For All of the Covid Deniers and Anti-maskers and Conmen
From This Point on Referred to as Babies
This prose poem is a fairly true rendering of a Trump rally that I happened upon during the controversy about masks, though the ending is manufactured for comic effect.
Rally
A face from a fun house mirror pressing against my driver’s side window. Giant shark teeth and a mouth twisted in rage—a gargoyle image of a banished second-rate mythological harpy some third-rate Greek poet had failed to write about after being distracted by a toothache. Which reminded me, once again, about the serendipitous arc of history that weak-minded people cling so hopelessly to, with predictable results. I’m with the guy who got arrested for drawing attention to himself while standing half-naked among the lily pads in the town’s pond, except I wouldn’t have been singing the National Anthem. That’s how people get into trouble. They make a barely acceptable symbolic gesture, then go overboard, alienating even the most hardcore troublemakers—like when this woman writes “Fuck you” on my window with purple lipstick, as my beat-up SUV inches slowly through the crowd. I’m on my way to get a scone, a seemingly apolitical gesture, but now she has my attention. “Smile! Be happy!” I say, lowering my mask. “Jesus loves you! I’ve got a Jesus as big as my hat!” I point to my black felt fedora on the passenger-side seat. Which is my attempt to distract her and exit this current dark tunnel of mania. There’s much yelling, a little spitting, until she’s dragged away by a shaggy guy holding a sign that promotes the castration of a certain gay journalist. Knowing that bleach cures and child molester conspiracies will soon follow, I motor on, eventually making my way home. I sit on the back porch, sconeless and forlorn. I tell my wife about the woman. She has her back to me and seems to have put on twenty pounds since this morning. “Smile! Be happy! Jesus loves you,” she says, in a snarky, unfamiliar voice—an ominous sign that I’ve been followed home.
There was a lot of bad behavior and misinformation during the first manifestation of Covid. The worst case I saw was a clerk at Cumberland Farms, a beefy guy who thought it was funny to take off his mask when he sneezed, saying, “Now we’re all in this together.” There were also the hoarders, of course. But the anti-maskers were the most insidious. They argued that wearing a mask infringed upon their “freedom,” not realizing that this bogus claim ignored all the old people and immune deficient, who just wanted the “freedom” to live. These anti-maskers weren’t interested in personal freedom. They were just selfish and didn’t want to suffer like the rest of us for the betterment of others. I thought about them when I wrote the below story, loosely based on a character I would see at the YMCA pool until he moved away a few years ago.
The Pool Nazi
Don made his way gingerly through the Scylla and Charybdis of boxed cereals, kidney beans, and vegetable juices, fearing the aisle might suddenly close in and suck the air right out of him. What he feared most, though, was the recurring image of him curled in bed, feverish and drowning in an inner sea of blood, unable to alert his wife by text, who would most likely be downstairs in the living room lost in the naïve simplicity of a Hallmark movie.
Don had chosen to grocery shop during the “senior hours” that were designated for the immune-compromised and half-dead. “Half-dead” because that’s how he was beginning to feel after listening to an assortment of cable-TV talking heads cheerily insist that he and his fellow baby boomers would be honored to sacrifice their lives to save the faltering economy. “That’s only fair,” he had heard, just yesterday, a Millennial outside of CVS say to his blue-haired friend with more facial piercings than an Aztec warrior. “The old coots with their fat-ass pensions have lived long enough. It’s time to move on, people.”
The kid was at CVS, he confessed, because he “felt like shit,” so he had decided to purchase some snacks and a couple cases of Sprite before the “shitstorm” hit him, whereupon he’d plop down on an old La-Z-Boy he’d inherited from his “old man” and revisit the entire “Dexter” series, all the time toking on the weed he’d fooled the Compassion Center into giving him. “Sounds cool,” his friend had said with visible admiration.
Thinking about them now almost made Don glad to be pushing his cart among aged kindred souls, one of whom had just navigated fiercely into his aisle heading straight toward him like an infected torpedo.
The man was unusually small and thin, wearing a black raincoat with a frayed Boston Red Sox hat pulled slightly over his forehead, as if he were ashamed to show his face. But his eyebrows, which were still visible, gave him away—two thick unruly patches of hair constantly twitching like a pair of horny centipedes. He was an old nemesis, a guy who swimmers at the YMCA called the “Pool Nazi,” because he spent most of his time nastily checking to see if each lap swimmer had showered. He could be friendly to a few swimmers, but for some reason he detested Don. Just over the last year he had made a number of inappropriate comments: “Boy, do you talk a lot”; “Are you really as smart as you think you are?”; and, most shockingly, “You know, they have medication for those man boobs.” He pretended his snide remarks were in jest, but even Don’s friends (who unfortunately often laughed at the taunts), thought the Pool Nazi’s dislike of Don bordered on the pathological.
