The Haight-Ashbury Post Office
By Arnie Gross
The Post Office is a godsend and a curse for people like me. Relatively intelligent, spirited souls who couldn't hold down a straight job if our lives depended on it. Under this insufferable bureaucratic mess there is lots of space to play with the system, and in the case of mailmen and women get out in the fresh air for plenty of exercise and a lack of supervision.
I spent over two years as a soldier, in the largest military post office in Europe, and swore I never wanted to see the inside of one again as long as I lived. Yet, fifteen years later, I wound up in the San Francisco P.O. I was a recent East coast immigrant and needed a job. There was this little notice in the Haight-Ashbury substation. I took one look around and thought to myself, what a great temporary job right around the corner from home.
But it wasn't around the corner, and ten years and ten post offices later I finally let go. I was hired on a temporary status, as were half of the unemployed people living in the Haight-Ashbury. This was the end of the era when postal work was undesirable. The union had just negotiated a sizeable raise and time-and-a-half for overtime. The word spread quickly through the neighborhood and it became bonanza time for all the poor freaks and Hippies. Everybody simply had to agree to work a seventy-seven and a half hour week until the postal crisis in San Francisco was over.
And what was that crisis? The expansion of the war in Viet Nam. One of the curious things in modern American history, unknown to but a few, is that much of the Haight-Ashbury movement and the first flow of honest news in and out of Viet-Nam was subsidized by the San Francisco Post Office. People worked for six months or a year and saved a bundle of money. They capitalized drug deals, tourist businesses, and love generation experiments of all sorts that got seeded on Haight Street. Underground publications were blossoming, and duplicate copies by the hundreds were kicking around. They were taken to the Post Office and used to rewrap broken-open packages. They were stuffed in parcel post sacks and thrown into containers going to the Far East. Peace symbols of all sorts were stuck on letters and packages. Love messages and joints were added to letters and packages. Goods that were supposed to be confiscated from the mails were rewrapped with notes and then sent on the minute a supervisor turned his back. Our G.I.'s loved it and reciprocated in kind. They visited when on leave, they sent pictures and letters, and a lot of them joined the ranks of Hippies the minute they got out of the service.
Meanwhile the San Francisco Post Office had the immense job of moving the mail. In a matter of weeks a small postal section became an around-the-clock operation in a six-story building. Under a mandate to move the mail America's rejects shone like a bright star in the dark nightmarish period when the great affluent American cultural machine had a policy of defusing the spirit of its gifted non-conforming youth.
The supervisory staff threw away the rule book, and let common sense rule. The practical thing to do when you are in charge and are an incompetent is to admit it and put somebody competent in charge. Let them run the operation while you sit in the coffee room receiving reports to make sure things don't get out of hand.
My second night at the Postal Concentration Center (known as P.C.C. in the trade), I was put in front of a mail case and told to sort letters. After two hours of this my head hurt and my eyes were spinning. I told my superior I was going to quit and he countered with, “Well, Arnold, this is better than a lot of dirty work around here that we have to get done.” I told him I would prefer to do anything to what I was doing. He took me into a huge dark storage room that was filled with parcel post sacks waiting to be emptied and the packages sorted.
All I was to do was to empty these huge, heavy boxes. I busted my butt for hours. I was covered with dirty sacks, sweat and dirt, but the sheer physical labor exhilarated me. I felt better than I had felt in years. Others like me wound up on' the job. We sang and joked. We were doing what nobody else wanted to do, and what some people were afraid to do. We got filthy and tore our clothes on all the rough objects we came in contact with. We were a happy mess, we established ourselves as the incorrigibles of the newly emerging night shift. Every night when we came to work the dirty jobs were assigned to us, they were even saved for us, and we loved it. We were told just what to do and then left alone to do it. We got a reputation as trouble-shooters for the midnight shift.
