Def Leppard + Journey + Booze + Burrito = Hangover

I'm a smart person. I make well-reasoned decisions that affect my life in a positive manner, without any negative consequences. One such decision was to attend the Def Leppard/Journey concert Wednesday night, six days before I am scheduled to take the Illinois bar exam, and get mindfucked on alcohol in the process.

At about 4:20 p.m., while I did not smoke any weed, Jeremy "Weed" Widenhofer showed up at my apartment in a full suit, desiring to change before we went to the concert. A wise decision, I thought, given that no one in the lawn at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheater (hereinafter, "FMBA") (f.k.a. The Tweeter Center, The World Music Theater, The New World Music Theater) would be wearing a suit.

Ten minutes later, we found ourselves walking down Sheffield, trying to hale a cab to take us to McGee's, from whence a bus stocked with beer would take us to the concert in exchange for thirty-five American dollars apiece.

The busses themselves were actually much better than I was expecting. I guess I was expecting school busses, since I don't really put that much faith into anything a bar does to make a tidy profit. However, these were coach busses, so that was an added bonus.

As soon as we got on the bus, we made a tactical decision to sit next to the beer cooler that was strategically placed in the aisle near the middle of the bus. For some reason, I felt that I needed to use this night as an excuse to get full-on bombed. Usually the fact that it was Wednesday is a good enough excuse, but combine that with Def Leppard and Journey and the fact that I haven't gone out drinking in an entire week and a half, and it's liver-hardening time.

The bus left a little after 5, and by the time we got to FMBA a little bit before 6:30, I had taken down six or seven Miller Lites. It should be noted that I hate Miller Lite because it always, without fail, gives me a skull fucking the next morning. Nonetheless, I figured that I had paid $35 for this bus ride, and if Miller Lite is all they got, I need to suck it up.

Our trusty bus driver, Virgil, before letting us free from his grasp, informed us that we would be leaving from the same spot he dropped us off a half-hour after the concert ended. "We are bus 4554," he explained. Just in case everyone was unclear, I announced several times to the bus that it was a palindrome. I'm pretty sure I came off sounding like Raymond from Rain Man, but I had no intentions of leaving any of these complete strangers behind in Tinley Park.

Upon our arrival, Jon "Armageddon It" Dudek and Tracy "Hysteria" Larsen were already there, staking out a spot in the center of the lawn for our viewing pleasure. Just so you're not confused, I was wearing my sleeveless Def Leppard Union Jack shirt, although at this time it was underneath my 1997 IU football "Keys to Victory" t-shirt. In case you haven't been paying attention for the past nine years, IU has not yet found said keys.

Just as the show was starting, Sean "Open Arms" Riesenbeck, Bridget "Faithfully" Spanbauer, and Katie "Wheel In the Sky" Wegner showed up to round out the septet (that means a group of seven people, for you Purdue grads out there).

Journey and Steve Perry, in case you haven't heard, went their separate ways (ah-thank you!). So, they hired some guy that apparently sounds just like Steve Perry. We'll call him SP2. It turns out that SP2 was unable to perform on this fair night, due to a bout with laryngitis, gout, scabies, the King's Evil, or something like that. So, they brought in some guy that apparently sounds just like SP2. We'll call him SP3.

SP3, god help him, looks like Justin Guarini of American Idol and From Justin to Kelly fame. While he did sound reasonably like Steve Perry, I was confused as to why the drummer was also signing several of the songs. Did SP3 not know all of Journey's vast and complicated catalogue? For shit's sake, they've been playing the same twelve songs every night for the past 20 years.

To test our mettle, God decided to send some rain our way. As you can see from this picture, we weren't really worried about it:



Soon enough, I was John Bonham Drunk -- or, more appropriately for the occasion, Steve Clark Drunk. (For those of you who are not Def Leppard savants, Steve Clark is their former guitarist who once registered a BAC higher than the one John Bonham had when Bonham died after taking 40 shots of vodka. Said BAC did not kill Steve Clark. Heroin did a year or so later. For those of you who don't know who John Bonham is, please stop reading this and shoot yourself in the face with an elephant musket.) I called more than my fair share of people "smelly pirate hookers." Women mostly.

Some shifty-eyed hippies tried to set up camp right in front of us, where there had previously been an unfettered line of sight to the stage. After a hippie chick nicely put her blanket down, fully spread out, she turned around toward the stage, fully expecting that her blanket would be fully spread out when she looked down. What she didn't count on was that my foot has a habit of kicking blankets of dirty hippies who try to block my view of Def Leppard. So, I flipped the blanket over a little, and then moved in a little closer so that it was impossible for them to fully spread it our again. Wisely, they gathered their patchouli-soaked belongings and went somewhere where they were less likely to anger me.

After Journey finished their set, the crowd was frothing with anticipation for Def Leppard. Jon, Bridget, and Tracy could barely contain themselves.



When Def Leppard came on, first Weed decided to tuck one arm in his shirt to pay homage to Rick Allen, who (as you may be aware) tragically lost his left arm in a December 31, 1984 car accident outside Sheffield, England. I'm guessing Rick can at least button his shirt correctly. As you can see, Bridget and I were not impressed.



When Def Leppard started, my IU shirt came off, and I got a little emotional.

