Letter from a Lil 5 arrestee veteran

Alright kids, here’s the thing. Little 500 is a tough week for everyone.

It’s tough for the racers, it’s tough for your professors, it’s tough for your poor, worried parents. It’s tough for the auxiliary police flooding into campus, and it’s tough for your own young, frail bodies.

But we still go through with it every year, in spite of previous arrests, in spite of injuries, in spite of embarrassments past and blackout, rain-soaked race days.

Without fail, we as a campus throw what some call the “best college weekend” and others call much more obscene things that I cannot put in print.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

This is a serious question. I actually want to know why we do this to ourselves because I have no idea in hell.

My freshman year little 500, I was arrested.

It wasn’t just any arrest either. It was, in fact, my second arrest in the last six months, and both were for underage drinking.

The first violation was innocent enough. A friend visiting from another school told me about a party her boyfriend was going to. I obliged to provide her a place to sleep for the weekend, and one cup of weak jungle juice later, the house was surrounded by excise police who, during the course of the next few hours, issued a ticket to any underage partygoer who had so much as a sip of alcohol.

My parents were upset, but eventually I was able to write it off as “naïve freshman mistake” and “wrong place, wrong time.”

I spent the money I had left from graduation and my summer job to pay for the ticket myself, and soon enough the incident was behind me.

I was noticeably more careful, however.

For the first couple of months, I rarely went out. It only took one bad night and the mounting stress of classes to get me to stop going out completely.

Before I knew it, April had arrived, and I was finishing what had been a rough semester.

Here was Little 500, a chance for a final hurrah, the holy grail of free booze, loud music and endless Facebook invitations.

You’ve earned this, I thought to myself, Seriously, every other one of your friends is going out tonight. Are you actually going to stay in? You make me sick.

And thus, I succumbed to the impossible allure of Lil Five. Go to class during the day, hit up a few parties at night and pull it together in time for class again in the morning.

Most gigs were a bust, and we found ourselves doing less partying and more meandering around our suddenly wildly populated, boozy town, hoping to find something good for the night.

Saturday night was when we had a plan. Saturday we were going all-out. There was a huge event off-campus, far enough that we arranged several sober drivers to bring along our entire crew.

The music was good and the dancing fun, but the scene was quickly getting out of hand. It wasn’t long before police showed up.

Most of my friends managed to leave swiftly and undetected, but as I was walking — probably stumbling — out the door, an officer approached me. “Have you been drinking?” he asked. Déjà vu.

The rest of the night remains kind of a blur. I was Breathalyzed, but I neither remember nor was I interested in hearing the number they read to me.

Somewhere between the ride home I got from a stranger and fumbling my way into my dorm room, I had lost my phone and the ticket I’d been issued.

When did I have to go to court? I think it was 9 a.m. I recalled that one officer said “She’s never going to remember this.”

I didn’t care. I just wanted to get out of my cold, rain-soaked party dress. I had left quite a sight for my roommate by the time she got home.

All of my clothes from the party were wet and piled on the floor, with blood all around the knee of my tights because I had slipped
and fallen.
Oh, and my dress? In what I would later reflect on as my finest moment of drunkenness, instead of fumbling around with all of the complicated steps of removing the belt and pulling it over my head, I grabbed the scissors off of her desk and cut it off.
The next morning was a panicky mess. Phoneless, clueless and more hungover than I could handle, I woke up an hour late for my scheduled court date. By the time I finally got there, the other Little 500 partiers were just leaving to do their mandatory community service.

I was told to just “come back tomorrow.”

Everything else went pretty smoothly. A few weeks and another $400 of graduation money later, and I was taking the same Pre-Trial Disposition class I had passed with flying colors in January. I never had to do community service.

My parents eventually stopped threatening to pull me out of school for my “outrageous behavior,” or as I chose to see it, “bad luck.”

Although I am still often the butt of the joke at many family gatherings, I’ve never received another ticket and certainly don’t plan on doing so again this year.

So, what have we learned from this story, besides that I am probably not very fun to be around and have a penchant for being arrested?

If it is Little 500, never leave your room. But if you do leave your room, don’t go to a sketchy party far off-campus.

And if you do go to a sketchy party, try not to get arrested. And if you do get arrested: lose your phone, cut off your dress, oversleep your court date, and you won’t have to do community service.