WELD DONE (WELDER)

Glen Mooney points to a chalk-sized strip of warm, bubbly steel.

"If you make it look that good," he says, "I'll go work at the paper and you can stay here."

No, that wasn't me on the roof of the Monte Carlo in January. I waited until now to try welding.

Mooney is one of 16 certified welders working the 22,000-square-foot shop floor at Southwest Steel in Henderson. And he's about to become one of 17, because I just took my welding exam this morning. Before allowing me near a real project, Southwest required my certification by the American Welding Society. (Any possibility of my skirting safety rules, if it ever existed, died in the $100 million Monte Carlo fire, which was reportedly started by welders working without the required fire lookout and heat-resistant mats.)

"You ready?" Mooney asks as he hands me the nozzle of his Lincoln LN9 wire feeder.

I am about to help convert a 100-square-foot steel plate into the landing for an emergency exit stairway at Encore at Wynn Las Vegas. Currently, the plate is tacked to its supporting structure. But it needs to be joined more securely, with 3 inches of weld for every 12 inches of joint.

Welding dates back to the Bronze Age which, without it, might have gone down as the Age of Bronze Pieces That Won't Stick Together. The incessant manual pounding of heated metal continued until 1800, when Sir Humphry Davy -- probably motivated by lack of sleep -- discovered the electric arc.

"No pressure or anything," Mooney says, "but anything you screw up, I have to fix."

The results of my certification exam won't be ready for 30 minutes, the time it takes for my test joint to be dipped in muriatic acid and analyzed for structural integrity. But my Southwest supervisors are allowing me to weld in the meantime because they were surprised by how decent my work appeared -- especially the ones who have read "Fear and Loafing" before.

I squeeze the trigger on the LN9, sending a thin steel wire through the electric arc near the nozzle. The welder's job is to lay the resulting molten wire at a 45-degree angle between the surfaces to be joined without setting any hotels on fire.

"Sizzifizzzz!" the device screams like bacon frying through a stereo speaker set to maximum volume and placed 2 inches from my eardrum.

The sound of welding, by the way, is soothing compared to the sight. Unlike most things your parents warned will make you blind, welding actually can. The arc ray is only a pinprick of light, but it glows brighter than the entire midday sun. To compensate, welding mask faceplates are tinted darker than the side windows on Snoop Dogg's Cadillac.

Right now, however, smell tops my list of most-overwhelmed senses. A plume of noxious smoke has billowed up and under my mask, triggering my cough reflex and blocking my view of the crease.

"Don't worry," Mooney says as I gasp. "Only the state of California recognizes it as carcinogenic, and we don't work there."

Mooney, 32, grew up in Warwick, R.I., thinking he would become a police officer.

"I wasn't really educated on the compensation, though, until I already decided to go in that direction," he said earlier. "For the money I would get paid, I figured, I might as well work with my hands, because I'm really good at mechanical things."

Mooney dropped out of college and answered a help-wanted ad for welding, which at Southwest pays $13 an hour to start. Mooney says he enjoys the vocation because "you get to see what you build from beginning to end."

Southwest, where Mooney has worked since January, has fabricated parts of the Las Vegas monorail, the World Market Center and the Blue Man Group's Venetian stage. Mooney's favorite work is now on display at McCarran International Airport.

"There are some exposed columns going through the entrance at the top that I specifically welded," Mooney said. "Millions of people see that, and I know they're not paying attention. But a welder would look at those welds and say, 'Wow, that guy knows what he's doing.' "

Upon examining my work, once the smoke clears, Mooney has quite the opposite reaction. I know because he's reaching for what he calls "the grinder," a machine whose main purpose is to gouge off unwanted welds. (Mine deviated nearly an inch above the crease.)

The shower of painful sparks unleashed by this contraption reminds me of July Fourth. It also reminds me of all the skin surfaces I neglected to cover.

"That's nothing," Mooney says. "Try getting flash burn some time."

Not only is an arc ray brighter than the midday sun, it also contains more cornea-scarring UV radiation. Flash burn, also called photokeratitis or welder's flash, is one of those injuries people tend to allow themselves to suffer only once per lifetime.

"It feels like someone grabs the back of your head and whitewashes your eyes in sand," Mooney says.

And Mooney -- who was welding for the General Dynamics Corp. in Rhode Island at the time of his flash burn -- was wearing a mask.

"The light was reflecting off a polished weld beneath me and shooting up underneath," he explains.

My technique has been on the upswing since Mooney positioned me away from the smoke belched by my nozzle. Not that there was any other direction for it to swing, but by my third weld, I'm quite adequate. In addition, I have learned to perfectly execute a flip. This is the delicate downard head nod that sends one's faceplate gingerly into place without a slam. It is important not only because it communicates coolness to nearby welders, but because the welder's hands must be in position before any work commences. (They're too dark to see through the mask.)

"Decent," Mooney commends my latest weld. "So what jobs you got for me at the newspaper?"

Before I can answer, Southwest's quality control manager, David Bean, has some news to deliver about my welding exam.

"You almost passed," he says, pointing out "slag pockets in the root of the weld" and a "greater than 30-second undercut" on my test joint.

I nod -- not so forcefully as to cause a flip, but just enough to give Bean the impression that I know what in the world he's talking about.

My welds must all be gouged out and redone by someone else. There will be no welding legacy for me to point out to my children while we stand in an Encore fire exit.

Oh well. The color my face got from all those UV rays should last at least a week.

Watch video of Levitan welding at www.lvrj.com/columnists/Corey_Levitan.html. Fear and Loafing runs Mondays in the Living section. Levitan's previous columns are posted at fearandloafing.com. If you have a Fear and Loafing idea, e-mail clevitan@review journal.com or call (702) 383-0456.