THE SIDE OF THE ROSE PARADE YOU"RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEE or How I Saw Five Arrests in Two Hours on New Year's Eve

Wild in the streets
A side of the Rose Parade that America never gets to see
By Carl Kozlowski

Photo by Tracy Lowe

Everyone loves a parade, especially in Pasadena, where we kick off each year with the Greatest Parade in the History of Mankind, the Rose Parade.
Flower-laden floats, celebrities, horses, princesses, a queen; what’s not to love? This year, I decided to drink deeply from this seemingly bottomless trough of high-brow tradition and family entertainment and actually spend New Year’s Eve along Colorado Boulevaard with thousands of other partiers.
But after being at the epicenter of all that excitement for just a few hours, I can truthfully say that what happens before the parade starts and television cameras roll — the part of the event that America never gets to see — is often bereft of any dignity and is sometimes totally unfit for family viewing.
In fact, all this unabashedly illegal and sometimes downright perverse activity was so bad that it prompted in me a whole new level of respect for what our police in this town sometimes have to go through just to earn a paycheck.
It all started with me running into a group of friends from Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. I feared I’d be bored spending the wildest night of the year with a bunch of Christians. But these folks were anything but boring as they set up their parade-viewing stoop in front of Fred’s Mexican Café, on the corner of Colorado and Arroyo Parkway in Old Pasadena, where they had coaxed a bunch of street kids into watching their spot throughout the previous day in exchange for some cash and dinner on the sidewalk.
I could see things were headed in an interesting direction when one of the kids got busted by patrolling police officers for hiding bottles of vodka. Another boy refused to have his bags searched for drugs. Another guy was so loaded that he did an impromptu dance after accidentally dropping a lit cigarette down his pants.
But just a short two hours later, when midnight finally rolled around, the dancer — El Loco to his compatriots — had forgotten all about that searing experience, pulled down his pants and mooned drivers caught in traffic on Colorado Boulevard, then put his private parts on display for select vehicles.
No cops were nearby to catch that part of his act, but when eight squad cars from various jurisdictions rolled past in slow succession, El Loco quickly hiked up his pants and did a jig, the moonwalk, the Running Man, Russian gypsy moves and a couple of interpretive numbers in an impressive display of energy that reduced the cops to laughter and led to a round of applause from passersby.
As El Loco took a well-deserved rest, things took a more urgent turn directly behind where we were sitting at Fred’s. A woman who had tied one on that night tried to walk out of the restaurant, then seemed to pass out, fell down and opened a bloody gash on the back of her head.
“I’m concussed,” she stammered as her date panicked and a passing doctor and I stopped to make sure she was OK. When paramedics arrived, though, she refused to go to the hospital and was ultimately strapped to a gurney, at which point she screamed a torrent of profanities, à la Britney Spears last week. As the woman at the pre-parade bacchanalia was being loaded into the ambulance, a cop took a statement from her date, who didn’t know exactly how to describe her condition until the cop asked, “Would ‘batshit crazy’ suffice?”
From there, it was off to King Taco right up the block on Union Street. While standing in the bathroom line, two guys looking for dates didn’t like getting shot down by some female customers. One of the guys put one of the girls in a chokehold. The other guy shoved another girl to the floor before a group of diners forced them both to flee. Restaurant staff knew enough to lock the doors so the attackers couldn’t return.
Eventually released from King Taco but still in search of a bathroom, I strolled west to the Subway sandwich shop at Colorado and Raymond Avenue only to find about 10 shrieking people running out and a platoon of police running in. What could have happened? A robbery? A hostage situation? The crowd finally erupted into peals of laughter as cops dragged out a guy who had defecated in his pants and on the floor of America’s favorite sandwich shop.
As two officers suffered through patting the guy down and other cops held their noses, the suit-wearing suspect stared straight ahead and refused to offer a statement, as if there was anything left to say. It was at that point I realized that behind the Kevlar vests, cops are really just as human as the rest of us.
In all, only 29 arrests were made at the parade and the Rose Bowl football game. In years past, those numbers usually ran well over 100.
So let’s throw our Boys in Blue a little shout out for a job well done, because in Pasadena, life for them isn’t always a bed of roses, especially on New Year’s Eve.
01-10-08