Post Office: A Novel

I got into the door, said goodbye, turned on the radio, found a half-pint of scotch, drank that, laughing, feeling good, finally relaxed, free, burning my fingers with short cigar butts, then made it to the bed, made it to the edge, tripped, fell down, fell down across the mattress, slept, slept, slept …
• • •
In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.

11 years! I didn’t have a dime more in my pocket than when I had first walked in. 11 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. At least with The Stone I had never known what to expect. Here there weren’t any surprises. II years shot through the head. I had seen the job eat men up. They seemed to melt. There was Jimmy Potts of Dorsey Station. When I first came in, Jimmy had been a well-built guy in a white T shirt. Now he was gone. He put his seat as close to the floor as possible and braced himself from falling over with his feet. He was too tired to get a haircut and had worn the same pair of pants for 3 years. He changed shirts twice a week and he walked very slow. They had murdered him. He was 55. He had 7 years to go until retirement.

Thanks, Hector.”

Hector? What the hell kind of name was that

It was one of the best. I heard the water, I heard the tide going in and out. It was as if I were coming with the whole ocean. It seemed to last and last. Then I rolled off.

“I still say, go to a small room and write.”

“BUT I NEED ASSURANCE.”

“It’s a good thing a few others didn’t think that way. It’s a good thing Van Gogh didn’t think that way.”

“VAN GOGH’S BROTHER GAVE HIM FREE PAINTS!” the kid said to me

She had two children who never came to see her, never wrote her. She was a scrubwoman in a cheap hotel. When I had first met her her clothes had been expensive, trim ankles fitting into expensive shoes. She had been firm-fleshed, almost beautiful. Wild-eyed. Laughing. Coming from a rich husband, divorced from him, and he was to die in a car wreck, drunk, burning to death in Connecticut. “You’ll never tame her,” they told me

Baby, that’s grammar school. Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working. Out here we call it ‘hustling.’ I’d like to be a good hustler.”

This kind of life is like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us."

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.

And you felt like screaming, "Lady, how the hell do I know who you are or I am or anybody is?"