Closing Time (30 page)

From the moment we moved to West Oak Lane, a quaint, leafy district whose vaguely Episcopalian name hinted at an elegance it aspired to without ever fully achieving, I was enthralled by the pixielike one-story apothecary at the corner of Chelten Avenue and Limekiln Pike. Prior to this, the word “apothecary” had not been part of my lexicon. In the housing project, when we needed prescriptions filled, we shopped at a dive called Major’s Drugs, an unkempt, all-purpose emporium that, in addition to such staples as bedpans and trusses, sold cupcakes, ice cream, cigars, newspapers, magazines, and condoms to a somewhat mangy clientele. Whatever else it may have been, it was not an apothecary.

Glenn took the palliative arts seriously, referring to his sugarplum establishment as an apothecary, rather than a drugstore, because the term “apothecary” bespoke refinement and tradition, while “drugstore” bespoke retail narcotics. He had the same attitude toward the word “pharmacy,” which to his ears sounded coarse and industrial. The paned windows of his colonial-style shop were adorned with brass scales and goosenecked vases filled with colored water; beside them sat framed illustrations depicting famous moments in medical history. Striking images of Galen and Hippocrates peered out at passersby, conferring an anomalous classical panache on a neighborhood with few other direct links to the Peloponnese.

Unlike most drugstores of the time, Glenn did not stock magazines, newspapers, or beverages, nor did he sell greeting cards. That, in his view, would have been tacky. He did stock candy and cigarettes; in fact, he changed his own brand every week or so, never quite finding a taste that suited him, inevitably reverting to Kool Filters, a brand at the time associated with jazz musicians, many of whom would go to an early grave. He was never without a cigarette in his mouth or on his person; he was incapable of starting a conversation without first lighting up what he referred to as “cancer sticks,” but it was obvious from the pained expression on his face that the Kool Filters gave him no pleasure. This was in 1966, two years after the publication of the landmark Surgeon General’s Report that decisively linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer. I admired the massive cultural dissonance and absence of logic in Glenn’s approach to life. He was employed in a distinguished wing of the medical profession, he earned his daily bread by helping others recuperate from various diseases, he knew that smoking was no good for him, yet he puffed away like a blast furnace. Any pharmacist worth his salt must have been aware by this late date that such a deplorable vice was at odds with the emerging ethos of the health-care establishment and thus constituted some form of emotional spittle directed at the panjandrums of the healing class. But Glenn did not care. He was beyond caring.

Glenn didn’t like to go anywhere near the cash register; he hired students as helpers in large part because he hated dirtying his hands with what he referred to as “filthy lucre.” I worked for Glenn every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for two hours after school; every Tuesday and Thursday from seven till nine; and every other Saturday from one until five. I was paid $1 an hour. Throughout that stint, he could never bring himself to hand me the $13.10 ($14 minus 90 cents in taxes) I was owed; my wages were always waiting for me late Saturday afternoon in the top drawer of a filing cabinet in the back room. Not once did I see Glenn physically dole out the cash; he always acted as if stealthy water sprites had deposited it there while his back was turned. Around him, one always sensed that the mere act of exchanging specie or even talking about money would have encrusted our liaison with slime, dragging our otherwise highbrow relationship straight down into the gutter.

Glenn insisted that the shop be spectacularly clean at all times; one of my jobs was to dust off the shelves and merchandise every three days, a task I did not enjoy one bit. I also had to wash the three picture windows, which, because they were each divided into twelve frames, necessitated my carefully rearranging the scales and illustrations and vases so I could climb into the window casement. In the front window sat a clock, accompanied by a photograph of whatever happened to be the major piece of news that day. A deliveryman from the news bureau popped in every afternoon with a fresh black-and-white glossy to slip into place. It usually involved somebody like Fidel Castro or Martin Luther King or Sandy Koufax. The news was mostly bad, except when someone who had once met Sitting Bull turned a hundred. The window cleaning was a cumbersome operation; one day I knocked over the most ornate of the vessels containing the colored water, dispatching it to an untimely death on the tiled floor below. It was the only time I saw Glenn angry; the fluted glass receptacle was an heirloom of some sort, one of a kind; it was a symbol of all the good times gone bad. He never replaced it.

