A night to remember at the Coke Lot
Last year, a man was shot and killed in the Coke Lot outside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during Indianapolis 500 race weekend. This year, Speedway officials and police responded with a host of new rules to keep law and order. Here's a look at how the Coke Lot revelers tried to keep the spirit of the place alive Friday night and early Saturday morning, even as police tried to rein it in.
8:20 p.m. Georgetown Road, outside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is a place getting ready to party — and it's also a staging ground for a massive contingent of police officers getting ready to try and control it. The calling cards of the Carb Day crowd — women in especially tight jeans, American flags emblazoned on short pants, tank tops, baseball caps and do-rags, a guy carrying a case of Modelo beer on his head, a man resembling Santa Claus in summer gear sipping from a can of Mike's Hard Lemonade, sheriff's deputies on bicycles heading both directions.
8:31 p.m. Outside the entrance to the Coke Lot stand three trinket vendors, looking like glittery gatekeepers to a strange land. Thomas Libbey stands at the corner of 25th Street and Georgetown Road wearing furry rabbit ears with flashing lights. He's also selling light sabers and swords and racy necklaces with beads that resemble female breasts, the latter of which seem to be the real obsession of the Coke Lot campground. Deane Suni, on an opposite corner, has been hawking similar wares — light-up necklaces shaped like rabbits, glimmering balls that shrink and expand, and run-of-the-mill glow sticks — for the past two years on Indianapolis 500 weekend.
8:40 p.m. Nearby, a group of guys, hold up numbers as women pass by on the sidewalk. The men, beers in hand, rate each lady that passes by. Two women in tank tops, tight shorts and boots, Ericka Groves and Ashley Capps, pass them. The men hoist signs with 9s and 10s. Are the women offended? No, Ashley said. She would have been offended only by a poor rating.
9 p.m. Doug Boles, the president of IMS and in all likelihood the only man in the vast Coke Lot campground wearing a suit and tie, checks in with his staff near the mobile command post. Last year, there was a man shot and killed here. This year, Boles and his team have a plan to keep the peace. There's an array of mobile light towers stationed around a place lit in previous years only by campfires. To keep out the riff-raff, everyone who is party to a campground in the Coke Lot must have a yellow wristband. It is the key to the kingdom. Rather than letting people park themselves in wagon circles and a chaotic mess, everything now is on a grid. And people are told where to park. Even escorted by cops to their parking area. There's a 1 a.m. get-to-your-campsite curfew. Above all, police are seen everywhere. Police on bicycles. Police in marked cars. Police in unmarked cars. Riding on ATVs. Police walking in packs. Police overhead in federal Homeland Security helicopters. There was one probably standing next to you in a hoodie with a beer in hand. Isn't that going to take all the fun out of it? "We're trying to keep it safe," Boles said, "so it can be fun."
9:22 p.m. Two young women sit handcuffed in the back of an ATV. One of them is crying audibly. The other is resigned to her fate. They've been arrested for underage drinking. To make sure they don't escape, four police cars converge on the scene. As the women are hauled off, the police cruisers follow in a procession like a small-town holiday parade. Nearby, Jessica Binhak, 30, is chafing at the new "police state" at the Coke Lot. "This year it's heavier than it's ever been," Binhak said of the law-enforcement presence. "That's not the Coke Lot."
9:59 p.m. A red-headed dude who's built like a fire hydrant walks up to a stranger and asks "Do you smell marijuana?" It's not clear if he is checking to see whether his smoking habit is noticeable. It could be his normal conversation starter. In the midst of hundreds of campfires, there's no telling what's burning. As he meanders back to his campground, three police patrol cars roll by.
10:05 p.m. The thumping beats from a dance party fill the air where a sizable crowd has gathered by an elevated stage and a set of booming speakers. The dancers twerk, twirl and twist to the sounds of Lil' Jon. A man in a cowboy hat and vest leads the crowd from the stage, where he expresses his thoughts about the night's curfew with expletives.
10:07 p.m. A mishmash of college-age kids from Brookville, New Castle and South Bend have gathered for worship around a six-armed device they call the Bongzilla. The beer and the liquor goes into a bowl at the top. It rushes down through tubes into the mouth of the waiting collegians. They say the Bongzilla went with them on spring break to Daytona. Now it's at IMS. Who knows where its travels will take it?
10:17 p.m. Two guys walk up to the Bongzilla crowd toting a sign that says "Shooters for Hooters." One of them has a bag of jello shots in tiny little plastic cups. Their proposition is simple: Women who raise their tops get a free jello shot. Some of the women from the Bongzilla crowd are tempted but decline. One says, "Come back later after I've had a couple more drinks."
10:28 p.m. The first mention of the "Speedo Cowboy" comes from a group of partygoers on the western edge of the lot. In between matches of the flippy cup drinking game, they encourage reporters to seek out the man, presumed to be wearing only a speedo and a cowboy hat. A few moments later, he appears, leaning into a black SUV some yards away. While amused at the idea of his fame, he requests a clarification: "It's actually boxer shorts."
