No one keeps picking up at the safeway [harmacy, which is a typo I’m going to keep. I leave please-help-me-but-don’t-judge-me-as-desperate voice messages every two days until I lose count. No one keeps calling back and I keep withdrawing, my husband asking Are you okay? No one calls back. You seem down.
Today someone picks up and says my drugs will be ready at 2pm. We get to the pharmacy a couple hours later and join the back of the drug line which is so long it spans several aisles. Like a bird flock twisting in the sky it splits for each cart that rattles through it, and re-forms. In the distance, one miserable cartoon tornado pharmacist. Michael realizes he’ll have to get groceries without me and I ask for chocolate because I started my period this morning.
Some people give up and leave but not me, I’m staying. The humiliation of being last in line drains off with each defeated senior walking out. Where there used to be razors there are barcoded hanging cards that you take to the register so another worker can get the razors for you. Time stretches and stretches. With a safeway worker in line behind me and the camera eye watching above, I put a box of hair removal cream into my coat pocket. Do you know what shrink and throwing and facing mean? Look it up or work at a grocery store.
In the aisle to my left, a safeway worker who is off the clock and shopping in uniform talks to another safeway worker who is on the clock and facing a shelf. The older worker who’s off says to the younger worker facing the shelf, We all had our hours reduced because it’s the end of the quarter and They have to make Their figures for bonuses. I’m an elderly couple and a mother with toddler away from the pharmacy counter. Oh yeah, and a raise just went through so they’re cutting pa– cutting hours for everyone because of that.
We’ll all be working at a 20% cut to labor until about May, he figures. So as long as you can keep doing 60 hours of work in 20 hours a week, we’ll be fine, he jokes. The worker facing also jokes, says I should just move downstairs, which means the parking garage, in a cardboard box, and the one who’s off the clock says Yeah! Facing worker then says Maybe that’s where I’m headed anyway. Thanks for depressing me while I’m still working.
Now it’s my turn, but the worker at the register says my drugs aren’t ready. I want to insist But I was told they’d be ready at 2 like I think it’s important, but instead I stand there, like an asshole. Exhausted and apologetic, she says The other pharmacist didn’t show up today.
Michael and I both used to work in grocery stores, and we talk about how it doesn’t matter if self-checkout truly replaced workers or not, because people, us included, keep standing in human lines even though there are only a couple left and they keep getting longer, and companies won’t stop closing stores and blaming retail theft while cutting jobs and giving the money to bosses as bonuses for doing less than nothing—for doing negative work. If you work in a grocery store you’ll learn about shrink and margins and you’ll never regret stealing again, especially when you work there and still can’t afford your groceries.
Anyway the drugs aren’t ready, and the person working the register can’t tell if there are enough drugs to fill my prescription until the lone pharmacist running back and forth between piles of bags of bottles of pills in the back can get to it, and she feels really bad, I can tell, but I think Not as bad as me after going without drugs for this long, softening and bubbling and fading. In the last hour, the line behind me has become longer. What’s another day when this one’s almost over? I say No big deal. We’ll come back tomorrow.
We go to the fucking self checkout. I turn up shitty beep boop radio music to lighten the car’s atmosphere, and we pull out of the parking lot. We’re two blocks removed from safeway when my phone lights up. Alert: your prescription is now ready. But we’re already going in a direction, already accepted reality. What are we supposed to do, turn around?
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Lauren Lavín‘s work appears in Triangle House Review, Farewell Transmission, Fourteen Hills, and other places. She was made in Mexico, born in Oakland, and currently lives in Seattle.
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image: Ashley Beresch. Check out more of her work on Instagram @ashleyberesch
Rejection Letters 