NEW YORK — Dr. Mark Miller turned down a homemade mask today that could help protect him from COVID-19 after seeing that it featured album art from the Blaze Bayley-led Iron Maiden lineup, disillusioned staff confirmed.
“You kidding me? I’d rather pump a gallon of coronavirus-infected mucus directly into my lungs than be seen wearing that trash,” said Miller, standing barefaced over an intensive-care patient being treated for COVID-19. “Sure, the songwriting is fine; the riffs, all that. It’s just the vocals — it’s the goddamn vocals! It sounds like someone doing Iron Maiden karaoke.”
“You don’t have Maiden without Bruce Dickinson, alright?” he added. “I don’t want to expose my patients to something arguably much, much worse than the disease they’re already infected with.”
The person who donated the makeshift mask upcycled the shirt for almost the same exact reason Dr. Miller refused it.
“I’ve had that shirt in my garage since ’95,” said semi-generous gifter Wayne McGowan. “A buddy of mine saw them on ‘The X Factor’ tour after I refused to go with him. He dropped $50 on this piece of garbage at the merch booth and gave it to me for my birthday as a gag, knowing it would piss me off. I only ever used it to clean up cat puke, and now I’m wondering if maybe knowing the shirt existed is what made my cat puke so much. When I heard people were making masks with filters out of old shirts to donate to hospital workers, I couldn’t get rid of this thing fast enough.”
Vanessa Stone, an operations coordinator at Mount Sinai Hospital, confirmed this isn’t the first homemade mask to be rejected by medical staff.
“This isn’t necessarily a unique case,” said Stone, wearing a mask featuring Power Trip’s debut album “Manifest Decimation.” “Every day we get deliveries of hundreds of perfectly fine masks, ready for heavy duty use on the front line by medical professionals. It’s just that most of these donated masks feature shitty bands or albums — that’s where the real shortage comes in. Look, no one wants to be caught dead wearing a ‘Saint Anger’ shirt, let alone a ‘Saint Anger’ mask. Just because we work in a hospital caring for the sick in this critical time doesn’t mean we don’t also care about our cred.”
Mount Sinai maintenance staff are reportedly running the incinerator day and night to burn the overwhelming amount of masks made from discarded Trapt merchandise.