It began as a mistake.
So begins Charles Bukowski's Post Office - a sad, funny, unapologetic ode to the working poor. It has often been noted that fate drops certain people into your life at a certain time and certain place for a certain reason. And so it is with books.
I was 22 years old, a struggling, aimless community college student working part-time at Bullwinkle's, a greasy, sticky-floored pizza parlor named after an animated moose when Charles Bukowski's Post Office found me.
To this day I still have trouble separating Bukowski's Post Office with that goofy, beloved moose of my childhood who slowly transformed into a loathed and despised symbol of the oppressive, minimum-wage-paying regime that bore his likeness and his name. It was a dreadful, soul-sucking three months of coming home in a tomato-sauce-stained, red-and-black-checkered, polyester uniform smelling like raw pizza dough and trying to keep at bay the paralyzing, all-consuming fear that some beautiful girl I had gone to high school with would come in with her family and I'd be humiliated and exposed as the broken, flour-stained doughboy I'd become.
I still have violent flashbacks of the canned animatronic stage show that featured Bullwinkle and Rocky the Flying Squirrel that played at the top of every hour:
Bullwinkle: Hey Rock, do you know what The Beatles "Penny Lane" would be called if came out today?"
Rocky: I give up.
Bullwinkle: They'd have to call it "Quarter Lane" due to inflation!!!!
The moose and squirrel's woeful dialogue about inflation and economic realities ended there. Like so many others who shared the same workspace -- the single mothers, the retirees who could not sustain themselves on their meager Social Security checks, and the high school dropouts with a lack of options -- they had not been programmed to connect the dots of inflation to wage stagnation and the working poor. They had been programmed to be tireless, unquestioning drones who reaked of watered-down tomato sauce.
I was definitely at the right place at the right time to be forever subverted by Post Office.
Bukowski's first novel about his thankless, lipstick-stained, booze-soaked days as a postal carrier became a gospel of sorts during that Bullwinkle's summer. It helped me retain my faith, sanity and most of my dignity as I made my way past my 7-foot animatronic Moose overlord planted inside the main dining area at the end of every closing shift.
The first time I read Bukowski's Post Office, I used it as a key to unlock the Bullwinkle's exit door. Finding comfort, solace and recognition in its pages.
"Maybe she hadn't saved the world," Bukowski wrote in Post Office, "but she had made a major improvement."
Post Office remains an "important" work because it was never consciously aiming to be an "important" work. It is a straightforward tale of a disgruntled, insanely perceptive, underemployed postal worker trying to find some kind of meaning amongst his suffocating surroundings. There is no lyrical wordplay. No heavy-handed allusions and allegories to weed through. And no metaphorical white whales to be hunted, clamped down and dissected with a tired, rusty blade. There are only the broken and forgotten hunched over on squeaky, tattered barstools wincing at whatever light leaks in whenever someone creaks a door open. In Post Office Bukowski neither judges nor glorifies them. He humanizes them, empathizes with them, and makes us pull up an empty stool next to them and wince along with them at the encroaching light.
The characters Bukowski introduces readers to in Post Office are the people that pop culture has always instinctually turned its back on. Society has always been obsessed with the rich, the beautiful, the powerful and the royal, but never those who are closest to the drains. We want to see the rise and the fall and perhaps a bit of redemption at the end. Nobody wants to watch a race where all the cars have already crashed and totaled before the starting flag has even hit the asphalt. Shakespeare's plays primarily focused on kings and queens and decorated generals not the peasants. Our current reality shows are devoted to documenting the wealthy, the plastic and the vacuous not the downtrodden, not the lonely and not the deeply dented souls who smell like whiskey and tap their cigarettes out in colorless ashtrays.
Bukowski's darkly comic, autobiographical tale of his time spent working as a lowly paid, put-upon postal carrier has all the staples associated with his work-booze, women, and lazy afternoons spent betting on the horses. And like much of Bukowski's work, Post Office has long been derided or discounted over the years by the academic snipers in their towers as a bunch of redundant drunken folktales. They don't get it. They might never get it. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing there to get:
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?
I just wrote in disgust against it all... To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
My most glorious moment working at Bullwinkle's (my only glorious moment working there, actually) was closing one night with my best friend from college who had been as desperate as I had been at that time for a minuscule paycheck. There we were scowling at the wretched mechanical moose whose grin seemed to mock us.
My friend took off one sneaker, gritted his teeth at the moose, shook a fist, and then motioned as if he were going to chuck his unlaced sneaker at Bullwinkle's head.
Under the heavy influence of having just read Bukowski's Post Office, I gave him a wicked smile and said, "Do it, man. Do it. Toss the shoe."
And so the shoe was launched.
Bam! Splat! A DIRECT hit! Right in the middle of Bullwinkle's oversized Polyurethane snout... Which as fate would have it also was where all the circuitry in the animatronic moose was located. There was a horrible crunching noise as the shoe bounced back off the moose.
My friend and I let out a panic, horrified laugh. We hadn't meant to cause any serious long-term damage to the moose.
"I didn't mean to toss the shoe that hard!" my friend exclaimed.
We quickly ran to another section of the restaurant to pretend to wipe down tables as if nothing had happened to the bent-nosed moose.
The next day the animatronic moose was covered in a faded lime green sheet. He would remain hidden under the faded lime sheet for the rest of the weekend.
A few weeks later I left Bullwinkle's with sweet relief and a tad of remorse for my role in having knocked the moose out of commission for a weekend. I moved on to my next Bukowski book as well, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.
Maybe I wouldn't save the world, but I would try to make some improvements.