Post Office (16 page)

Eleven years shot through the head. I had seen the job eat men up. They seemed to melt. There was Jimmy Potts of Dorsey Station. When I first came in, Jimmy had been a well-built guy in a white T-shirt. Now he was gone. He put his seat as close to the floor as possible and braced himself from falling over with his feet. He was too tired to get a haircut and had worn the same pair of pants for three years. He changed shirts twice a week and he walked very slow. They had murdered him. He was 55. He had seven years to go until retirement.

“I’ll never make it,” he told me.

They either melted or they got fat, huge, especially around the ass and the belly. It was the stool and the same motion and the same talk. And there I was, dizzy spells and pains in the arms, neck, chest, everywhere. I slept all day resting up for the job. On weekends I had to drink in order to forget it. I had come in weighing 185 pounds. Now I weighed 223 pounds. All you moved was your right arm.

I walked into the counselor’s office. It was Eddie Beaver sitting behind the desk. The clerks called him “Skinny Beaver.” He had a pointed head, pointed nose, pointed chin. He was all points. And out for them too.

“Sit down, Chinaski.”

Beaver had some papers in his hand. He read them.

“Chinaski, it took you 28 minutes to throw a 23-minute tray.”

“Oh, knock off the bullshit. I‘m tired.”

“What?”

“I said, knock off the bullshit! Let me sign the paper and go back. I don’t want to hear it all.” “I‘m here to counsel you, Chinaski!” I sighed. “O.K., go ahead. Let’s hear it.”

“We have a production schedule to meet, Chinaski.”

“Yeh.”

“And when you fall behind on production that means that somebody else is going to stick your mail for you. That means overtime.”

“You mean I am responsible for those three and one half hours overtime they call almost every night?”

“Look, you took 28 minutes on a 23-minute tray. That’s all there is to it.”

“You know better. Each tray is two feet long. Some trays have three, even four times as many letters than others. The clerks grab what they call the ‘fat’ trays. I don’t bother. Somebody has to stick with the tough mail. Yet all you guys know is that each tray is two feet long and that it must be stuck in 23 minutes. But we’re not sticking trays in those cases, we’re sticking letters.”

“No, no, this thing has been time-tested!”

“Maybe it has. I doubt it. But if you’re going to time a man, don’t judge him on
one
tray. Even Babe Ruth struck out now and then. Judge a man on 10 trays, or a night’s work. You guys just use this thing to hang anybody who gets in your craw.”

“All right, you’ve had your say, Chinaski. Now, I‘m telling YOU: you stuck a 28-minute tray.
We
go by that. NOW, if you are caught on another slow tray you will be due for

ADVANCED COUNSELING!”

“All right, just let me ask you one question?”

“All right.”

“Suppose I get an easy tray. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I finish a tray in five minutes or in eight minutes. Let’s say I stick a tray in eight minutes. According to the time-tested standard I have saved the post office 15 minutes. Now can I take these 15 minutes and go down to the cafeteria, have a slice of pie with ice cream, watch t.v., and come back?”

“NO! YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO GRAB A TRAY IMMEDIATELY AND START STICKING MAIL!”

I signed a paper saying that I had been counseled. Then Skinny Beaver signed my travel form, wrote the time on it and sent me back to my stool to stick more mail.

But, there were still bits of action. One guy was caught on the same stairway that I had been trapped on. He was caught there with his head under some girl’s skirt. Then one of the girls who worked in the cafeteria complained that she hadn’t been paid, as promised, for a bit of oral copulation she had supplied to a general foreman and three mailhandlers. They fired the girl and the three mailhandlers and busted the general foreman down to supervisor.

Then, I set the post office on fire.

I had been sent to third-class papers and was smoking a cigar, working a stack of mail off of a hand truck when some guy came by and said, “HEY, YOUR MAIL IS ON FTRE!”

I looked around. There it was. A small flame was starting to stand up like a dancing snake. Evidently part of a burning cigar ash had fallen in there earlier.

“Oh shit!”

