by Alex Wellen
“Got to get my ILY ratio up,” I whisper.
Mac Daddy gives me the silent treatment, his microprocessor always humming, always judging.
The six o’clock newscast launches with the urgency of an apocalypse as Pamela Worth tosses to a reporter in the field, standing outside Simpson Pharmaceuticals. I feel for him, standing there like a jackass. What’s he supposed to say? Thanks, Pam. I’m standing outside Simpson Pharmaceuticals. This is what the building looks like when it’s closed. About an hour ago … it was open.
Our anchor needs to lighten up. Nothing a few shadow puppets couldn’t fix. How would Pamela Worth look with bunny ears? I wonder.
“What’s an ILY?” Paige curiously whispers over my shoulder, studying the horizontal lines of the stacked bar chart.
“Yewp,” I yip, startled by the visit. My tiny outburst prompts Worth to flub a line on live television. Paige and I clench our teeth in unison. Pamela Worth is such a witch. Paige will likely pay for this later.
“What’s what?” I whisper back, frantically covering the screen with a splayed hand.
“Mm-hmm,” Paige says skeptically. “Make sure you watch my segment,” she demands, and then she runs away.
I study my chart. In Mac Daddy’s humble opinion, I should propose on a Wednesday. Do it on a Wednesday and maximize the surprise. This makes total sense seeing as Wednesday is generally reserved for Gregory, the other man in Paige’s life. Most Wednesdays, Paige and I are lucky if we speak.
With love, romance, and affection at an all-week low, I’ll spring the ring. She’ll never see it coming.
“YOU’RE quiet,” she says as we exit the Oakland Bay Bridge.
“Am I?” I ask her, my eyes fixed on the road.
I prefer Paige in civilian clothes, without all the pancake makeup, the conservative hairstyle, and TV attire. Sitting next to me in low-cut denims and a black tank top, her jet-black hair held in a haphazard updo, bubble-gum-smelling lip gloss, I want to ask her to marry me right now.
“You didn’t say anything about my TV segment,” she complains.
“What do you mean? I said I loved it, like, three times.”
“But what did I say right before telling people to catch Arnold in theaters?”
“When you say ‘theater,’ why do you make it a long ‘a’?” I ask her.
“What do you say? Theater?” Paige says, hitting the first syllable.
“Yeah, heater, like a normal person. You’re not British, you know.”
“It’s more fun to say theater than heater,” she informs me. “Did you or didn’t you hear what I said on-air?”
I shrug.
Paige shifts into her broadcasting voice: “Kumquat may, nothing’s going to stop the original Terminator from telling fans: ‘I’ll be back.’”
“Bull,” I laugh. “You did not.”
“Watch it on TiVo. You’ll see. Time to pay the piper.”
With one hand on the wheel, I reach into my back pocket. But Paige is disappointed to see me pull out my cell phone instead.
“Don’t worry, I’m no welsher. I’ll pay.” I hit number 4 on my speed dial. “Salami, black olives, and fresh tomahto?” I confirm.
Paige says “tomahto;” I say “tomayto.”
“Hang up, please,” she pleads suddenly.
“Three Brothers!” shouts the grumpy man on the other end of the line.
I look to Paige for some direction.
“Hello? Speak!” demands the pizza guy.
Then it hits me: a moment of clarity. I know exactly what she’s thinking; I know exactly what she’s going to say; and I know exactly how she’s going to say it.
Tired of waiting for my pizza order, one of the Three Brothers, presumably the Rude One, hangs up.
“Don’t be mad,” she insists.
“Don’t do it.”
“But I have to,” she says. “Daddy’s all alone. I didn’t leave him any dinner. The laundry’s piling up.”
“And the gutters need cleaning. Firewood that needs chopping. A spice rack that needs alphabetizing,” I say.
“Don’t be mean.”
“No, you don’t be mean. I thought we had this custody battle all worked out. Gregory gets you Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and I get whatever’s left. Now you’ve got him muscling in on my Thursdays?”
I exit the 101. Paige puts her hand on my lap and starts rubbing my thigh, slowly and seductively. She leans over and kisses my neck. We swerve slightly onto the shoulder.
