Post Office

Hank takes the exam and physical to become a substitute mail carrier. The job is easy at first, but the brutal schedule quickly takes its toll. Hank and Betty usually stay up past midnight, drinking. He reports to his supervisor, Jonstone, at five o’clock in the morning, and sets out on his route already pressed for time. Worse, Hank and his fellow subs work night routes several times a week, with routes that are exhausting and impossible to complete.

Fed up with Jonstone’s cruelty, Hank files a 30-page complaint, sending one copy to Jonstone and taking another to the Federal Building. He waits an hour and a half, then the clerk takes him to a gray-haired man who berates him for his complaint. He screams, “‘MR. JOHNSTONE IS A FINE MAN’” and rages about Hank’s advanced vocabulary in his complaint. Hank gives up and leaves. He takes the next day off without pay.

The following morning, Jonstone greets Hank with a face as red as his shirt, but he says nothing. Hank doesn’t care. He had been up until two o’clock in the morning, drinking and having sex with Betty. After making Hank wait for several hours, Jonstone, whom Hank addresses as Stone, tells him there is no work for him today. Hank returns home and is soon back in bed with Betty.

Jonstone refuses to give Hank a route the next day, too. One of the older subs, Bobby Hansen, tells him Jonstone did the same thing to him once. Hank doesn’t care if Jonstone is trying to starve him or get him to quit; he won’t suck up to him. Bobby advises Hank to go to Prell Station each night and tell the supervisor that he isn’t getting work so that he can sit in as a special delivery sub. Hank thanks him.

The special night delivery job is easy for Hank. The route is relaxed, the work is leisurely, and he frequently delivers to a young woman who makes and wears lingerie. However, this doesn’t last: Jonstone summons him back to Oakland station on threat of disciplinary action or dismissal.

Jonstone assigns Hank to route 593, the hardest route in the station. The route is full of apartment buildings with difficult addresses and tedious old women asking for their mail. Worst of all are the dogs. One German Shepherd, in particular, sniffs Hank’s rear. Realizing how close the dog’s mouth is to his private parts, Hank quickly and carefully makes his escape.

Hank narrowly avoids being mauled by another German Shepherd, spilling his mailbag in the process. Consequently, he’s 40 minutes late reporting back to the station. Jonstone writes him up for being late and mouthing off. Hank throws the write-up in the trash.

Only the regular mailmen know the ins and outs of each route, and they refuse to share their secrets. For the subs, “Each day it was another god damned thing, and you were always ready for a rape, murder, dogs, or insanity of some sort” (21). Hank still drinks and cavorts until two o’clock in the morning before rising at 4:30 am.

One day, Hank, hungover, finds himself on an easy route. He thinks he can eat lunch for the first time in two years. However, his route takes him to a church, and it isn’t apparent where he should leave the mail. He explores the property, finding a communal bathroom (where he uses the toilet and smokes a cigarette, and which he plans to use the next time he’s down and out). He finds the empty priest’s quarters, takes a swig from a bottle of wine, and leaves the mail. He doesn’t have time for lunch after all. Back at the station, Jonstone writes him up for being 23 minutes late.

The rainy season begins. Because Hank spends most of his money on alcohol, he does his routes in shoes full of holes. Hank’s days are soaking wet and miserable. Many of the full-timers and subs call out sick.

One morning, Jonstone sends Hank to Wently Station, where the supervisor gives him the most stuffed bag of mail he has ever seen. The route is hilly and long, and Hank has no help. He later learns that the Wently supervisor is Jonstone’s best friend.

The route would have been impossible, even on a dry day. Hank finishes the first leg in an hour; there are 11 to go. Hank’s frustration grows as he’s forced to skip lunch again. On the fifth leg of the route, an old woman alerts him that his bag is open, and the mail is getting wet. Hank decides to quit on the spot. He goes to a nearby café, orders some terrible coffee, and sits for an hour, drying off. When he notices that the rain has stopped, he completes his route. He returns to the station at twilight, finding it locked. The clerk shouts at him for being late, but Hank threatens to kill him if he says another word.

Hank reports to work the next day. Jonstone says nothing about the previous day but sends him home without an assignment. Hank almost loves him for it.

The rain returns. Jonstone assigns Hank to the Sunday Collection route. Inaccurate maps, coupled with the amount of mail to collect, make the route impossible to complete on time. Hank relies on his clipboard for directions as he drives through the pouring rain, resorting to lighting matches to read as night falls. He makes good time for once, until he momentarily loses the clipboard in the flooded streets. The thought of relaxing with Betty, his dog, and a drink sustains him through the driving rain.

By the time Hank drops off his load at the station, the water has risen to an actual flood. At a red light, he stops next to Tom Moto, another sub, who warns him to go a different way to the garage: The area that Hank is headed to is flooded. Hank ignores this warning and single-mindedly presses on. Three blocks from his destination, the truck floods and stalls in two feet of water. He abandons it, realizing that it’s on someone’s front lawn, and wades to the station. He throws the keys to the dispatcher, giving him the address where he left the truck.

