Friday, September 15, 2000
Last night in the evening, I went down and across the street from my apartment to Walgreens, a local drug store, to pick up a prescription for Celexa, an antidepressant I take every day. The pharmacy is at the back of the store. After entering the store, I went to the coolers against the wall at one side of the store and efficiently found a gallon jug of milk that had the most distant expiration date possible. I always hope a jug like that will be fresh and stay that way longer, especially if the milk has been left sitting outside of refrigeration somewhere on the way into my hands. I knew the clerks who work at the store were probably thinking to themselves, or even saying to each other, “It’s him again…” Perhaps they even shared some gossip about me with a customer or two at their checkout counters.
As is very typical for me in public, I had a kind of hazy mindset, and was only halfway seeing the world around me as I navigated through it. Most of my mind was focused on paranoid thoughts and listening and watching for actions by people that might have something to do with me, such as nasty comments or laughter inspired by the living, breathing joke that I believe I am. In public and often at home, I am constantly trying to make sense of the sounds and human activities around me. I try to decode them and reconcile their meaning with the paranoid interpretations that I automatically assign them and the paranoid memories that I almost always greet me when I wake up in the morning, stay with me during my day (or night, since I don’t often keep a normal sleep schedule) as obsessions, and are almost always my ordinary nightcap and lullaby as I drift off to sleep.
I took the jug of milk and walked down the aisle and approached the pharmacy counter. Two members of the pharmacy staff were working that evening, a pharmacist and a pharmacy technician, who was already helping a customer paying for a prescription. I recognized both of them. The pharmacist also recognized me and rushed to the bins and quickly extracted my refill even before I reached the counter. Finding my happy pills in the alphabetically organized bins was easily done. It was my suspicion that she saw the milk I carried and knew I intended to pay for it at their counter, as pharmacy customers are permitted to do. This often saves the customers a wait in the lines at the registers at the front of the store. I thought she did not want me to pay for the milk at their counter, but I was not sure whether she simply wanted to force me to wait in the line or whether she felt it was beneath a degreed pharmacist to run a cash register. Looking back, I think there could have been other explanations.
I always think that the pharmacy staff, who know that state Medicaid, a welfare program for low-income individuals, pays for my prescriptions, are always gossiping about the items for which I often pay at their counter. It could be something as innocuous as a bottle of pop. I have heard a number of people complain bitterly about food stamp recipients they have seen buying pop at grocery store checkouts, so it does not seem unlikely.
I quickly put the jug of milk on the counter before she could rush away from it, and she did let me pay for it at her register. As I walked away from the counter, though, I thought I heard them laughing at me. My mind quickly tried to come up with reasons they were laughing at me. Was it because I had bought milk for the thousandth time? Was it because they know I take psychiatric medications? (I often recall listening to the store’s senior pharmacy technician laughing cruelly as she loudly reported seeing a former employee of the pharmacy who she noted was “psycho” because she took psychiatric drugs. I observed this incident when I stood at the same counter one day to pick up another prescription. I hold a grudge against this woman.) Were they were laughing because the psychiatric drug I picked up was an antidepressant? These thoughts crossed my mind as I returned down the aisle from the pharmacy counter and past the coolers to the front of the store.
Then another typical thought entered my mind. Were they laughing about my clothes, since I have a large number of very similar and sometimes identical shirts and pants? It occurred to me that I had worn an identical cheap and comfortable outfit the last time I had come to the pharmacy a few days earlier. Having wandered to fashion-related explanations, my next thought was that they were laughing at my hair. I always feel very self-conscious about my hair, which is usually a bit wild looking because it is very curly and the curls don’t behave or look a lot like most people’s hair. Only a day or two after a new haircut, my head begins to look very unkempt. I can’t wear popular hairstyles because the behavior of my hair is rare.
At this point in my shopping trip, feeling extremely self-conscious and starting to think they laughed at me because they thought I needed a bath even though I was actually very clean, I had to walk past the checkout counters with their lines of customers. I thought one of the cashiers, who has worked at the store for at least three years and observed my coming and going and spending habits, said something to me as I passed her. It was one word, and I could not make out what she said with my mind in an even deeper haze than the one that clouded it as I entered the store. I went out through the automatic door and into the darkness of the fall evening.
As I walked home, I felt everyone was looking at me. I heard someone yell something at me from a passing car. These are experiences with which I am very familiar and never comfortable. I thought someone in an open apartment window made a comment about me to another person as I passed a wing of my apartment building.
In a few minutes I was back in my home. I would have returned sooner, but I had to carefully avoid a wild skunk that has been hanging around outside the apartment building at night. I realized as I put the milk and bottle of Celexa away that I really needed to take some garbage that had been accruing out to the dumpsters behind the apartment building. It could not be put off any longer. Dutifully, I carried two large black plastic bags and an old shower curtain liner stained all over with mildew out my door and down the hall to the elevators. I heard the ordinary domestic sounds of my neighbors’ televisions, stereos, and conversations, which were muffled by distance and the steel fire-resistant doors that lead into each rental unit. I suspected, as I do daily, that they heard me come out of my apartment and were laughing about me. This was perhaps because they knew I had not left my small domain for about two days. I found two daily newspapers in front of my door when I exited on my way to the drug store, which my neighbors had probably noticed. I don’t voluntarily get newspapers because I never read them. I have called the subscription office and complained more than a couple of time about the papers that keep appearing in front of my door, but they keep coming. I have a paranoid idea that someone keeps requesting newspaper delivery for me every time I cancel it.
As I walked from the back door of the building to deposit my trash in the dumpster about sixty feet away and then back again, I heard a couple of voices, one male and one female, coming from a window a few floors up, yelling “Freak! You freak!” At least I thought that’s what was being said.
I traveled back to my apartment, where it took about ten more minutes to push the disturbing events of the previous half hour far enough out of my immediate consciousness so that I was no longer filled with anxiety.
|THE END|