A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Leroy

69 Leroy I’m guessing Leroy (Luh-ROY, not LEE-roy) graduated from Libertyville High School in 1924, and he had worked in stores up and down Milwaukee Avenue in Libertyville ever since— the hardware store, grocery stores, the drugstore off and on for a while. When the IGA closed in the early fifties, he came back to the drugstore and worked full-time there—first for Mr. Taylor, then for Mr. Wilson. He wore short-sleeved, bleach-yellowed, mostly synthetic dress shirts, bolo ties, those trousers guys who didn’t wear suits used to wear to work every day, and comfortable shoes, really comfortable shoes. Leroy’s arches had long since fallen.AndACE bandages for his various varicosities. On the job, he brought the entire ensemble together with one of the gray, crisply starched clerk’s jackets that everyone who worked at Wilson’s (but wasn’t a pharmacist) wore. He set off the look with an ink-stained pocket protector full of ballpoint pens and grease pencils. Leroy didn’t have a written job description, and frankly, he didn’t need one. After more than forty years of retail, he knew the ropes and stayed contentedly busy without supervision. He would get a little testy if the young pharmacist who had eyes on buying the place from Mr. Wilson decided to stick his nose in and supervise him. He delivered prescriptions. He took deposits two doors down the block to the savings and loan and brought back rolls of coins 70 LEROY for change. He swept and mopped the floors, stocked the shelves, straightened the magazine rack, and washed windows, waiting on customers the whole time. He checked incoming orders against invoices to make sure things toted up right. When business was slow, he would slip over to the feminine products counter and wrap the Kotex and Modess boxes in green paper and label them in grease pencil (“K” for Kotex, “M” for Modess) so we could all be discreet about that particular transaction when the time came. Most important of all, Leroy maintained the drugstore soda fountain. Ancient Rome had the Forum. New York has Times Square. For more than fifty years, Libertyville had the soda fountain at the drugstore. Anyone who was anyone would drop by now and then. You might live in Libertyville, but you weren’t from Libertyville if you weren’t a regular at the soda fountain for the phosphates and sodas after school or for a sundae while you were out for a walk after supper. Or a malt or a shake or, on an especially harrowing business day, maybe a Bromo-Seltzer, handmixed by Leroy. He’d put the salts in one glass, pour another glass full of water over them, tumble the white foaming mix from glass to glass until it was fizzing properly, and set it in front of the stressed-out businessman who would toss it off in one big quaff, then wait for the belch we all knew was coming, which he would politely suppress. Leroy was the lord of the soda fountain. He ordered the ice cream and syrups and polished the chrome. Once a month, he cooked up a big batch of chocolate sauce on the gas ring in the corner of the drugstore’s backroom—cooked it up to his own taste and specifications. Mr. Wilson may have owned the store, but Leroy asserted his own unique dominion over the high-ceilinged old space. It was all dark wood, tall shelves, and glass display cases, with a cigar counter from the days when cigars were cigars. The cash register sat on top of the cigar counter. The glass was scratched to near opacity by generations of coin transactions. LEROY 71 He had a space of his own—a fortress of solitude, where he could retreat for a moment and survey his fiefdom. It was just past the corner of the soda fountain, near the feminine hygiene products, almost out of sight, not quite in the backroom. He kept a small stamped-metal ashtray over there, and he kept a nonfiltered Kool Regular cigarette smoldering in it, two inches of ash sagging away from the Kool’s ember. Every so often, he would pad over there on those ACE-bandaged legs and fallen arches. He would take a drag and, keeping an eye on the store, contemplate which of his hundreds...