Wets and Dries

For my birthday last month, my friend Larry presented me with a stack of prescriptions scribbled by doctors one hundred years ago. All of them had a smattering of Latin phrases and were written for syrups, fluid extracts, crystalline powders, emulsions etc... all from natural sources.

When I entered pharmacy college in 1950 those same substances were still in use. By the time I graduated, they were gone. The garden of botanicals had vanished. Exotic vapors had escaped along with rhizomes, roots and excrescence on some trees. No leaves macerating, nor acacia rancid in the glue bottle. It was those arcane names that drew me in and their intoxicating breath.

They asked me, what’ll it be? You’re seventeen. Who are you? I only knew who I wasn’t. My brother, four years older, with a tool box, tinkering under the hood, never owned a library card. No. I would become my father.

I entered his world of pharmacy as it was withering but still with ancient aromas I had inhaled as a kid. Apothecary jars on the shelf labeled podophyllin, glycyrrhiza, aqua hamamelidis. The glossary became a second language.

When I got my license, the Edenic garden was nearly gone. It had become bottled alphabetically. The aromatic elixirs had disappeared or fallen into disrepute. Squibb, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Burrough-Wellcome claimed the space, now deodorized. But we still had the Wets and Dries.   

That’s what we called them. Compound tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus were some of the wets. The stuff put into a vaporizer whose mingled odor in the steam certified a sickroom. Bicarbonate of soda was one of the dries. They were sold over-the-counter as part of a section dividing the prescription area from the front.

The front was where customers stood. Back in the day the Rx compounding area was raised so the pharmacist was looked up to as he presided between globes of colored water. My father was on that pedestal for me but now I was eye to eye with a man faking a cough to get his hands on a bottle of Terpin Hydrate with Codeine, aka G.I. Gin, which was among the wets. His signature in the registry book was required; today it was Joe Smith, tomorrow Bill Blotz. Poor guy. If the codeine didn’t get him, the alcohol did.

Wets and Dries are the last gasp of early pharmacy. Old preparations or chemicals so long in use they couldn’t be patented and sold as proprietaries still hang on. Iodine would be one; spirits of camphor another one. Epsom salts, in five pound boxes remain, usually filling the bottom shelf of the section. Flowers of sulfur (brimstone) used for acne, no longer. The wets included oil of clove for toothaches, gentian violet (anti-fungal), cascara sagrada (laxative), spirits of ammonia (smelling salt), peppermint water (mild carminative) and Stokes expectorant (demulcent and cough suppressant). Those names still get me.

I'm of two minds about these old world remedies. They are part of my early romance with pharmacy yet I also tend to discount their therapeutic value in modern medicine. When I hear of someone relying on these organic, alternative medications, I cringe. Otherwise enlightened people spend money for worthless products as if they are striking a blow against Big Pharma. The result is what I regard as a multi-billion dollar hoax industry.

In the 1970s, the FDA required proof of efficacy and safety for all items sold having a therapeutic effect. There was no pharmaceutical company to bear the expense of an approval process. Old standards such as Mercurochrome fell away along with dozens of others. 

I also fell away but that drugstore air remains in a corner of my lungs, pungent, floral and earthy in a special proportion which I can conjure with any number of old-world words…cimicifuga, asafetida, opodeldoc.

Uniforms

Watching ball games, as is my vice, I have come to accept men running around in their colored underwear, or rather their uniforms. It doth proclaim them.

Before Zuckerberg’s t-shirt or Steve Jobs’ turtleneck there were suits. Three-piece or gray flannel or those you could buy at Sears with two pairs of pants, all wool gabardine. Men wore them to see a play or fly from here to there. These days, even sports jackets are so yesterday they're ripe for a comeback. 

I wore a smock, on and off, for fifty years as a dispenser of assorted remedies and assuring words. I don’t miss mine at all.

Maybe they’ve been replaced by tattoos. We’re not our job anymore; we are individuals each making our own major statement. Egalitarianism allows us to dress down, to slum or choose a wardrobe out of thrift stores. Designers have lines of scrupulous sloppiness with ventilation at the knees. There are friends I have never seen in jeans and others who always wear them. To each his uniform.

All of which leads me to remember vanished uniforms along with the jobs themselves. Whatever happened to that young woman with her bright jacket and flashlight patrolling the aisles as she hushed us and ushered us kids into the dark movie house, darker still because it was Saturday afternoon and we always came in the middle of a film. Was she dreaming of being discovered, projecting herself on the big screen. Or did she fade to black?

Gone, too, is the doorman with his epaulets, our peacetime commander who lived on tips. He waved, whistled and launched a thousand taxis. Doormen disappeared or did they just live in movies set on Park Ave? I imagined these quasi-aristocrats fled Europe as professors or constables and had to settle for the ignominy of brass buttons.

