I went to pick up a prescription on Monday at CVS. Like all pharmacies in the 2020s, the shelves are mostly bare, what you want is locked up, two people are working, and cleaning supplies and HVACs and HEPA filters are blasting everywhere. It looks like triage. I picked up this prescription at a different CVS for 10 years before they closed last summer, either because of its proximity to new, briefly-fresher locations, or the constant shoplifting and assaults that occurred. Not that this doesn’t happen all the time at every CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreen’s, you name it, but sometimes you get lucky and find the floss and Drano without need of a skeleton key.
None of this is new. But what struck me standing in line was how many people in the store were coughing. You could hear it everywhere, more than usual, but I couldn’t see anyone. These were loud, rough, thick coughs, mostly dry but still dislodging some piece of resin-like phlegm. I moved up in line and realized it was the pharmacist, not even bothering to cough into the crook of her arm or a tissue or whatever the proper method is now, if there is one—she was just letting it roar in the faces of her customers, or as an aside, as if on stage performing the most riveting piece of pandemic art in the last year.
Am I mad? Come on. How can you be? Two, certainly three years ago it would’ve been shocking, and in 2020 behavior like that would’ve gotten you kicked out of any building, let alone a pharmacy. Surgical and KN95 masks became political symbols, mostly due to Donald Trump’s catastrophic communication about the pandemic in 2020 (and the largely liberal media’s inflammation in response—you never would’ve seen ceremonial social mask wearing go so deep into the early-2020s if not for Trump’s stubbornness at the start). Disease as moral failure hadn’t been deployed since the AIDS epidemic, and even then you only saw virulent homophobes like Anita Bryant and Fred Phelps openly saying that gay people deserved to die from their custom plague. And in 2020, to win an election, the Democratic Party convinced millions of people that getting COVID-19 was your fault, and you were an awful person if you ever risked giving it to someone else.
Never mind that three months into the pandemic, millions of people around the world raced out into the streets to (rightfully) protest the murder of George Floyd. Cheek to jowl, protestors were crammed in what should’ve been a “superspreader event,” and at the start of June 2020, I thought that might be the last straw. I was listening to the CDC, I was listening to every ominous “expert” bracing us for a multi-year rather than a multi-month lockdown—I thought that amount of people would surely spread this super-virus around the country and kill scores of Americans, just as it had in New York City, where the privilege of first place doesn’t just mean getting new movies before everyone else.
Later that night, I saw Le Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville at the Charles. A thunderstorm began about 10 minutes into the movie, and it aided the mood immensely; I didn’t feel so bad missing Twisters in 4DX anymore. Booms of thunder hit in time with photoflashes of a detective, along with another chorus of coughs pinging throughout the theater like surround sound. Again, what would’ve been a scandalous situation four years ago is now simply the elephant in the room, or the mouse, or the tic, depending on your sensitivity. I don’t see the token mask-wearers anymore, though there are a few; and from what I could tell, all the rough, wet coughs were, once again!, “unprotected” and coming from the elderly.
This dude two rows up and one aisle over was blasting Alain Delon with whatever soup’s brewing in his lungs; no one complained, no one said anything, and if they did, they caused no scene, and nothing happened. Everyone just pretended not to notice. I don’t think it’s possible yet not to notice a chorus of coughs after what we’ve been through this decade. We—the pandemic hit everyone somehow, and now that things really are back to “normal,” no one wants to talk about it. There’s currently yet another surge sweeping the nation (but apparently not Joe Biden, if you believe Seymour Hersh), but it’s not covered like the election, or even the rise of Hailey Welch, aka the “Hawk Tuah” girl. Again—imagine a meme about spit working out in 2020, let alone turning someone into a celebrity overnight back.
Rather than take stock and talk about what happened to all of us, most people just don’t want to think about it. That’s understandable, and predictable—but there’s a rise in vulgarity, a fascination with bodily fluids and excretion and cleanliness, whether it’s Welch or a scatological song by Ice Spice. Dealing with it all by diving into a cesspool, free of Purell and not a Clorox wipe in sight.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith