In mid-May, the CDC revised its guidelines on masks. Vaccinated individuals could go maskless both indoors and out. The news came on the tail end of a long shift at my retail job. We’d strictly enforced the mandate since last May. It felt like, mid-fight, the enemy combatants had called out from their opposing trench that the war was over. Maskless customers filtered in throughout the evening. Without word from On High, the battle was over. And that battle had been about more than just public health.
I was angry, though that was hard to admit to myself. Retail workers had been suffering abuse– including several murders–for a year… and the CDC just tweeted it away. After a day or so, that anger revealed itself to be rooted in abandonment. And uh, those sorts of feelings are often pretty messy. Masks and the pandemic itself had devolved into a culture war. I was no fan of that. I hated the zombie hordes of frothing anti-maskers that had made life hell. But I also resented Powers That Be that had made retail spaces a battle zone during the pandemic. All the while washing their hands of how that works in practice. I adjusted the next couple days. Naked faces up close again were weird at first. But that resumed intimacy soon came as a relief. Still, we’d been through something, dammit. And whatever it meant–it deserves to be remembered.
Do you recall exactly where you were when lockdown hit? I do–as much as I remember that 2nd grade day in Sept. 2001. I was at my apartment last year when the news hit. It was a cloudy day off work–weird clouds brewed in the air. Family texted that something was up. I turned on the radio to hear the news of curfews, closures, and mask mandates. I drove to work to be with my crew for a while. I ostensibly came to replenish our stamp inventory. But I also knew processing this all while on the clock is extra hard. A war had come to America. A war against an invisible enemy–but we knew our lives would change. And our working lives in retail, in particular, were about to get a lot more complicated. I got the cash and went to the store to grab the stamps. The roads were ghost-town empty. But the grocery store was as madly packed as I’d ever seen. With my silly little objective, I could view the mayhem from afar. Carts full of toilet paper, bottled water, Funyons. You remember the scenes. An electric panic crackled through the air. The mood hadn’t yet turned sour or anti-social. Everyone was scared. But there remained a common courtesy amidst the mayhem. There was no looting or fistfights. This was new; we were all processing it together. Reality was raw and hadn’t yet split off into separate narrative bubbles. I approached the customer service desk. With faux-intensity, I told the worker “I need every book of stamps you’ve got.” I kinda hope he still thinks about the dude panic-buying stamps on the eve of the Apocalypse.
The sun descended then rose over this new Covid world. Over the next week, the “New Normal” started settling into place. At work, corporate was slow to issue guidance. Across the country, administrative corporate types were, I’m sure, having a time of it. It’s all cushy office work and business lunches until you have to make real policies that affect lives. Mostly the higher-ups shyly trailed behind whatever the government was recommending. And the response in Trump’s America was haphazard. I think Trump stalled because he was subconsciously contriving an aesthetic response that would leave his strong-man persona intact. (This came to fruition later when he got Covid. He descended for three days under the virus–then emerged “stronger than ever.”) Decisions were left to state authorities. DeWine in my state was progressive and proactive. Mask mandates, social distancing, limits on occupancy. There was no countervailing word from corporate so we went with the State.
It all felt a little above us as lowly retail workers. We’re mainly a poor bunch beneath the middle class. But class consciousness in America is odd. “Pink collar” trades are largely denied the working class respect bestowed on plumbers, firefighters, etc. The same goes for fast-food, warehouse workers, and other attendant professions. There’s this weird macho tinge to our ideas of class. I remember how a manager at a past job once received a rude blow during an unpleasant rap with a difficult customer. The kicker was the customer’s sign-off: “Get a real job.” My co-worker took that real hard. In hindsight that sign-off sounds like exhortations to “Be a real man” with all that implies. There’s a kind of ascribed femininity to these lowly service jobs. Maybe in simplest terms it’s because you’re always someone’s bitch. And in that milieu we were now quasi-deputized as the mask police.
In right-wing circles, a masculinist opposition with an anti-mask ideology was brewing. Masks neutered you; they were face diapers. Joe Rogan made crude jokes about how men who wear masks like to Take It. One dude on Joe’s team turned up with a mask that read, in hastily applied Sharpie, “This piece of cloth is designed to oppress White Men and extinguish their future.” (No joke.) I never saw that mask or man again. I hope someone kicked his Nazi ass.
Around May, once we’d been given the task, we started experimenting with enforcement of the mandates. We weren’t ready for what came our way. In my memory, May 2020 will forever be known as “hell month.” America’s collective psyche was cracking up. Dark, repressed energies bubbled up to the surface. The daily unpleasantness reached levels I can only term emotional terrorism. At that time, the anger was free-floating. It wasn’t yet pointed in the direction of masks. The slightest inconvenience for shoppers would result in brutal, often cruelly personal verbal tirades. People were freaking out, and it brought out a real evil in some. We were all processing a national emergency. But stupid realities like Amazon returns still had to be taken care of. I remember one lady I was trying to help with an issue so small I can’t even remember what it amounted to. I got out a few words between the gushing flow of accusations. And every one of those words was twisted back at me like I was some worthless incompetent. I’m usually patient to a fault, but I hung up on her. (First and only time.) Then I threw the phone, shattering it.
