When the CDC started telling us to wear face masks when we went shopping, I stopped going to the grocery store.
I didn’t want to walk into Kroger looking like I was there to rob the place. Or scare children. Or look like I was pretending to be a doctor or a nurse, or like I was a rapist, or a serial killer, or a terrorist, or whoever else wears masks in the movies and tv shows that are my reality.
Just grow up I thought as I sat in my car in the Kroger parking lot watching masked shoppers emerge from the dark exit like extras from an apocalyptic horror film. I had a job to do–feed my beloved and myself. And for a moment, that was what I needed to fix my resolve–I put on the homemade mask our neighbor the nurse had given my wife, got out of the car, and started walking toward the cast of Contagion like I belonged. Then my glasses fogged up, I almost got hit by what I assumed from the horn was a good-sized truck, and I changed my mind: Forget it–I’ll just eat the ramen and beans we’ve had in the cupboard since I can’t remember when and my wife, if she’s so hungry, she can mask up and join this Halloween party, but I’m not invited and I’m not crashing it, because someone in there is carrying a chainsaw.
That’s when I realized that this maskaphobia (yes, it’s a thing, and it’s related to the fear of clowns, so it’s not that crazy) goes back to my first Halloween. I was three, maybe four, and what they now call a “sensitive kid.” I was just a little older than my grandson Olly, who believes almost anything. I was going to be a skeleton and I had the coolest costume–white glow in the dark bones on a black background that, when you turned the lights off, looked like you were bones only. The stiff polyester suit was a little itchy, but I could deal with that. The mask was the problem. I had a big head and the thin elastic band barely fit around it and pressed the plastic mask and all the polymer stink into my face, the two little drilled nostrils were hardly enough to provide sufficient oxygen, and the eye holes were too high and caught my eyelashes and I couldn’t see a thing.
“What’s wrong, honey,” Mom said as I ripped off the mask, which my big brother grabbed and held up to his own face, pretending to be helpful.
“See–it’s not so bad,” Mom said just as Donny thrust his face forward and made this otherworldly yowling sound that only a spawn of Satan can create and my world collapsed and I peed in my glow in the dark bones.
That’s the year I started my tradition of “Halloween Hideout,” where I would choose some small place in the house where my parents couldn’t fit or find me and stay there until the last trick-or-treaters had come to the door.
The next Halloween my big brother put my little sister’s Snow White mask on my dog Twinkles and marched around the house after us like one of the seven dwarves singing “Heigh ho, Heigh ho, it’s off to work we go.” I didn’t know what “surreal” meant, but I had lived it.
A few years later at our new house and what I hoped would be a fresh start, the neighbor two doors down jumped out from behind the hedge on his front porch wearing a ski mask and waving a bloody ax and something deep in my soul rolled it’s wide-open terror filled eyes and said “fuck this holiday.” I didn’t mind the candy, but I never dressed up as anything again. My best friend Rob and I would wear our regular clothes with our shirt tales out and rub some dust on our Levis and call ourselves “hoboes,” and we were rail-hopping vagrants until we were in high school and we showed up at the neighbor’s doors and a few would go along but the rest would say something like “why don’t you boys just buy some candy at Safeway or Skaggs?”
Those memories helped me understand my fear, and a skillful telling of the tale to my wife bought me a couple of weeks of not having to shop. Then last week I ran out of what has been a life-saving prescription for me. My wife was not sympathetic, having taken over grocery shopping duty. It was time for me to face my fear.
So I did. By this time we’d had more Covid-19 cases in our county and people were scared and a little more likely to follow the CDC guidelines. As I stood in line I realized had I not been wearing my pink mask with its flowers and forest animals on it made from my neighbor’s old nightie, I would have been in the minority. I still couldn’t see very well through the condensation on my glasses but I made it to the counter, told the blue-masked pharmacist who I was (whoah–is that an N-95 you’re wearing?) and told her my birthday and she dutifully turned and walked to the cubbies to fetch my medicine.
I looked around the store and felt not completely at ease, but close. Pretty much at home. I had done it–pushed through my fear, irrational though it may be, and I was whole and strong and I belonged here just like everyone else.
Then the pharmacist called out, “Was that for the viagra or the welbutrin.” If I’d been wearing that skeleton costume I would have peed in my bones. Instead I struggled to think through the all-consuming fire of humiliation that enveloped me. I had an important choice to make: admit impotence or depression? And in a guy my age, they’re pretty much cause and effect.
“Viagra,” I mumbled through my mask. She didn’t quite get that. “Viagra?” she asked, as if she was yelling it over the store’s loudspeaker. I gave her the thumbs up sign before I realized it was metaphor.
She brought the bag over to the cash register as if nothing had happened and asked for my insurance card, rang up the meds, I inserted my debit card, made my donation to Riley Children’s Hospital, got my receipt, and before I could turn and run away the woman behind the mask said, “Thank you–Have a great day.” As if I was just a regular human being like everyone else in line. And of course I couldn’t see if she was smirking or smiling, but I could feel my pulse slowing to the point where I could take a deep breath through the animals on that cotton fabric, and I looked back into her eyes and said, “Thank you–you too!’
As I turned and headed for the exit I looked at my fellow masked serial killers and terrorists. I walked down the line and felt the power of my newfound anonymity. They didn’t know me, I didn’t know them. We could be complete failures in god knows what and no one knew who any of us were. We could do anything, and no one would ever know who really did any of it.
So this is what wearing a mask was all about! It took me 64 years but I had finally learned the secret, and I was reveling in it. I stared each one of my fellow cult members in the eyes, brothers and sisters of the mask, as my faulty penis and I marched proudly toward the door. I wanted to hug each and every one of them, but that would have violated social distancing guidelines.
We would have to be bound to one another from afar.