Post Office

“I looked around and there was a German Shepherd, fully-grown, with his nose halfway up my ass. With one snap of his jaws he could rip off my balls. I decided that those people were not going to get their mail that day, and maybe never get any mail again. Man, I mean he worked his nose in there. SNUFF! SNUFF! SNUFF!”

Not only is this passage emblematic of Bukowski’s hyperbolic and darkly comedic style, but it exemplifies the dangers and absurdities of Hank’s daily life as a substitute mailman. The situation with the German Shepherd is grotesque, but it shows the real dangers that Hank faces on the job, playing into the stereotypical rivalry between dogs and postal workers.

“I picked up the bottle of wine, had a good drag, left the letters on the robes, and walked back to the showers and toilets. I turned off the lights and took a shit in the dark and smoked a cigarette. I thought about taking a shower but I could see the headlines: MAILMAN CAUGHT DRINKING THE BLOOD OF GOD AND TAKING A SHOWER, NAKED IN ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.”

Absurd misadventures, roadblocks, and frustrations mark Hank’s daily life as a postal worker, leading Jonstone and other authority figures to repeatedly reprimand him. The episode in which Hank wanders around an empty church shows that he’s at least somewhat fearful of the consequences of his actions.

“I walked off. That does it, I thought, only an idiot would go through what I am going through. I am going to find a telephone and tell them to come get their mail and jam their job. Jonstone wins.”

The new frustrations that accompany the rainy season push Hank to his breaking point. His only motivation to keep his job is his hatred for and defiance toward Jonstone at this point; however, the constant frustration Jonstone causes him nearly pushes him over the edge.

“I walked over, punched out, then stripped to my shorts and stood in front of a heater. I hung my clothes over the heater. Then I looked across the room and there by another heater stood Tom Moto in his shorts.

We both laughed.

‘It’s hell, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Unbelievable.’

‘Do you think The Stone planned it?’

‘Hell yes! He even made it rain!’”

Hank shares a rare moment of camaraderie with Tom Moto, a fellow substitute, after delivering mail through the flooding city. Joking that Jonstone can control the weather merely to spite them brings some levity to their absurd situation and thematically develops The Futility of Formally Resisting Authority. Their interaction reveals their mutual dislike for Jonstone, indicating that Hank’s antipathy toward his supervisor isn’t unique.

“Some of the boys wore African sun helmets and shades, but me, I was about the same, rain or shine—ragged clothing, and the shoes so old that the nails were always driving into my feet. I put pieces of cardboard in the shoes. But it only helped temporarily—soon the nails would be eating into my heels again.

The whiskey and beer ran out of me, fountained from the armpits, and I drove along with this load on my back like a cross, pulling out magazines, delivering thousands of letters, staggering, welded to the side of the sun.”

Throughout the novel, Hank constantly undermines his own comfort through small acts of defiance. He could afford better, more comfortable clothes and shoes that don’t dig into his feet, but he instead chooses to spend his money on alcohol, thematically highlighting Substance Use as a Coping Mechanism. In addition, this passage indicates the gritty yet poetic use of language that critics later celebrated in Bukowski’s prose and poetry.

“I never saw G.G. again. Nobody knew what happened to him. Nor did anybody ever mention him again. The ‘good guy.’ The dedicated man. Knifed across the throat over a handful of circs from a local market—with its special: a free box of a brand name laundry soap, with the coupon, and any purchase over $3.”

The tragic story of G.G. shows that the bureaucratic machine of the Postal Service doesn’t care for the individual worker; the system chews them up and spits them out without mercy or consideration of the sacrifices the workers have made for the service. After a life of service, G.G. was thrown under the bus because Jonstone was unwilling to stick up for him.

“Then Joyce wanted to go back to the city. For all the drawbacks, that little town, haircuts or not, beat city life. It was quiet. We had our own house. Joyce fed me well. Plenty of meat. Rich, good, well-cooked meat. I’ll say one thing for that bitch. She could cook. She could cook better than any woman I had ever known. Courage comes from the belly—all else is desperation.”

Joyce is a chaotic presence in Hank’s life, first taking him to live in the country and then prompting them to move back to Los Angeles; Hank acknowledges that he has no say in the matter, as they’re living off her family’s wealth. Despite the new frustrations and absurdities that life in small-town Texas brought for Hank, it provided him a degree of stability and comfort he had never experienced in Los Angeles.

“I met an old drunk on the street one afternoon. I used to know him from the days with Betty when we made the rounds of the bars. He told me that he was now a postal clerk and that there was nothing to the job.

It was one of the biggest fattest lies of the century. I’ve been looking for that guy for years but I’m afraid someone else has gotten to him first.”

