Читать книгу SQUIRRELY - John Mahoney - Страница 6

I took the Civil Service Exam at the Main Post Office in East Orange one week after being fired from the gas station. It took nearly a month to find out my score. Two weeks after finding out my grade I was having a beer at O’Leary’s, celebrating the coming of Spring, when Ugly came in for his lunch break. I told him I got a grade of 78, plus the extra five points for being a veteran brought my score up to 83.

“Great,” said Ugly. “You should be hearing from Mr. Stevens soon. Then you’ll get to meet Mr. Sadhouse. I know for a fact there’ll be an opening for a clerk soon.”

“Hold on,” I said, “I was told my name would go on a waiting list. I may not get a job for a couple of years.”

“No way. I put in a good word for you. I’m their fair haired boy, you know. When I recommend someone it’s because I know that person will do a good job. And Postmaster Sadhouse knows that.”

“I appreciate the faith you have in me, Ugly.”

“Ain’t no big thing. Us homies have to stick together, right?”

After I filled out the application for the Post Office, I had a short interview with Mr. Stevens, the Superintendent of Mails. He was a big fat slob in loose fitting clothes. He had a large, pock-marked nose and a droopy face. I disliked him from the start. He looked over my application for several minutes before speaking.

“You didn’t put down any employment references,” he said in a gravelly voice.

“I just got back from Vietnam nine months ago. I was wounded. I haven’t been able to work until now.”

“Do you have a disability?”

“No.”

“Did you receive a Purple Heart?”

“No.”

“No? Isn’t that unusual? What was the extent of your wounds?”

“I had a broken hand.”

“How did that happen?”

“You don’t…I mean it happened kind of fast.”

“But, you’re okay now. You can pitch mail and lift sacks with no problem? Because if it is a problem I want to know right now.”

“Oh no, I’m fine now.”

Six days later I received a letter ordering me to report to Postmaster Sadhouse. I didn’t want to go on the date stated in the letter because it was a sunny, warm day, the first one we had in months. But I went anyway. Mr. Sadhouse didn’t smile when he met me, but he did shake my hand. He looked about the same age as Mr. Stevens, but was the complete opposite in appearance. Mr. Sadhouse was trim and well tailored, and had a clear voice. He looked directly at me when he spoke, but in a way that made me feel like I was undeserving to work in his Post Office.

“So you’re a friend of Mr. O’Leary’s,” he said.

“Yeah. Me and Dennis go back a long way.”

“I see. The carriers call him Ugly. Is that what you call him too?”

“Yeah, that’s right, that’s what we call him. Ugly.”

“He had a rough time in Vietnam,” Mr. Sadhouse said. “But thank God he came out all right. He’s a fine carrier. One of the best we have. You should do well if you follow his lead.”

“I’ll do that. But…I thought I was going to be a clerk, not a carrier.”

“You’ll be on probation for three months. Yes, you’ll start off as a clerk, however, I may have a carrier opening at the end of that three months. If you work to our satisfaction you might be allowed to switch to the carrier side. Mr. O’Leary stated it was your desire to be a letter carrier. Isn’t that so?”

“Oh right, right. A carrier, that’s what I want to be.”

I hadn’t really thought about being a letter carrier. I thought I was just going to work inside the Post Office, sorting mail. But I suppose being a letter carrier wouldn’t be such a bad job. I mean, how difficult could it be to walk around town putting letters in mailboxes? Plus, I would be in uniform again.

“I understand you were in Vietnam, too,” Mr. Sadhouse said.

“Yeah, I was.”

“It’s a sad situation over there. I hope we’re out soon. I have a nephew over there right now.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. He’s a sergeant in the Air Force. He says he’s not in any danger, but I don’t know how that could be in a war zone.”

“What’s his MOS? I mean, what’s his job?”

“He’s a clerk-typist.”

Those words made me wince. And for a brief second my mind raced back to my endless days behind a typewriter. God, how I had hated being stuck in an office while kids younger than me were grabbing all the glory.

The last thing Mr. Sadhouse did before I left his office was to swear me in. I had to take some stupid oath about protecting the sanctity of the mail. It was almost like the oath I took when I was at the Army Induction Center in Newark. The oath in both cases was laughable.

My mom and dad were happy I finally had a good job. My dad was especially happy because I was completely broke and I was always hitting him up for money.

My first day of work was on a Saturday. Mr. Dell, the tour supervisor, met me at the time clock. He was a balding, pot-bellied man who looked like he wanted to be someplace other than the Post Office. After my time card punching instructions he took me aside to tell me that promptness and the ability to follow orders was all he expected of me. Then he added accuracy. That’s what he expected of me. Then he added respect for others. Then he added speed and accuracy. But that was all he expected of me. And honesty. And truthfullness. That’s all.

