TaterTown

The Clancy's pharmacy building today. I used to "merchandise" those front windows.

I've grown to really love a good true life story. I've started to find great questions to ask people that engender them to dig deep and tell me their stories. This is one of mine that I have told so many times.

Clancy's Beachwood Pharmacy. That's the name. That's the place. It was, once, the remaining center of a tiny downtown. The downtown of my hometown...Beachwood, New Jersey.

There was a small town grocery around the corner where you told the grocer what you wanted and he piled it all up on the butcher block counter an tallied your charges on paper. The kind of place where they still wrapped your meat in brown paper with red and white string. There was a barber shop. The old-fashioned kind with the metal chairs and spinning candy-can striped pole. One of those places that only men frequented. However, by the time I got to high-school, the grocer had closed and the pharmacy was the main remaining business. The owner had started an attached "Tobacco" store with newspapers, cigarettes, lottery tickets and candy. Another building housed his surgical supply store. He had also opened a very forward-thinking video store in the next building over.    He basically owned the block and was a small town entrepreneur. More on him later.

The thing to do when I was growing up and you turned 15 1/2 years of age was to get your NJ "working papers". I cannot remember the legal technicalities around it, but you needed these if you were going to be employed in a non-agricultural setting or in a non-family business. Getting them was somewhat of a "rite of passage" for working class kids--of which I was one. So, I got mine. However, the idea of actually working was ridiculous. I just wanted to be empowered to do it if I wanted to.   I had no idea nor intention to actually work. I was very busy with school, flag squad, and various social activities. The universe and my father had very different plans as I would soon learn.

My mom worked part time as a real-estate agent and my dad was the master (captains work for masters) of tug boats. Mom's job brought income in spurts. Dad's job paid well but could be very dependent on seasonality. When I was very young, it seemed as if he was always being "laid off" just before Christmas. This makes sense because if it is freezing cold outside and harbors are icy, dredging and other tug boat operations slow down to a halt. We never wanted for a thing but as I grew older and was more exposed to more affluent people I started to ask for more and better material goods.   Like any teenage girl, my insatiable need for clothes and makeup and hair products was a rising tide. I wanted a pair of Jordache jeans in the worst way and my mother thought I had lost my mind because of how expensive they were. I remember there being a mounting tension in the house around this issue.

One day, some time after I'd gotten the aforementioned "working papers" as a symbol of someday independence, my dad came home from work in the afternoon and putzed around the garage for awhile as he often did. Then, he came inside and asked me if I wanted to run down to "Clancy's" with him for cigarettes. I agreed, of course, because...well...he was my dad and one didn't really NOT do what he wanted. So, I climbed in the passenger seat of whatever car he as was working on at the time and drove down the street to Clancy's Beachwood Pharmacy.

Clancy's was the place where we went for Hallmark cards, prescriptions, candy, cheap make-up, etc. I knew it well and had been going in and out of there for years. There was a sweet older German lady named Emme who worked at the cosmetics counter (yes, they had a cosmetics counter) in a light pink kind of house - coat garment somewhat similar to the Clinique staff wears today. I knew her a bit and I knew the owner, Frank Clancy, just because he was the big man in town due to the fact that he owned all those stores.   So, when we pulled up in front of the place, I was in known territory.

Dad stopped the car and took the keys out of the ignition and just sat there. He made no motion to get out. I recall a moment of confusion and then saying something to the effect of "Do you want me to go get them?" meaning his cigarettes. He turned to me and said "No. I don't need cigarettes. But you do need to go inside." Again, confused, I must have questioned or made a quizzical face.   And then it came.   "Go inside. Go see Frank. You start work in 15 minutes. You're working for him as a cashier from 5-10 pm two weeknights and a shift on the weekends".

Imagine that. Bam. Go inside. You have a job.   You are going to work. You are going to grow up. In the next 5 minutes you are going to change. Just like that. Snap.

I don't exactly recall what happened next. I remember being shocked and scared and intimidated. But you really didn't argue or disagree with my dad very much. At least I didn't. I must have fussed a bit and I do remember him saying something to the effect of "If you want all these things you keep asking for you need to earn your own money and pay for them."    I went inside and started my job. I would work there for the next four years.

Clancy's was a community. The cast of characters was amazing. It was a big jumbled dysfunctional family that was led by its patriarch, Frank. Frank was a big man of about 6'2'' and prematurely white haired. He always wore one of those white zip-up pharmacist coats. He had a bad leg that was constantly in one of those air boots. He'd had varicose vein surgery that had resulted in such poor circulation that he constantly had a leg ulcer and he kind of lumbered around dragging that leg behind him all of the time. He moved fast for a big hobbled man though. Lots of times late at night there would be drunks or thieves or other disturbances and I'd see him really pull it together and run after people.

He was a widower with two grown sons, one of which worked for him running the surgical supply business and the other was a physician. I don't know exactly how old he was at this time but I'd guess around 55. Frank's deceased wife's mother lived with him and she was a tiny little chubby lady who didn't speak English very well. She was from somewhere in Eastern Europe but I don't know exactly where. On the weekends she'd come in with giant casserole dishes of stuffed peppers or cabbage or kielbasa baked with potatoes and onions.   Frank was constantly farting and the weekends were gas festivals after this food would arrive.

Frank's older brother, John, was also a pharmacist and worked at the store. John was kind and a bit frailer. He was also a big man, but had lost a lung to cancer and used oxygen all the time. This fact, however, did not keep him from smoking. He'd sit in a chair that was tucked in between the arcs of the pharmaceutical shelves behind the counter and smoke Parliaments while the oxygen tube was still up his nose. I used to tell him all the time that he was going to blow us all up but he'd just say "Nah. It just makes my cigarettes burn faster."