The flame grew rapidly. I took a catalogue and, holding it flat, I beat the shit out of it. Sparks flew. It was hot. As soon as I put out one section, another caught up.

I heard a voice:

“Hey! I smell fire!”

“YOU DON’T SMELL FIRE,” I yelled, “YOU SMELL SMOKE!”

“I think I’m going to get out of here!”

“God damn you, then,” I screamed, “GET OUT!”

The flames were burning my hands. I
had
to save the United States mail, third-class junkmail!

Finally, I got it under control. I took my foot and pushed the whole pile of papers onto the floor and stepped on the last bit of red ash.

The supervisor walked up to say something to me. I stood there with the burned catalogue in my hand and waited. He looked at me and walked off.

Then I resumed casing the third-class junkmail. Anything burned, I put to one side.

My cigar had gone out. I didn’t light it again.

My hands began to hurt and I walked over to the water fountain, put them under water. It didn’t help.

I found the supervisor and asked him for a travel slip to the nurse’s office.

It was the same one who used to come to my door and ask me, “Now what’s the matter, Mr. Chinaski?”

When I walked in, she said the same thing again.

“You remember me, eh?” I asked.

“Oh yes, I know you’ve had some real sick nights.”

“Yeh,” I said.

“Do you still have women up at your apartment?” she asked.

“Yeh. Do you still have men up at yours?”

“All right, Mr. Chinaski, now what’s your problem?”

“I burned my hands.”

“Come over here. How did you burn your hands?”

“Does it matter? They’re burned.” She was dabbing my hands with something. One of her breasts brushed me.

“How did it happen, Henry?”

“Cigar. I was standing next to a truck of third-class. Ash must have gotten in there. Flames came up.”

The breast was up against me again.

“Hold your hands still,
please!”

Then she laid her whole flank against me as she spread some ointment on my hands. I was sitting on a stool.

“What’s the matter, Henry? You seem nervous.”

“Well … you know how it is, Martha.”

“My name is
not
Martha. It’s Helen.”

“Let’s get married, Helen.”

“What?”

“I mean, how soon will I be able to use my hands again?”

“You can use them right now if you feel like it.”

“What?”

“I mean, on the work floor.”

She wrapped on some gauze.

“It does feel better,” I told her.

“You mustn’t burn the mails.”

“It was junk.”

“All mail is important.”

“All right, Helen.”

She walked over to her desk and I followed her. She filled out the travel form. She looked very cute in her little white hat. I’d have to find a way to get back there.

She saw me looking at her body.

“All right, Mr. Chinaski, I think you better leave now. “

“Oh yes … Well, thanks for everything.”

“It’s just part of the job.”

“Sure.”

A week later there were NO SMOKING IN THIS AREA signs all around. The clerks were not allowed to smoke unless they used ashtrays. Somebody had been contracted to manufacture all these ashtrays. They were nice. And said PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. The clerks stole most of them.

NO SMOKING.

I had all by myself, Henry Chinaski, revolutionized the postal system.

Then some men came around and ripped out every other water fountain.

“Hey, look, what the hell are they doing?” I asked. Nobody seemed interested.

I was in the third-class flat section. I walked over to another clerk.

“Look!” I said. “They are taking away our water!”

He glanced at the water fountain, then went back to sticking his third-class.

I tried other clerks. They showed the same disinterest. I couldn’t understand it.

I asked to have my union representative paged to my area.

After a long delay, here he came—Parker Anderson. Parker used to sleep in an old used car and freshen up and shave and shit at gas stations that didn’t lock their restrooms. Parker had tried to be a hustler but had failed. And had come to the central post office, joined the union, and went to the union meetings where he became sarge-at-arms. He was soon a union representative, and then he was elected vice president.

“What’s the matter, Hank? I know you don’t need
me
to handle these soups!”

“Don’t butter me, babe. Now I’ve been paying union dues for almost 12 years and haven’t asked for a damn thing.”

“All right, what’s wrong?”

“It’s the water fountains.”

“The water fountains are wrong?”

