Grainy Pictures
It was a scene from a black and white 1980’s movie shot in Soviet Russia, maybe after Chernobyl. The customers line up spaced apart, distances carefully monitored by stripes on the ground. Almost all are wearing facemasks, and standing in singles or at most, couples: no groups, and few kids. There are no conversations; the line focuses on their carts, or their phones, or how long they have to wait. Those few without facemasks seem outliers. Employees monitor the lineup, determining what door, and how many, can enter.
Inside you get your ID card, and they take a grainy black and white picture. “Do I take off my mask? Do I hold my breath if I do? It seems wrong to smile.” It really didn’t matter; the picture is so grainy the mask probably would have helped.
The Corona Dance
In among the shelves people carefully follow the new etiquette: a dance of six feet around each other in eight-foot aisles. Shoppers focus on the products: what’s missing? If they smile, you wouldn’t know, the masks screen emotion. Someone stops to look for jalapeno peppers, the whole procession grinds to a halt. There is no way, with the new rules, to get by without violating their space, their aura of corona.
The only normality is the employees. Some wear masks but many don’t, seeming to live in a different reality, the time “before”. They stand beside each other, they laugh, and they even touch. It’s like the virus is only for the “marks”, the customers, and by virtue of their employment they are somehow granted immunity. Wish it were so, we’d sign up.
Of course, there is no toilet paper. The worker laughs, it’s one in the afternoon. The toilet paper he said, what little they had, was all gone by nine. Get in early, that’s the rule if you want toilet paper. But there are paper towels, even goods ones, “Bounty”, in massive packages of fifteen rolls. Better buy those now, who knows when next you’ll find them.
Toilet Paper Conspiracy
Toilet paper: what’s the magic there? Is the cure to COVID-19 somehow tied to Charmin? Since the very beginning, that week before St. Patrick’s Day when the world ground to a halt, everyone has been searching for toilet paper. Somewhere, in someone’s basement, there has to be millions of rolls of Charmin and Scott’s, sucking up all of the world’s supply. Procter and Gamble says that there’s no change in production; that simply every roll they put on the shelves is snatched up before nine, squirrelled away in closets and shelves for the day of the toilet paper apocalypse.
Or is the toilet paper the talisman, the signal? Is this artificially created shortage some vast conspiracy to focus the citizenry on the reality of the COVID-19 Pandemic. You may not get the virus: if you live in the right part of the country, you might not even know someone who does. But we all share one suffering. We all are on an eternal and existential search for Charmin. The bears on the commercial are a simple reminder: you could run out, you could be “the home” that has none. Perhaps there’s a Dark Web sage, “A-Anon” (the Alpha version of Q-Anon) who’s calling for the march to the paper aisle, creating his own version of a toilet paper Pandemic. Only those who link to Reddit know. It’s definitely mysterious.
Reaching the Door
We search the aisles. If there’s a Starbucks’ French Roast shortage in the world, we definitely started it. They are three-pound bags, enough coffee to get our two person-two dog household through two and a half weeks. We bought enough to make June.
Finally we fill our cart, and grab our boxes to stuff into the car. We line up again, waiting for the checkout. The cashier is armored behind a newly installed Plexiglas barrier, protected from sneezes and coughs by eight feet of clear plastic. She asks for the boxes to fill with our groceries, and stacks them at the end of the counter. You want your groceries boxed – you do it, was her subliminal message.
I insert the card to pay the damages. Push green for credit, push no for cash back, push green to approve the amount. Who pushed those buttons last? Is the screen clear of virus? Does anyone ever clean it? Did I ever, even care about this, in the time “before”?
We take our cart, and our boxes into the parking lot. Our masks come off, and with their removal we seem to enter a more genial reality. We talk, we smile, we breath the cool spring air. We get to the car, and pack our groceries into the boxes our cashier so clearly disapproved. Then we go and use our new ID cards to fill the gas tank at twenty cents under the going price.
Welcome to Costco.
