[Note: Four years ago this week, on March of 2020, I became one of the first persons in my circle of friends and family to fall victim of COVID-19. I was lucky to recover, although I have continued to exhibit symptoms that make me suspect I carry a strain of Long COVID. In the Fall of 2021 I presented an exhibition and performance at the Shirley Fiterman Arts Center / Tribeca Arts Center in New York titled A Journal of the Year of the Pharmacy that gathered my diary notes from that period, of which I include the following performance excerpt.]
Lights go on the empty stage. Pablo is standing in center
I love places that have a history, or a cultural or religious meaning. I love
archaeological sites, old churches, obscure museums where I am the only visitor.
But drug stores, those with pharmacies in them, play a special role in my life.
Over my adult life I developed a mild obsession with pharmacies. It was not until
about a year ago when I finally realized the true reason for that obsession.
But first, let me explain my relationship with those places.
Growing up, the closest pharmacy was around the corner of the house. They had
a Pac-Man console, and my brother and I would go there practically every
afternoon after school to play . It was one of the first examples of how both he
and I could become obsessive about things.
The pharmacy, which had a light green interior with fluorescent lights and glass
counters, also had that smell that is distinct to all Mexican pharmacies, a mixture
of crushed aspirins, rubbing alcohol, and calamine lotion.
I should say that I don’t consider drugstores particularly interesting. On the
contrary, I am obsessed with everyday, corporate, superficial looking, commercial,
shallow, drugstores.
I love them because they are artless. I love them precisely because they help me
escape from art, something I need often. They are a medicine for escapists like
me.
I love them because they preach a contrived commercial gospel of wellness,
which I know full well is a fairy tale, a children’s story. Still, I like their
ubiquitousness, the fact that there is one on every corner and that they all look
exactly the same.
The neutral colors of the pharmacy, meant to convey sterility, would foreshadow
my future working in art museums, with their brightly lit, neutral white walls. Yet,
when I think of pharmacies I am not interested in artists who made art about
them like Joseph Cornell or Damien Hirst. I am interested in pharmacies because
they are sites that regulate extremes, like between healing and recovery. They are
not places built for drama. They are places for supporting our basic biological
functions. ]And often our needs of beauty as well. They are repositories of first aid
items but also shaving cream. Oof Tylenol and Motrin but also Tres Semme
conditioner; a place to refill a prescription and to get makeup remover.
Pharmacies, the boring commercial kind, underscore the equalizing fact that we
all have bodies, rich and poor, smart and not, beautiful and ugly, and we all are
going to face the end of life.
Throughout my life, I always enjoyed walking into pharmacies. In Mexico City, I
would go into the pharmacy section of Sanborns, the one that was directly across
the street from my aunt’s office, and I would acquire a glass bottle of red
mouthwash, supposedly made after a formula conceived by a French chemist. The
bottle looked elegant, and the mouthwash seemed to me like a powerful tonic.
Over the years, and for some reason increasingly over the last 10 years, on my
way home from work I would go into a drugstore and buy something or pretend
to buy something. Usually it was a small toy for Estela, which I brought home until
she got tired of Rite Aid toys. But going into drugstores became a kind of therapy
for me.
A year and a half ago, in March 2020, I woke up with a fever. I had lost my sense
of smell and taste. As my fever climbed to 103 and I had hallucinatory visions, the
nights became visits to the abyss. My head was on fire and my body shivered
violently. I dreamt of the Commendatore, the stone statue that arrives in Don
Giovanni’s lair to take him to hell.
Nearby our house in Brooklyn people started to die by the hundreds per day. I
learned of colleagues and neighbors who had been taken away.
Then one morning, the fever broke. I began a long way to recovery. I had been
spared this time.
We were all confined in our homes, going to the drug store next to the
neighborhood park was our only possible outing. Buying Dove body wash, finding
the ever-scarce Bounty paper towels and the even more scarce Lysol cleaner or
even Purell became a thrilling experience. We became a hunter/gatherer society
in the pursuit of those items. During those early days, the shelves where those
products once stood were totally empty.
At some point I realized that the truck that delivered the weekly shipments to the
drug store arrived on Tuesday afternoons. So I would walk to the drugstore on
those days, like the main character in Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to
the Colonel, a Colonel visiting the post office daily to find out if his pension check
has arrived.
On one of those days, as I was waiting in aisle 4 next to the cat food for the drug
store attendant to unload a delivery—somewhere between the vitamin section
and the bandages—I had an epiphany.
It was one of those insights that are hard to describe in words, and can only be
explained through images or by being there.
It is understanding through navigation, through, simply, walking. Places have
languages, and our bodies have a physical/corporeal/spatial understanding. It is
through the conjunction of those two that we can understand things that we have
not been able to understand before.
I thought of a drug store I remembered from 1989, the year my family emigrated
to Chicago. We lived on Campbell Avenue, in Chicago’s West Rodgers Park Area,
close to Lincoln Avenue, an area full of mysterious budget hotels. New to the
American way of life, I often wondered, “why would tourists stay in hotels in our
neighborhood?”
My room had a window overlooking a Korean restaurant. The barbecue smell
from that restaurant reminded me powerfully of summers in Mexico City and of
my friends who I missed so much.
We also had an Osco across the street. My dad liked that there was an ATM at
the drugstore, a novelty for us. He said the words “cash station” in an
exaggerated English accent, which my mom hated. As recent immigrants, were
struggling financially. On special occasions, like birthdays, my dad sometimes
bought soaps and shampoo at the store for my mom, thinking they were fine
items.
I personally loved the office supply section. I still love the office supply section. I
also particularly loved the term “Express Scripts.” It made me think that you could
purchase plays from the pharmacists.
One Sunday evening in late summer of 1990, I went to Osco with my dad to buy
milk. 2% milk.
When we were crossing the street I saw the deep blue sky of dusk and the reverse
red letters of the Osco pharmacy reflected on his glasses. I associated the blue
color with the 70s, and the 70s with my childhood, and with him. And I associated
the red light with happy activities.
I knew this everyday trip to Osco was one of those events that would be totally
forgettable, something that no one should remember, and I remember thinking
that I needed to remember that very moment for that very reason. I had always
felt that my role in life was to be a memory preserver, to save moments that had
been left unperceived by others, and record/document/memorialize them for
posterity. It was precisely the banality of that moment, accompanied by the
awareness that I felt that one day, on a day like today, my dad would would no
longer be around and I would painfully miss him, that made me realize that it was
important to save the memory.
Places, memories, blue glass, red letters, milk, office supplies, the 1970s. Eau de
toilette, Mexico City, Chicago, budget hotels, Lincoln Avenue, Osco.
This body remembers.
Thank you for your neon illustrated story telling. You are a weaver of histories and memories.