“Just don’t be mad,” she whispers.
“And what about Scrabble?”
“I must admit, nothing gets me hotter than a triple-word score,” she sighs. “‘Q’ me, Andy, oh ‘Q’ me,” she says, biting my earlobe.
I’m going to crash. I take a hard right onto her street, pull over one house short of Gregory’s, and turn off the engine. I can see his pudgy silhouette reclining in his ratty olive chair. Paige and I mash faces, grabbing, groping, kissing, tugging, squeezing. We round first base and sprint toward second.
“Don’t go in,” I huff, my eyes focused on the bay window to his living room. “Come home with me. I’m more fun than he is.”
Gregory’s silhouette stands. I quickly disengage.
“Sunday … I promise,” she says, catching her breath and adjusting herself.
I pull the car forward another twenty yards and Paige is home.
“Kiss me,” she commands. With one foot already out the door she holds out her cheek.
I present my own cheek and she kisses it.
“No, that’s me kissing you.” She laughs, longing for affection. “Kiss your girlfriend.”
She holds out her cheek again and I rub my cheek up against hers Eskimo-style. Paige laughs a second time.
“I love you, Andy,” she says, closing the car door.
I nod, but say nothing. Fifteen paces later, I’m alone.
Seven. Seven ILYs. Seven “I love yous,” just like Mac Daddy predicted, and yet his chart is way off: she says it, but I love her more.
CHAPTER 4
Deflected
THE story behind Day’s Pharmacy is the story of Ringer’s Lactate. Gregory Day isn’t the type to reminisce so what I know about this place and his life I’ve largely pieced together from Paige and Sid.
In the early 1950s, Gregory is drafted into the Korean War. Six months later, his entire platoon is airlifted into the heart of enemy combat, and his troop is given an unenviable task: stall—stall the North Korean Army until American reinforcements arrive. But the U.S. Army severely miscalculates how long and how many men it will take to fend off the enemy. Gregory and the men of C Company, Twenty-first Regiment, Twenty-fourth Infantry Division are greatly outnumbered. Gregory’s battalion is decimated, but Gregory is among the few survivors, sustaining severe shrapnel wounds to his left leg. He is losing a lot of blood. Airmen helicopter him to the nearest M.A.S.H. unit, where he receives one of the very first applications of a new miracle drug called Ringer’s Lactate, now a common electrolyte fluid used to resuscitate the wounded. Gregory receives a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Ringer’s saves his life.
Following an honorable discharge, inspired by the power of medicine, Gregory returns to northern California to attend college. The army pays for the first three years until he drops out in 1955 to play ball for a now-defunct minor league baseball team. The San Francisco Seals are willing to overlook Gregory’s slight limp be cause he’s a true slugger. During the third day of spring training, Gregory is hit—literally—with a stroke of bad luck when a wild pitch smacks him square in the chest, cracking three ribs. He sits the season out.
Six months later, the San Francisco Seals relocate and become the Phoenix Seals, but Gregory isn’t invited to join them. His career is over before it begins. A medical degree seems too far off and too much work, so instead, he chooses pharmacology. In those days, you could get a pharmacy degree straight out of high school in just three years. Pharmacy school takes twi
ce as long today.
In 1958, Gregory moves back to his hometown of Crockett to work at the only pharmacy in town—Ace’s, owned by one of Crockett’s most famous residents, Barnaby Rothschild. No one seems to know why Barnaby called it Ace’s. (I’d heard Ace was his poker name, but that’s probably folklore.) Barnaby, come his late seventies, decides he’s tired of running a pharmacy and agrees to sell the business and transfer the long-term lease to Gregory and his new bride, Lydia—Gregory’s high school sweetheart. But there’s a catch: Barnaby isn’t ready to retire, so Gregory must keep Barnaby on part-time. For ten long years, the Days are held hostage to a dying man and his endless demands.