10:35 p.m. Jeff Bond parks his "beer cart" next to a row of portable toilets and avails himself to the facilities. When he returns, he begins to explain the wonders of his rolling party on wheels. On the back of a four-wheel flat-top cart, he's affixed an eight-gallon keg and a cooler of ice. Car stereo speakers blare music from its undercarriage. Topside, there's a bar countertop complete with cup holders. It's Bond's own creation and he's proud of it. So much so that he pays no attention to the campground nearby, where the most prominent feature is a "Boob-o-meter." It's a board with several pairs of round hole cutouts, presumably for the sizing of breasts. The pairs of holes bear labels from "mouthful" to "colossal."
"We wanted to know, really, if just two fingers fits between each woman's boob," said Kyle Marker, an Iowan who set up the device with a few veteran Coke Lot attendees. Not all patrons were as welcoming to the idea.
"We've been at the racetrack all day," Marker said. "When we came back, it was face down. I don't know if someone got pissed off or offended, but we're back now."
10:51 p.m. The dance party is no more. Security officers shut down the event, its organizers say, for fear that the crowd was growing too big. The packed dance space has dwindled to a remaining few as the police presence swells. In addition to the two plainclothes officers keeping watch nearby, a group of five officers on bikes and a sheriff's car have packed the street. Ryan Miller, a Decatur, Ind., native who put on the short-lived show, said he appreciates the security but believes they went too far. "I understand the overall idea, and I think it's a decent idea," said Miller, who's camped in the Lot for 10 years. Now, he said, he'll have to think again about coming back.
10:55 p.m. On the northwest side of the Coke Lot, a man with a camper has set up a strange game show set. There's a mini-trampoline, a karaoke machine, feather pillows and a table with several liquor bottles. But the heart of the set is a colorful wheel ready for spinning. On a microphone, the proprietor, a guy named Jerry, is urging women to step onto the set and spin the wheel. Their reward is a free Jello shot. The cost? Depends on where the arrow points? It could point to "Pillow Fight" or "Hula Hoop." But it could also point to "Flash us," "Show Your Boobs," "Spank or Be Spanked" or "Jerry Picks." There are plenty of guys standing around hopefully, but few female takers. One woman who gets an unfortunate spin walks out of the game area without delivering. Some of Jerry's middle-aged guy pals try to turn her back in, but she escapes. Some in the crowd boo. Just across the gravel road from Jerry's game show set, three police cruisers are parked, keeping an eye on the crowd nearby.
11:47 p.m. At the all-purpose food stand, at 25th and Georgetown, there's a line forming for chicken on a stick, for foot-long corn dogs and for recently fried potato chips. About 100 turkey legs warm on a grill but just shy of midnight, they are lonely birds. But business is brisk. Same is true at the wood-fired pizza place. Some of the customers are wobbly on their feet. One woman who complains about the prices asks whether she can get a corn dog if she shows one of the cooks her breasts. He declines.
12:29 a.m. Back in the Coke Lot, underneath a Purdue University flag, a guy relieves himself up against a pickup truck. Boiler Nation is well-represented in a couple of raucous campsites, one of which is hosting a dance rave. Two guys in zebra pajamas are dancing with no one and everyone.
12:50 a.m. A contingent of Wabash College guys have gathered around a table playing flippy cup, a drinking cup. Although it's an all-male school, they have met some women who have joined them. Chris Donahue, who graduated last week, says he's just glad to have one last chance to hang out with his Wabash friends. He was here last year when the shooting occurred and he's happy with the tighter security.
1:07 a.m. Several minutes into the official curfew time, a few stragglers are still meandering around the lot. Sheriff's deputy cars patrol the gravel roads, stopping every now and then to chat with one of the lot's customers. One deputy looks out from his vehicle and stares off into the sky. A Homeland Security helicopter soars overhead. "Ol' man security's flyin' that puppy low," the deputy says.
1:11 a.m. Four sheriff's deputies walk down one of the gravel streets in the Coke Lot, talking to campers and checking things out. There's not much going on. One of them notes the burgeoning pile of beer cans at the campsite of a guy who gives his name only as "Cave Man." There must be 300 empty beer cans in the pile, the work of half a dozen young men over the course of a day and a half. Three of the guys around the campfire are slumped over in their folding chairs, asleep. One of them gets tipped backwards into the pile of beer cans and awakes in anger. To calm himself, he has another beer. One of the guys says he wants to make snow angels in the beer cans — which technically would be a beer can angel. Cave Man, who says he's on his 15th beer, is a bit surly. He says the crew was reprimanded by an officer earlier and threatened with arrest for disturbing the peace for using a megaphone. He admits, after some questioning, that he was shouting profanities into the megaphone.
1:40 a.m. The four sheriff's deputies, still on their rounds, pass the campsite of Jeremy Diggs of Sharpsville and Adam Robertson of Westfield. The two campers stop and shake hands with the officers. They say they're grateful for their presence, even if they are less happy with other aspects of the security measures. The higher campground prices are "horrible," Robertson said. Almost cost-prohibitive. He also says the police seem are attentive to what's going on with the campers, but he's not sure they're keeping out interlopers. Last year, his campground was burglarized as his crew slept. He thinks there needs to be a fence around the entire Coke Lot campground. Randomly, five women show up and ask Robertson to play a song on the guitar he's holding. He starts strumming and singing "Wagon Wheel" in the spirit of Darius Rucker's version. The women are satisfied and walk away into a quiet night.
Call Star reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @ RbtKing.
Call Star reporter Jill Disis at (317) 44-6137. Follow her on Twitter: @ jdisis.