Of Pharmacy Lipstick

Pharmacies were a bit like the walk-in clinics of the 70s. I was recommended for employment by a friend, to the proprieter, a balding, near middle aged pharmacist, of the Center Pharmacy in Fort Lee New Jersey. I was hired and not only worked the counter, but delivered medication by beat-up Dodge automobile. If you continue to follow me you will learn again and again that I was a terrible messenger and delivery person. I am terrible at most things, employment wise, just terrible. This is why I work with such fervor at the few things that I excel at, you know, to make-up. Not convinced of my inablitiltes? I backed up at a clients home in the very dead of moonless night, to make a three, likely 13 point turn behind the wheel of that pig of a car, to return, untipped, to my post at the counter. Those drives were always accompanied by the soundtrack of mechanical woe produced by our ride and that night, a scraping was added to the cacaphonous instrumentation. When I arrived and parked I did notice a shrub, that I had picked up by the clawed end of the car’s bumper, less mindfully but in similar fashion to a decorator crab seeking adornment. Convinced now?

Back to the pharmacy, we did not see very severe injuries, but there was a distinct hands-on aspect. Many  of our older customers called the pharmacists and indeed me, a high school student and budding idiot, "doctor". An ill bestowed compliment, which our senior pharmacist insisted I did accept. “They need to feel safe here". The place operated efficiently I suppose, but was in nearly total disarray from my back of the counter, vantage point. The little visited slum of a cosmetics counter was operated, if you can call dropping in once a month, by the proprieter’s hot wife, operating. GLIFish, wealthy, all-round lovely and purportedly the source of seed money for that fine enterprise it was understood, likely true, that my seriously glabrous and serious pharmacist had been,(was?) the boy-toy of this woman. How complimentary a rumor is that? Our queen attempted, over the course of a couple of years to organize the lipsticks. Sisyphus Oh Sisyphus, can you please help me find the errant tube of FANCY ME IN PINK so that I may retire to my apartment and martini? In the two years that I toiled, peddling medicaments, did she ever successfully rehabilitate the less than two-meter long counter and wall of her cosmetics empire? I will let you guess.