Danny Boy recalls three of the most painful post-drinking experiences imaginable that all took place because of one thing…Chilifest.
Danny Boy
That’s right folks, it’s that time of year again. No, not Lent. Nope, not baseball season or March Madness, either. Yes, spring is right around the corner, but even that’s not what’s important. No, my friends, it’s Chilifest time. That’s right. The once in a lifetime event that happens every year.
For those unfamiliar with Chilifest, well, you’re missing out. It’s the best thirty-six hours of the year. Better than Christmas, better than your birthday. Whatever it is, I don’t care, it’s not as great as Chilifest. Chilifest is a two day party every year that takes place in the small town of Snook, Texas, which is about 15 miles outside College Station and Texas A&M (side note: Snook should be a slang term for vagina).
Chilifest is basically a contemporary Woodstock, only with country music, less drugs and more beer. It’s 40,000 people camping out, getting as drunk as they’ll get all year, and listening to live music. There really aren’t words to describe how much fun it is. In fact, the name “Chilifest” is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve been to three Chilifests, and have never actually seen a pot of chili. A more accurate name would be, “Three-Day Hangover-Fest,” or, “Sex With Strangers in a Port-a-Potty-Fest,” or maybe even, “I Hope I Don’t Pass Out and Choke on My Vomit-Fest.” But I digress.
The way it works is, you get a bunch of your friends and form a “chili team.” Back in the early days of Chilifest, teams actually competed in a chili cook off. Now, your team is just the people you get drunk with for 36 hours. Each team gets a plot of land, about forty feet by forty feet, where you set up your tents, grill, smoker, etc. You get there on Friday afternoon and start drinking. Most people will pass out there on Friday night, instead of tyring to run the gauntlet of consisting of every cop in Texas between Snook and College Station. You wake up Saturday and do it all over again, before calling it a day around sundown Saturday.
Even though, I’ve had an insane amount of fun at the three Chilifests I’ve attended, every time, something catastrophic has occurred. Every time something has happened that has had a severe and negative impact on my health and overall well-being. We’ll start with Chilifest 2005.
Chilifest 2005
First of all, the fact that this was five years ago makes me feel incredibly old. But this was my first Chilifest, and I look upon it with the same fond memories as a new father does the birth of his first child. Friday night, my friends and I did the same thing the other 39,950 people do at Chilifest; get incredibly drunk, then pass out in a tent, and hope you don’t piss yourself.
So Saturday morning, I wake up with a hangover the likes of which you can’t imagine. I’m also incredibly sore because I just slept on the cold, hard ground. I decide that I really need some Advil and a bottle of water. Now, Chilifest is BYOBeer, but no hard liquor is allowed. However, this rule can easily be side stepped with the ol’ rum or vodka in a water bottle trick. I was also at the time recovering from a cold. So I had a cough drop in my mouth, and my sense of taste was still diminished by the cold.
So I reach into the cooler, grab a bottle of “water” and a couple Advil, pop the Advil in my mouth, and then proceed to chug about one half to three fourths of the “water” before I realize that something isn’t right. The exchange that followed went like this:
Me: This doesn’t taste like water.
Friend: Yea, it’s vodka.
Me: …Oops.
Being the young, naive asshole that I was, I didn’t really grasp the severity of what I had just done. So I piled a few beers on top of the 10-15 ounces of vodka I had just chugged. About an hour later, it hit me. Next thing I know, I’m passed out in a lawn chair for the rest of the afternoon.
This presented two problems. One, I’m about as Irish as Bono and Sinead O’Connor’s illegitimate love child. Needless to say, my skin doesn’t hold up well under the sun. And by this time in the day, I had not yet put on sunscreen. By the time I woke up, I had second degree sunburns all over my face, arms and legs. It was bad. The peeling and blisters lasted about two weeks.
Second problem was, I was passed out in a lawn chair, surrounded by a lot of very drunk people. Let’s just say, if I had a dollar for every testicle that was stuck in my face that afternoon, I could probably bail out AIG by myself.
But that’s not all, folks. No, it gets better. So after eight to ten hours passed out in a lawn chair, baking in the sun and getting ball sweat wiped off on my cheeks; I finally awake from my slumber just in time to catch a ride back into College Station. Somebody, I still am not sure who, dropped me off at my house. Thinking that I’m good to go by now, I sit around and drink a few beers with my roommates, before heading back to my bedroom to pass out again.
The next thing I remember, it’s 4 a.m., I’m in my bed, and my roommate is yelling at me.
Roommate (drunk, slurring his words): Dude, I need you to drive me to this chicks house. I need to get laid.
Me (drunk, slurring my words): Fuck off.
Roommate: Dude, I’m horny.
Me: I’m drunk, leave me alone.
Roommate: Dude, you’ve been passed out all day and all night, you have to be sober enough to drive by now.
Me: Go fuck yourself.
My roommate rips the sheets off my bed, and then stands there, staring at me in silence, while his brain processes the sight before him. He then says the following:
Roommate: Dude, you’re naked and covered in piss.
I didn’t care. It got my roommate out of my room, and immediately went back to sleep. Piss covered bed and all.