And where are the elevator operators, in authority for the length of their shift, traveling vertical miles on one spot from Icarus to Orpheus as they alone contracted and expanded those wrought iron lungs?

The usher had no name but saw plenty of wandering arms in the balcony. Maybe the other two wrote novels in their heads from snatches overheard. They answered to first name only and remembered to speak politely to Mr. and Mrs…. on the 23^rd floor.

They slipped away unnoticed, loud uniforms, shiny buttons and all. Jackets and caps now in vintage shops, indignity and pride embedded in the fabric. In one pocket dried lipstick and a stick of gum. In another an empty flask and a check for two bucks, uncashed.

Misadventure

It’s only money. If the object of life is to die broke, I’m well on my way. For $545 I could have bought a magnificent dinner on some rooftop restaurant for a few close friends or better yet, donated to a fund for saving the lives of bombed out children with medical needs.

But none of the above happened. Instead, I paid that money to retrieve my car after it was towed away for parking in a spot designated (in small print) for valet service owned by an upscale eatery called Elephantine.

I had met my two friends at the Laemmle theater in Santa Monica for a three o’clock showing of the new Christian Petzhold film, Mirror-3. All his movies are highly recommended.

In the last two works by this director, cars play an important part. In this current one, an accident kills the driver but his passenger escapes unharmed and that sets in motion the entire narrative. His previous film entitled Afire involves two men dying as they try to tow their own car. For me, it was a bad omen foretold.

Does anyone really believe in omens? After all, the Ides of March passed unremarkably. Synchronicity is another thing. As I was reading the word moth, a moth flew out of nowhere. It happens all the time. Not only moths but friends or relatives die or win lotteries at the moment they might enter your mind even though you haven’t thought of Uncle Max for eleven years.

We enjoy these random happenings as if portals to a place beyond. We crave transcendence. Surely, there must be another dimension, why else would my car be towed?

So there I was staring at the empty space where I had parked my car. By this time, Adele was about 15 blocks away but stayed on the line with me. Tamara was walking and graciously came back to be with me even as her husband Basil was waiting for her return. I thought I spotted Petzhold filming the entire human drama unfolding.

I was given a number to call. The police were very understanding of my predictament particularly when I played my age card and reliance on my walker. They arranged for a police car to pick me up. The officer was a model of human kindness as he first drove me to the police station to pay the fine, then to the towing place (which was closed) and lastly took me home.

Janice drove me to pick up my car this morning. Now, I have almost filled a page distracting me from my carelessness, from that elephant in the room.

 

 

Taking Back The Moon

The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.

                                                     W.B. Yeats

The moon has always been the province of poets and songwriters. And now it is a destination.  No, not for low-housing, but as a base for further space travel. One hopes not for colonizing other planets.

Of course, we knew early on it was our satellite but wolves howled at it and troubadours pined under it to the point of lunacy.

For Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, it represented the sublime. For Shakespeare, inconstancy. Eugene O'Neill saw the moon as a symbol of redemption in his A Moon for the Misbegotten. 

In Peggy's poem, Under the Unwed Moon, she wrote, The moon in the force of its pull releases the buried bones.

It also hit your eye like a big pizza pie. The moon can’t help it if it rhymes with June, balloon and sleepy lagoon. For Robert Graves in his book, White Goddess, the moon was the supreme muse; the feminine aspect which represented birth and the life of the imagination.

No argument from me though I was brought up thinking it was made of green cheese with cows jumping over to the fiddle of hi diddle-diddle.

Gilbert and Sullivan borrowed the moon in Trial By Jury.

     The moon in her phases is found the time, winds and the weather / You cannot eat breakfast all day nor put two Mondays together.  

Here G&S remind us that Monday is a contraction of Moon-day.

Again, in the Yeoman of the Guard, the moon belongs to lovers.

   It is sung to the moon / by a love-lorn loon ….. He sipped no sup, and he craved no cup /As he sighed for the love of a ladye.

In my day, which is close to prehistory, there was Les Paul and Mary Ford's rendition of How High the Moon and Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. How many times did Frank Sinatra fly to the moon on gossamer wings? Cat Stevens walked to fame in Moon Shadow.

It's once in a blue moon that we get such as Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14, thirty years later renamed Moonlight Sonata. And then there was Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune.

That word lunacy has a troubled history. In the ancient world a full moon became the culprit for an unsound mind. It also got tied in with female menstruation which was a mystery to unsound males. Lunatic asylums were so named for millennia. It was Barack Obama, in 2012, who signed a bill striking the word from all legislation forever more. It wouldn't surprise if Trump restores it. 

Go ahead, let NASA circle the moon. From where I stand it still casts a spell, bitten, gibbous or full.