“No, god damn it, the water fountains are right. It’s what they are doing to them. Look.”

“Look? Where?”

“There!”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s the exact nature of my bitch. There used to be a water fountain there.”

“So they took it out. What the hell?”

“Look, Parker, I wouldn’t mind one. But they are yanking out every
other
water fountain in the building. If we don’t stop them here, they will soon be closing down every other crapper… and then, what next, I don’t know…”

“All right,” said Parker, “what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get off your ass and find out why these water fountains are being removed.”

“All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See that you do. Twelve years worth of union dues is $312.”

The next day I had to look for Parker. He didn’t have the answer. Or the next or the next. I told Parker that I was tired of waiting. He had one more day.

The next day he came up to me in the coffee break area.

“All right, Chinaski, I found out.”

“Yes?”

“In 1912 when this building was built …”

“In 1912? That’s over a half century ago! No wonder this place looks like the Kaiser’s whorehouse!”

“All right, stop it. Now, in 1912 when this place was built, the contract called for a
certain
number of water fountains. In checking, the p.o. found that there had been
twice
as many water fountains installed as were called for in the original contract.”

“Well, O.K.,” I said, “what harm can twice as many water fountains do? The clerks will only drink so much water.”

“Right. But the water fountains happen to jut out a bit. They get in the way.”

“So?”

“All right. Supposing a clerk with a sharp lawyer was injured against a water fountain? Say he was pinned against that fountain by a handtruck loaded with heavy sacks of magazines?”

“I see it now. The fountain isn’t supposed to be there. The post office is sued for negligence.”

“Right!”

“All right. Thanks, Parker.”

“My service.”

If he had made up the story, it was damn near worth $312. I’d seen a lot worse printed in
Playboy
.

I found that the only way I could keep from dizzy-spelling into my case was to get up and take a walk now and then.

Fazzio, a supervisor who had the station at the time, saw me walking up to one of the rare water fountains.

“Look, Chinaski, everytime I see you, you’re walking!”

“That’s nothing,” I said, “everytime I see you, you’re walking.”

“But that’s part of my job. Walking is part of my job. I have to do it.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s part of my job too. I have to do it. If I stay on that stool much longer I am going to leap up on top of those tin cases and start running around whistling
Dixie
from my asshole and
Mammy’s Little Children Love Shortnin’ Bread
through the frontal orifice.”

“All right, Chinaski, forget it.”

One night I was coming around the corner after sneaking down to the cafeteria for a pack of smokes. And there was a face I knew.

It was Tom Moto! The guy I had subbed with under The Stone!

“Moto, you motherfuck!” I said.

“Hank!” he said. We shook hands.

“Hey, I was thinking of you! Jonstone is retiring this month. Some of us are holding a farewell party for him. You know, he always liked to fish. We’re going to take him out in a rowboat. Maybe you’d like to come along and throw him overboard, drown him. We’ve got a nice deep lake.”

“No, shit, I just don’t even want to look at him.”

“But you’re
invited.”

Moto was grinning from asshole to eyebrow. Then I looked at his shirt: a supervisor’s badge. “Oh no, Tom.”

“Hank, I’ve got four kids. They need me for bread and butter.”

“All right, Tom,” I said. Then I walked off.

I don’t know how it happens to people. I had child support, need for something to drink, rent, shoes, socks, all that stuff. Like everyone else I needed an old car, something to eat, all the little intangibles.

Like women.

Or a day at the track.

With everything on the line and no way out, you don’t even think about it.

I parked across the street from the Federal Building and stood waiting for the signal to change. I walked across. Pushed through the swinging doors. It was as if I were a piece of iron drawn to the magnet. There was nothing I could do.

It was on the second floor. I opened the door and they were in there. The clerks of the Federal Building. I noticed one girl, poor thing, only one arm. She’d be there forever. It was like being an old wino like me. Well, as the boys said, you had to work somewhere. So they accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.

A young black girl walked up. She was well-dressed and pleased with her surroundings. I was happy for her. I would have gone mad with the same job.