EVERY DRUGSTORE in America is a small temple to narcissism, and in America nearly all women and a growing number of men (whose vanity is still under cultivation by Mad Ave) are defeated narcissists.

Walk into any drugstore, although best is the fancy kind, with pretensions, such as are plentiful at the southern end of Brattle Street. An invariable, perhaps immutable progression in the arrangement of the objects will emerge. From the front of the store to the back, from the esoteric to the mundane and banal, from the pretty to the unpresentable, everything unfolds in a predetermined way.

You enter to the tinkling bell full of the suspect hope of rescuing yourself, your long-lost self, your deserved self, the self that has been promised by the many-tongued copy boys and girls (although you profess to be unconvinced). You are sophisticated: the meretricity of attractive bottles holding substances of pleasant colors cannot seduce you.

Upon entering, an odor rose up around you and surrounds you still. It is the most delicious and fragrant and sweet-smelling of odors and one which you cannot buy, for it is nothing less than a confused compound, a farrago of a thousand smells. Even could you afford to buy the thousand bottles of perfume and eau de cologne, the bath powders, and the multiple packages of amber soap that lie in tissue-papered state, you still would not have smell, unless you could also the time, the long, bored months during which the smells gathered and deepened on the shelf.

At the front of the glassy-floored store, the walls are loaded from top to bottom with tinted makeups, going by such names as Midnight Blush, Ginger Interlude, and seduction Night Sienna. The Timex and Bulova displays are cruelly juxtaposed on another counter, just across, to remind you that you are old, or will be soon, and will be in want of makeup. Back at the makeup counter, you shrink under the sullen gaze of the desperately nubile females trapped in their placards. There are piles of solemn light green pamphlets like the AWAKE pamphlets the Jehovah Witnesses push on passersbys. IS SKIN PERFECTIBLE? catechize the covers. Is man? you think is the older question, but inured to devaluations of this sort, you study the booklet from cover to cover.

Encyclopediacally, you learn everything there is to know about all varieties of blemishes and ills that skin is err to. However, there is the consolation of the pamphlet's last page, the message that CLINIQUE SAVES.

The lipsticks are lined up like little bombs, or phalli, viz, any Xaviera Hollander column in Penthouse. The pop-anthropologists say that the lips are secondary sex organs, turning lightly the fancy of young men to less public parts of the body; setting off the subliminal alarm of desire.

Passing by the Belinda-cabinets of tortoise shell combs and silver-backed brushes, you proceed to the center of the store, out of the cosmetics area, which was only the antechamber to reality.

Here on the center shelves are the prosaic items, toothbrushes and toothpaste, utilitarian, kid-proofed bottles of aspirin, razor blades, wart-burning solutions, hemorrhoid suppositories, the banal soaps of everyday for people who use soap to get clean. You notice the preponderance of American trochees: Colgate, Ben-Gay, Right Guard, Band Aids, Q-TIPS.

Diverting as the front two sections of the drugstore have indeniably been, it is the rear of the drugstore for which you are destined, and which you fear. Beyond the Dr. Scholl's footpads, and beyond the tampons, Regular, Super and Super-Plus, deodorized or not--beyond the condoms and the contraceptive jellies, the final answer to the equation set up by the cosmetics), is the sick corner.

The mask-faced pharmacist smiles at you from behind his counter. It is fitted out with all the fake arcana of his trade, looming RX signs, mysterious-looking vials containing nothing but colored water, and selected two-color prints from Great Moments in Pharmaceutical History: "Galen at Work," "Dr. Fleming Peeling Oranges," and so forth.

INCHING AWAY, you turn to face a throng of orthopedic shoes who manage a feeble salute. Next to them is a shelf of large brown cotton bandages crutch padding, and rubber pants for the incontinent. You feel the wooden pegs in your hipbones creak, as do the bones in your neck, and the gnarled vertebrae of your defeated back.

The scent of the store has grown sour, nauseous. You try to hold your breath while heading for the door because otherwise you are going to die, and dropped-dead on the floor you will not make a cosmetically fetching corpse. But you stop first and buy a package of mints, half-believing that your exhalation of sweet, clear breath will be sufficient to extinguish the world, or at least Brattle Street's.