Hank’s anticlimactic return to the Postal Service mirrors his start as a substitute in Chapter 1. Based on his experience, he should have known better than to trust that any job for the Service would be easy or that there would be nothing to it. His dispassionate anger toward the “old drunk” foreshadows the negative impact that 12 years as a postal clerk later has on Hank’s life.

“Nearly 12 years later, out of those 150 or 200 guys, there would only be two of us left. Just like some guys can’t taxi or pimp or hustle dope, most guys, and gals too, can’t be postal clerks. And I don’t blame them. As the years went by, I saw them continue to march in in their squads of 150 or 200 and two, three, four remain out of each group—just enough to replace those who were retiring.”

As Bukowski depicts it, life as a postal clerk is repetitive, demoralizing, and hazardous to one’s mental and physical health, thematically foregrounding Menial Labor and the Degradation of the Body and Spirit. Few people have the tenacity to make a career out of it. The only reason Hank lasts so long is due to his almost self-destructive tenacity.

“I got up for a glass of water and as I walked into the kitchen I saw Picasso walk up to Joyce and lick her ankle. I was barefoot and she didn’t hear me. She had on high heels. She looked at him and her face was pure small-town hatred, white hot. She kicked him in the side with the point of her shoe. The poor fellow just ran in circles, whimpering. Piss dripped from his bladder. I walked in for my glass of water. I held the glass in my hand and then before I could get the water into it I threw the glass at the cupboard to the left of the sink. Glass went everywhere. Joyce had time to cover her face. I didn’t bother. I picked up the dog and walked out. I sat in the chair with him and petted the little shitsnot. He looked up at me and his tongue came out and licked my wrist. His tail wagged and flapped like a fish dying in a sack.”

This shocking scene of animal cruelty demonstrates Joyce’s instability, but it also offers a rare glimpse into Hank’s caring side. Joyce’s reaction to Hank’s smashing the glass indicates that she expects him to hit her; though Hank isn’t above violence toward women, he restrains himself in this instance. Consoling the hapless Picasso is one of several scenes throughout the novel that reveal Hank’s love for animals.

“I want you to understand that we’ve got to hold down the budget! I want you to understand that EACH LETTER YOU STACK—EACH SECOND, EACH MINUTE, EACH HOUR, EACH DAY, EACH WEEK—EACH EXTRA LETTER YOU STICK BEYOND DUTY HELPS DEFEAT THE RUSSIANS!”

The Italian supervisor’s outburst is emblematic of the anti-communist paranoia of the post-Red Scare era. With few markers to help keep track of the passage of years throughout the text, this helps establish this part of the novel as taking place during the late 1950s or early 1960s, before the Vietnam War. The supervisor’s patriotic enthusiasm for the Postal Service reflects a workplace culture that Hank refuses to buy into.

“The red one was much more hesitant. He walked around in the bottom of the cage, nervously. It was a hell of a decision. Humans, birds, everything has to make these decisions. It was a hard game.”

Despite being annoyed by Joyce’s parakeets to the point that he releases them into the wild to fend for themselves, Hank still expresses empathy for the birds, likely due to his own dislike of being trapped or “caged.” For Hank, the red bird’s struggle to free itself, even though the cage door is open, is akin to the human condition.

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH ASSHOLES, BABY? YOU’VE GOT AN ASSHOLE, I’VE GOT AN ASSHOLE! YOU GO TO THE STORE AND BUY A PORTERHOUSE STEAK, THAT HAD AN ASSHOLE! ASSHOLES COVER THE EARTH! IN A WAY TREES HAVE ASSHOLES BUT YOU CAN’T FIND THEM, THEY JUST DROP THEIR LEAVES. YOUR ASSHOLE, MY ASSHOLE, THE WORLD IS FULL OF ASSHOLES. THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE CARWASH BOY HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE JUDGE AND THE MURDERER HAVE ASSHOLES… EVEN PURPLE STICKPIN HAS AN ASSHOLE!”

Joyce’s disgust about the fact that the snails Hank cooked have “assholes” spurs Hank to burst out in this vulgar yet philosophic diatribe. On one hand, he’s genuinely frustrated with Joyce’s small-town narrow-mindedness and how she refuses to eat the Asian feast he cooked for such an arbitrary reason. On the other hand, he’s purposefully goading her and pushing her buttons, as his mention of Purple Stickpin reveals.

“There was a small man in a necktie. He jammed some papers into my hand and ran away.

It was a summons, for divorce. There went my millions. But I wasn’t angry because I had never expected her millions anyhow.”

Joyce blindsides Hank with a divorce, but, just as when Betty left him, he seems (or pretends) not to care, taking it in stride and doing nothing to change the situation, just as he does almost every aspect of his life. Likewise, he’s true to his word that he doesn’t want Joyce’s money: Neither during their time in Texas, nor back in Los Angeles, did he ever bring it up.

