Wear Your Mask, Unless You're Actively Smoking

Smoke and swirling glasses of ice and bourbon. Doubled-up coffee straws and maraschino cherries dipped in Whiskey Sours and Vodka Cranberries. Round black-puck ash trays with one or two embering cigarettes docked in the notches around the rim. The sting of a room filled with tobacco smoke wets my eyes, dragging across my tastes buds—second hand, third hand, fourth hand vice. Ringing and dinging, a thousand little lights glimmering every direction I look. Shades of ocean blue, blood red, fruity orange, and sunny yellow rounding the wheel of unlimited fortune. Hundreds, thousands, millions even—pulsating numbers at each angle around the clock. Just spin and win.

The ringing, the dinging, the endless sound of spinning numbers, sevens matched and unmatched, arms cranked, gears turn, spend twenty and win ten. The floor is a thousand shapes, plastered atop one another, faded from the struts of the drunk. Groups of strutters gathered around rectangle tables, throwing dice, sevens matched and unmatched. More bodies semi-circled around card tables, flipping chips, sliding between their fingers, up and down and up again, dropped in little clay-plinking piles. Behind them, more strutters stare on, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, watching the night's games, hoping for the strangers whose hats are in the ring to walk away richer than before. Hoping and praying—the dinging colorful sea of smoke and swirling glasses is making me blind, dumb, and deaf. Overdosed on all that hoping.

I’m walking through the casino lobby, my mask unknowingly tucked in my front right pocket. I’ve passed two or three signs now, all stating just how required masks are in this place. My chin and nose and lips are free, smoky casino air able to easily waft in and out of my half-drunk lungs. In and out, no flaps to sift through.

“Sir, make sure you’ve got a mask on,” a sudden voice sounds to my right, reminding me of my rule breaking. I nod, dip my fingers into my pocket, and draw out the flimsy cloth. The same one I wore yesterday, and the day before that. Around one ear, then the other, over the mouth and nose, just like I’m supposed to.

I’m outside now, under the October sky of Las Vegas. A miracle of moderate temperatures, saved and spared from the beating rays that flood the summer months of southern Nevada. The mask is off, my face diaper back in my front right pocket. Out of sight, out of mind. I’m outside, free to smell the hearty human-musk that taints the atmosphere of the Strip. And boy, does it! It’s wonderful and the juices of all the humans that strut and shuffle mix together and it’s all happening out here on the street. The homeless hang their signs around their necks and tell the stories of war in Vietnam. The artists are starving and shoving CDs in your hands and playing out their ‘lil rhymes from their tube speakers. The fiddle players slide, the saxophone jazz blowers keep up their blowing. They blow all night under the sky of the southern and western desert and it’s all magnificent. We smile and we all see it as it happens.

The bridge concludes and it’s back inside again, trotting across another casino. Lights and neon, humming wildly, vibrating your bones to life and reminding that this place sleeps when it’s dead. Rests when the sun is high in the sky. That’s the time to shut your eyes. Until then, their open and peeled and caked in smoke and raped by stimulus. And I’m here for it, living for it, pounding another drink, another sour lemonade mixed with liquor and I’m all here for it and feelin’ right.

“Sir, make sure you’ve got a mask on,” another voice refrains, always harkening the 2020 chorus in the breaks of 2021—October, months down the line. Fifteen days to slow the spread grew like vines around the rest of time, for the rest of time, into the new normal, the one we’re in now. And if you think we’re not just look around. Don’t forget your puke bucket, the one that fastens around your ears and hides away your mouth and nose. Make sure it’s on. And mine is again, back out of my sweaty pocket.

Muffled scents of tobacco. The recycled musk of liquor I’ve already drank rushing out my mouth and up my nose and I’m breathing it all back in and getting drunker off my own stomach bubbles. It’s turning, moisturized and dewy beneath the cloth, rubbing my lips raw and I’m all drunk on it and shuffling anyway. In and out and in again, just like a good Vegas-goer.

Sign after sign, row after row—wear your mask, wear it good and tight. The casino needs it, beckons it out. They want to stay open and for their sake you wear it. It’s backward and no one asks why, we just fall in line and do it anyways. I want to stop and ask and make them tell me to put it on. I want to disobey because I’m tired and wafting in my own gurgled fumes. You could light a match in my cloth-trough and my face would blow out the back of my skull and I’d finally be free from the upside thinking. Everyone’s wearing and being told to wear and doing it, and so am I and I’m just left wondering and laughing at the stupid charade, all the same.

So I take it off and I wander and breathe deep the skunk of cigarettes and joints and it’s all Vegas and lovely. It’s all damaging, all the same. But I sand-sift it through my lungs anyways, because that’s why I’m here. Not to obey the laws of the universe, the laws of vice, the rules of the human spirit. I’m here under the beats of fall in the city that fails to slumber to let it all out, sweat it all out. So I am.

“Sir, make sure you’ve got a mask on,” and the chorus flies back through my head like a gnat and I turn and I give that half-baked, cynical smile. The one filled with teeth that are gouging my tongue. I imagine the backtalk and it excites me, I won’t lie. It riles me up a little, just to be contrarian, just to scream and howl out the logic as I see it and stump ‘em and leave ‘em wondering. But they wouldn’t, they’d slap a face-cover right over these big lips and hide away my fading smile because that’s who I am, and that’s who I shouldn’t be. Take it away like a prisoner and leave it forgotten in the hotel dungeon, beat and broken under the weight of compliance. But I’m wearing it, and making big, exaggerated movements before the chorus singers just because I’m that asshole, the one-of-a-million. Roll your eyes, and I’ll fuckin’ do it again and not care because I’m drunk on my own stomach acid.

So we sit and we gamble, my horde of strutters, still inside, still under the mirror ceilings and rows of golden bulbs. We laugh and cackle like groups of dogs, wrangling up more free drinks and tipping our dealer. It’s a good time and our masks are lowered, secured like chin-straps under our heads, because we’re swirling liquor and puffing on cigars. Our mouths are occupied, always occupied. Either sitting or sucking or slurping so the face diaper can come off and the teeth can come out and the beaming grins show of a bunch of monkeys in a place built for monkeys. It’s all in place, all as it should be, and unless you’re actively smoking that cigarette or drinking that bourbon, you’re mask better be up. We’ll kill you one way or another.