The Post Office built a mail chute six floors high that came out on a conveyor belt in the basement. It took six seconds for a sack to get from the top to the bottom, and this chute was acclaimed a marvel until it was put into operation. The first dispatch of sacks sent down jammed up the chute between the third and fourth floors.
Pandemonium broke out. A van at the loading dock in the basement was waiting, and it was scheduled to meet an airplane at the airport. We were brought out to appraise the situation. We lowered ourselves by ropes into the chute and pulled out all the sacks until we got to the core of the jam. The chute kept jamming and we took turns going in and straightening out the mess. The work was dangerous and we were so filthy we were unfit to do other work. For several months after the chute was installed and before it was fixed we found a permanent gig breaking up mail jams. I was so good at it I got to riding the mail down to the basement, which blew out the crew working down there. These guys would be pulling sacks off the conveyor belt as fast as the sacks would land on it and boom, all of a sudden some poor soul would go to grab a sack and would have me in his arms instead. The shouts and screams those guys let out was bloodcurdling. Everyone was touchy about corpses rumored to come through from time to time. The famous code 15 mail probably started the rumor about corpses. These were sacks of mail with code 15 on their slide labels that were taken to a locked room. Eventually I found out they were the personal effects of our killed in action in Viet Nam. Before being sent to the families of the deceased they were gone through by special military personnel who removed anything that might adversely reflect upon the character of the dead. The trouble-shooters all knew, but we had the sense to keep our mouths shut.
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. As I put together my memories I know I truly loved my work. I discovered I was O.K. and not really the colossal fuck-up that others would have had me believe. There were lots of people like me, and lots more wanting to let it all hang out like I have a tendency to do. And I say take a chance, make that risk; because the grief and the criticism and the flack that you get is nothing in comparison to that warm, good feeling that starts flowing inside. I found the secret to life and it’s not gonna cost you any more money after you buy this book if you believe me when I say, “LET IT ALL HANG OUT BABY, CELEBRATE THE FIRST DAY OF YOUR COSMIC CAREER BY LAUGHING, SINGING, CRYING AND TURNING IN YOUR NEW CAR AND EXPENSIVE SUITS.”
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. Oh, yeah, so I'm at the P.C.C. learning how to celebrate my existence while my brothers are getting shot up in Viet Nam. I feel helpless and a little guilty and I do what I can; and so do a few others. The rest is in the History books.
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. Rick is a Hell's Angel, reputedly a past president of the San Francisco chapter. We work together often unloading the conveyor belt. All five-foot-six, one-hundred sixty-five pounds of me and all six-foot-three, two-hundred sixty-five pounds of him. He is a gorilla, but his neatly trimmed goatee, round face, and soft eyes--plus his sense of humor, make him a very likeable guy. At least I like him and he likes me. We talk for hours about our past life adventures and I marvel at the bullshit stories he tells. A war broke out between the Hell's Angels and the Gypsy Jokers and I had an inside view of some of the happenings. Every morning as the night shift left work the Angels and the Jokers would be waiting on opposite sides of the street at the exit to pick up their women who worked at the Post Office. The ladies were escorted home whether or not they needed it, wanted it, or even chose it. The chivalry, chauvinism, and ritual which was ninety-eight percent of the hostilities filled me with mirth. I compared it to how many of the American Indians or the old European Feudal Barons fought their wars. Of course I shared my insights with my friend Rick, and not only did he not understand, but he really got pissed off at me.
We had a helluva fight right there on the fifth floor of the old P.O. Me standing on the conveyor belt so I could look him in the eyes. Our fists in each other's faces shouting obscenities that made me blush before I went into the army. Several hundred of our work colleagues took cover. Of course after a while we both got sore throats from all the shouting and fisticuffs would not have been in order since we both had new work shirts on and we hadn't gotten them dirty yet.
About an hour after the fracas had died down, I was sorting mail which was my punishment for the previously described incident. My supervisor came over to me and said: ”Arnold, I want you to go to the men's room and apologize to Rick. He has locked himself in one of the stalls where he has been crying for the last fifteen minutes.” I did so because I was deeply touched that my friend felt so strongly about me that my angry words caused him to grieve.
