There I am, wedged into the narrow aisle between the stationery supplies and the vitamins, waiting to pick up a prescription, a long line of people in front of and behind me, one man with a dog on a leash that keeps sniffing my legs, maybe because he thinks I have a treat or because he wants me to pet him or because, well, he’s a dog.
It’s the middle of the day so predictably, half of us are seniors, but the other half are not, which is remarkable to me. I overhear a willowy young woman in gray sweatpants and fuzzy boots tell the person at the register she was born in 2000, when I’d been working for over a decade for the Associated Press, in large part because of their excellent health insurance plan, even in retirement.
I try to make good use of this time. As a longtime New Yorker and inveterate newspaper and magazine reader, I always carry at least one issue of The New Yorker and a week-old Opinion section of The New York Times in my purse. Or I scan my phone. But inevitably, I end up pondering eternal mysteries like why is the Sarna at the end of the short, stumpy aisle on the other side of the pharmacy near the Epsom salts and not with all the other lotions at the front of the store, and why are the Epsom salts in the medical devices aisle at all?
The line briefly parts when a CVS worker emerges from the storeroom and pushes his dolly past us so he can restock shelves. I feel bad for him and all the other clerks in their cheerful red jackets trying to earn a decent wage (and hopefully qualify for health insurance) while having to put up with constant aggravation, like the crackly announcement over the intercom that a suspicious person has entered the store and is heading straight for the maximum-strength cough syrup, which, naturally, is under lock and key. But also the constant irritation of us, the presumably paying customers, who have been reduced to ringing a buzzer just to have someone come over to unlock the case with the slightly better-quality shampoo.
How did it all get to be so shabby and ugly? At this small commercial space at the corner of 91st and Third Avenue, where the concrete foundation is still so bumpy that even though it’s covered with cheap indoor-outdoor carpeting, now badly soiled from sidewalk salt, dog pee, and plain old city schmutz, I nearly tripped up the aisle this morning walking past the gaudy orange-and-purple boxes of GenTeal Tears toward the back of the store, where the laxatives are displayed catty-corner to the adult diapers for men and the adult diapers for women, and where I stopped to wonder why—isn’t a diaper just a diaper?
Over the years that I’ve been picking up my prescription meds here—after becoming intermittently suicidal dealing with my former mail-order plan, which was staffed by offshore workers who may as well have been on the far side of the moon and have probably since been replaced by an even cheaper AI—I’ve walked up and down these aisles dozens of times, past displays of cosmetics, cleaning supplies, shower caps, travel kits, batteries, razor blades, greeting cards, and other tchotchkes and chazarei, the Yiddish word for garbage.
Today, for reasons not completely unknown to me, I chose to walk down the one lined with junk food: cookies and soda and crackers and Campbell’s soup and brightly colored bags of Snickers and Reese’s peanut butter cups that even now (regrettably), in the eighth decade of my life, still call out to me, especially at Halloween.
But there is a reward, if you can call it that, for the endless, repetitive trips to this forlorn but busy outpost just four blocks from where I live. For here, in the furthest corner of the store, wedged in between the Metamucil and cognitive health supplements, is where I pick up the six prescription drugs that save my life on a daily basis, let me eat actual food as long as it’s not too spicy or greasy, and ensure that while I’m still living, I won’t go blind.
These drugs, my drugs, the end result of decades of research and billions of dollars, are all laid out behind the pharmacy counter on floor-to-ceiling shelves, piled up on counters, spilling over the sides of plastic bins on the floor, stapled securely in thick brown paper bags, tops folded over, with prescriptions on the outside, the contents invisible to prying or curious or simply bored eyes, racks and racks of prescription drugs just waiting to be picked up by this long bedraggled line of ordinary New Yorkers, young and old and in between, silently reading or loudly talking into their phones, and this one persistent dog that keeps sniffing my leg as if I had another dog at home, which I don’t.
This CVS, my CVS—it’s nothing at all like Burns Drug Store, the pharmacy of my youth, when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties in a small town in western Pennsylvania, part of an even smaller Jewish community of about forty families. Back then, everyone, even the people who lived up in the mountains and only came into town on the weekends, went to Burns or Rehanek’s, the other drugstore on Main Street.
Burns was run by a tall, lanky guy named Earl, who reminded my cousin Jack of the Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel. It had a Kodak concession in the front and a grill in the back near the pharmacy, where you had to go if you wanted to buy rubbers and where Earl, in his white lab coat, filled prescriptions. All the Jewish guys who were his pals would go back there, near the stockroom where the drugs were stored, to talk to him about their stomach problems, business headaches, and monthly poker game while he worked.
