The thing about Monaco is that there are no fat people within its environs. I hadn’t seen any signs posted that announced the verboten nature of porky pies within the nation state’s small limits, but there are other more subtle ways of getting what you want when you have your own kingdom perched on the fat rump of France. Monaco police are famous for being somewhat unpleasant. In this sense, Monaco is the true bastion of equality in the world. Saying, “Do you know who I am?” to one of these cops is just asking to be bent over your expensive shiny Bentley in order to receive a rogering of rather rude proportions. These guys take the art of not giving a shit to new and impressive heights of disdain. So if anyone can keep out the fatties from the principality, it’s the boys in blue on the Azure Coast.
Monaco is a feast for the senses, but mostly the eyes. The women are thin and beautiful, from the age of fourteen to somewhere north of sixty. The men dress like they have just walked off the set from shooting a scene with Don Draper. The gardens are manicured to within an inch of their frangipani lives and the people who tend them do so in the extremely early hours of the morning so that the entire set seems dressed like magic, but mostly so the citizens do not have to lay eyes on them.
I had come to the city in order to watch broom broom cars go round and round the city’s impressive circuit. It was a last minute decision fueled by optimism and a steady trust that the EU wouldn’t change their travel restrictions at the last minute, thus putting me out of a not so pretty penny. Evidently, most people had decided that the risk wasn’t worth it, as me and my entourage had one of the prime stands mostly to ourselves. This made the viewing of the race extremely relaxing. To top it off, what few viewing neighbors that we did have around us seemed to be almost entirely comprised of young ladies on the cusp of their first major affairs. Oh what fun we had; we danced, we laughed, we sang, all through the rivers of our minds. Such glory, such glory, my friends.
The only issue was the masks. Since this was the first F1 race in over a year that had fully opened its doors to the public, the local authorities had been forced to also put on a show of complete obedience to the Covid cult. Masks were thus obbligato. Not only that, but they had teenage mask enforcers ready to pounce on you for any mask indiscretion. We were perfectly happy for any of the girls to come up and enforce the rules upon us, for obvious and lecherous reasons. But instead of the girls we got a pimply faced Goebbels in the making. Mask Nazi stood at the bottom of the stand leaning against the railing with his back to the race and his puny arms folded. His only earthly desire that we could tell was the sheer joy that he obtained from bounding up the stairs and accosting some hapless individual whose mask had fallen below the level of his forehead.
To counter the frenzied enthusiasm of Mask Nazi, we decided to order a steady stream of beer cans from which we sipped with insipid gusto so as to make the drink last as long as possible. To drink meant to dis-mask. But our collective abuse of the mask protocol only caused a great rage to build up in young Mask Nazi. Finally able to no longer stand our flagrant disregard for all he held dear, he sprinted up to the top of the stand and accosted my friend sitting next to me in a disturbed contralto. The essence of his approach was to exclaim that my friend had not been drinking often enough to not wear the mask. We expressed some doubt as to the veracity of his claims, but he then screamed that his victim had last drunk from his can over five minutes’ ago!
I took a nervous sip from my own alcohol vestibule as the scene played out.
Mask Nazi flounced back down the stairs leaving us in some bemusement. I turned to the two teenage lovelies sitting beside us and offered to them the reason for the young man’s hysterics was because he didn’t have any friends. The young ladies laughed in agreement and then said that it was most probably sexual frustration. From the looks on their faces they were not about to help the unfortunate young man with his predicament of l’amour.
We then turned around as we were startled by several rows of spectators sitting behind us who were in hysterics at the proceedings. Bolstered with the group solidarity we moved on to eating packets of M&Ms, one small candy at a very long time. To be honest, we almost got as much enjoyment out of keeping an eye on the steady mental deterioration of Mask Nazi as we did out of watching the broom broom cars going past our prime spot.
“So stupid these masks,” I said at one point.
“It doesn’t matter anyway as we’ve all had the vaxx,” one of my companions replied.
I looked at him in a confused manner. “I haven’t had the vaxx,” I said.
Their next assumption was that I had just been unlucky and that I would be getting it very soon.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m not putting that shit in my arm.”
They regarded me with looks that made me feel like I had suddenly discovered myself to be obese and that somehow I had been found out after slipping into the city. How did this fatty get past the guards? Quick, either toss him out or get him on a major weight loss program right now, and I mean right now! We’re not screwing around here! This is serious business. And anyway, what’s a little foetus serum between friends? What indeed.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.