The Worst Man in The World
I waited forty minutes at a CVS yesterday. The line was long and serpentine and the whole pharmacy seemed to be in low spirits. A single woman was assigned the pick-up station and it was unclear whether her glacial pace was out of resentment towards us or whether she was trying her best. We stood there forever, like statues in the backroom of a museum. I closed my eyes and tried to envision foreverness.
Behind me were two men who bonded quickly over what we were experiencing and were getting louder and louder. As they aired out their grievances, they began to laugh and enjoy themselves.
One of the two men in particular, who through a fleeting glance backwards I sensed was a couple inches shorter than me, began to open up to his new friend very quickly. He explained to the other man, who was friendly and older and chuckled submissively in a foreign accent, that Jay-Z was actually part of a secret order that worshipped the anti-christ. He then explained, with even more indignation, that Webster’s Dictionary had gone so far as to remove the word ‘sin’ from their new editions in 2015. “Can you believe that?” he asked in a gruff and sardonic voice. “The very concept of sin is gone. Look around you. The Ten Commandments mean nothing anymore. Stealing and lying… people can do whatever they want, and without fear of being judged.” The foreign man chuckled emptily and repeated his new friends words in a skeptical guffaw: “oh yes… sin is gone!”
I stared out at aisle 3, all of which was hidden away in a plastic covering that required a lock-and-key, and I began to see what the guy meant. On a certain level: what he was saying was right. I wasn’t entirely sure it had anything to do with The Bible, but I knew modern life had turned out rather strange in that it was mostly free of judgement. I knew that, had CVS not been smart enough to board-up their moisturizers, I could’ve grabbed three of them, slipped them into my pocket, and no one would’ve said anything. In fact, any sort of “cheating” feels like it’s understood to make total sense.
When it was finally my turn, I sauntered my way over to the pick-up counter and was curtly informed that I had been standing in the wrong line the whole time. I was supposed to wait under the consultation sign, which had a line that was absurdly shorter. Fifteen minutes later my prescription was in my canvas tote and I was chugging a cappuccino down the block at a recently-opened bar. The feeling of having no power felt stuck to me. I made friends with the bartender and he poured me a lychee-martini. I drank it as I scribbled in my journal. OK, I was to make a blog. I was to somehow be huge. I was to somehow make sure I would never be stuck anywhere so useless ever again.
It was March. Things drifted slowly, pleasurably slowly, into a dark blue night. At the bar I stabbed the lychee with my little red straw and popped it into my mouth. I couldn’t afford the drink, but I was pretty sure the bartender had poured it for free and plus the CVS prescription had only been a dollar. Maybe it all balances out in some weird way, I thought. But I knew it didn’t. If the martini was gonna cost me, I knew it wasn’t within budget. The urge to exit the bar and leave my bartender-friend hanging rushed over me. I thought about the Ten Commandments, and how inapplicable these rules are when things, generally, are lacking.
I went back to the same pharmacy a week later and found myself becoming the villain. I was visibly flustered and felt less patient. I had a negative-field surrounding me and people glared when I stood behind them. Instead of waiting I fumbled through, found an excuse to cut the line, and tore my way out of there. Afterwards I sauntered my way down the avenue and thought about the pharmacies of my childhood, sterile and tiny with little security measure. I became curious, almost in a distracted way, if I would live near those kinds of pharmacies ever again.