Back in those days, before Walmart killed Main Street, it seemed like the whole world, at some point, walked through that door underneath the bright yellow Rexall sign. If you were lucky, you might have been at the lunch counter, where a hot dog and French fries cost forty-five cents, the day an elderly Jewish woman named Ella, whose son Leonard ran the children’s clothing store up the street, came up to the pharmacy window for her sleeping pills and was told that Earl wanted to speak to her about the habit-forming nature of the medication.
“Ech,” she said, “I’ve been taking them for forty years and they’re not addictive.”
Dad used to walk across the street when he was at work to drop off film, pick up prints, and purchase refuahs, the Yiddish word for remedies or healing. These were the things we relied on day in and day out, including Desenex foot power (he said he was born with athlete’s foot), Pepto-Bismol (he said he was born with heartburn), as well as aspirin, peroxide, mercurochrome, calamine lotion, and Coppertone suntan oil because back then, no one had ever heard of SPF.
For more serious ailments, there was Dr. Bill, whose office was right across the street from Burns, next door to his brother, Eli the dentist, and half a block down from my dad’s furniture store. We went to Dr. Bill for annual checkups and the usual sequence of childhood shots—lockjaw was the thing that terrified us most—except for that glorious spring day in the early 1960s when I lined up at the Elks Club with all the other kids in town for the polio vaccine on a sugar cube in a small white paper cup.
There was a festive but solemn air in that normally staid dining room, which, when it wasn’t being used as an inoculation center, was a popular lunch spot for some of the downtown businessmen, including the Jews, who’d seize the opportunity to order a ham sandwich away from prying eyes at home. I say “men” because even though their wives and mothers often helped out in the stores, my memory is that only the men ever went out for lunch. Standing there in line that day, doing my civic duty—it was one of the most thrilling moments of my young life.
Today, I don’t feel all that differently about vaccinations, except that all the majesty is gone. When the Covid vaccines were first introduced in the winter of 2021, I was lucky enough to get my first few shots at one of the city’s best hospitals because I’d been treated there for cancer. The doctors, nurses, and lab techs fussed over us like royalty. After the shot, we were ushered into a comfortable waiting area with plush sofas and chairs and bird’s eye views of the roiling East River so they could monitor us for thirty minutes to make sure we were okay. I even got a little white booklet sealed in its own plastic bag to keep track of my shots.
But no more. These days, I get most of my jabs at this grungy, badly lit CVS, where there is no comfy waiting area, no private exam room, not even a makeshift cubicle, just a scrap of careworn carpet scarcely big enough for a tiny table and folding chair, walled off, but just barely, from other customers by a dilapidated folding screen.
This past fall, when I slipped behind it for my senior flu shot and started to peel off layers of garments to free up a patch of flesh on my upper arm, I realized with dismay that I’d forgotten to wear a bra. For a second I was worried I’d flash a boob at the unsuspecting folks milling about the counter. Then I realized that absolutely no one would care.
It’s not like I wanted to be taken care of by Dr. Bill again—though, actually, I did. In my memory his small exam room was clean, quiet, and suffused with muted light, his tall, taciturn nurse dressed in crisp, sparkling white from tip to toe, standing at attention nearby. (My cousin Jack remembers her as something less appealing, a cross between Nurse Ratched and Frau Blücher from Young Frankenstein.)
Even at the start of managed care, when I was going to a practice in midtown not far from my office, my PCP would spend an hour with me in an antiseptic cubicle with diplomas hanging on the wall. During the annual exam, she’d take the time to tap my knee with a small silver reflex hammer and shine a beam of light back and forth before my eyes to make sure, I suppose, that my pupils were still working.
Some fifteen years on, I have a new PCP who spent precisely twenty minutes with me for my first workup in a space the size of a closet. As she ticked through the questions, she kept her eyes focused on the computer screen, not on me. After it was over and I was in the system, all subsequent communications were routed through an electronic portal, my questions answered by one of her “nurses,” though it very well may have been an AI. “She” seemed human enough but there was a bland impersonality and uniformity to her answers that made me wonder.
Dr. Bill, on the other hand, made house calls. He’d arrive at the back door of our house at 600 South Church Street in his baggy suit and custom-made orthopedic shoes, carrying his black leather medical bag, which had a clasp at the top and opened to reveal a series of cleverly engineered compartments holding a stethoscope, thermometer, needles and syringes, bandages and gauze, and little ampules of medicine—a refuah for whatever ailed you.
When we were little, we used to get so many earaches, my four siblings and me, that Dad prevailed on Dr. Bill to get him an otoscope so he could examine our ears himself and thereby save everyone a lot of time and money. If he peered in and they were inflamed, then Dr. Bill might prescribe penicillin and suggest that Dad run down to Burns to pick up one of those gorgeous midnight-blue bottles of Auralgan eardrops, which he or my mom would warm up in a couple inches of water in a saucepan on the stove. I can still remember curling up on my side, waiting for them to squirt the warm, viscous liquid into my ear.
