My Pharmacy

While on the exciting subject of pharmacy, more specifically Norm’s Pharmacy, I want to say it is still there bearing my name. I used to tell some of the young sales reps that my mother was a visionary and named me after the store.

For anyone in my vast readership, including North Korean hackers or scam artists sweating it out in a boiler room in Belarus, I welcome you to visit this historical monument. We might sit down for a beer. You can pick up the tab since you already have my credit cards.

The store is located in the upper middle class or lower upper-class town of Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. It was so named because Edgar Rice Burroughs once lived there when his creation Tarzan swung from trees with a banana in his mouth. As he presciently said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there.

I had the pharmacy for seventeen years till it became clear that the mail-person carried more prescriptions than I had filled that day. One day the phone rang:

Hi Shirley.

How did you know it was me?

I only have two customers and the other one just hung up.

At that point, twenty-seven years ago, I sold this goldmine to a Russian family who were actually from Odessa. But they spoke only Russian and thought in Russian, damning Gorbachev and admiring Putin because Gorby was weak and wore shirts while Vlad was strong and bare-chested. Sigh.

Why would anyone buy my store, I thought, except for money-laundering? As in all money matters I was wrong. They tripled the business attracting the community of Russian emigres.  The transition from communism to Medicaid was seamless.

I hung around for a while until it became a Russian store. Spasibo and Dasvidaniya didn’t get me very far. Yet they kept my name. Maybe they thought someone would straggle in thinking it was Norm’s Restaurant.

I’d had enough; I walked away from the gulag. My mother had said pharmacy was always something I could fall back on. I fell back for fifty-three years. My father, in his day, had presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water. Gone are those days of arcane scribbles and the whiff of alchemy. Life was now deodorized and deconstructed.

It was as if I was toiling on the back forty while a voice read me the Emancipation Proclamation. Free, free at last.