Barnaby Rothschild lives to see man step foot on the moon, but only by a few hours. He dies the next morning. With Barnaby out of the way, Lydia finally convinces her husband to change the store’s name. It costs them $500 to purchase the defective neon sign out front. A picture screwed into the wall near the front register still shows six brawny men with a crane struggling to mount the cherry red, four-hundred-pound, fifteen-foot sign on the side of the building. It was only after they got it up there, and flipped the switch, that anyone noticed the punctuation error—it was missing that crucial apostrophe. That’s when “Day’s Pharmacy” became “Days Pharmacy.”
The early 1970s brings the national pharmacy chains. To stay competitive, Lydia persuades Gregory to borrow some money from her parents and rent the empty barbershop space next door. They knock down the dividing wall, nearly doubling the pharmacy space. Gregory and Lydia add hundreds of new products, extend the pharmacy workbench, build out a lunch counter, install a soda fountain, and lay down that magnificent honeycomb tile floor.
Gregory, so proud, and Lydia, so pregnant, with her second child, Paige, invite the entire town to the ribbon-cutting ceremony. There are plenty of pictures of the celebration on the wall. One of the photos shows Paige’s sister, Lara, not even two years old, resting her head on Lydia’s belly. There is another picture where—if you squint—you can make my parents out in the crowd. (My mother tells me that it is entirely possible that I am conceived later that evening.) Gross. It is at the pharmacy opening that Crockett’s townsfolk crown Gregory Day “The Mayor of Pomona Street,” a title he embraces to this day, perhaps a little too much. Soon thereafter, the town council appoints Gregory grand marshal of the Crockett Memorial Day Parade, a responsibility that never interested his buddy Sid.
For the next twenty-five years, Gregory handles the prescriptions and Lydia does the books. The hours are long. Neither Paige nor her older sister, Lara, are born in the pharmacy, but Lydia’s water breaks here both times, nearly two years apart to the day. Exactly where, I don’t know, and I’ve repeatedly asked Paige not to tell me (even though she’s dying to). Paige and Lara have always worked here. First as child labor and then over many a summer break. Paige never had much interest in more than part-time work, but Lara worked here full-time while going to college at night, and then again when she was studying to get her CPA. The sign out front should probably have read “Days’ Pharmacy.”
Unlike most Bay Area towns, Crockett’s population has only grown modestly in the last one hundred years. Gregory still handles the prescription needs for just about everyone here, the vast majority of them senior citizens of Italian and Portuguese descent who at one time or another were employed by C & H Sugar.
In the nine and a half months I’ve worked here, Gregory has always been the first person to arrive at the pharmacy and the last to leave. Although he is hardly the picture of health, best I can tell, he’s never missed a day of work. Paige tells me that Gregory even came to work after Lydia’s funeral. Being here makes him feel closer to Mom, she tells me.
Paige’s mother, Lydia, died before I moved back to Crockett. I really only have one memory of her. I was twelve, and a future felon by the name of Anthony “Bunky” Bianco dared me to steal some Hubba Bubba watermelon-flavored bubble gum. I must have walked back and forth past that candy rack twenty times before stuffing two packs in my Levi’s jeans and booking. “Excuse me,” Lydia shouted politely as I bolted out the front door with bulges in my front pocket. If she wasn’t sure what happened, she definitely figured it out moments later when Bunky high-fived me. We ran like hell. I didn’t return to Day’s Pharmacy for years after that, even if that meant forgoing those precious Red Rocket candy rings and taking my chances at the parade. To this day, those two packs of gum have been the only two things I ever shoplifted in my life—a childhood memory that still sickens me.
I often wonder how happy Lydia would have been to learn that her daughter ended up with a hoodlum. I can only hope she would’ve been forgiving.
It’s not stealing now when I snatch a candy bar or pack of gum off the rack. Like Belinda and her magazines, we consider it more like back pay for all the uncompensated overtime Gregory expects from us. The truth is that us stealing chocolate and gossip rags is the least of Gregory’s problems. Gregory has dozens of customers who have gone years without settling enormous pharmacy tabs. Around here, “tab” is code for “free.” Every once in a while Gregory says or does something that suggests he’s ready to collect, but he never follows through. What’s most important to him is that his customers get the medical attention they need, when they need it.