Anyone else might have told the guy to go to hell, or punched him in the nose, but Don’s way was to take the path of least resistance. He knew if he called the guy out, the battle would escalate, and then swimming, the one exercise he cherished, would cease to be fun. To him lap swimming was like meditation, peaceful as going back into the womb.
“Did you ever think of just swimming at a different time?” Don’s wife had suggested when he told her about the Pool Nazi.
“I’m not changing my schedule for him,” Don had replied.
“But the jerk’s gotten into your head.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You should see your face when you talk about him. You look like you’re going to stroke out.”
“Probably just the lighting in this room.”
She started to laugh. “Look, sweetie, sometimes you have to get into someone’s face or they think you’re weak.” Unlike Don, his wife could be confrontational, and had a repertoire of glares that could freeze a wise guy in his tracks.
“You saying I’m a wimp?”
She walked over and kissed him on the cheek. “No, I think you’re kind and thoughtful. That’s why I married you. You know how I feel about most men.”
Now that’s more like it, Don thought.
“But,” she added, “I’d rather you’d try to drown the guy than walk around for the next few months obsessing about him.”
Which he most certainly would have if the virus hadn’t forced the Y to close down. It had been a month since he’d even seen the Pool Nazi, and now here they were face-to-face.
The Pool Nazi peered up from under his hat. “Fancy, this,” he said, his eyebrows seeming to defy biology by squirming in different directions. His raincoat opened to reveal a soiled white T-shirt and an old pair of salmon-colored shorts.
“Oh, hi,” Don said.
The Pool Nazi moved closer.
“Six feet, remember?” Don said. “I have a pre-existing condition.”
“What is it? Lack of insight? Or just an adolescent fear of death?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Don said, backing up a few paces.
“Take a chance, Donald. Lick a doorknob, shake a few hands. Put your head into the lion’s mouth.”
So he knows my name, Don thought, which, for some reason, spooked him.
“You can’t live forever, Donny Boy. Just lean into that instead of acting like a scared puppy.”
Don felt his face go red. He thought about what his wife had said, and a lot of comebacks flashed through his mind. “What’s your problem, asshole?” “Nice sandals, jerk-off,” referring to the Pool Nazi’s Birkenstocks that were older than Christ. But, as always, he decided to be reasonable.
“Why do you bust me all the time?” he asked.
“I don’t have enough hours of the day to go into it.”
“Well, it has to stop.”
“Or what?”
Don could feel his right hand begin to shake. It was as if it had a mind of its own and was about to grab the Pool Nazi by his T-shirt and hurl him into a row of canned tomatoes. He tried to steady himself by grasping the cart’s handle but it didn’t help, so he said, “I forgot something in the next aisle,” and he drifted away, leaving his cart behind—the Pool Nazi’s laugh (a sound like a blender crushing ice) echoing behind him.
A few dazed moments later he found himself in the toilet paper aisle, staring at row upon row of empty cream-colored metal shelves. No toilet paper, no tissues, no paper towels. An old woman in a motorized wheelchair approached, stopping about ten feet away. She had short gray curly hair. A surgical mask was fastened to both of her ears.
“What’s with people’s obsession with toilet paper?” Don said. “It’s biologically impossible to have that many bowel movements in a week.” He thought this was pretty funny, but the old woman didn’t laugh.
“Please,” she said, “You’re scaring me.”
“Sorry, mam, it was just a joke.”
“There’s nothing funny about the look on your face. You’re just another angry man. I should know, I married one. Lived with the bastard for forty years.” She backed up her wheelchair very quickly, waving Don off. “Just don’t think you’re going to get away with robbing me.”
Don had no idea how to respond to that, so he left the aisle and went to grab a loaf of Portuguese sweet bread from the bakery, and a couple of cartons of egg whites from the dairy section. By the time he returned to his cart, the Pool Nazi had gone. Looking at his full cart, Don decided to check out before the line of shoppers got too long and he’d be forced to share everyone’s viral air space. Unfortunately, when he reached the checkout stations, there were about three people in each lane, all with full carts, so he chose the line he thought might be the quickest. About ten minutes later he began mindlessly placing items onto the conveyor belt. He couldn’t wait to finish and get home, and he wished he could hold his breath until the items were bagged and paid for. Everything was going fine until the conveyor belt stopped. The cashier, a hefty woman with fleshy arms and wearing so much mascara she looked like a raccoon, placed one hand on her hip, and her eyes widened.
