Cruising Beach Street, Santa Cruz 1960
Friday night and the girls were off the leash in a '55 Chevy and looking for trouble. FIVE-MINUTE FICTION
Come join the teenage mating rituals with a cruise down Beach Street on a Friday night in Santa Cruz, 1960.
Santa Cruz, the spring of 1960, and the four girls are cruising Beach Street as they do every Friday night — ever since Marcie was unwisely granted a license to drive in the State of California. It’s Easter week, and school is out. They’re off the leash, untethered and looking for trouble. Marcie is the only one who has a car, a brilliant birthday present from her dad that makes them all so envious they’re on the verge of orgasm every time they slide into the back seat.
The entire boulevard is jammed, bumper to bumper, west to east. Everyone between the ages of fifteen and twenty has the same idea in mind – cheap, salacious entertainment.
The girls are hanging their arms out of the blue and white ‘55 Chevy Bel Air convertible, shamelessly waving and shouting remarks at the boys that they want to meet. The young men rev up their motors as they pass by - a sign of virility, a gesture akin to gorillas thumping their chests. The girls love it. They’re only seventeen, juniors in high school and they don’t care about how loud or how stupid they are. There is a kind of joy in making an ass of one’s self at that age on a warm spring night at the beach in Santa Cruz.
They pass the Municipal wharf, V-8 engine purring like an panther on the prowl. Boys are shouting lewd remarks from a ‘53 two-tone Buick with portholes in the front fenders. They wolf-whistle at the girls from a low-riding ‘54 Mercury with sexy chrome-plated Lake’s plugs. They cat-call from a ‘47 Ford coupe with pin-striped flames around the wheel-wells and headlights. The girls shout right back and loudly sing along with the Coasters’ Charlie Brown on the radio. “He walks in the classroom, cool and slow, who calls the English teacher Daddy-O? Charlie Brown!”
The cars cruise slowly past Carniglia Bros. Fish Restaurant, past the Coconut Grove and Penny Arcade, past Marini’s saltwater taffy and the Sno-Cone stand. The air smells like Coppertone and cotton candy. Palm fronds rattle like maracas in the on-shore breeze high above their heads.
On the balconies of beachfront motels, college students are drinking suicidal glasses of *spolie and watching the vehicular mating rituals below. Rolling over the railroad tracks, they pass the Merry-Go-Round, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Giant Dipper, the Bumper Cars. Down at the end of the long street the traffic makes a U-turn and cruise slowly all the way back. Then they do it all over again. This parade of blatant youthful libido goes on for a couple of hours.
The four girls find the boys they want, and Marcie yells, “Steamer Lane.” The boys meet them up on West Cliff Drive overlooking the ocean. They all get out of the cars and walk around, circling each other, bantering back and forth, flirting, getting back into the cars, drinking a little beer and making out in the back seat. Sitting in cars with boys on West Cliff at night is called ‘watching the submarine races’ in the local teenage vernacular.
The guys are second-year San Jose State students, Sigma Chi – too old for the girls, making their liaison even more inappropriate and thus, more desirable. They all tease and joke for a while, but the boys can see they won’t be getting any serious action from the likes of these babes. Oh, they’re all cute and fresh and funny, but the frat boys have driven thirty-five miles across the mountain to find easy girls. Santa Cruz has a lot of them, but these aren’t of that tribe, so they head back down to Beach Street to continue their hunt.
The young women make their way across town in the Bel Air, giggling like hyenas, no seat-belts, no air bags, and Marcie, their incompetent driver, has a buzz on. The parking lot of the 5-Spot Drive-In Restaurant is jammed, cars stacked up double deep, all the radios tuned to KDON at volume. Young men are walking around from car to car, leaning into windows, engaging in a bit of reconnaissance. Car hops attach trays to the driver’s side window ledge and take orders for flavored fountain-cokes and french fries.
Those four girls always have a great time together. They are all equals on the stupidity scale, well-matched on the immaturity meter. Oh, they like to pretend they are bad girls, but they know how far they can go without compromising what is reverently called their “reputations”. So they aren’t bad. Okay, maybe a little bad, but that story will be saved for another day.
1.) This is purely a work of fiction, not memoir.
2.) “Spolie” was a cheap alcoholic drink favored by California college students in the 60s — a deadly mix of Hawai’ian Punch, cheap vodka and Red Mountain burgundy. Made by the gallon, it caused the worst head-cracking, swearing off hangovers ever … or so I am told.
If you liked this little tale, I invite you to read “Waffles and Weeds”, another short fictional memoir about highly unmatched family members. CLICK HERE
You know your cars, Sharron! Galveston was my Santa Cruz with "smells like Coppertone and cotton candy". What great times. I don't remember what we called our "Spolie", I do remember its aftereffects. Thanks for the ride down Memory Lane!
My father owns a Chevrolet Bel-Air from that era, but it's a '54 rather than a '55.