Life of Letters

I walk and walk and slip into military cadence. Your left, your left, your left right left. But the chant becomes a distraction. I need to survey what’s ahead, hazards big and small, and I’m still irked about the dog shit caked in the treads of one shoe. I haven’t yet found a puddle where I might rinse some stink off.

“Mister Mailman!”

I’m already two houses farther along. A retiree is on his porch, waving the letters I’d just put in his box.

“Mister Mailman! I have a question.”

I wave back with my own handful of letters. The man waits. It’s presumed I’ll be the one walking to him, backtracking. Extraneous steps, lost time. Having recently revisited Charles Bukowski’s 1971 novel, Post Office, I wonder, What would Henry Chinaski do? He’d curse and spit. If he walked back, he’d cross the man’s lawn, working the dog shit into the grass as he went. The anti-hero Chinaski wasn’t afraid to make enemies or get written up. My demonic id.

I walk back to the man on the porch. He says one of the letters, a charity ask, is addressed to his long-dead father. “How do I stop this?”

I tell him he’s welcome to slash out the name, but most solicitation mail doesn’t return to sender. It gets shredded, so he might as well drop it in the recycling bin. He says he’ll try to get someone on the phone. I wish him luck and enjoy a sinister giggle as I resume my route. Mailing lists don’t get pruned: they thrive like a strangling vine, filling with the dead, the elsewhere, the barely known. Hello, Dave! We noticed your Malibu is due for a ten-point inspection. The mail is often preposterous, and it’s my life.

Bukowski spent fifteen years with the postal service in his hometown of Los Angeles, quitting at forty-nine to dedicate himself to writing. Although he was becoming an established poet, his global readership was seeded with Post Office, the first of five novels narrated by his alter ego, Chinaski.

I also thought about getting out in my late forties, as I approached two decades as a postie. Then I turned fifty. Now I’m fifty‑one. . . .

Canada Post is in the midst of its own aging crisis. The labour uncertainty that dragged on for two years and included multiple strikes has triggered a restructuring that could see the workforce halved over the next decade. Door-to-door delivery is set to be phased out for the four million households that still have it. For a corporation so large and so integrated in the lives of Canadians, change will come slowly, which means my job will be available as long as I want it. This is mostly a comfort.

All of Chinaski’s miseries hold true for today’s mail carriers — the rolling weariness, bloodthirsty dogs, rains you feel might drown you — but he’s more miserable than me. And the torment is comic. His supervisor is a “sadist,” his co-workers are numb or delusional, and escaping the depot to start his route is no salvation, because “the streets were full of insane and dull people.”

On a recent elevator ride with three men in a low-income high-rise, my presence seems to push buttons. I stare at the door as cat food samples threaten to explode my bundle.

“Bringing the bills,” says one man.

“And the holiday spirit,” I try.

“Fuck Christmas,” says the second.

“Your kids leave home and forget about you,” says the third. “And then you’re alone.”

“You couldn’t pay me to do what he does,” says the first man, vaguely sympathetic.

Where Bukowski considered himself an animal among animals, I strive to be human among humans. He would mock that narrow distinction with his smoker’s laugh. (Bukowski mocked striving in general.) Either way, delivering mail puts me ankle-deep in the muck of ordinary lives.

Canada Post will remain vital to the dispossessed (“Ya got my cheque?”), but mail is a great leveller. It links us all equally to the state: new passport or driver’s licence, voter registration, tax documents, jury summons. Address is identity, which inclines all of us to check the mailbox now and then. We can’t not check.

People love telling me the mail is mostly garbage. And the sky is blue, ma’am. At shift’s end, letter carriers prep the next day’s batch: fast food, real estate, Canadian Tire piles lined up on waist-high carts. As we collate a few hundred sets, we talk to the ceiling: What did I do to deserve this?