Then Mr. Dell reminded me that I was on probation for ninety days. During that ninety days I had to prove myself worthy of continuing to work for the North Orange Post Office. If I did all that was expected of me, and more, I should have no trouble becoming a permanent employee.

I didn’t know whether to salute him or knee him in the groin.

I worked the second tour. I worked a six day, forty hour week. My work days always ended at eight thirty, which meant two days a week I started at noon, and four other days I started at two thirty. Overtime meant I started work earlier, not stay later.

The hours suited me fine. I could go to O’Leary’s after work and still not worry about getting up early. My title was Substitute Postal Clerk, or Sub for short. I found out later that Sub also meant Sub-human, because that’s the way I was sometimes treated.

Mr. Dell introduced me to the rest of the staff. Most of the clerks greeted me in a genuine, friendly fashion, but others treated me like I had invaded their private domain, like I was not to be trusted, like I was only there to spy on them and report their every infraction to the Postmaster. The untrusting and uncaring were the oldtimers—in the Army we called them Lifers—their eyes were vacant and underlined with dark circles, the result of too many years reading too many addresses.

My first assignment was the face up table. Not a table exactly, it was a wide conveyor belt where four of us stood and culled the half ton of mail dumped at the lower end of the belt. Directly in front of us was a thinner, high speed belt into which we fed letters with the stamp down and to the left. The letters were gathered at the end of the belt by someone who would then feed them through a machine which canceled the stamp and printed a postmark on the envelope. There were canvas hampers behind us into which we tossed small parcels and rolls (SPR’s), and flats (newspapers or magazines).

It wasn’t a procedure performed all day. Thank God. If it was I would certainly go beserk. I only worked at the face up table when the route carriers or the collection carriers brought in the mail they had collected from the mailboxes. It was at the face up table that I received my first lesson in submissiveness training. We were allowed to talk while at the face up table, unless Mr. Dell thought we were talking too much, at which time he’d yell, “More mail, less talk!”

I guess he felt that talking slowed down the processing of the mail, and if we talked too much the entire country would be paralyzed because the day-to-day survival of business, government, and John Q. Public depended upon how swiftly we fed long and short letters into the canceling machine. What power I had! What responsibility! To think I could destroy a persons life just by facing 1.4 letters per second instead of 2.5 letters per second.

When I wasn’t at the face up table I had other duties to perform. The letter cases had to be “swept” periodically. “Sweeping” meant I had to remove the letters from the cubby holes in the letter case, tie the letters in bundles, then drop the bundles into the appropriate mail pouch which was later loaded onto a truck. The bundles of letters were tied automatically by one of the weirdest contraptions I had ever seen. When you had a handful of letters, or flats, you’d slap it down on this machine which triggered an arm that spun two strands of string around the bundle, tied a knot, and cut the string. Amazing! Only trouble was, if you didn’t take the bundle of mail off the machine at exactly the right moment, the arm would swing around again, tying an additional two strands of string. Every millisecond that you left 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 a Saturday morning. And that was after having worked until eight thirty the night before. I might only work a couple of hours before being told to go home and report back that afternoon to finish Tour Two. I was never in one place for more than ten minutes at a time. I went from unloading the truck, to dumping sacks, to the face up table, to sorting parcels, to folding empty sacks, to sweeping the cases, back to the face up table, to loading the truck. I couldn’t take lunch until told to. I wasn’t really allowed to take a coffee break, but sometimes I got so tired I had to ask to sit down for ten minutes. I also had to ask permission to use the men’s room. And when I returned from the men’s room Mr. Dell always looked at me then his watch. I didn’t like how I was treated, but I had to put up with it. One peep of dissent from me and I was out of a job. Sayanora. Adios. Hit the bricks.

The reason I put up with their bullshit was because I had made up my mind to make a career out of the Post Office. The money was better than what I made at the gas station, and I was positive my high school diploma wouldn’t get me a higher paying job anywhere else. I was there to stay. I knew it meant I had to endure injustice, ridicule, humiliation, and maybe even physical pain. But I would survive. I would survive until I was an apathetic, flabby old blob with dark circles under my eyes.

I was at managements’ mercy for the first ninety days. After my probation period I could join the union and I would have some recourse in the event of unwarranted discipline. Still, the agreement between the unions and management favored the full time regular employees over the Subs. As long as I was a Sub, management had the power to play with my schedule and work assignments. Their irrational acts reminded me of another group of neanderthalic twits: Drill Sergeants!

But I survived basic training, and I could survive being a Sub. I made a vow to put up with anything the supervisors dished out because I knew there would come a time when I no longer would be a Sub, and their treatment of me would improve.