Post Office [1971] - Charles Bukowski

"She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn't go back. But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes."

Opening line: "It began as a mistake." Down-and-out barfly Henry Chinaski becomes substitute mail carrier, quits for awhile and lives on his winnings at the track and then becomes a mail clerk. The work is menial, boring and degrading. Our hero survives through booze combined with an extremely cynical view of the world.

Bukowski's first novel, Post Office, is "dedicated to nobody." The great love of Bukowski's life, Jane Cooney Baker ("Betty" in Post Office), was a widowed alcoholic 11 years his senior with an immense beer belly. She also served as the model for "Wanda" in the 1987 Bukowski-scripted film Barfly. Bukowski's first wife, Barbara Frye ("Joyce"), suffered a physical deformity - two vertebrae were missing from her neck, giving the impression that "she was permanently hunching her shoulders." After a little over two years of marriage in the late 1950s, she filed for divorce, accusing him of "mental cruelty." In the novel, Joyce is portrayed as a wealthy nymphomaniac.

Post Office Quotes

"It began as a mistake."

"She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn't go back."

"The streets were full of insane and dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it."

"The whiskey and beer ran out of me, fountained from the armpits, and I drove along with this load on my back like a cross, pulling out magazines, delivering thousands of letters, staggering, welded to the side of the sun."

"He told me that he was now a postal clerk and that there was nothing to the job. It was one of the biggest fattest lies of the century. I've been looking for that guy for years but I'm afraid somebody else has gotten to him first."

"God or somebody keeps creating women and tossing them out on the streets, and this one's ass is too big and that one's tits are too small, and this one is mad and that one is crazy and that one is a religionist and that one reads tea leaves and this one can't control her farts, and that one has this big nose, and that one has boney legs . . . But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress . . . a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all."

"My nerves were raw from the drinking and the action. It's not a new story about how women descend upon a man. You think you have space to breathe, then you look up and there's another one."

"Eleven years! I didn't have a dime more in my pocket than when I had first walked in. Eleven years. Although each night had been long, the years had gone fast. Perhaps it was the night work. Or doing the same thing over and over and over again."

"I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo."

"In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did."