Here are the numbers. I am 31 years old and they are 19, 20, 21. I am out numbered something like 5000 to 1, but I am in disguise. I have dyed the gray from my hair and turned the whole mass blond and shaved the hair from my chest and drunk enough beer to remove all polysyllabic words from my vocabulary. Truthfully, the disguise doesn't matter. Truthfully, this is spring break in Mexico and all that matters is I am a live body and they are live bodies and beyond that, well, somehow something else has taken over.

I have been in country for less than four hours. I am on a dance floor the size of a basketball court in a three level club the size of an auto plant. The club is called the Beachcomber and was built specifically to accommodate the mayhem carried upon these ill winds of March. Over a thousand people packed wall-to-wall, nearly all of them students from California. The whole collegiate mash: frat guys and sorority girls, wanna-be punk rockers and wanna-be gangsters, the quiet and the studious and the about to be tossed out for bad grades and all of them jumbled together in some mad Mexican haze. It's the kind of scene you want to take slow, to ease into—but this is spring break and nothing about spring break happens slowly.

Not twenty minutes after arrival, I'm walking along the edge of this dance floor, getting the lay of the land, when a pretty little brunette in a pretty little sundress grabs me from behind and asks me where I'm from and in about fifteen seconds she ascertains that I'm a Russian Jew and she's a Russian Jew and then she says nothing else because she has decided being Russian and Jewish is a good enough reason to shove her tongue down my throat and her hand down my pants and when she finally comes up for air she grabs her friend, a pretty little blond girl in a pretty little sundress, and tells her that I'm Jewish. Her friend says: "Really? Are you circumcised?" And shoves her hand down my pants to find out.

We are four hours down the Baja Peninsula in San Felipe, Mexico. We are in a small town, a few miles of pavement, a few thousand local inhabitants. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. Not the hotels or the nightclubs or the madness. Twenty years ago no one had heard of LA Ski and Sun Tours and nobody had seen a foam party (more on the foam later). Twenty years ago this was a stretch of pristine beach at the tail end of an enormous mesa at the tail end of a small mountain range—as quiet and sleepy and tucked away as could be.

Before LA Ski and Sun there were other tour operators, but none of them had the local pull and the on-campus clout to be able to monopolize an entire Mexican town for themselves. See LA Ski and Sun Tours is a vacation party outfitter operating out of LA. Five or six guys who started throwing parties back in college and never quite stopped. They've got it down to an art. They host early summer high school graduation trips and mid-winter ski trips and over the past few years they have helped make San Felipe a major spring break tourist destination—so much so that for three weeks every March and April something like five thousand co-eds descend on this little village and turn it into a non-stop festival that somehow feels more like a war than a vacation.

If you've never been on spring break, like I had never been on spring break, then it's a little hard to understand. It's not just like spring break is another stealth subculture that slipped on by. We're not talking some secret goth-rock pig blood festival, this here is mainstream America. This is apple pie and Chevrolet. These are well-educated college kids who are going on to work as stock brokers and investment bankers and news anchors. They are going to sit next to you in cubicles and stand next to you on the subway. But right now, they are none of these things. Right now they are kids on vacation, just after finals, just another part in an old tradition. Spring break: suntans, cervezas, make some new friends, kiss on the beach—all the usual stuff—but somehow, somewhere the ante on the usual stuff hasn't just gone up, it's just plain gone.

Let me tell you a story of San Felipe. Let me tell you about two men in a truck and a group of three young women. The men are in their early twenties, just out of college, professionals, at the fresh beginning of respectable careers. The women are fresh faced and happy, they go to school at a place called Chico State in Chico, California, a small college town located on the edge of the central valley. All three girls come from good homes and good families and good backgrounds and all three girls decided to spend their spring break with LA Ski and Sun. So they got on a bus and rode that bus and crossed a border and found themselves in another country. Since the bus ride was long beer was consumed and then more beer. People got drunk. Some had sex. Others watched. One guy was so drunk and so busy having sex he forgot that he was about to be sick and when he failed to get the window open he instead chose to nestle his head between his partner's breasts and puke there. Some of those watching found this gross, others cheered. This is not yet the meat of the story, this is simply the background.

