Post Office by Charles Bukowski Read Free Book Online Page A

find a job unless he had a car to drive around in. Joyce got on the phone and gramps sent the money on in. Next thing I knew I was sitting in a new Plymouth. She sent me out on the streets dressed in a fine new suit, forty-dollar shoes, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll try to stretch it out. Shipping clerk, that’s what I was. When you didn’t know how to do anything that’s what you became—a shipping clerk, receiving clerk, stock boy. I checked two ads, went to two places and both of the places hired me. The first place smelled like work, so I took the second.
    So there I was with my gummed tape machine working in an art store. It was easy. There was only an hour or two of work a day. I listened to the radio, built a little office out of plywood, put an old desk in there, the telephone, and I sat around reading the Racing Form. I’d get bored sometimes and walk down the alley to the coffee shop and sit in there, drinking coffee, eating pie and flirting with the waitresses.
    The truck drivers would come in:
    “Where’s Chinaski?”
    “He’s down at the coffee shop.”
    They’d come down there, have a coffee, and then we’d walk up the alley and do our bit, take a few cartons off the truck or throw them on. Something about a bill of lading.
    They wouldn’t fire me. Even the salesmen liked me. They were robbing the boss out the back door but I didn’t say anything. That was their little game. It didn’t interest me. I wasn’t much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.

6
    There was death in that place on the hill. I knew it the first day I walked out the screen door and into the backyard. A zinging binging buzzing whining sound came right at me: 10,000 flies rose straight up into the air at once. All the backyards had these flies—there was this tall green grass and they nested in it, they loved it.
    Oh Jesus Christ, I thought, and not a spider within five miles!
    As I stood there, the 10,000 flies began to come back down out of the sky, settling down in the grass, along the fence, the ground, in my hair, on my arms, everywhere. One of the bolder ones bit me.
    I cursed, ran out and bought the biggest fly sprayer you ever saw. I fought them for hours, raging we were, the flies and I, and hours later, coughing and sick from breathing the fly killer, I looked around and there was as many flies as ever. I think for each one I killed they got down in the grass and bred two. I gave it up.
    The bedroom had this room-break encircling the bed. There were pots and the pots had geraniums in them. When I went to bed with Joyce the first time and we worked out, I noticed the boards begin to wave and shake.
    Then plop.
    “Oh oh!” I said.
    “What’s the matter now?” asked Joyce. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”
    “Baby, a pot of geraniums just fell on my ass.”
    “Don’t stop! Go ahead!”
    “All right, all right!”
    I stoked up again, was going fairly well, then—”Oh, shit!”
    “What is it? What is it?”
    “Another pot of geraniums, baby, hit me in the small of the back, rolled down my back to my ass, then dropped off.”
    “God
damn
the geraniums! Go ahead! Go ahead!”
    “Oh, all right …”
    All through the workout these pots kept falling down on me. It was like trying to screw during an aerial attack. I finally made it.
    Later I said, “Look, baby, we’ve got to do something about those geraniums. “
    “No, you leave them there!”
    “Why, baby, why?”
    “It adds to it.”
    “It adds to it?”
    “Yes.”
    She just giggled. But the pots stayed up there. Most of the time.

7
    Then I started coming home unhappy.
    “What’s the matter, Hank?”
    I had to get drunk every night.
    “It’s the manager, Freddy. He has started whistling this song. He’s whistling it when I come in in the morning and he never stops, and he’s whistling it when I go home at night. It’s been going on for two weeks!”
    “What’s the name of the song?”
    “Around the World In Eighty