Receiving ads is a choice, but many customers never bother to opt out; some grouse even as they take the flyers from my hand and start browsing. Direct-mail marketing works, which is why it will remain a steady revenue stream for Canada Post. Parcels, meanwhile, have lagged as the small businesses that rely on Canada Post’s reach and relative affordability have lost trust in the service.

At the picket line, I shoved pallet wood into the burn barrel, wishing I could feed my debts and cost-of-living anxiety into the same oily flames. The strikes were ineffective because the union, CUPW, is hamstrung: the Crown corporation didn’t have to negotiate in good faith when it could assume that its boss, the federal government, would eventually intervene, as has happened many times before. And it did happen again. An industrial inquiry commission was convened to consider paths forward, after which Ottawa asked the company to submit a transformation plan.

The brand is damaged, and I hear about it on the street.

“What’s going on with you guys?” a man asks. “I never know when the mail’s coming anymore.”

He has a hostile bent, one shoulder aimed at me and an eyebrow raised. I tell him I’m also irritated and that Canada Post doesn’t have to be so hopeless. We could bump the price of a stamp gently and more often to help offset declining lettermail volumes. And we should have been delivering parcels seven days a week many years ago. UPS, FedEx, Amazon, every other courier racing around on the weekend makes us look dopey and uninterested. He’s only half listening, waiting to get a jab in.

“As long as they don’t touch your pension. Is your pension safe?”

“Should be.”

“That’s all that matters.”

Every Canadian has legitimate ownership rights, what we might call two cents’ worth. Fortunately, some people are pleased to see Mister Mailman coming up the sidewalk, particularly, it seems, the old and the young. I might be an anachronism, but I don’t feel I’m on the verge of extinction. (I may be closer to extinction as a writer than as a mail carrier.)

Chinaski would sneer at my pride and the folly of wanting better days for an enormous institution, as though it’s a troubled individual deserving of sympathy.

Discontent is the ethos among posties, and this is partly because we’re replaceable, nobodies doing anybody work. Except anybody can’t do the work. You need forbearance when you’re being trailed by a supervisor doing compliance checks, and when you’re stepping around a comatose body in a tenement stairwell, and when you get scolded by a stay-at-home on her pressure-washed driveway because the dog wig took so long to arrive from Osaka.

Unskilled labour, the economists say, but it requires the cool of Gandhi and the stamina of a plow ox.

“You didn’t adjust, you simply got more and more tired,” Chinaski says. After resigning to try other odd jobs and to spend more time at the horse track, he’s drawn back to the postal service as a sorter. His griefs multiply. Dizzy spells and soreness everywhere as the bosses lean on him to improve his speed and accuracy. A fellow clerk tells Chinaski he’s a writer and asks him to read his novel. Perhaps that character, Dave Janko, is another thread of Bukowski’s ego. It’s as if the author is talking to himself when he begs the chatterbox Janko, “Why don’t you quit this job? Go to a small room and write.”

Bukowski wouldn’t encourage me to quit Canada Post. In fact, he wouldn’t care one way or the other. His own purgatory was plenty to stew over. And what about my pension? That bowl of sugared oatmeal waiting for me across a room of time. I’ll probably get there. I only need to never stop moving.

When I first read Post Office, I was in my early twenties and the writing felt breezy, insubstantial. My fondness then was reserved for biblical slabs like Blood Meridian and Underworld. Bukowski’s curbside barking missed the mark with me as I wasn’t yet his peer. I hadn’t learned to accommodate failure or become tired of regret. Reading it now makes me feel middle-aged from my insomniac brain down to my crowded toes, which I mean as praise. I might cope better than Chinaski did in the sour elevators and on the bitter streets, but I’m still just another wretch.

Bukowski would say even those who manage to be human among humans are doomed. Yet light can be found in his seething. In a letter to a poet friend from 1962, he perhaps accidentally distilled the best of a mail carrier’s life: “Today I will walk in the sun. I will simply walk in the sun.”