Ronnie Donberg has been to NASCAR races before but had never been invited to a tailgate party until last weekend’s Samsung 500 at Texas Speedway. It was there, in the parking lot, that Donberg (known as Ron-Don at the Sears automotive department in which he works) became extremely agitated that he was the subject of an ingenious practical joke concocted by his newfound, so-called, friends.

“I kept waiting for someone to shout ‘Pee Jay’ at me or just come clean, but the thing that made me madder than hell was that no one ever said anything,” Donberg said. “I mean, that’s really a poor way to treat the fella who volunteered to bring fifty pounds of ice to your party.”

Indeed, the controversy at the tailgate centered on Ron-Don’s contribution to the festivities, ten five pound bags of Red-D-Ice that were procured just down the road from the speedway.

“Alright,” Donberg explained, “I show up with this ice and everybody’s all ‘Ron-Don’s here!’ and we start tearing open bags of ice and funneling it into coolers full of warm beer. The beer cools down and we start slamming ‘em back. Everything is cool for a couple of hours, right?”

That’s when things went south for the first-time tailgater.

“So I open up the BL cooler and all the beer on the top has been taken, so I reach down into my ice for a super-cold one. It’s cold, all right, but it’s also wet. That’s when I discovered that someone has been stealing ice out of there and replacing it with water.”

Ron-Don kept a close eye on the coolers for the rest of the afternoon, but invariably he would be distracted by a game of washers or the antics of a fellow tailgater just long enough for some smart-aleck to steal more of his ice and dump more water in.

“I couldn’t even enjoy the race — all I could think about was some jerk walking around enjoying all of my nice clean ice, and us stuck with his dirty crap water. That nasty water touches the lip of the beer cans! I could have sat by my refrigerator with a bucket all night, but, no, I bought real ice — the fancy kind in the big cabinet at the gas station. And you know it’s good ice because you open that glass door and the ice has just made it freezing cold in there,” the young man complained.

Amazingly, Donberg’s misfortune was not the only one at the tailgate on Sunday.

“Some other poor bastard had his charcoal stolen by some cretin who tried to cover up his crime with ash.” Ultimately, Ron-Don concluded he’ll just go back to attending the races, “and leave tailgating to the criminals.”