Tommy Angelo

This is a photograph of the biggest room at the 2010 World Series of Poker, minus the people. You know how we’ve been trained to think of a “football field” as a standard unit of area? Like a hectare or acre, except that we actually know how big it is? I paced off this room. It’s 120 yards long and 50 yards wide. Now that’s an area I can conceive! Until you fill it full of chairs with people on them, all playing poker. Then it becomes infinite and hivelike. And where I want to be.

So I’m sitting in this humongous room, about ten hours after this picture was taken, when the hive was buzzing, and I’m playing poker, and I’m looking around at all these poker dealers. Where the hell did they come from? There was like, billions of them. Where are they housed during the 10.5 months per year that the WSOP is not going on?

The next morning, on my walk, I ventured to the backside of the Rio complex and beyond, deep into the seamy underbelly of Las Vegas, where the delivery trucks roam. I came upon a large lot with a warehouse-type building on it. Barbed wire topped the chain link fence that surrounded the lot. Who are they keeping out? I wondered. Who are they keeping in?

The building had big letters on it. Las Vegas something or other.

As I moved closer, all was revealed, and the mystery was solved. Conveniently located right next to the biggest demand for dealers the world has ever seen, they have a dealer manufacturing and storage facility.

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The air pushed on the leaf, and the leaf pushed equally on the air, yet they both moved without resistance.

But none of that even occurred to me until afterward.

I was walking where I walk, and the strangest thing happened. A leaf fell from a tree. Nothing strange there. I saw it fall. That was a bit unusual. I heard it fall. Okay, now we’re talking weird.

I didn’t hear it while it was falling. It was when it hit the ground. We now enter the attempt-to-describe-the-indescribable zone…

It sounded just like what it should sound like when a leaf drops on the ground, except much louder. With more of a splashing quality than one might expect from the solid earth. Kuh-TOOSSSH, like how a boy mimics an explosion, except much shorter.

I saw the whole thing unfold, just a few feet in front of me, right before my very ears. I noticed the leaf at about eye level, and I watched it all the rest of the way down, so I knew exactly when the moment of splashdown was going to happen. This episode begs several questions: Did my brain copy and paste some sounds from my mind’s database on top of the actual sound? Did I actually hear what I heard, in the physiological sense, because I happened to be paying attention? If a leaf falls on my walk path and I’m not watching, does it really make a splash?