Whataya Wanna Do Today?

Click To See The Clip

I've spoken before of where and who I grew up with. Looking back on it all we were a might bit young to be partying like adults, but we did. We weren't pre-criminals (well, a couple of us were) but mostly middle class kids looking to have fun.

The movie Over the Edge was based on an actual event in Foster City, CA where a planned neighborhood was built w/o any thought to the fact there would be kids there. Foster City was built on reclaimed marshland that was at the time, somewhat isolated from the more fun areas of San Francisco. Add to that, the entire suburb had no place for the kids to go but each others homes or a rec center that sat on a playground. Other than that, there was little else for the kids to do.

So, it being the '70's, they smoked pot, drank, ate 'ludes and acid to pass away the time and try to find what fun that could be had in that. The parents of the time, who I found accurately depicted, either were too busy with their careers or didn't give a rat's ass what their kids did. They had no idea just what little Johnny was up to every night he went “out.”

So, as these kids were left unattended, they became worse. They started to engage in petty vandalism out of boredom and finally one night, en masse, assaulted their own school. The San Francisco Examiner wrote a piece entitled, ““Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree.”

Here's a bit of that article.

--Mousepacks. Gangs of youngsters, some as young as nine, on a rampage through a suburban town. One on a bike pours gasoline from a gallon can and sets it afire. Lead pipe bombs explode in park restrooms. Spray paint and obscenities smear a shopping center wall. Two homes are set ablaze. Antennas by the hundreds are snapped off parked cars in a single night. Liquid cement clogs public sinks and water fountains. Street lights are snuffed out with BB guns so often they are no longer replaced. It sounds like the scenario for an underage Clockwork Orange, a futuristic nightmare fantasy. But all the incidents are true. They happened in Foster City where pre-teenage gangs—mousepacks—constitute one of the city’s major crime problems.

--Last summer the Foster City parks department sponsored ‘drop-ins’ at a junior high gymnasium. “Within two months the gym had been destroyed—pool tables ripped, ping-pong tables broken,” said Juvenile Officer Rick Rivera. “The program had to be canceled.”

--“Foster City was supposed to be an ideal bedroom community. The designers built it with a master plan; it was threaded with little man-made canals and waterways. Outside of some houses were docks that people could use to boat to the grocery store. But there was nothing for the large percentage of teenage kids to do in that town — 25 percent of the population was below the age of 18. It had the highest percentage of juvenile crime of any comparable city in the country.

--“These kids were bored out of their minds. There was literally nothing for them to do. It was like a theme park without the fun — you’d have these developments called ‘Whaler’s Cove’ and these fake pilings and these lame rec centers, with ropes and an airplane and a slide and a sculpture of a whale. Everything was brand new. Nothing was older than the kids themselves. The place made everyone feel a little disposable.”   

I saw this flick when the just then new cable TV was wired up in our neighborhood. I sat there with my mouth half open because it looked like, in some ways, exactly what we did as kids. Not only that, the clothing and hair styles were what we wore then too. It could have been Darlington where I grew up. Though we didn't set fire to the school.

It got bad here once. Bad in that no one, not even the cops, were stopping us. In Slater Park, there was a simple parking lot we dubbed “The One Way.” Here is where we all hung out. Sunday through Saturday, you'd find someone there getting stoned or drunk. After that, the defenseless woods, park buildings and what not was prime game to take out any anger, boredom or whatever you could to them. I saw kids plow down young trees with their cars for God's sake.

As word spread of this place, more and more teens showed up. It became the largest open air pharmacy you'd see. Cars would pull in and dealers, competing with one another, would run up to the car, nearly begging the buyer to purchase their weed and not the others. On some nights there must have been 100 kids in that lot, doing whatever the hell they wanted.

It did finally all end and luckily I wasn't there for it. The police, after nearly nine months, finally acted and came crawling out of the woods, up the street in their cars and brought along a prison bus to handle the myriad arrests they made that night. I was told half of the kids scattered and escaped through the marshlands by the creek that feeds the duckpond.

Out of the 60 or so arrests, the cops let most of them go, as most didn't have enough pot on them to satisfy the Attorney General's office to push that many through the court system. Even the AG's office has a budget that must be used for cases that provide enough bang for the buck and processing a bunch of punky teens wasn't in the policy.

A week went by and all of a sudden there was a new place to hang at, Pascale's Lot. It was situated inside a zoned industrial area directly across from McCoy stadium. The festivities began anew.