Thursday, April 29
5:45 PM: Drove for 7 hours in rush hour traffic for almost 400 miles from the Detroit area to Louisille, Kentucky. Upon attempting to park on a one-way city street with an inappropriately high speed limit, I am almost rear-ended by two pickup trucks, and hear one driver shout "YEW KAIN'T DOO THAT!!!" in a voice straight out of the movie "Deliverance". I hide my face so they do not see that the Yankee driver who stopped right in front of them is Asian. This would only confirm every stereotype they were ever told by their Dad/brother/cousin (which could all be the same person...only kidding).
6:00 PM: Arrive at my brah's house in downtown Louisville. Everyone at the house has been piss-drunk for hours. Several of them tell me how relieved they are to see me because they have been shouting "JIMBO" at every car that has passed by since five o'clock. Thanks to the great game of beer pong, I don't even have to worry about dinner as food has instead been supplemented with Miller Lite. Periodically, the host runs outside to check on the pig that is being roasted on a spit. Somewhere off in the distance, a dog barks.
11:00 PM: Shit is about to get real. Someone suggested playing an overtime game of beer pong with 21 cups per side. In the closing minutes of the game, someone puts on the theme song from "Chariots of Fire" for dramatic effect. My partner and I win because I am afraid to lose with this song playing. An hour or so later, someone drunk-drives us to get Mexican food and I pass out shortly thereafter as other drunk people make fratty, homoerotic comments while I try to sleep.
Friday, April 30:
7-11:30 PM: Around this time, the rest of the crew arrives, most of whom I haven't seen in at least three years. To get an idea of what we did, picture everything I wrote about yesterday and extend it about three hours. A lot of what was overheard/said probably shouldn't be repeated in the interest of good taste, but just know that there was more ribaldry and, at one point, dudity than you could shake a stick at. The smart collection of people would realize that since we had to start our day early tomorrow, the correct life choice would be to stop drinking and turn in relatively early. I will give you one guess as to what actually happened.
Saturday, May 1: D-DAY
The exact opposite happens. We are all awoken at about 8:30 after falling asleep around 5 to "The Circle of Life" from the Lion King movie and the ten of us drive in a van with no seats to a country club just to take a shower. Every blueblood in the club knows exactly what we are doing last night and I resist the strong urge to shout, "BITCH YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE" at a couple of them. After dressing in our Saturday best we load said van with a beer pong table and enough liquor to float a boat and head off to Churchill Downs to begin tailgating around 11.
The van ride makes my butt and legs fall asleep and my stomach feel so atrocious that the first thing I choose ginger ale over beer as my first drink.
Several of the guys get rip-roaring drunk before we even enter the race track by playing their patented game of "drunkball", which involves throwing ping-pong balls at beer cans, running to pick the ping-pong ball up and chugging that exact same beer. This attracts a minor crowd of sketchy people closing in on their mid-30s of when they were two years removed from college as opposed to ten.
Around 1:30 the area next to our parking spot looks like Hurricane Katrina, prompting us to finally pack up and lurch the mile or so to the race track. Bear in mind, we are not actually going to the Derby to sit in the stands to watch the races. The track is so big that there is actually a massive, fenced-off infield where the vast majority of the crowd goes. On this day, it has rained so heavily that the infield is one giant mud pit and the wind is so strong that huge tents are blowing all over the place. By the time we arrive, impromptu mud wrestling matches and slip-and-slides have popped up everywhere and the National Guard is already trying to arrest the people who are running on top of the Porta-Potties.
We stake out our own spot as close to the track as possible and at this point I am stuck baby-sitting the worst drunk girl in the world. I pass the time trying to convince her I'm Jewish and at some point she utters the quote that appears as the title of this post. After some time, she punches my friend in the head and stumbles away at which point I realize several of the other guys in the group are trying to start a fight with a group of people from Georgia about infringing on our spot with their tent. After everyone finishes arguing about nothing, people head over to place bets/eat funnel cake/drink mint juleps and while waiting in line I am accosted by an Indian guy who drunkenly explains to me how one out of every five people is Asian. I tell him I don't believe him because we are the only two non-white individuals here.
The bad weather has not let up and I am worried about catching pneumonia, so we decide to leave around 6. Predictably, as we make it back to the parking lot the sun comes out and one member of the group is sitting on the ground in the spot where the van used to be. It turns out that half of the group had already left, and I can only imagine what the drunk car ride back home was like for them. Arriving back at the house, we discover that the host's younger brother has been arrested for public intoxication, which may or may not have been because he was carrying a hollowed-out binocular flask and decided to look through it.
Thus ends the account of the 2010 Kentucky Derby, where I did not end up seeing even one actual race. If there's anything that can be learned from this weekend, it is that you shouldn't miss out on catching up with old friends and that we need to bite the bullet and rent the party bus with the fireplace and stripper pole for next year.