Def Leppard started off with "Let's Get Rocked," then followed that up with another one from Adrenalize, "Make Love Like a Man," which I thought could have been removed and substituted for a better song. They only played two songs off of their new album, Yeah!, which is all covers of '70s British songs that influenced them, and they went with Badfinger's "No Matter What" and David Essex's "Rock On." Other songs they played (I think) were "Brining on the Heartbreak," "Rocket," "Armageddon It," "Animal," "Hysteria," "Rock of Ages," and "Foolin'." Their finale, as you might imagine, was "Love Bites" and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" (which is my favorite song of all-time). Before "Love Bites" came on, Bridget arrogantly bet me $20 that the next two songs would be "Love Bites" and "Pour Some Sugar On Me." Firmly believing that she was not some sort of song-predicting gyspy, I made the bet. I lost. But in reality, everyone won.

This picture accurately portrays the overall mood during Def Leppard:



Despite what that picture may imply, I was coherent enough to make it back to the bus after the show. There was not a conceivable reason why I was one of the only people on the bus back to McGee's that was not passed out. It didn't hurt that I spent about 20 minutes talking to Greg Weeser*, who lives in LA and is also a huge Def Leppard fan. Looking back on it, I was probably that guy, but I'm not sure if it's possible to be that guy if no one else on the bus is awake.

Upon our arrival back at McGee's, Weed was certain that we needed to get burritos, as is the fashion in these parts. I concurred, so we walked from McGee's to a burrito place about a block south of LaBamba that I was sure I'd never been to before (although Greg "Bicep Deep" Bohmann has assured me that I made him go there once -- Greg, you were right). My piping hot pork burrito went down all too easily.

I'm not sure that I've ever given off the gay vibe quite like I did walking home from the burrito joint. Let me set the scene for you. Weed and I are walking from the burrito place, north on Halsted, towards Wrightwood. He is trying to convince me that he is going to just catch a cab home from where we are, while I am trying to convince him that he needs to get his suit, shoes, and briefcase the fuck out of my house.

Either way, he needs to go to the ATM, so we walk across Halsted, and we make our way toward the Chase ATM just north of Wrightwood. We are still arguing loudly, which turns out to be a very bad thing. There are two mildly attractive girl walking towards us. They ask where they can catch the Red Line. In response, I yell, "Just go that way, to Fullerton. And -- hold on a second -- while you're at it, can you please tell this guy to get his shit out of my apartment?!?!" In case you forgot, I am wearing a sleeveless Union Jack t-shirt at this point, with my red IU shirt tucked into the back of my shorts and hanging down like some sort of tail. One of the girls says something along the lines of, "Uhh, I don't want to get in the middle of that." Then I realized how gay I sounded, so I responded, "No! No! NO! I'm not gay. Neither of us are gay. Oh my God. I just want him to get his suit that he left in my apartment out of there so I can go to sleep."

This might have been even more gay than the first statement. One girl responded, "Okay, do whatever." All I could say was, "I swear to God I'm not gay, despite what I'm wearing. I have a wife. I'm wearing a ring and everything." Then I started laughing out loud at the situation. Weed, still in the ATM booth, was also laughing. The chicks had actually gone into LaBamba to ask for directions, rather than trust whatever I had told them (even though I was right). We should have toyed with them a little more, although they didn't want to hear anything that was coming out of our mouths.

Weed did get his shit out of my apartment and caught a cab back to his place in North Park (a delightful little Scandinavian and Arab neighborhood in Chicago's Northwest Side), where I'm sure his wife was overjoyed to see and smell him. I assume he made it home alright, but then again this is the same guy who once wandered off on the way home from the bars when he was visiting me in Bloomington during law school, somehow getting lost in Bloomington (where he went to school for four years), and ended up breaking into an office building and sleeping under a desk.

I crawled into bed with little fanfare and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

At 6:45am yesterday, I found myself awakened by the incessant screaming of my alarm clock. Damn Jessie and her having to go to work on a Thursday. It was at this point where I realized that I needed to fall back asleep before evil things happened to me.

My head felt like it was giving birth to a rabid porcupine. While most of the time eating a burrito after a night of heavy drinking lessens the chances of getting a hangover, sometimes burritos can come back to haunt you in the most nefarious of ways. The burrito I ate staged a surprise massive guerilla assault on my stomach lining, coming painfully close to a violent coup. The Sandinistas would have been proud.

While Jessie was getting ready for work, I readied myself for what I assumed was the inevitable sprint to the bathroom to pray to the porcelain gods. I tried several times to get her attention, but my pathetic, muted screams of "Jessie" could not be heard five feet away, much less downstairs. Eventually she came back upstairs and I was able to muster the strength to ask her to please bring be a glass of water and a couple Advil. I would have asked for Excedrin Migraine, which we all know to be the cure-all for hangovers, but it has caffeine in it and I refused to believe that being awake would benefit me in any way.

Through a minor miracle I did not puke, and I was able to fall back asleep after Jessie left for work around 8:30, awaking around 10:30 or 11 with no headache and only minor gastral issues. I did, however, look like a big bag of pale shit. No matter how bad you think you had it yesterday morning, at least you didn't have to wake up and look at this in the mirror:

I look like I was given several pounds of Valium and then knocked around with a frying pan. Somewhere there is a dead hooker who's in better shape than I was yesterday morning. I'm surprised I found the strength and ability to put on a t-shirt and actually hold my camera phone up. Rock on!