So I wake up the next morning, and sure enough, I’m incredibly hungover, I’m naked, and still lying in my own piss. At that point, I did what any rational 21 year-old that just pissed himself would do: I took my sheets off the bed and put then in the washing machine. About an hour later, I go to get my sheets out of the washing machine, and out falls my cell phone. So on top of all the physical pain and discomfort, in my hungover induced stupor, I also destroyed my cell phone.
Chilifest 2006
As I said earlier, I’ve never actually seen a pot of chili, but there is still very, very good food at Chilifest. On Friday night, most teams have a team dinner, with a designated cook, some sort of huge, contrived grill or smoker, and lots of red meet.
Our team’s cook was Beau. Now, I love Beau. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. It’s impossible to be around Beau and be in a bad mood. But that being said, the son of a bitch almost killed me. Beau cooked a brisket that was absolutely delicious (but what doesn’t taste good when your on your sixteenth beer in seven hours?).
The rest of Chilifest went off without a hitch. All in all, it was pretty uneventful. There was some Crisco Slip and Slide, a guy passed out in a cactus, you know, the usual. I managed to avoid the vodka this year, the massive sunburns, and testicles in my face.
I went home Saturday night, passed out, woke up Sunday with only a mild hangover. Didn’t do much all day, sat around the house, watched some TV, cooked myself dinner, and went to bed around ten or eleven. Then midnight rolled around, and I honestly thought I was going to die.
I woke up with the WORST case of the stereos you could possibly imagine. I’m not sure how widely used the term “stereos” is, but my dad uses it to describe when you’re so sick, it comes out of both ends, like a stereo. I spent all night, literally, from midnight to 5:30 a.m., sitting on the toilet, diarrhea coming out of my ass, while simultaneously throwing up into the bath tub next to me. I was on the toilet so long, I thought my ass was going to fuse to the seat.
After about two to three hours of constant vomiting and diarrhea, I thought I was puking up, while simultaneously, pooping out my internal organs. I wasn’t sure how there could possibly be anything left in my stomach to poop out or throw up. I think around three or four in the morning, I just started throwing up stomach acid and bile. I’m telling you, I was sick. I don’t know if Beau bought that brisket at E-Coli-Mart or just stuck it on the grill for 3.4 seconds and served us raw meat, but that brisket did a number on me. I wasn’t the only one. Half our team got sick. Though, no one it seems, got as sick as me.
Yet, being the nice guy that I am, I didn’t want to wake up my roommate and ask him to take me to the hospital, despite the fact that I may or may not have been dying. Instead, I got my cell phone and called the “Dial a Nurse” hotline that Texas A&M provides to its students. I spent the next hour or two on the phone with a nurse (outsourced to India) asking me what color my stool and vomit was. I kept asking her if I was dying. She assured me, I just had food poisoning (thanks, Beau) and sever dehydration (thanks, Beau and Miller Lite).
Finally, at about 5:30 in the morning, after the diarrhea and vomit had subsided, I crawled off the toilet (not even sure if I wiped my ass because I was so weak), and literally crawled into my roommate David’s room. I grabbed his arm, and like a small child trying to wake his dad up on a Saturday morning, just tugged at him until he woke up. He sat up and then looked down at my ghost white face covered in vomit as I lay on his bedroom floor.
He carried me to his car and drove me to the hospital, where the ER doctors confirmed what the Indian dial a nurse told me: I had food poisoning and severe diarrhea. I spent that morning in a hospital bed while they pumped two bags of saline into a vein in my right arm (thanks again, Beau!). I lost about ten pounds (thanks even more, Beau!). And I still believe to this day that I also pooped out my small intestine.
Chilifest 2007
Chilifest 2007 was a bit tamer than the previous two Chilifests, partly because I was a little older (and ostensibly more mature), but mainly because most of my friends had graduated and moved off to start their “careers.” There were only a few of us left.
This year, we had managed to arrange a sober ride back into College Station on Friday night, so we avoided tent/cold ground sleeping. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Tom, Christian and myself pile into K.P.’s car and she graciously allowed us to sleep at her place. Why we slept at her place and not our own house, I’m not entirely sure, but once again, I digress. Christian and Tom somehow finagled their way into a bedroom (her roommates were camping at Chilifest) and I got stuck on the couch. No worries though, I was drunk, and a couch is much better than the ground. Or so I thought.
Right before I passed out for the night, K.P. came into the living room. ..
K.P.: I hope you’re not allergic to cats
Me (drunk, slurring my words): Very allergic….
K.P.: Well, my roommates have cats, and they sleep on this couch, so there’s a lot of cat hair on it. You might want to sleep somewhere else.
Me: I don’t care. Just let me sleep. I’ll be fine.
K.P.: Okay….
As I told K.P., I’m very allergic to cats. I woke up five or six hours later, my head twice the size it usually is, with all sorts of strange fluids coming out of every orifice of my head. I couldn’t talk to anyone, because I couldn’t stop sneezing. I could barely see, because my eyes were almost swollen shut. There wasn’t enough Benadryl on the face of the planet to cure this allergic reaction.
While it didn’t require a trip to the hospital and two IV bags, a hangover combined with an allergic reaction to cats is almost as unbearable as food poisoning and severe dehydration.
Despite my bad luck (or self inflicted misfortune), I would go back to Chilifest in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, law school isn’t really conducive to being drunk for 36-48 hours straight and then being hungover ‘till Wednesday.