I lift my cup of wisdom to a long forgotten friend. Never in my opinion was he more truly a great Hell's Angel warrior than when he sat on the shit can on the fifth floor of the P.C.C. and wept for the angry of a friend. Salute Rick, L’CHAIM.
Post Office, Post Office rings in my head. About a year after I started working the V.O. a lot of dumb, adverse publicity plus creeping bureaucratic organization brought about a cleaning up and a tightening up. The good times were coming to an end. That, plus coming home one day to my apartment in the Haight and finding a friend who was on acid taking a piss in the doorway and telling me it was groovy and natural, motivated me to put in for a transfer to Mill Volley where I immediately found a new place to live.
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. I am now a window clerk in Mill Valley. I also have a neat three-room basement bachelor pad overlooking a valley of Sycamore and Eucalyptus trees. My time is absorbed in remodeling my apartment. I have never built anything in my life. For the first time I pick up a hammer, saw and screwdriver, and use them with the mentality of a ten year old. The frustration is overwhelming. Fortunately, I am active in the “Foundation for Advanced Psychoanalysis” and in groups three times a week I go into tirades to get the pressures off my head.
Also in the interim of my relocation I am dealt the intense blow of my Dad's death, I am too immature, too crazy, too intellectual to accept death. I start my poem Kaddish a hundred times in my head, and it will be years before
I complete it, and it is published and I have made my statement to the world. And that statement leads to a chain of events that culminates with my writing
this book.
Post Office, Post Office - buzzing in my brain. Mill Valley. Here I am sitting at a window selling stamps, and weighing parcel post. The Haight-Ashbury is falling apart and daily the refugees arrive. Many don't recognize me for I have shaved my beard, cut my hair, and am working on a triple chin. I am a fat, bald, middle-aged looking amiable public servant now with a bachelor pad up in the hills that came right out of Playboy. I spend a lot of time selling pretty stamps one at a time to housewives who spend a lot of time looking for something exciting to do. I endeavor to excite them and update the old myth about the milkman. I lead a rich fantasy life as I munch pot brownies that the local heads lay on me because I don't get uptight when they come in the post office and play with my rubber stamps. Tessie White is my generation and handsomely built and wears loose blouses that she can lift quickly. She loves to drop acid and come visit me, and when nobody is looking she bares her chest and I stamp airmail on one breast and special delivery on the other. The people I work with are O. K. Straight out of squaresville, except the postmaster, Jim and Mrs. K. Their spirits transcend and we all have that sense of one another, although it is never verbalized. The postmaster squeezes his healthy footballer body into his captain's chair behind his big desk, dons his horn rim glasses, and jams a pipe into the corner of his mouth. All day he leans back, puffs his pipe, watches flies and fantasizes. He is a scoutmaster, and a good one. A nice human being who has been sucked into the bureaucratic machine and is stuck. Jim hides his sensitive soul by running around all day like a lean, overgrown elf and continuously humorizes everybody with clever quips, funny body movements and a great, loving leer.
Now Mrs. K., she is something else, and I love Mrs. K. She is ninety-two years old, lean, with long grey wispy hair and an ageless beautiful face and clear, beautiful blue eyes. We talk lots and some of the guys think I'm queer, but Mrs. K. understands and she talks to plants, trees and cats just like I do. A restlessness develops inside of me, I want to spend more time playing in the sunshine, and I'm tired of frustrated housewives who come to the Post Office every day looking for something to do. My sideburns start to creep down the side of my face and my colleagues get a little nervous about my public image, and they are relieved when I ask to be transferred to the mail carrier's annex.
Now I'm a mailman and the reins are still too tight. My landlord decides to give my apartment to his sister and the leader of the Foundation For Advanced Psychoanalysis dies. All my reasons for my lifestyle are no more and I buy a V.W. camper, quit my job, and move on out to see America.