Frank's key employee was a guy named Tony who was probably about 35 years old. Tony did everything. He unloaded the trucks and stocked the shelves. He cleaned the windows and the floors. He kept the heat and the air conditioning running. Frank was fond of Tony and treated him like a son. Tony lived above one of the stores in an apartment and was a fixture.   Frank had kind of taken Tony in as a teenager. Tony came from a lousy family and he'd had drug and alcohol and mental health issues.   He was what today we'd call bi-polar and had actually been institutionalized at the state psychiatric hospital at Marlboro. He kind of reminded me of the character of Jim on the sitcom "Taxi". He had that same low voice and wild-eyed kind of look.   Late at night when things were quiet in the store he'd absolutely kill us with stories of the crazy situations he'd been in when he was young and he'd make fun of anyone who came in that he thought had a screw loose. He'd tell us what it was like at Marlboro at "feeding time" when all the patients/inmates would get their Thorazine and then do what he called the "Thorazine Strut" and walk around in circles for hours.   He was the leader of all of the hi-jinx that went on. Even then I was a bit more game than the average girl and Tony and I would cook up ridiculous stuff. One of our favorite things to do was to take down the condom racks late on Friday night. We'd drag them to the back of the store which would force any guy coming in for a pack of Trojans to have to come to me, the 16 year-old female cashier and ASK where they were. That was fun enough to start with but later we improved it by telling guys that we were totally out except for the multi-colored party packs. Tony would give me $5 bucks every time I sold a box of party pink or yellow condoms. We would absolutely howl when the guys would leave the store.    Tony had street smarts and I learned alot from his very acute and usually correct observations about people. He told me who to watch out for and who to trust.

That nice older lady named Emme also wore a zip up jacket but hers was light pink. She was spry and had the most beautiful fair, translucent skin. She and her husband barely ate real food and subsisted mainly on vegetable juicing. She'd extol the virtues of clean eating all of the time. She also loved to steal the occasional lipstick and she was constantly tucking ones she thought would look nice on me into my purse.

There was a regular customer we called "Coach" who was the football coach at Admiral Farragut Academy.   This was a naval prep school in Pine Beach just down the road. Coach was tough ball of a man and he was Frank's friend. He was also a dirty old pig. He'd hold my hand and wiggle his finger in my palm and constantly grab my ass. He wasn't threatening in any way, just tedious.

There was always a parade of new cashiers and pharmacy assistants. They would come and go. Usually they'd go.    The cash register was the old fashioned kind that didn't calculate change for you and this was a make-it-or-break it issue. So many people just could not do the math. I can't recall how many times I tried to teach idiot girls my age or younger how to "count up" to make change.

The customers were a constant source of fascination.   After so many years of selling cigarettes, if I know you smoke, I can guess your brand and have about a 75% chance of being correct. That used to be pretty close to 100%.   I could spot a Virginia Slims lady a mile away, not to mention the always reliable profile of the Kool Menthol smoker. There were the panicky young parents in the middle of the night seeking baby aspirin and asking Frank to check out their feverish infants.   The African-American ladies with their periods looking for Lydia Pinkham's Tablets.   And there were always the drug addicts looking to buy codeine cough syrup or Paregoric because at that time you could buy it over the counter but you had to give ID and sign a book. Supposedly the DEA kept track of who bought the stuff but that giant carbon copy book sat on the shelf for 4 years and the DEA never came in once. The Paregoric purchasers always made me wonder how it felt to be kind of a little high and totally constipated.

I also worked as the pharmacy assistant which meant that I filled the prescriptions while Frank and John watched TV and did other stuff.   John always paid a bit more attention, but the truth is that for most prescriptions its not rocket science to find the bottle with the right drug and dosage and count out 20 pills.   I marvel that today with all of the computers and technology that pharmacists have survived as a profession. I'm not sure why you need someone with an advanced degree to do that work. Especially since none of them can give medical advice as they used to.   One thing that really stands out in my mind about filling prescriptions was a mark of the times. The AIDS epidemic was just beginning and I remember Frank noting that suddenly there were alot of men getting prescriptions for oral yeast infections.   Thrush is one of the first signs of immune suppression. What was crazy about it was that there was no prescription oral med. Doctors simply prescribed those waxy vaginal yeast infection tablets that you popped into your mouth and let dissolve. Frank got so sick of men freaking out about it when they saw the boxes with the pictures of the vaginal insertion instructions that eventually we started using chloroform on a long q-tips to swipe off the the pictures and any appearance of the word "vaginal" on the boxes. Chloroform removed the printing as if magic and it stopped all of the protests from the men about what the hell were we giving them and that we'd clearly made a mistake. Frank didn't seem to care that tampering with prescription labeling was probably some kind of federal offense. We used chloroform often because it is a great cleaning agent and we'd use to use it once a month or so to really clean down the counters. The occupational hazard is that it knocks you out cold. I fainted twice doing this but Frank knew its probability and both times he was right there to catch me and bring me around with some smelling salts.

Working there was a great life experience. It was part of my becoming an adult and it acutely focused me on the ways people's lives go off in different directions. It showed me a full and sometimes heartbreaking view of the world around me outside of my protected home. I'm sure there are a bunch of reasons I never did drugs as did many of my peers but I'm also sure that working here was a big part of that. Working there made me confident to talk to people. To help them. It made me learn how to question people about what they wanted. Make them be specific. It showed me that when you were in charge--when you knew your stuff--people trust you.

Thanks, Dad. I'm sure you just wanted me to be responsible and buy my own Jordache jeans but you gave me a whole lot more than that the day you dropped me off and told me to get my ass to work.