Hank finds Tom Moto warming himself by the heater. Tom abandoned his truck, too. They joke that Jonstone caused the flood. Tom agrees to give Hank’s 12-year-old car a push with his newer car, but Tom’s car won’t start. Hank’s car does, so he pushes Tom’s car to a garage a mile away and returns home to Betty.

Tom Moto tells Hank that Jonstone’s favorite mail carrier, Matthew Battles, whom Jonstone showers with praise, was arrested for stealing money from letters intended for the Nekalayla Temple. Nekalayla is a religious leader who claimed to have received revelations from Jesus Christ. Battles was caught when old women became suspicious because they never received thank-you letters for their donations. No one has told Jonstone.

A sub is assigned to Battle’s route. Hank waits for a while and then asks Jonstone where Matthews is. Jonstone seems defeated and ignores the question. At seven o’clock in the morning, he tells Hank to go home.

Hank hears the same things from people, no matter which route he’s assigned. He concludes, “The streets were full of insane and dull people” (34). One man in particular perplexes Hank. This man refuses to let mail be placed in his mailbox; instead, he stands in his driveway to receive it by hand. Other carriers claim not to know who he is. One day, Hank sees the man talking to a neighbor up the block. Determined to outpace him, Hank runs to his house and nearly places the letter in the mailbox before the man sprints toward him, yelling for him not to. After receiving the letter, the man calmly opens it and goes inside, leaving Hank baffled.

Hank is assigned a suspiciously easy residential mail route. Enjoying the quiet neighborhood and thinking he might finally make his lunch break, he comes to a house requiring a registered letter delivery. A woman inside demands that he stand back so she can see his face. When Hank refuses and tries to leave a pickup slip, she bursts out, wearing a sheer negligee, no bra, dark blue panties, and heavy face cream. She grabs the letter without signing and retreats indoors.

Because the postal procedure requires a signature, Hank wedges his foot in the door and forces his way in. The house is dark; all the shades are drawn. She reluctantly signs but then blocks the doorway, calling him evil and accusing him of attempted rape. As Hank tries to leave, she claws his face, drawing blood. He reacts by groping and kissing her despite her protests, escalating to sexually assaulting her. After finishing, he leaves her lying silently on the couch. He returns late to the station, and Jonstone notices his injuries, but Hank brushes him off.

Hungover during a brutal heat wave, Hank struggles through his route in ragged clothes and worn-out shoes lined with cardboard. Aggravating encounters fill the day: A woman demands that he walk back a block to collect a misdelivered advertisement, another insists that he must have a letter for her because her sister promised to write, and a third angrily complains about receiving only bills.

At an apartment building, a man shouts from behind a screen door, addressing Hank as Uncle Sam. Hank tells the man not to call him that, and the man threatens to fight him for being a wise guy. Enraged, Hank throws down his mailbag and cap, shouting for the man to come out and face him, but the man remains silent and unseen. After 20 minutes of reorganizing scattered mail, Hank finishes the route, assuming that the man reported him to Jonstone. He returns to the office, asking Jonstone about the call, but Jonstone received no call and is so confused that he forgets to reprimand Hank for being late.

Hank works beside George Greene (G.G.), a mail carrier in his late sixties who has worked more than 40 years on the job. Quiet and physically worn down, G.G. has an easy route in a wealthy district. Each day, he whistles for children at the route’s edge to give them candy. He’s well-liked by the children on this route. However, this innocent practice leads to a false accusation of child molestation when a mother, new to the area, misinterprets his words. This breaks something in G.G. Hank attempts to defend G.G., but Jonstone, always afraid of the public’s opinion, won’t hear it. G.G.’s body begins to slow, and during a heavy-mail morning, Hank notices him faltering, barely able to keep up sorting the mail. They both manage to finish in time for dispatch, but at the last minute, Jonstone hands them impossible-to-sort bundles of circulars.

G.G. stares at his stack and then lowers his head and begins to cry. When Hank tries to help, G.G. runs to the locker room, where Hank finds him sobbing uncontrollably. Hank pleads with Jonstone to let him take G.G. home, but Jonstone refuses, focused on staffing the route. G.G. never returns, and no one at the station ever mentions him again. His decades of service end abruptly over a trivial stack of store flyers.

After three years, Hank is finally a regular, gaining holiday pay, a fixed 40-hour week, and assignment to five routes, which he’ll eventually learn well. However, the stability feels dull compared to the unpredictable challenges of his sub days. A minor new rule sparks a petty standoff with Jonstone when Hank repeatedly ignores it. Jonstone issues one write-up after another, and Hank throws them away without reading them, mocking the absurdity of the escalating paperwork. The standoff ends when he simply doesn’t show up the next day. At the Federal Building, he resigns after three and a half years, shocking the clerk. He goes home and drinks with Betty, not realizing that he’ll eventually return to the post office as a clerk for another 12 years.