Glenn felt that background music added a soothing ambience to an apothecary, but the music he chose was repellent: a string of excruciating instrumentals derived from golden hits of the thirties, forties, and fifties. They were shopworn tunes, so familiar that even though they featured no vocals, the listener could hear the lyrics in the canyons of his mind, reminding him, in case he had forgotten, that there was, indeed, a summer place, beyond the blue horizon, where one could stand on a corner, watching all the girls go by—several of whom bore a stunning resemblance to the girl that married dear old Dad—before returning to either Sorrento or Capistrano, whichever was more convenient. I was never allowed to switch channels, certainly not to Top 40 stations, because Glenn believed that pop music was crass and hopelessly out of synch with the rhythms of medication. Once, without his knowing it, I switched on the November 19, 1966, Notre Dame-Michigan State classic that would decide the national championship and listened with bated breath to the barely audible broadcast all afternoon. This epic showdown, one of those Games of the Century that usually end up being duds, was the most breathlessly anticipated sporting event of the year, if not the decade, but Glenn would not give me authorization to listen to it, deeming sports idiotic. There were, at that time, no more than four people in Philadelphia who shared this opinion. The game ended in a tie.

Glenn’s attitude toward the radio was completely utilitarian: Ambient music was one of the costs of doing business, but nobody said he had to like it. Most people of that era accepted it as gospel truth that without a song, the day would never end, but Glenn did not agree. For him, music existed purely as a mood-setting device; he believed that if Galen and Hippocrates were still among the living, they would be operating upscale apothecaries where saccharine renditions of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” would perpetually chug along in the background. Muzak and commerce went hand in hand, but that was about the extent of it. He was the first person I ever met who not only had no taste in music but to whom music was not even important. Today all sorts of people feel that way.

I have no idea what Glenn’s personal life was like; he never spoke about his wife and rarely mentioned his daughter. As had been the case with Len’s wife and two daughters, my new employer’s family never once visited the store the whole time I worked there. On the professional level, Glenn was a drug-industry ronin, a masterless samurai. As he explained it, pharmacists had once been radiant stars in the medical constellation, luminous planets giving off only slightly less light than physicians. Back in the first half of the century, when hanging out a pharmacist’s shingle was considered a lofty achievement, it was not unheard of for druggists to ring a physician immediately after receiving a prescription and question the dosage or even suggest an alternate medication. There was a reassuring collegiality between doctors and druggists; they were joining forces to ensure that the patient got the best possible treatment. The role of the pharmacist then was not unlike that of the House of Representatives: to advise and consent. But by the time I started working for Glenn, pharmacists were beating a fast retreat before the onslaught of the drug companies.

By 1966, working as a pharmacist entailed little more than counting out an infinite series of antidepressant pills purchased by women who hated their husbands and weren’t all that fond of their kids. Twenty Valiums. Thirty Valiums. Forty Valiums. With the audacious scumminess that is their calling card, drug companies had seized control of the health-care industry, seducing crass, easily manipulated doctors into becoming robotic shills who were only too happy to prescribe the same high-markup medications over and over again. The position of pharmacist was fast becoming menial and ancillary, the druggist serving as little more than a gatekeeper between listless physicians and a catatonic public, a mere cog in the Great Mandala of sedation. I could tell from the increasingly brief telephone chats Glenn had with the new breed of avaricious, condescending young physicians that they had no interest in his input. They were the ones who made the diagnosis; they were the ones who wrote the prescription; his job was to fill it. No further jaw-boning was necessary. Got it, Pops?

The only time Glenn displayed even the slightest interest in his now-eclipsed profession was when some Precambrian crone dragged her carcass into the shop, brandishing a tube containing the very last driblets of some Hoover-era balm useful in relief of rectal measles or psoriasis of the trachea, a prescription originally written in 1937. Then Glenn would spring into action: He would haul out his capacious mortar and equally daunting pestle, exhume a bevy of antediluvian jars and bottles garlanded with cobwebs, and spend the next fifteen minutes whipping up some quasi-medieval ointment, salve, potion, lotion, paste, elixir, or cream. In a poignant, Proustian moment, Glenn’s face would now turn rosy red, illuminated by a jubilant smile, as he returned to the golden days of pharmaceutical derring-do he had known in his youth.