“She took the 42 pages back to her desk. She read and read and read. There was somebody reading over her shoulder. Then there were 2, 3, 4, 5. All reading. 6, 7, 8, 9. All reading.

What the hell? I thought.

Then I heard from the crowd, ‘Well, all geniuses are drunkards!’ As if that explained the matter. Too many movies again.”

Hank’s excessive, 42-page defense of his record, delivered a day late, is the first real indication of his talent as a writer, though he doesn’t yet see it himself. His dismissal of the crowd reading over Miss Graves’s shoulder, despite their impressed reaction, is typical of his view of humanity: Everyone, including himself, is full of it.

“Betty just looked at me. I saw it all in that look.

She had two children who never came to see her, never wrote her. She was a scrubwoman in a cheap hotel. When I had first met her, her clothes had been expensive, trim ankles fitting into expensive shoes. She had been firm-fleshed, almost beautiful. Wild-eyed. Laughing. Coming from a rich husband, divorced from him, and he was to die in a car wreck, drunk, burning to death in Connecticut. ‘You’ll never tame her,’ they told me.”

Betty is the one romantic partner throughout Post Office with whom Hank had a deep, lasting connection, despite their breakup. When they reconnect, Hank respects and cares for her, describing her in a more empathetic way than he describes other women. However, it’s evident that, in the years since their parting, life has broken Betty: She’s fully resigned to her alcohol addiction and has given up all hope.

“SIR! SIR! SIR! FORGET THAT ‘SIR’ STUFF, WILL YOU? I bet if that were the president or governor or mayor or some rich son of a bitch, there would be doctors all over that room doing something! Why do you just let them die? What’s the sin in being poor?”

Hank’s frustration with the hospital’s treatment of Betty is directly linked to the struggle of the poor and working classes to access healthcare. Hank believes that the nurses refuse to treat Betty because she’s poor; however, Betty is clearly beyond the help that they can provide. Hank’s anger is a sign that he’s in denial that his closest companion is dying.

“It was honest writing.

Maybe I have misjudged this man, I thought.

I was hoping for him as I read. Then the novel fell apart. For some reason the moment he started writing about the post office, the thing lost reality.”

Despite the constant annoyance that Janko presents at work, Hank agrees to read his novel. This is one of the few indications in Post Office of Hank’s interest in writing. His disdain for any attempt at romanticizing the gritty reality of life reflects Bukowski’s own ethos as a writer.

“I began getting dizzy spells. I could feel them coming. The case would begin to whirl. The spells lasted about a minute. I couldn’t understand it. Each letter was getting heavier and heavier. The clerks began to have that dead grey look. I began to slide off my stool. The job was killing me.”

The psychosomatic effects of the constant pressure his job puts on him increasingly take a toll on Hank, likely because Fay’s pregnancy put even more responsibility on him as a provider. His deteriorating physical and mental condition indicates the toll that repetitive, mundane labor and constant stress have on the mind and body, thematically emphasizing menial labor and the degradation of the body and spirit.

“The baby was crawling, discovering the world. Marina slept in bed with us at night. There was Marina, Fay, the cat, and myself. The cat slept on the bed too. Look here, I thought, I have three mouths depending on me. How strange. I sat there and watched them sleeping.

Then two nights in a row I came home in the mornings, the early mornings, Fay was sitting up reading the classified sections.”

The birth of Marina Louise brings an unprecedented sentimentality to the tone of the narrative. Though he doesn’t dwell on his feelings for his daughter, it is evident that Hank cares for her deeply. This makes Fay’s sudden decision to leave him and take Marina with her all the more shocking.

“Eleven years shot through the head. I had seen the job eat men up. They seemed to melt.”

With no one around depending on him, Hank is left alone to reflect on his long service at the post office. He has nothing to show for it, except for the dizzy spells and the weight he has gained. It’s as if more than a decade has been stolen from his life.

“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.”

Tom Moto was one of the few comrades Hank had during his days as a substitute mail carrier. Years later, Tom still recalls Hank’s hatred for Jonstone and jokes with him about it. However, seeing Tom promoted to supervisor is a blow to Hank: In his eyes, it’s as though his old friend lacks integrity.

“I went into the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo. Ice cream bars, chimpanzees, tigers, green and red birds, the sun coming down on top of her head, the sun coming down and crawling into the hairs of your arms, easy, old boy.”

The rapid decompression (“the bends”) that Hank feels upon quitting the Postal Service nearly kills him outright due to the sudden release of stress and the lack of structure in his life. In his darkest moment, only the thought of his daughter prevents him from dying by suicide.