I was making out with my girlfriend once on the beach in Del Mar, California. This was during the mid-80s. I was just a teenager.

Suddenly this figure appeared on the balcony of one of those houses right on the sand. One of the beachfront homes that pulled right into the shore. Whoever it was that came out was wearing an old - house robe - it looked like and was screaming obscenities at us in a thick Hispanic accent.

"Hey jou kids!" I mean it just went on and on.

Finally some middle aged woman came out on the balcony and pulled him back inside, but not before we realized who it was.

Desi Arnaz - Ricky Ricardo himself - drunk off his gourd, yelling in his Cuban accent for us to stop making out in public and get out of there.

Later I learned that ol' Ricky was an alcoholic and had been treated - unsuccessfully, evidently - for alcoholism at the McDonald Center in La Jolla. A friend of mine had been in rehab with him. Arnaz had been hospitalized under a false name to avoid the publicity, but no one seemed to really care, or at least it never made any tabloids I could recall. He was even supposed to attend Aftercare - the continuing weekly care at McDonald Center - to tend to his disease, but of course he never showed up.

Desi did apparently attend a few A.A. meetings before he finally died of alcoholism and lung cancer in 1986, but he supposedly would just sit in the back, complaining that "it was deh pills" that did him in - not the alcohol. Typical denial from a typical alkie.