Royal's Sin City Journal

Your here and then …your gone

by Royal Hopper

 

You walk into the room with trepidation slightly behind the people who accompany you _ the stale smells of humaness of body odor, stale socks and life lost hanging in the air… The remains of a meal and two large drinks sit stale on the counter in the back of the room,. The red brown traces of food smelling of stale potatoes and sauce and onions sit on e the center of plate
The lemons in the tall glasses are just starting to turn a little brown and the ice long since melted and either drunk or evaporated. There are bits of personal property here and there but the room is sparse and somewhat Spartan.
You look to the right (cant be more exact privacy reasons) and see some blood .. This was someone’s last day on earth. That day they enjoyed room service and two tall lemon filled glasses of some Vegas style drink a day of gambling and then they were gone.
One thing living in the City of Sin has taught me is that life and the end of life isn’t like in the movies most of the time. One minute your a person with hopes and desires, favorite foods, favorite drinks, a favorite TV show favorite shoes …a history and stories to tell and then suddenly your gone …invisible ..a thing now ….
Later that day you see a young man walking across some place the law says he is not supposed to be …everyone watches as you politely tell the young man’s parents he cant be in the casino because everyone notices youth and the power of youth and potential. They even notice the 30 something couple walking across the casino sarcastically overdressed and rolling their eyes at the “peasants” who notice them. From their conversations they are not geniuses and may be as dumb as rocks . They are not invisible and are not gone.
Still later an older man at the bar is obviously sick and cannot tend to himself. He immediately gets attention from the staff of the hotel/casino and from surrounding friends . They call him coach and are clearly worried about him. He is not invisible …..
back to the empty room.

As you enter the room your companions who are much higher on the casino food chain look to you for reassurance and obviously nervous about the routine but unnerving part of their job they must now do. You manage a fake nod of bored confidence out of years of practice…but the sights in that quiet stale room will stay with you for decades to come. You leave the room realizing you have seen a dark Gothic painting of someone’s last day in the City of Sin …one that will be cleaned up and ready to be rented to someone else’s memorable decadent day in the City that’s for its own survival has learned to be cold and distant ..to smile reassuringly and pretend to know the answers pretend to be untouched.
I cant tell you precisely where this happened for privacy reasons but suffice it to say it was in one of the 100,000 hotel rooms in the City of Sin. It is a constant melodrama here… People come here near the end perhaps wanting one last fit of decadence before the reaper comes to claim them or perhaps just out of habit if their youth and then they are gone … just gone….

That’s life and death in the City of Sin
Love You Sinners Rock on