The Post Office is a godsend and a curse for people like me. Relatively intelligent, spirited souls who couldn't hold down a straight job if our lives depended on it. Under this insufferable bureaucratic mess there is lots of space to play with the system, and in the case of mailmen and women get out in the fresh air for plenty of exercise and a lack of supervision.
I spent over two years as a soldier, in the largest military post office in Europe, and swore I never wanted to see the inside of one again as long as I lived. Yet, fifteen years later, I wound up in the San Francisco P.O. I was a recent East coast immigrant and needed a job. There was this little notice in the Haight-Ashbury substation. I took one look around and thought to myself, what a great temporary job right around the corner from home.
But it wasn't around the corner, and ten years and ten post offices later I finally let go. I was hired on a temporary status, as were half of the unemployed people living in the Haight-Ashbury. This was the end of the era when postal work was undesirable. The union had just negotiated a sizeable raise and time-and-a-half for overtime. The word spread quickly through the neighborhood and it became bonanza time for all the poor freaks and Hippies. Everybody simply had to agree to work a seventy-seven and a half hour week until the postal crisis in San Francisco was over.
And what was that crisis? The expansion of the war in Viet Nam. One of the curious things in modern American history, unknown to but a few, is that much of the Haight-Ashbury movement and the first flow of honest news in and out of Viet-Nam was subsidized by the San Francisco Post Office. People worked for six months or a year and saved a bundle of money. They capitalized drug deals, tourist businesses, and love generation experiments of all sorts that got seeded on Haight Street. Underground publications were blossoming, and duplicate copies by the hundreds were kicking around. They were taken to the Post Office and used to rewrap broken-open packages. They were stuffed in parcel post sacks and thrown into containers going to the Far East. Peace symbols of all sorts were stuck on letters and packages. Love messages and joints were added to letters and packages. Goods that were supposed to be confiscated from the mails were rewrapped with notes and then sent on the minute a supervisor turned his back. Our G.I.'s loved it and reciprocated in kind. They visited when on leave, they sent pictures and letters, and a lot of them joined the ranks of Hippies the minute they got out of the service.
Meanwhile the San Francisco Post Office had the immense job of moving the mail. In a matter of weeks a small postal section became an around-the-clock operation in a six-story building. Under a mandate to move the mail America's rejects shone like a bright star in the dark nightmarish period when the great affluent American cultural machine had a policy of defusing the spirit of its gifted non-conforming youth.
The supervisory staff threw away the rule book, and let common sense rule. The practical thing to do when you are in charge and are an incompetent is to admit it and put somebody competent in charge. Let them run the operation while you sit in the coffee room receiving reports to make sure things don't get out of hand.
My second night at the Postal Concentration Center (known as P.C.C. in the trade), I was put in front of a mail case and told to sort letters. After two hours of this my head hurt and my eyes were spinning. I told my superior I was going to quit and he countered with, “Well, Arnold, this is better than a lot of dirty work around here that we have to get done.” I told him I would prefer to do anything to what I was doing. He took me into a huge dark storage room that was filled with parcel post sacks waiting to be emptied and the packages sorted.
All I was to do was to empty these huge, heavy boxes. I busted my butt for hours. I was covered with dirty sacks, sweat and dirt, but the sheer physical labor exhilarated me. I felt better than I had felt in years. Others like me wound up on' the job. We sang and joked. We were doing what nobody else wanted to do, and what some people were afraid to do. We got filthy and tore our clothes on all the rough objects we came in contact with. We were a happy mess, we established ourselves as the incorrigibles of the newly emerging night shift. Every night when we came to work the dirty jobs were assigned to us, they were even saved for us, and we loved it. We were told just what to do and then left alone to do it. We got a reputation as trouble-shooters for the midnight shift.
The Post Office built a mail chute six floors high that came out on a conveyor belt in the basement. It took six seconds for a sack to get from the top to the bottom, and this chute was acclaimed a marvel until it was put into operation. The first dispatch of sacks sent down jammed up the chute between the third and fourth floors.