“No need to do the math. Our customers will never cut a pill in half”—that’s the Day’s Pharmacy credo.
EVERYTHING I find dreary and dilapidated about this place, Paige finds charming and quaint. She uses words like authentic and warm to characterize the faux wood paneling on the pharmacy counter. Retro is how she describes the now-unused marble-top lunch counter and the red vinyl chrome barstools where Lydia used to serve fountain drinks and hand-dipped milkshakes. The number 4 key on the cast iron cash register sticks, but we can’t get rid of that, it’s a collector’s item, she insists. Mixed among the modern plastic pill containers are empty antique glass bottles, oddly shaped, some with corks and some without. In all the time that I’ve worked here, not a single customer has ever asked me to unlock the small glass display case filled with knock-off Montblanc fountain pens and dusty magnifying glasses.
To me, this place is a death trap: a dying town with a dying generation of clients, and Gregory’s glorified but dying legacy. If not for Paige, I would have managed a Houdini escape long ago.
OUR delivery guy, Manny Milken, is thirty minutes late and Gregory is annoyed, which is good news for me—anything to deflect attention from our latest argument, somewhere on the order of a magnitude 4.0. (Gregory was mad because I forgot to slap a red “Do not take this medication with antacids” label on one of our orders. I don’t see the big deal—all of our prescriptions come with an instruction booklet. But Gregory thinks no one reads those. He’s probably right. I never do.)
Manny has an excuse for everything. Today it’s FedEx’s fault.
“Sorry, Mr. Day, I was, like, ‘Where are these guys?’ and when they showed up, trust me, it wasn’t pretty. We were close to coming to blows. But it’s a blessing in the skies seeing as it gave me time to pick this other package up for you,” he says, holding up a shirt box wrapped in brown paper and twine.
Manny Milken isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’s more like a spoon, or possibly a spork. I suspect he sustained too many blows to the head playing high school football. Last week, he told me that my point was “mute.” At our five-year high school reunion, he asked a roomful of alums what they thought of his “chick” jeans. Manny wouldn’t know chic if it smacked him upside the head. I told him white dungarees aren’t appropriate after Labor Day, but that he still looked “fetching.” Manny told me to shut up, then went home and “prolly” looked up fetching in the dictionary.
I sign for Gregory’s packages. The box secured with twine has neither postage nor a sender’s return address, just Gregory’s name.
“Gimme,” Gregory says about as nice as you can say that.
I reach over the counter and he quickly snaps the box f
rom me with a shaky hand.
“Emmanuel, pull your truck around back. Andrew will help you unload.”
I meet Manny in the back alley. It takes him ten minutes to back up ten feet. He can’t risk scratching his baby—our love for cars may be the only thing we have in common. Right after we graduated from high school, Manny bought, repaired, and repainted a vintage 1965 Superior Cadillac ambulance and launched his own delivery service. Gregory gave him his first break. Soon, another independent pharmacy in Hercules signed on, along with a few grocers and a handful of restaurants that wanted to do takeout. It’s been nearly eleven years now, and to his credit, Manny’s carved out a decent little business for himself. Over the years, Gregory’s made plenty of cutbacks, but he’ll never drop our prescription delivery service. Partly out of loyalty to Manny and partly because Gregory thinks that it’s the little things that distinguish his independent pharmacy from the evil corporate chains.
Emblazoned across the side of Manny’s ambulance and embroidered on every white cotton short-sleeved shirt he owns is that lame slogan: “Milken Deliveries: Delivering More Than Milk-In California.” He thought that up all by himself. Just ask him.
If he backs his car up any slower, Gregory will have my head.
Let’s go, let’s go, I wave my hands.
Since his years as high school lead tackle Manny has let himself go. He now sports one of the biggest potbellies I’ve ever seen on a thirty-year-old. These days, Manny must be pushing 280.
He pops the trunk and taps on the boxes with his clipboard. I begin unloading the toiletries and prescription meds. Manny, of course, supervises.
“The original version of The Haunting was on Turner Classics last night,” he says, scribbling something down—I can only assume smiley faces or basic geometric shapes. “Man, is that movie terrifying. Paige would have loved it.”
