Post Office (1971)

By Charles Bukowski

Genre: Dirtbag Hall Of Famer That Might Keep A Teenage Boy Away From ChatGPT But Also Hopefully Won’t Inch Him Closer To Andrew Tate

Recommended For: Someone Who Doesn’t Want To Actually Go On A Two-Day Bender But Wants To Read A Book For Two Days That Scratches The Itch Of Living Life On The Fringes

It’s hard to say what the right age is to read Bukowski. A good age would probably be when-you’re-not-still-a-dumbass. Which, for men, within the context we’re talking about, is probably not until about 30.

The problem with Bukowski is that I would imagine that most guys read him before 30, when its main purpose is a sort of madlib for debauchery. I get the sense that his legacy has evolved into a meme, signifying a class of bro culture, elevated slightly above Boondock Saints dorm poster. 

Another problem with Bukowski is that the imagined reader is indeed a man (or, boy/almost man) largely owed to his underdeveloped female characters, or just all the misogyny in his writing in general. He writes about the grimy, shitty, vice-filled days of low-life’s, to the point where he’s almost a one-trick pony. 

On one-hand, he does it vividly and convincingly - you can turn a page and feel like you’re peeling your back off a mattress, unsure if the mattress made your back sticky or your back made the mattress sticky. On the other hand, what do you do with that kind of aimlessness and that much generally shitty behavior at a certain point? Bukowski gets a lot of mythos mileage out of the autobiographical nature of his work - it makes him seem cooler to two types of people: 1.) the down-on-their-luck who want to feel like a protagonist without having to bother with a hero’s journey and 2.) the fairly privileged who want to cosplay as down-on-their-luck while still glorifying their worst habits.

For either, Bukowski’s work can go a long way toward taking the overarching concept of inescapably crushing poverty and making it seem…occasionally fun, if you treat yourself and others like shit (?)

Look, I don’t want to come off hard on a guy who’s capable of stirring feelings within you. That’s something. There’s no doubt about it. We live in a society where a married couple can sit at a table staring at their phones for literal minutes until one of them makes a snorting sound and shows the other one an absolutely pointless ChatGPT-generated image that barely qualifies as funny. 

Definitely read Post Office if the alternative is participating in a life like that. It’s about a guy working at a post office. He hates it. He routinely goes to the race track and tries to scheme ways to make enough money to actually enjoy what he enjoys without doing what he hates. Relatable but self-destructive. If your reaction to that is, That sounds insufferable, I could listen to a Tom Waits song and at least that would only take me like three minutes, then you know what, fair!

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What I want to briefly focus on in regard to Post Office is the way it depicted Los Angeles as a dirty, desperate city that contradicted Hollywood and Disneyland. There’s truth there, obviously, and there’s an interplay, if you have time and a car. Bukowski’s LA is a puzzle piece in a larger portrait of a city I’ve been an interloper of my entire life. 

To me, personally, there’s a greater symbolism in Disneyland than just the Yin and Yang to the race tracks and slums in Post Office when it comes to talking about LA. When you place a map of Disneyland down on a table, it’s meant to give you a sense of physical space and world shifting. That Disneyland map (or for gamers, maybe a Grand Theft Auto map) makes you believe in the idea that a certain surface area could include well-refined traditions/thought patterns/foods/images/characters/fantasies/etc. that have been accumulated over time for you to witness and experience and yet only yards away everything is drastically different while operating under the same rule of order that got its neighbor there: the habits of people’s creativity. 

In Disneyland, this is manufactured. In Los Angeles, it is reality, more than any place I can think of. More so than even New York, whose density creates a different sort of perspective. When I think of New York, I do actually think of a melting pot. It’s not that Los Angeles is not a melting pot, but I think of it more of an adventure, more of a themed map. Like any city, its mechanisms are the result of greed and racism and exploitation, but what you actually see is the product of people’s adaptation to that.

Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, whatever streets you are driving down in Southern California (excluding the many that are carved out for the mega-wealthy) have a particular Southern California-ness to them. You can see the palm trees from 500 yards away, but if you traced them down to their base you’d see something ordinary yet regional in a way that is somewhat architectural, somewhat temperature specific, but mostly just vibes. Put it like this: If you placed a Los Angeles native in a strip mall anywhere else in the country, they wouldn’t like that shit. A Walgreens isn’t better in Los Angeles. It’s just more Los Angeles there. You can’t say the same for a Walgreens in Dallas or Chicago. Mostly the same ingredients. Different flavors. 

My grandpa worked at Disneyland, helping to build and fix the rides. Eventually, he was the park’s first Mexican foreman, proudly union. Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s A Small World. The Teacups. He played a major role in those. It was his first “career” type work (you know, benefits, retirement, that sort of thing) he was ever given after already nearly getting three daughters through high school (all of whom would eventually attain master’s degrees). 

That’s all to say that Disneyland can be many things all at once. I went there every summer from age 4 to probably about 15 - getting in for free and occasionally getting to sneak to the front of the line of one of the Mountains (Thunder or Space) before the days of Fast Passes when my Grandpa saw one of the old timers working who still knew him. Those are memories of genuine joy, ones that I don’t know I’ll be able to afford for my own son, and for which I resent the place for putting families in a position to spend money that amounts to near monthly mortgages to let their children experience. 

My grandpa grew up in more than one place, but he’s from Boyle Heights, a part of Los Angeles that if white people associate with anything they probably associate with gangs and violence. Mexicans largely associate it with just a part of Los Angeles where you live among other people, a place on the map with exciting people and boring people, next to other places on the map with other exciting people and boring people.

I know less about my dad’s side of the family, also Southern California denizens. Most information gathering has been told through my dad’s jokes and storytelling. There’s intrigue when you get bits of someone’s past through humor but you don’t really ask follow-ups. For one, they had years to tell you what they wanted to tell you. For another, the humor has probably long been a coping mechanism, and that’s something you show some degree of respect for instead of pretending to represent the generation that invented therapy. But maybe most importantly, my dad is funny, and when he tells a funny story, he’ll make you laugh, and there’s grace in deciding that’s enough. Piece together the info you get over time if you really want to.

My other grandpa, who died long before I was born, sounded like he veered a lot closer to a Post Office-esque character than anyone I’ve ever met from my family. Maybe not as outwardly degenerative, but perhaps in the sense that he wasn’t afraid of flawed short-term schemes that were not remotely conducive to the long-term best interests of the ones who were supposed to be able to rely on him and were instead conducive to picking up and nurturing bad habits. 

My parents were a product of these people, and they were a product of Los Angeles. My dad was a goofball, semi-screwup, hippie surfer, who stumbled off to college in 1968 when it cost like $35 and eventually became a very influential contemporary art curator. My mom became a social worker, looking out for our society’s most vulnerable population: children.

That last paragraph is very cool and sweet, but a little bit beside the point I was previously making. The point I was making is that Los Angeles is a landscape where the worst it has to offer punishes you while keeping so much of its best firmly in your sights. People like my dad’s dad might have been out there being A Character, acting however he acted that would make my dad less interested in talking about him, but he and the rest of the family would still be moving through the city in their own ways. My dad was still surfing. My other grandpa was still packing up his girls and taking them to the beach. The strip malls were still distinctly LA. 

Maybe the reason Bukowski’s characters could so quickly convince themselves they could turn it all around is because they were in LA. They were basically almost there. They just needed someone to get off their back and let them wander around. 

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-Richard Ford’s remembrance of Raymond Carver

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-The breathtakingly dangerous ignorance of Michael Porter Jr.