Pandemonium broke out. A van at the loading dock in the basement was waiting, and it was scheduled to meet an airplane at the airport. We were brought out to appraise the situation. We lowered ourselves by ropes into the chute and pulled out all the sacks until we got to the core of the jam. The chute kept jamming and we took turns going in and straightening out the mess. The work was dangerous and we were so filthy we were unfit to do other work. For several months after the chute was installed and before it was fixed we found a permanent gig breaking up mail jams. I was so good at it I got to riding the mail down to the basement, which blew out the crew working down there. These guys would be pulling sacks off the conveyor belt as fast as the sacks would land on it and boom, all of a sudden some poor soul would go to grab a sack and would have me in his arms instead. The shouts and screams those guys let out was bloodcurdling. Everyone was touchy about corpses rumored to come through from time to time. The famous code 15 mail probably started the rumor about corpses. These were sacks of mail with code 15 on their slide labels that were taken to a locked room. Eventually I found out they were the personal effects of our killed in action in Viet Nam. Before being sent to the families of the deceased they were gone through by special military personnel who removed anything that might adversely reflect upon the character of the dead. The trouble-shooters all knew, but we had the sense to keep our mouths shut.
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. As I put together my memories I know I truly loved my work. I discovered I was O.K. and not really the colossal fuck-up that others would have had me believe. There were lots of people like me, and lots more wanting to let it all hang out like I have a tendency to do. And I say take a chance, make that risk; because the grief and the criticism and the flack that you get is nothing in comparison to that warm, good feeling that starts flowing inside. I found the secret to life and it’s not gonna cost you any more money after you buy this book if you believe me when I say, “LET IT ALL HANG OUT BABY, CELEBRATE THE FIRST DAY OF YOUR COSMIC CAREER BY LAUGHING, SINGING, CRYING AND TURNING IN YOUR NEW CAR AND EXPENSIVE SUITS.”
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. Oh, yeah, so I'm at the P.C.C. learning how to celebrate my existence while my brothers are getting shot up in Viet Nam. I feel helpless and a little guilty and I do what I can; and so do a few others. The rest is in the History books.
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. Rick is a Hell's Angel, reputedly a past president of the San Francisco chapter. We work together often unloading the conveyor belt. All five-foot-six, one-hundred sixty-five pounds of me and all six-foot-three, two-hundred sixty-five pounds of him. He is a gorilla, but his neatly trimmed goatee, round face, and soft eyes--plus his sense of humor, make him a very likeable guy. At least I like him and he likes me. We talk for hours about our past life adventures and I marvel at the bullshit stories he tells. A war broke out between the Hell's Angels and the Gypsy Jokers and I had an inside view of some of the happenings. Every morning as the night shift left work the Angels and the Jokers would be waiting on opposite sides of the street at the exit to pick up their women who worked at the Post Office. The ladies were escorted home whether or not they needed it, wanted it, or even chose it. The chivalry, chauvinism, and ritual which was ninety-eight percent of the hostilities filled me with mirth. I compared it to how many of the American Indians or the old European Feudal Barons fought their wars. Of course I shared my insights with my friend Rick, and not only did he not understand, but he really got pissed off at me.
We had a helluva fight right there on the fifth floor of the old P.O. Me standing on the conveyor belt so I could look him in the eyes. Our fists in each other's faces shouting obscenities that made me blush before I went into the army. Several hundred of our work colleagues took cover. Of course after a while we both got sore throats from all the shouting and fisticuffs would not have been in order since we both had new work shirts on and we hadn't gotten them dirty yet.
About an hour after the fracas had died down, I was sorting mail which was my punishment for the previously described incident. My supervisor came over to me and said: ”Arnold, I want you to go to the men's room and apologize to Rick. He has locked himself in one of the stalls where he has been crying for the last fifteen minutes.” I did so because I was deeply touched that my friend felt so strongly about me that my angry words caused him to grieve.