By the time I came on board, Glenn was rapidly seceding from a profession that no longer honored its members. Like an aging desperado who has hung up his guns, only occasionally emerging from retirement in the direst emergency, he would sit in the back room of his tiny but well-appointed establishment and occupy himself with just about anything that did not involve the career for which he had been trained. He would ensconce himself in his swivel chair and chain-smoke cigarettes as he indulged his assorted hobbies. One was reading about the bygone splendors of Olde New York; often I would hear him chuckling merrily at the exploits of Diamond Jim Brady, Dutch Schultz, Fiorello La Guardia, or Legs Diamond, swashbuckling fixtures of Gotham mythology whose adventures were chronicled in a pile of mildewed biographies that were never terribly far from his reach. But often, he merely dozed.

Initially, Glenn hired me to man the front counter. But after I’d been ringing up sales and waiting on customers for a while, he designated me his official aide-de-camp. He would lay out the prescriptions, place the relevant tubes or canisters atop them, and wait for me to come in after school to count out fifteen thousand sedatives. Meanwhile, he’d snuggle into his swivel chair in the back and read about the dexterous thugs who ran Tammany Hall or the astounding legerdemain of that irrepressible robber baron Jay Gould. He was also partial to the adventures of one Toots Shor, a still-breathing restaurateur, raconteur, bon vivant, and all-round high-stepper who operated a famous restaurant on Fifty-first Street, just off Fifth Avenue, that was home for many years to New York’s most fabled ballplayers, lounge lizards, politicians, scribes, and gangsters.

Allowing a sixteen-year-old boy, not yet in possession of a high school diploma and boasting no formal training in the pharmaceutical arts, to fill prescriptions was in brazen violation of every Food and Drug Administration stricture on the books. Had I been a maniac, an anarchist, or even a garden-variety knave, I could have easily dispensed the wrong medicine or jacked up the dosage so high it would have sent half of our dysfunctional clientele to the loony bin. Looking back on it, I recognize that I, too, was in brazen violation of FDA policy regarding who could and could not dole out powerful antidepressants, and might conceivably have done a stint in the slammer for my transgressions. But at the time it all seemed like innocent fun, the urban equivalent of cow tipping or impregnating minors down at the old fishing hole.

America teems with bogus eccentrics, most of them wealthy poseurs whose rehearsed eccentricity evaporates the first time anyone mentions the yield curve. They falcon or collect vintage addressing machines or take up the viola da gamba in a shabby attempt to camouflage the pallid hues of their personalities. Glenn, on the other hand, was the genuine article, a twenty-four-karat oddball who navigated perilously between the shoreline of lucidity and the shoals of lunacy. Needless to say, he occasionally ran aground. But unlike those who were not playing with a full deck because they had been born “odd” or had suffered some emotionally paralytic trauma somewhere along the line, Glenn had deliberately removed the high cards from the deck, substituting jokers. Unlike so many people of that era, who were famous for taking brief, well-publicized, transparently hedonic sabbaticals from society before going back to work for Morgan Stanley, Glenn had really and truly “dropped out.”

One of the strangest contours of Glenn’s personality was his obsession with fire. He would sit in his creaky old chair, gleefully listening to reports of serious conflagrations on a police-band radio concealed in the storage room, on top of a refrigerator. Meanwhile, I would be out front medicating another three dozen zombies masquerading as housewives into a state of rapturous catatonia. The illegally obtained radio—John Q. Public wasn’t supposed to be listening in on all this stuff—suggested a talking breadbox. It sat right next to a Himalaya of banned medications, beloved painkillers of a bygone era. Glenn kept them tucked away for emergencies or on the off chance that opium-laced cough medicines might one day come back into vogue. It was Hophead Heaven back there; had any of the local losers known of its existence, they would have blown the back door off its hinges and made off with enough mood-altering potions to keep them squirrelly till Amelia Earhart made her long-overdue return.