Wear your protective face bandana like an outlaw

I went to Duane Reade yesterday morning. I needed Olay face moisterizer, and shower body wash for sure; plus my Neilmed salt packets were running low; and my hand cream in the green hockey puck container was also running low. I made a shopping list, and also added Tylenol/acetominophin, and disposable latex gloves, as well as additional toothpaste and floss, not to mention a bunch of packaged food items I expected Duane Reade would carry. I steel myself for going in the morning — right after my shower and now daily (previously was every second day) stubble trim. I have the idea to wear my bandana over my face in lieu of a face mask; I’ll wash it as soon as I get home; I cannily decide as well to wear clothing that is in need of a wash so I can just take it all in the shower. I put on my gray Levi’s jeans that once had an athletic cut, but now due to my slimmer (and genuinely more athletic) figure the jeans are always falling off me. So I put on the older and less preferred of my two cloth belts. Will I have to bring the cloth belt into the shower too? I change into my Old Navy faded black jeans that actually fit me (and which I probably couldn’t even zip up and button without hurting myself during my barbell strength training “growth” phase) which can hold themselves up without a belt. I’ve accepted I won’t wear a baseball cap, because I don’t want to wash it when I get home and misshape the bill; I put on my nearly transparent sunglasses to protect my eyes (the bandana is already over my nose and mouth and hanging down in a point to my chest by now) and realize I look like a thug, or someone seriously ill. Off come the sunglasses. Final concession: no jacket, because I don’t want to have to wash that when I get home. Well, it’s fairly decent weather out, and I live just around the corner from Duane Reade. I walk out the house. The sidewalk is quiet. A man and his young son of about three or four (of the crunchy granola kind one sees in Ditmas Park) are coming up the other way from Cortelyou. They slow and step over to the edge of the sidewalk by the street, between two of the sidewalk trees.

“Let’s practice that thing I was telling you about and give this man six feet,” the man says to his son.

I walk past, and give them a thumbs up — and realize, in the man’s mind, when he sees me in my red bandana (the man himself is not wearing a face mask, let alone a face bandana) that he’s probably concerned I’m infected (as I am about everyone about me; although I generally don’t worry so much about passing within two feet of someone on the sidewalk; but is that true?; I do hold my breath when I walk past other people). I round the corner to Duane Reade. I go straight to the door; someone is standing outside. A young woman, just inside the door and wearing the face mask, points me back outside. I see the young man outside is standing on a taped square; I go to the next taped square behind him. It’s only a minute or so before the masked woman lets both the young man and me into the store. It’s rather empty (as it would be much of the time anyway). Those plastic reusable packing crates (similar to what we used to pack the Sony offices from 550 Madison down to 25 Madison) are stacked up three high and one thick the length of the counter in the front of the store: to keep six feet between the cashiers and the customers. Wow. A little freaky, but also impressive safety-wise.

I’ve just come into the store. I’m looking for a shopping basket. The first cashier — J_____, I believe his name is — he’s the one who, years ago (probably during my strength training bulking phase) when I used to come in the store all the time and buy four or six or eight of whatever protein bars were on sale) the cashier (a black woman, maybe in her 40s or 50s) recognized me and said, humorously, that I was the one who always bought all the protein bars; “Do you know J_____?” she said; “He likes to buy them too. He works here.” J_____ is cute, I admit, and probably about 23; he would have been about 19 or 20 then; he might, in fact, have been more muscular back then; in any case he’s got the pimples of youth on his face, which I don’t find unattractive. Well, yesterday J_____ was at the first cashier’s post, and sees me standing there, just inside the entrance, right near the cashier’s counter, wearing a red bandana over my face (nearly up to my eyes) and looking around the store like I’m scoping it out.

“Can I help you with something?” J_____ says.

“This is a hold up!” I could have said — and it wouldn’t have been out of character with how I was dressed (I even had two reusable shopping bags with me, to carry out all the money from Duane Reade’s registers).

“I’m just looking for a basket,” I say.

And I walked down past the counter, making sure to stay behind and out of the way of the people on line, rather than cutting between them and getting within breathing range.

And so begins my Duane Reade shop. Everything was available — and many things on sale. Acetominophin was OUT! And there’s plenty of ibuprofen and Advil. They had just two boxes of Tylenol left behind a locked cabinet. The guy restocking the aisle unlocks it for me.

“Do you have any Duane Reade-brand acetominophin?” I say.

Sorry, no, he says.

That’s fine. I take the Tylenol. It’s $10.99! For just a small-to-normal-sized bottle.

I had checked the website before leaving the house; the store should have had “2–5” boxes of latex gloves. I don’t see them in the aisle where I expect they would be (near band-aids and other first aid type stuff), and in fact there’s a section of empty shelf where I expect they might have been. I figure the gloves, if there are any, have been moved behind the pharmacist’s counter. By now, already in the store, and having already worked out my plan to take all my clothes in the shower with me when I get home, I decide to let the gloves go — the doctors and nurses, who might even be coming to Duane Reade to see if they can find any, need them more than me. I do notice while I’m standing there staring at the shelves, going up and down, right and left, with my eyes, and then trying the next aisle, and then coming back to the first aisle — and noticing the slightly sweet smell of my bandana which, admittedly, I have used a couple of times to wipe my nose since I last washed it, but not for at least three weeks — that I’m granting myself a generous amount of time to do my shopping, perhaps comforted by my face bandana that it’s protecting me. Well, I’m not staying in the store awfully long. But I do surmise to myself that if I weren’t wearing the face bandana, and hadn’t come up with the plan to wash all my clothes in the shower with me when I get home, I might be in and out of that store like lightening (and not get nearly as much of the stuff I will ultimately need).

I do well in the food aisles. A box of pasta, four cans of hearty protein-filled (11 grams! 19 grams!) Campbell’s soup (steak and potatoes, chicken noodle, another with sirloin), on sale for two cans at $2.98. Wow! I had a steak and potato soup for lunch yesterday with a few crackers. It was good. I also get some instant beef-flavor teriyaki noodles (that I can have with the teriyaki beef jerky I have at home), orange juice, nuts, turkey jerky, coffee, “Sleepytime” caffeine-free herbal tree. I spent, I believe, one hundred and thirteen dollars (or was it a hundred and thirty?) And that includes the more than twenty dollars of savings.

“I better get my points,” I say to the cashier through my bandana.

He doesn’t laugh.

Well, he probably couldn’t see through my bandana the arch smile on my face that signaled I was making a joke.