Chapter 3: Hand Sanitizer (3/14)
Boston's St. Patrick's Day Weekend Comes to a Screeching Halt
It has finally come, St Patrick's Day weekend. In South Boston, home of the rowdiest Irish celebrations in perhaps all of the world, there is a tradition known as Evacuation Day. It's a tradition which in fact refers to the Revolutionary War.
Wherein George Washington and his Revolutionary War generals ordered an evacuation of Boston as the British were rapidly approaching with their Navy and their cannons. Up the hill from the store is where Henry Knox famously dragged a cannon from Ticonderoga—300 miles away—to defend the city. (I have to wonder how many of these new residents, if any, know about this story).
In South Boston however, Evacuation Day came to represent an informal proclamation for the citizens to gird themselves for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, or either, evacuate. Having lived in Boston almost two decades I had finally moved to Southie as it is known, a few years earlier and thought it would be fun to be a part of the South Boston Community during the Saint Patrick's Day festivities, so I stuck around.
It would prove to be true, if by “fun" you mean: standing up to drunkards before they puke on your car, dodging emaciated coeds on the trudge to the convenience store, or watching a military parade in Minsk.
The aftermath of the Saint Patrick's Day Parade in South Boston is one of such momentous calamity it's hard to describe…
… but imagine a green and orange and white plastic beer-can-hurricane swirling in the overwhelming smell of cheap beer, puke, and cigarette butts (and nips of McGillicuddy's).
It is something like that.
I was working the Saturday before, and the Saturday before St Patrick's Day Parade in South Boston is when the bars make an incredible amount of money. It must be that the bars in South Boston make as much as 10% of their annual revenue or more from this weekend.
Certainly the little tiny townie bars do—some of which you have seen in those the famous Southie movies:
because they’ll charge $20 cash on the barrel just to get in.
Across the street from the shop, the two-story Irish Pub actually paints its entire facade green for the weekend in celebration—perhaps in honor of the cash that they were about to bring in.
For me though, it was a time of celebration. I had the day off tomorrow, a Sunday. Being that in Massachusetts you make time-and-a-half on Sundays, I had taken to running the store in order to make that little extra money on the side.
And as a result, I had not had a Sunday for myself, Sunday's which I still count as sacred as I was raised a Baptist as a Christian (which is in fact why the old “blue” law says you have to pay employees time-and-a-half) … so I was looking forward to perhaps even going to a church the next day.
We had to close on Parade Sunday to protect ourselves. It was the only Sunday of the year we close.
Staying open just brought too much temptation to the customers to, say, pay us $20 to use our already challenged bathroom facilities, buy us out of red cups and ping pong balls and backyard tables, or, of course to avoid the inevitable "cleanup on aisle 3."
It was a typical Saturday, perhaps the co-eds who are usually drunk on college football we're now drunk on green beer and the (offensive-to-many-around-here) “Irish Car Bombs.” But around 2:30pm, as I stood looking out from our floor-to-ceiling windows, at the bar across the street, something extraordinary was starting to take place.
In Boston, politicians have perhaps an overwhelming influence on the community at large. Certainly, in many older cities of the East the traditions and political power structures of families have long been embedded and established in its maintenance electrical grid and sewage lines. (I had taken up interest and have read some pretty good books about it).
Earlier that Saturday the city council had begun to hear word from China that there was a contagion afoot. We had of course been hearing rumors about this viral load for a few weeks, but suddenly it had become a political obsession. Of course, politicos in Boston cherished the Saint Patrick's Day Parade. There were breakfasts, there were ceremonies, there were awards, there were pomp and circumstances of all varieties on that weekend. But suddenly, it all came to a grinding halt.
Across the street from the store the bar which had been anticipating this weekend for months, perhaps forever, began to move people out of its already over-capacity facilities. Eventually they were forced to close.
"What's going on?" "Why are they kicking people out?" "Do we have to go home?" "Can I use your bathroom?"
All I could think was: "They can't do this! This isn't Soviet Russia!"
Of course in the months ahead I would continue to be astonished at what the American public would tolerate.
And so the parade was canceled the next day. To facilitate people's needs, plumbing or otherwise, we decided to open the store, and my hopes for a day off were dashed.
The run-on hand sanitizer was complete, and as I was closing at the end of the day a sort of desperate looking man entered through our chiming front door. It wasn't uncommon to see a desperate man around closing time, but something seemed odd.
“Do you have any of those little ketchup bottles like you would bring to a picnic oh, you know, for like hot dogs and mustard and things like that?”
"Sure," I would say walking towards the back of the store to our kitchen area. "here we go, we've got three different sets of those."
As I sauntered back to the front I thought to ask the man what he needed them for. As a rule, in a hardware store, it is ill-advised to ask a customer what exactly they need things for as the answers might surprise you. I learned this lesson when, in the dead of winter, a middle-aged man bought six long lighters, as if for a BBQ. I asked him why in the world he was buying lighters in the dead of winter: “We just buried my wife after a long battle with cancer and today we’re lighting paper boats and setting them onto the ocean.” Curiosity kills the cat.
"What do you need the bottles for?" I asked mentally wincing.
“My wife has asked me to get hand sanitizer, and everyone is out of it. So I am going to the port-a-potties at construction sites around town and filling these bottles full of the hand sanitizer inside.”
I would not have a Sunday off until—months later—I would finally quit.
Next week marks the famous toilet paper run of 2020:
