts. "She's got the biggest tits, seriously. We all just love them, like they're new friends. Who wouldn't want to suck on one of those monsters?"

Jessica looked embarrassed.

Then out of the room shot Sammy, a small, dark-haired girl with thick red lips. She looked at the illustrations on Kacey and laughed. But as he turned she looked mildly upset. "OK, guys, at least wash the swastika off his arm," she said. "I'm Jewish and I don't want it to look like Kentucky is a bunch of rednecks." Then she asked where the hash pipe was hidden and disappeared into one of the hotel rooms.

"Seriously though, how the fuck am I supposed to get permanent marker off the rest of my body?" Kacey asked.

"Use vodka," shouted Jason Curd, a Kentucky buddy who brought a backpack full of booze everywhere he went. "That shit won't come off with just soap. Especially the thing on your nipple there."

Kacey examined his nipples, which had both been colored blue. Around one was a series of concentric blue rings, like a target.

Sammy re-emerged with a small glass pipe in her hand. She exhaled a puff of skunkish smoke and passed the pipe to a thicker blond girl. Kacey leaned in on the blond girl, who had the straps from her bikini top dangling over the front of her towel. "This girl hooks up with all the basketball players at UK," he said. "She likes 'em big, if you get what I'm sayin'." Then he pointed to the 12-inch penis his friends had drawn across his stomach. "But I've got the biggest dick on this beach right now. It's drawn right here. They don't get bigger than this monster."

A group of spring breakers in yellow polka dot bikinis passed the Premiere and looked up at the Kentucky crew on the third floor. They put their fingers in the air and shouted up "Spring break! Woo!" Kacey, Sammy, Brad, Jessica, and everyone else on the balcony raised their hands and screamed back "Spring break! Woo!"

"See, I don't even know those people," Kacey said. "That's what spring break is all about. Fucking spring break, woo! Now who has my pants?"

When he turned, he revealed an even larger penis drawn on his back and pointing downward, as though it were positioned to enter him.

The roar of partiers still echoes off the thin walls of the Elbo Room, Fort Lauderdale's best-known spring break icon. On busy nights it thunders down from the balcony and out over A1A, over the bright, clean beach and into the teal abyss of the Atlantic. The sound hovers in the air, thick and malty like the mingled aromas of beer and sea breezes, hanging like the legend of spring break over the bar and the entire city, a phenomenon that dissipates but never fully disappears.

Some bars still get rowdy. Some kids still drink themselves into a stupor and fall off their stools. The occasional asshole still picks a fight or breaks a bottle. But no one seems to believe Fort Lauderdale is or will ever be the spring break Mecca of years gone by. When visiting students hit a critical mass back in the day, they were too destructive; it was too much to deal with traffic jams and drunks urinating along street fronts.