Chapter Thirteen: Lazy Sunday

Sundays in California are a phenomenon unto themselves.

Every week, I meticulously planned my activities and errands such that they never, ever fell on a Sunday.

If I was going to the grocery store, it’d be Wednesday night. If I had to buy some office supplies, that was a perfect Friday-evening trip. If the car needed washing, Saturday it was.

But come Sunday, I’d better not have to leave the house, because I knew exactly what I was up against.

To say that Sundays are “lazy” in California is like saying that winters in Alaska are “cold.”

If you do have to venture out, the first thing you’re up against is a freeway that—while rated at fifty-five miles per hour (which usually translates to seventy, when speaking fluent Californian)—will, inexplicably, trundle along at a brisk forty-five. People will float and drift like so much mechanized phytoplankton along a concrete corridor, heading nowhere in particular, getting there in nothing resembling a hurry.

When you do arrive at your destination, there’s more of the same to come.

I rolled up at the drugstore, poised to buy the essentials (Pop Tarts and decongestant), and should have known that I was going to be thwarted before I even began.

First of all, the store in question was in the midst of converting to another chain, which brought with it the same sort of fear and loathing that you’d feel if every Best Buy somehow ended up rebranded as Circuit City. (You know, had Circuit City not, well, disappeared).

Sure, they’d sell the same merchandise, but you knew the customer service. More precisely: you were aware of its absence. The sinking feeling of long lines, lousy cashiers, and waiting in line like so many cattle began to overtake you. Even before you began shopping, you did a quick glance-over of the registers on the way out, and your mood turned foul. Then, you began second-guessing just how badly you really needed whatever you were planning on shopping for.

Sundays in California are all about depression.

I entered the store, and made a beeline straight for the allergy medicines. I discovered that Sudafed makes a twenty-four hour decongestant, which fills me with the same kind of excitement as I usually get when I find a forgotten twenty in a shirt pocket. When you have chronic sinus issues, the idea of taking one pill a day to make it all better is incredibly enticing.

However, since the chemically gifted have figured out how to turn Sudafed, pencil shavings, and kitty litter into good drugs, you have to pluck a cardboard mockup of the drug box from a placeholder on the shelf, take it obediently over to the pharmacy, and wait to have someone write down your license number, take a DNA sample, give you a body cavity search, and run your profile through the National Database of Decongestant Offenders before you can even begin to entertain the faintest glimmer of leaving the store with real, honest-to-God Sudafed. Even with the insult added to injury, though, you want to go through this, because I am convinced that “pseudoephedrine” means “decongestant,” the way “phenylephrine” means “placebo.”

I wait in line patiently, because there are three lines to the pharmacy, with no clear indication of which will lead me to gratification (and which will lead me to certain doom).

In my line, a man is arguing passionately over a prescription that he needs to have filled. I’m not exactly unfamiliar with this scene, so I wait patiently as he completes his rant, and I finally ratchet my way up to the pharmacy technician.

I present my purchases, only to have her say, “Oh, actually, you can take that over to the other side.” No offer to ring me up there, or drag me over to the register. I have chosen poorly, albeit with no directions to the contrary, and since I do not want to wait another fifteen minutes in line, I shall depart the store with an over-the-counter box of placebo, and not with my highly anticipated, ass-kicking, twenty-four-hour decongestant.

Things are not off to a good start.

For the next part of our story, I have to make a tiny confession: I smoked. Not all the time—I’m off the cancer-sticks, and at the time, I could go months without giving in to temptation—but as of right then, I was smoking. Deal with it. From my perspective, I was singlehandedly funding the education of two preschoolers, the hospitalization of three-and-a-half seniors (one with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, no doubt), and providing textbooks for one high school student off the tax I paid that makes $1.50 worth of product cost $10.

Believe me, I’ve tried to find ways to redirect the energy I waste being happy and pensive when I smoked, but never could find anything that quite took the place of a good dose of nicotine.