Every day in retail brings the chance of a run-in with a crazy. But in May 2020 humans in my line of work, received an unprecedented level of abuse. I grasped the abusers were hurting badly in their own way. But, my Lord, leave me the hell out of it. Something had to give.
Masks were becoming the defining touchstone of the War on Covid. I think the emerging narratives (pro or against–which side?) helped folks steer themselves through the chaos. Pro-masker’s concern could be channeled into concrete action. And anti-maskers fear could be transformed into a Stand. I’m not making moral equivalencies. We all shared a sense of powerlessness though. As the saying goes, “The hell of life is that everyone has his reasons.”
I quickly learned the danger in asking “Hey, do you have a mask on you?” Many people said “Sure” or “No, can I have one?” For some, though, the question made them explode. I learned to recognize the type. They’d come in looking tense and guilty. “This one’s going to be trouble” I’d think as my fight-or-flight began to churn. That look, before the first word was spoken, stays with me. I don’t know if the intense ones were ready to do evil or have evil done unto them. Were they coiled up from traumatic retail experiences in their past? Or rather, because they were gearing themselves up to inflict new harm? Not that it really matters. Me and my associates didn’t deserve the abuse we suffered. We were just doing our jobs. And that meant asking customers to wear masks during a pandemic. We were not scheduling trains to death camps during a genocide.
I also learned that best of lessons–to take it personally. I read a confessional in the Times from a mini-mart worker down south. She spent a summer of tears at the abuse she endured. Something clicked in me. Everything she said vibed with me–the despair and the impulse to just end it all. Quitting sounded good, but there were bills to pay. I felt powerless, at the mercy of urges and reactionary forces bigger than myself. Except I wasn’t, entirely. This was my workplace. I stopped caring about the masks as a public health concern and took it more as a matter of my dignity and autonomy in the workplace. Maybe that’s whack–maybe that’s exactly what Big Mask wanted. But after you’ve experienced callous disrespect—and understood people’s true conception of your place in society–you don’t forget. And you take whatever steps, however insignificant, to push back. Anti-maskers were mostly a petty-bougeisie goon squad. They were obsessed with their own “liberty” and relative place in the hierarchy, consequences be damned. Every person who came through our door was asked to wear a mask. But I tended to talk only to a villainous few. I asked everyone so that these people would reveal themselves. I wanted them to know I was here too.
Such things make a man smaller, quick. Retail workers deserve dignity and respect. But our battle was downstream from the material conditions that gave rise to the problem. Retail clerks got drafted during the pandemic. But when the struggle turned nasty and personal–what was the goal? Dignity as an imperative on its own tends towards, I don’t know, being clapped for like all those doctors and nurses. Nice, but hollow. At the very least, enforcing the mask mandates became a teachable moment, reflecting my own place in society back at me. The mandate exposed the powerlessness of retail workers. It also gave us temporary authority to act up. Now masks are gone, for vaccinated people and otherwise. (Few businesses will check vaccination cards. Rightfully so. Us workers will have to mask up for a while longer though.) Individually, this debacle is little more than a matter of injured, narcissistic pride. But there’s larger lessons for retail workers as a group. Seeing clearly may become a habit.
There’s a subreddit for “bored workers” at my retail chain to shoot the shit. It’s mostly devoted, as these things are, to griping about random interactions and policy changes. But the posts from the last year sometimes hint at something more. Surface-level knocks on corporate’s incompetence veer at moment’s notice. A nerve is touched, and a no-name employee will lurch into pointed, clear-headed critique. We’re denied sick days, Covid supplies, and hazard pay in the midst of a pandemic: “I know our franchise owner is small-time, but I’m expected to work through this all at low pay without health insurance. Save your ‘essential worker’ bullcrap. We need protection!” It comes out like that all at once because of the hard truths we’ve lived through. The franchise system sucks. It’s a pyramid scheme directing profits from small-business owners to a largely disconnected corporate elite. And, practically, for workers, it’s a bar to protections, let alone the unions which could ostensibly make those protections real. Reddit ain’t some incipient front for labor organizing. But such a coming-together is bracing amongst the atomized. It’s important to put into words the collective trauma that was 2020 for retail workers.
I look up, and am startled out of my daydream. “The CDC announced vaccinated people don’t have to wear masks,” the customer tells me. “Huh,” I say, “That’s good news. Nature is healing!” (I say that too much.) Maskless folks filter in like a funeral throng for the past year. I am absolutely sure that this one lady I’d confronted multiple times made a special trip just to–what? Gloat? I smile and hand her her receipt. “Have a good day, we’ll see you next time.” The CDC pulled back–the war is over. But I’m dreaming of a power and hope that’s not beholden to any outside authority.
My coworker was replacing a few of those social distancing floor decals that direct the flow of traffic. No reason other than they were tattered and we’ve got a stack of leftovers. She’s crouched down replacing the first one. A rude gentleman, exiting the store, flings the other stickers off the counter. “So fucking stupid,” he says. In the process he not-so-accidentally bumps into her, and she’s knocked over. By the time I realize what’s happened, he’s out the door. I dash over and ask “Hey, what happened–are you ok?” “I’m ok,” she says. “I just hope that guy never comes back again.” “Yeah, I know, I hope so too. He’s gone now.”