The girls in question didn't watch this scene or not up close. Instead, they were busy in the front of the bus, devising a point system to be put into play once in Mexico. One point for a blow job, two points for the real deal, three for a threesome, four for sex with an LA Ski and Sun staff member and negative one for a local. Remember these are nice girls on a long bus ride. They weren't really serious, they were just passing time.

So the bus deposits them in a small Mexican fishing town where, because of bad planning and over-exuberance, the fishing industry had nearly gone to hell and has been replaced by this strange other world designed by LA Ski and Sun. There is little to do and less to see. But the girls are curious, one of them is an ecology major, she wants a tour of the land. So on their first night in town, not an hour after getting off the bus, they meet two guys with a truck. They ask these guys for a ride around town, maybe a little off-roading so they can get a feel for the land. The guys say yes. They ride, they drink a few beers, they see the flat stretch of the desert, the drink some more beer. Someone mentions the point system, someone elaborates. Which is how each of those girls did each and everything on their point system with each of those guys and then, when all was said and done, they got dropped off at their hotel to go get ready. They were in San Felipe and the night was still young.

There's really very little to do in San Felipe. Just an endless parade of parties thrown for whatever reason one can think of to throw a party. There's the band playing during the day party and the band playing at night party and the band stopped playing after party. There's a booze cruise party where a couple hundred folks pile onto a big boat that does laps around a big bay while these couple hundred folks do laps around a big keg. There's a Mardi Gras theme party complete with thousands of plastic beaded necklaces which are earned through a one-sided game of truth or dare. Over the course of that evening I see women kissing men and women kissing women and shots drunk and fake fellatio and real fellatio and each and every available body part sucked and licked and fondled all in the name of what I did to earn a plastic necklace. There's the Queen of the Beach party and the King of the Beach party and at sometime during one of those contests, in front of nearly a thousand spectators, a women in her quest for the title did a complicated bodyshot. The bodyshot was accomplished by yanking down a man's shorts and placing the lime between his buttocks and then pouring the tequila down his back and licking the whole mess up before taking a deep mouthful of ass and lime and whatever else was in there.

If you think this sounds a little out of hand, well yes, certainly, but to help clear things up let me give you an idea of the scale of spring break substance consumption. Over the course of the week, in what would be considered moderate partying by comparison, I consumed over 100 beers. This says nothing of tequila shots, random blue drinks, margaritas, controlled substances and two B-12 shots delivered by a local shaman. The B-12 thing is kind of a local secret. It's the vitamin that serious partying most leaches from the body. Sure you could take it orally, but why wait for the effects. It all happens so much faster if administered through a shot in the backside. Which is how, one dizzy morning, I'm standing in a nearly destroyed hotel room with seven others. Each and every one of us has our pants down and asses out. Behind us a medic is kneeling. He's got a syringe in one hand and an assfull of co-ed in the other and then there's a knock on the door. The hotel maid has come to clean the room. It was going to take a hell of a lot more than a mop and a bottle of windex to clean up what she saw.

They have a saying down here: "What goes on in Mexico, stays in Mexico." It's a little spring break mantra to replay whenever the nagging hint of conscience decides to surface. It's the grand pardon delivered from on high and it's never more appropriate then at the foam party. The foam party takes place on the last night of spring break. It takes place when LA Ski and Sun cordons off a fifty-by-fifty square in the middle of the main dance floor in the middle of the main room of the Beachcomber. They then fill the entire square chest high with white foam. The foam is hypo-allergenic and tastes like supermarket pina colada mix. People arrive in shorts and t-shirts and bathing suits and whatever it is they have brought that they don't want to take home and really it doesn't matter because after an hour or so, after a little more booze and a little more of that throbbing beach funk, the foam pit turns into one big pile of seething, humping bodies. It starts out with people dancing and throwing foam at each other and pretty soon they're rubbing foam all over each other and a little later they've given up on anything so passé and have simply decided to drop into the foam and go for it. By midnight each corner of the square has five to ten bodies somewhere in the middle of the sex act. People get passed from person-to-person and back again. I talk to at least five guys who have shown up at the party already wearing condoms.

As I'm trying to walk out of the club that night a girl runs past me and grabs my hand, she wants me to come play in the foam. I tell her I've already seen the foam and I've already seen spring break. I tell her I am 31 years old and am in disguise. I tell her all this and none of it matters. All that matters is this is spring break and I am still a live body—at least for a while.