So, Pop Tarts and placebo in hand, I went up to the register with the tobacco, and waited patiently for some guy—who was trying to get a refund on something that cost seventy-five cents—to complete his story and transaction (because he was apparently sufficiently motivated to seek a refund, but not sufficiently vigilant as to keep the receipt). Finally he does, and—Pyrrhically victorious—I announced my intent to buy Camel Lights.

The cashier walks over to the cabinet of sin, and stares intently at the boxes. Then, she tallies them a second time.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have any of those—just the 99s, or the regulars.”

I’m starting to get elevated blood pressure now, and I haven’t even taken any decongestant. Cigarettes are like religion—very specific, and intensely personal. Just because someone smokes Marlboros doesn’t mean that any kind of Marlboro will do. You have menthols (for people who prefer to combine nasal spray and cigarettes into one product), 100s (for people who prefer three times the smoke with twice the filter), and various flavors that combine the effects of tar and nicotine to provide lung-paving and buzz commensurate with the user’s expectations. If I can’t get Camel Lights, then “nothing” is a better option than something I don’t want.

So, nothing it is. Plus Pop Tarts, plus do-nothing decongestant.

I probably would have been in a better mood if I hadn’t struck-out with the straight guy I tried to hit on at the restaurant earlier. Regardless, I feel justified in my assessment that, yes, this is a Sunday in California, and yes, like all the rest, I have made the mistake of entering the fray, and emerging in the Twilight Zone. Now, it’s too late to turn back.

The best source of reliable (and expensive) cigarettes is, undoubtedly, the same place that proves to be a reliable source of premium unleaded. So, I head over to the gas station.

On walking in, I realize that, for whatever reason, Sinéad O’Connor is buying cigarettes in front of me. (Well, it looks that way, anyhow.) A tall, thin, tattooed and sunburned girl in a lace blouse and jeans, sporting a buzzed head (perhaps literally and metaphorically speaking), is buying two packs of Marlboro Mediums.

Though noteworthy in and of itself, I make the equally intriguing discovery that she is paying for her merchandise with dimes.

The cashier, who wears an expression that suggests she sees this sort of thing all the time, is intensely focused on the task of counting the sea of shinies in front of her, tallying what’s been put down, and dropping the tons of lucre into the register till. It takes—all told—about five minutes for her to figure out what’s been tendered, and file it away in the cash register.

The girl looks up at me and smiles through a patina of embarrassment. “Sorry,” she offers wanly, as she then waltzes across the store to the candy area and procures a pack of gummi-worms. She tosses these on the counter with her smokes, and this time emits a stream of nickels to cover the cost.

Unfazed, the cashier returns to counting.

By the time I do finally get my cigarettes, I’m beginning to think that smoking—and the intricacies of supporting the habit—may drive me to the point of having an aneurysm unrelated to any cardiovascular effects of the drug.

On the way out, I peel the plastic off my pack of Camels, and toss the foil top in the trash. Sinéad is standing outside, fidgeting with the gummi-worms and studying her cigarettes. As I walk by, she speaks up.

“Hey, can I swap you a pack of these Mediums for your Camel Lights?”

As any gracious, religious person would, I offer my sincere apologies. “I’m sorry, I really can’t deal with anything but these. I just can’t smoke Mediums, you know?”

Disappointed, she understands. “I know. I can’t smoke more than a third of a Red, but these Mediums I can smoke all day long. You know, they’re getting ready to change the labeling of these things because of, well, like, the tar, and nicotine, and whatever? It’s all bullshit. Bullshit, man.”

I pause for a moment to both savor and process this tidbit of product manufacturing insight, as I smile and shrug pacifyingly again, offering my sincere condolences that our taste in candies and tobacco are simply not a match.

I get into the car and head home, and as I watch two sets of four pedestrians wander blithely across the intersection, stop, meet in the middle, and remain there to have a conversation in a four-lane street as the timer on the crosswalk counts down, I realize that I have got to stop smoking. Not just because of the health benefits, the cost, or the fact that I could finally force preschoolers to foot the bill for their own damned education…but because being out of cigarettes is the only possible thing that could send me out on an errand run on a Sunday afternoon in California.