The kids behind the counter at my CVS are the farthest thing in the world from Dr. Bill. You’d think they were slinging burgers, not powerful, life-preserving, prescription drugs. There is no obvious dress code, no red apron or jacket. They come to work in shredded jeans, baggy sweatshirts, and psychedelic leggings, rocking all manner of exotic hairdos. Do they talk to us? Not if they can help it. Rather, they have side conversations with each other, sometimes bordering on flirtatious, while studiously trying to ignore the ever-swelling line, unless they have to answer a direct question or ring up a sale.
But after so many trips down these dreary aisles, half-listening to the robotic voice of the malfunctioning self-checkout machines, which require the constant attention of the clerks, I’ve become quite fond of them. While they aren’t exactly polished or even eager to please, they have a bracing nonchalance and low-key expertise. Each one is far more proficient with tech than I’ll ever be and fluent in the arcane, almost incomprehensible language of the pharmaceutical industrial complex.
For instance, I never pay much attention to the statements that pour in from my prescription drug plan, with their opaque explanations of benefits, claims, coinsurance, denials, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs. I just throw them on a heap and figure I’ll decipher them later. So, I was completely surprised one day when, after reaching the front of the line, I discovered that the co-pay for a drug I have to take every day, twice a day, if I want to eat, was zero. Earlier in the year, I’d been paying hundreds of dollars for a ninety-day supply. I asked the young woman at the cash register why.
She wore coal-black mascara and had dark, avenging eyes—for what transgression, I wondered?—and said, “Because you have health insurance.”
Yeah, I’m gonna miss them, these smart, hustling kids with their complicated hair. Because just when I was getting used to their brusque ways, I found out that two of my six mandatory drugs won’t be on the formulary of my prescription drug plan next year. So I have to change plans, which means changing “preferred” pharmacies.
Instead of walking four blocks to this CVS, I’ll have to schlepp ten blocks to the Duane Reade at 84th and Lex—in the driving rain, in the sleet and snow, as I grow progressively older and frailer. But I’d rather keel over on the narrow, crowded sidewalks of Lexington Avenue, amid the endless construction and teeming crowds, than sign up again for that ghastly mail-order plan.
So here I am, back in line, underneath the flickering, fizzing fluorescent lights, trying to get all my prescriptions refilled before I change plans and thinking about all the refuahs I’ve ever taken in order to preserve, protect, and possibly extend my life.
First, there was the cisplatin and Taxol that blasted my stomach cancer to bits, and the Sucralfate suspension that keeps my biliary reflux at bay. Then there were the megadoses of orange-flavored, chewable vitamin C tablets that I binged on because Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel Prizes, said it was good for you—and because they tasted like SweeTarts. Then there were the bags of dried papaya that I gobbled down because the enzymes were supposed to aid digestion—but also because they, too, tasted like candy.
There were also all the other fads that came and went—wheat germ for vitamin E, bran to increase fiber, and wheatgrass juice because it was supposed to reduce inflammation. I used to order the vile-smelling, sludgy stuff at my local health food store, but it tasted so nasty—think rancid lawn clippings with bird poop—that when I got my bloodwork back and my numbers hadn’t budged, I quit. It took me years to overcome my aversion to that store.
But of all the refuahs, the one I treasure most is the google moogle. That’s the remedy that inextricably links me to my father, his parents, and all the other ancestors from Eastern European and Russia, who brought it to America when they came here in the early 20th century. Different families make them different ways, including with a raw egg, but Dad just heated up a cup of milk, sweetened it with honey, and spiked it with spirits, either Jim Beam or Remy Martin VSOP, whatever was in the liquor cabinet.
I remember one especially frigid winter when I had such a bad cold—runny nose, sore throat, earache, fever—that I stayed home from school. That night, my father came up the drafty front stairs with his usual stack of newspapers and a google moogle for me. He pushed open the door to my bedroom, where I was buried under the covers, and handed me the mug in the semi-dark. I sat up in bed, gulped it down, and slept the sleep of the dead for the next twelve hours.
When I woke up, the fever was gone, my nose had dried up, and I felt well enough to go back to school. But my parents let me stay home for another day so I got to watch TV, read Nancy Drew mysteries in bed, and run around the house in my footsie pajamas while my brothers and sisters trudged off with their books in the drifting western Pennsylvania snow.
That house is gone now. It was torn down to make way for a parking lot for the local hospital. There are just a few people left who remember Earl in his lab coat, cigarette dangling from his mouth, standing out in front of Burns Drug Store, or the refuahs of old.