I lift my cup of wisdom to a long forgotten friend. Never in my opinion was he more truly a great Hell's Angel warrior than when he sat on the shit can on the fifth floor of the P.C.C. and wept for the angry of a friend. Salute Rick, L’CHAIM.
Post Office, Post Office rings in my head. About a year after I started working the V.O. a lot of dumb, adverse publicity plus creeping bureaucratic organization brought about a cleaning up and a tightening up. The good times were coming to an end. That, plus coming home one day to my apartment in the Haight and finding a friend who was on acid taking a piss in the doorway and telling me it was groovy and natural, motivated me to put in for a transfer to Mill Volley where I immediately found a new place to live.
Post Office, Post Office - rings in my head. I am now a window clerk in Mill Valley. I also have a neat three-room basement bachelor pad overlooking a valley of Sycamore and Eucalyptus trees. My time is absorbed in remodeling my apartment. I have never built anything in my life. For the first time I pick up a hammer, saw and screwdriver, and use them with the mentality of a ten year old. The frustration is overwhelming. Fortunately, I am active in the “Foundation for Advanced Psychoanalysis” and in groups three times a week I go into tirades to get the pressures off my head.
Also in the interim of my relocation I am dealt the intense blow of my Dad's death, I am too immature, too crazy, too intellectual to accept death. I start my poem Kaddish a hundred times in my head, and it will be years before
I complete it, and it is published and I have made my statement to the world. And that statement leads to a chain of events that culminates with my writing
this book.
Post Office, Post Office - buzzing in my brain. Mill Valley. Here I am sitting at a window selling stamps, and weighing parcel post. The Haight-Ashbury is falling apart and daily the refugees arrive. Many don't recognize me for I have shaved my beard, cut my hair, and am working on a triple chin. I am a fat, bald, middle-aged looking amiable public servant now with a bachelor pad up in the hills that came right out of Playboy. I spend a lot of time selling pretty stamps one at a time to housewives who spend a lot of time looking for something exciting to do. I endeavor to excite them and update the old myth about the milkman. I lead a rich fantasy life as I munch pot brownies that the local heads lay on me because I don't get uptight when they come in the post office and play with my rubber stamps. Tessie White is my generation and handsomely built and wears loose blouses that she can lift quickly. She loves to drop acid and come visit me, and when nobody is looking she bares her chest and I stamp airmail on one breast and special delivery on the other. The people I work with are O. K. Straight out of squaresville, except the postmaster, Jim and Mrs. K. Their spirits transcend and we all have that sense of one another, although it is never verbalized. The postmaster squeezes his healthy footballer body into his captain's chair behind his big desk, dons his horn rim glasses, and jams a pipe into the corner of his mouth. All day he leans back, puffs his pipe, watches flies and fantasizes. He is a scoutmaster, and a good one. A nice human being who has been sucked into the bureaucratic machine and is stuck. Jim hides his sensitive soul by running around all day like a lean, overgrown elf and continuously humorizes everybody with clever quips, funny body movements and a great, loving leer.
Now Mrs. K., she is something else, and I love Mrs. K. She is ninety-two years old, lean, with long grey wispy hair and an ageless beautiful face and clear, beautiful blue eyes. We talk lots and some of the guys think I'm queer, but Mrs. K. understands and she talks to plants, trees and cats just like I do. A restlessness develops inside of me, I want to spend more time playing in the sunshine, and I'm tired of frustrated housewives who come to the Post Office every day looking for something to do. My sideburns start to creep down the side of my face and my colleagues get a little nervous about my public image, and they are relieved when I ask to be transferred to the mail carrier's annex.
Now I'm a mailman and the reins are still too tight. My landlord decides to give my apartment to his sister and the leader of the Foundation For Advanced Psychoanalysis dies. All my reasons for my lifestyle are no more and I buy a V.W. camper, quit my job, and move on out to see America.