the bundle on the machine meant an additional two layers of string.
During my first week on the job I managed to tie my hands to the bundled mail almost every time I attempted to use the machine. By the second week I had gained enough expertise where instead of tying my entire hand to the mail, I was merely tying my thumbs. By the third week I was tying the mail and slam dunking the bundles into the mail pouches like I had been doing it all my life.
Because of my late starting time I never saw Ugly O’Leary until he returned from his route in the afternoon. He always had a grin and a wave for me. I often saw him at his parents’ bar at night, and he’d ask me about work—did I like my job, was I getting along with the bosses and the other clerks? I always told him everything was fine, even though it wasn’t really. The work itself was a bit mind-numbing, but the real problem was the people. Some of the clerks still snubbed me, and the supervisors were a bunch of hard asses.
Whenever Ugly was around another carrier, and I was nearby, he’d always introduce me to that carrier. I liked every carrier I spoke to, and unlike some of the clerks, every carrier seemed happy in his work. The carriers were always joking and laughing with each other.
The Post Office was divided into two sides. The clerks, or mail processing, were on one side, the carriers worked on the other side. The friendly jabs, singing, whistling, and yelling emanating from the carriers side was a far cry from the night of the living dead aura I had to work in.
There were a few clerks who made attempts to make the workday less dreary, but their antics were quickly knocked down by the ever-present Mr. Dell. And If Mr. Dell wasn’t around, there was always somebody else to watch over us, as if we would all stop working if we weren’t yelled at every fifteen seconds. The supervisor/employee ratio was something like one supervisor for every eight employees. There were 22 clerks on Tour One, 20 clerks on Tour Two, and 39 carriers. That comes to ten supervisors plus the Superintendent of Mails and the Postmaster. There were other personnel wandering around the building, but who the hell knows what they did. It was the same in the Army: too many chiefs and not enough indians. No wonder the government was in such a mess.
I was only friendly with a couple of the clerks. One in particular was a black guy named Leon Goldberg. There were a lot of blacks in North Orange, but I knew very few of them personally. They had their own neighborhoods and hangouts, just as the Italians, Irish, Jews, Polish, and Puerto Ricans had theirs. We work together, shop at the same stores, ride the same buses, but we hardly associate with one another. I knew many blacks in the Army. The Army was supposed to be intergrated, but you would never know it. We had to work together, live together, but we rarely played together. At the EM Club the blacks sat with blacks, the whites sat with whites. In the Mess Hall it was the same thing. The blacks always took the same tables, as if they had their own pre-determined section. And the whites always sat at their same tables. The Puerto Ricans too, had their own section; a small section.
I don’t know why we separated ourselves. Maybe it was fear. Or ignorance. We never separated ourselves according to religion, only skin color. Stupid.
I had friends in the Army of all colors, nationalities, and religions. Good friends. Friends who I hated to part with. But there were also people who I hated and wanted no part of. Behind their backs, and less often to their faces, they were called niggers, spics, wops, kikes, mics, pollacks, or fags. And of course there were the 2nd Lieutenants. It didn’t matter what color or religion they were, all 2nd Lieutenants were worthless scum.
Leon Goldberg was several years older than me. Married. Ex-Navy man. Funny. He would do a Jerry Lewis impersonation that would make even the old timers laugh. His nickname was Go-Go. Go-Go Goldberg. Not because he was fast, but because he worked at a steady, methodical pace. He once explained to me that management couldn’t do anything to you if you’re working all the time.
“Just set your own pace,” he advised me. “Don’t kill yourself. The more work you do, the more management will expect out of you.”
“I get it. Start slow and leave room for improvement, right?”
“Right on,” he said.
All the clerks seemed to like Go-Go. Even the carriers called out to him when they came back from their routes.
Go-Go was a “schemer”. That is, he knew the scheme. When you sorted mail in front of the letter or flat case you had to know into which cubby hole the mail went. To do this you had to learn a scheme. Depending on which case you were at—either city or state—the cubby holes were labeled with either numbers or state post offices.
I was told I would someday have to learn the scheme, but to me this seemed an impossibility. Learning the scheme was like memorizing the encyclopedia.
I often asked Go-Go to meet me at O’Leary’s for a drink. But he was married with three kids and he always wanted to go right home after work. There was one other clerk who I considered asking to meet me at O’Leary’s. A girl. Her name was Cathy Jordan. She was about my age and had worked 18 months in the Post Office. She was also a schemer and often worked next to Go-Go. Cathy had a nice face and ass, but she was as titless as a twelve year old boy. She seemed pleasant enough, always said hello to me, providing I said hello to her first. The only people she had regular conversations with were Go-Go and some of the old timers. I guess she felt less threatened cavorting with the geritol generation than she did with someone her own age, and race.
She also talked to Go-Go during lunch, and I suppose I could’ve learned a lot about her through him, but I never really felt the urgency to do so. I decided to bide my time. Let her seek me out, ask questions about me, pursue me.
Not long after I started working for the Post Office, I became aware of the ongoing battle between management and craft. A craft employee was anyone not in management. As in any business, productivity was important. But there are ways of getting people to produce without constant brow-beating and intimidation. There should be incentives instead of threats. Rewards instead of retribution. “Discipline” was a word I heard many times.
“Do it or face discipline”, was a supervisor’s key phrase.
Every two or three weeks, Postmaster Sadhouse posted a letter on the bulletin board for all the craft employees to read. The letters always began in one of two ways. Either it read, “Apparently there are still some people who,” or, “It has come to my attention that.” Toward the end of the letter were always the words “from now on”. And of course the letter was sprinkled with “discipline”.
Not one of his letters ever began with, “I am pleased to report,” or, “My fellow workers”. Never. Not once.
There was a great deal of good natured ribbing between the clerks and carriers, and I sincerely believe that management would be a lot happier if the rift were more serious. The supervisors were always quick to blame a clerk for something gone wrong on the carrier side and vice versa. The result was a sometimes angry confrontation between one or more of the clerks and carriers. There must be a plaque somewhere on the Postmaster’s office wall that reads DIVIDE and CONQUER.
But much to managements’ annoyance, the clerks and carriers were allies, united in the struggle against half-baked politics.
It seemed managements’ policy that no one had the right to be too happy in his or her work. Talking was tolerated—barely. If either a clerk or carrier was thought to be talking too much, or if either one stopped pitching mail for even a second, there always came the reverberent, “Face the case!”
As a probationary Sub I was particularily subjected to the mercilessness of management. There were times when I was ordered to come to work at four thirty on