“Did you think we wouldn’t notice?” she said.
“Notice what?” Don said.
She pointed to cans of tuna, boxes of Kraft Maroni and Cheese, and a few other items.
“Didn’t you see the signs?” she asked.
She was right. Every item that was limited to two per customer had miraculously multiplied in his cart.
“I honestly don’t know how that happened,” Don said. He glanced at the people waiting behind him. They looked like they wanted to beat the hell out of him. “I swear, I don’t remember doing that. I’m not that kind of person,” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” he heard a familiar voice in the next aisle say.
It was the Pool Nazi.
Everything suddenly made sense.
“He did it,” Don said to everyone, pointing at the Pool Nazi.
“I’ll bet if you made him unzipper his jacket, you’d find even more merchandise,” the Pool Nazi said. “Last week I saw him leaving with thirty rolls of toilet paper.”
There was a collective gasp from the customers around him, because, as Don himself knew, at this very inglorious time in history, you were better off being a serial killer than a toilet paper hoarder.
Don started to unzipper his jacket to prove his innocence when the cashier said, “Not necessary. Let’s just get you out of here, sir.”
“Not until I make him confess to what he did,” Don said.
“Watch him,” another familiar voice said. “He went nuts in the paper towel aisle. I feared he might hurt me.”
It was the woman in the wheelchair, who was standing next in line behind the Pool Nazi.
“You should see how he behaves at the Y pool,” the Pool Nazi added. “It’s shameful. Boy, could I tell you stories.”
“Let’s just get you out of here, sir,” the cashier repeated. “I’m beginning to fear for your safety.”
And so that’s what she did, allowing Don to help her bag, after which he stumbled, shocked and dismayed, out of the store toward his car. He thought about confronting the Pool Nazi outside, but he was so shaken that he hastily tossed his bags of groceries into his SUV and drove toward the exit. After about fifty yards, he stopped. “Not this time,” he said, backtracking and parking the car in an alley that was adjacent to the market. He waited for the Pool Nazi to appear, which happened a few minutes later. The Pool Nazi pushed his cart toward a beat-up red Toyota that was parked next to the bike path, which itself bordered a gully that descended into a large pond. When the Pool Nazi reached his car, he started to unload his groceries but then checked himself. He looked behind him, shaking his head, then returned to the store, as if he’d forgotten something.
Don hesitated a moment before pulling out from the alley and driving toward the cart. Arriving at his destination, he put his foot on the brake, allowing the SUV to inch forward until its front bumper touched the cart. Then he nudged it across the bike path until it tumbled down the gully and into the pond below.
He sat there, considering what he had just done. It was so unlike him, yet it felt so natural. He grabbed the steering wheel to steady himself and he looked into the rearview mirror. The Pool Nazi was on his way back to his car, swinging a bag of ice with one hand, removing his mask with the other. Don backed up cautiously, at first trying not to attract attention, but then not caring anymore.
It was like a duel, Don in his SUV squaring off with the Pool Nazi, who appeared to have figured it all out. He was smiling broadly. He bowed and waved Don by, motioning for him to roll down his window.
Is he going to punch me in the face? Mace me? Don thought. Pull me out of the car and beat me with the bag of ice? In spite of these fantasies, he lowered the window, whereupon the Pool Nazi stuck his head into the opening, his nose about two inches from Don’s. They were so close that Don could smell his stale breath. Don jerked back in horror, and then the Pool Nazi stepped away.
“Like I said, Donald, put your head into the lion’s mouth.” He looked toward the pond. “At least you showed some balls for once. You should be proud of yourself.”
“You’re crazy,” Don said. “I’m going to report you.”
“To who?” the Pool Nazi said, his smile turning into a sneer, before he strolled casually toward his car.
On the way home Don looked glanced at the rearview mirror where he saw his face, which was red and damp with sweat. He wanted to know what he had done to the Pool Nazi to warrant such bizarre behavior. Maybe he could make things right if given the opportunity. After all, he had lived his whole life making concessions and working hard to be fair. But then he pictured all of the items in the Pool Nazi’s cart floating ridiculously on the surface of the pond, and that image made him laugh loudly, and long. He turned on Pandora. John Lennon’s “Imagine” was playing. “No thanks, Johnny Boy,” he said. He checked his station list and decided on AC/DC. “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” came on, and he cranked it up as loud as he could bear.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories