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From the novel Westlake Village by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
CHAPTER TWENTY
Going First Class
Whatever the qualifications may be for the position of Postmaster, I'm sure they are higher today that they used to be. The present Postmaster of Westlake Village drives a BMW and can only be seen by appointment. We have twelve mail carriers and six mail trucks. An eighteen wheeler, jammed with junk mail, backs into the truck dock of the Post Office every morning at seven. Emblazoned on the side of our town water tower we display our very own zip code number. We are, in short, a first class neighborhood with a first class post office.
This does not mean that our mail service has improved since the old days. On the contrary! The only noticeable improvement is that our mail is delivered to our door. When the first Westlake Villagers straggled into town at the close of the war, mail gathered dust in the post office until somebody walked down and got it. The post office was little more than a steel barred window at the back of Ernie's Hardware store and was presided over by our Postmistress, Helen Grogan.
Helen was Postmistress
through the war years. She and her husband, Andy, handled the entire postal
burden in that critical cross-over period between the hayseed years of Toad
Hollow and its slow but steady transformation into a structured community of
strangers. Every morning at dawn a brown van would
dump a canvas sack of mail at the front door of Ernie's Hardware store and pick
up a smaller one that was waiting. Helen and Andy took their sweet time sorting
the mail and stuffing it in the worn wooden slots set in the wall behind the
barred window. To the accompaniment of grunts and body language only they could
understand, the sorting process would grind on until noon. In their closeness,
Helen and Andy had developed a communication of their own; a series of growls,
mumbles and nudges were all Helen needed to tell Andy what to do with the mail.
It was not critical for us to get mail every day. Once a week was enough, and when a Westlake Villager went to get his mail he was coerced into picking up the mail for his neighbors. Helen would insist on it, and it was not unusual to come home with an armload of mail for your neighbors and none for yourself. Helen would shout at you from behind her barred window while you were looking for washers in Ernie's plumbing supplies. With her head cocked to the side, she would call . . . "Hey you! -- Appledore Drive, pick it up! You got mail here!"
"Appledore Drive" and 'you' were one and the same to her. She would strong arm you into accepting mail for 28 through 47, even though you lived at 36, and you'd spend the better part of a Saturday afternoon delivering letters and postcards to your neighbors when you should have been working on the leaky sink. If you had the nerve to ignore her, she would shout at you and fling your mail and that of your neighbors at your feet. Fortunately, fourth class mail in the early fifties had not yet overwhelmed us.
It was obvious
to postal patrons that Helen was in charge. After all, Andy was not the Postmaster,
Helen was the "Postmistress," and therefore called the shots in the
confined space of the Post Office back of Ernie's store. Everyone got the impression
that Helen ruled the roost in their modest apartment across the street as well.
She was a barrel chested woman while Andy was not much bigger than a ventriloquist's
dummy. She wore flowered house dresses over which she strapped an apron such
as bakers wear. She wore her hair in a net and her feet were as flat as they
had to be to support a body of such bulk. She wore lavender woolen carpet slippers
and gray cotton stockings. The gray stockings and her flat shuffling feet encased
in carpet
slippers brought to mind a caged elephant. The store would tremble gently on
its foundations as she plodded from the barred window to the worn wooden slots
where she retrieved the mail from the lower shelves -- she left the top three
rows of slots to Andy who would scramble to reach them from the top of a shaky
step-stool.
Helen and Andy lived together, worked together and presumably slept together as well. They were never out of sight of each other. It is said that two people so inseparable begin to look like each other and maybe even think as the other does. But as the years passed they looked less and less like each other and more and more like themselves.
No one knew them as well as Ernie. Helen and Andy were on the job before Ernie opened the hardware store in the morning, and they stayed back there for lunch. They would sit behind the iron bars, in the middle of their unsorted mail and grunt to each other as they ate something left over from the night before. Ernie couldn't help thinking how zoo-like it was. The Post Office rented the space from Ernie, and it was good for his business too; people would walk in for their mail and buy something on impulse from him as well.
As the town matured,
and grew from rural to suburban, Helen and Andy tried to
keep up, but it was clear they would have to expand. The Post Office decided
to build a First Class Post Office building with a First Class Postperson. It
would have been hard to imagine Helen Grogan being in charge. It meant Post
Office boxes, packaging sales and overseas mail. It meant Post Office vehicles
and delivery men. It meant issuing passports and money orders .... and it certainly
meant NOT eating your lunch with the first class mail as your tablecloth.
It was good news
for most of us in Westlake Village. Ernie, in his hardware store, rationalized
the decision by saying he could use the extra space as a "Home Decorating
Center" .... after all, the town was growing up and gentrification was
creeping up on us.
"Lose money offa the rent?" Well, maybe; but a brand new Pizzeria
was moving in next door, hardware and Italian food go well together.
In short then, the only rumblings of dissent came from Helen Grogan, and as the new Post Office took shape on Westwood Avenue, she became increasingly bellicose. I avoided picking up my mail, hoping that someone else might do it for me. Perhaps my wife might be curious enough to go down there to see if there was news from her father back home. Helen, in her Darth Vader voice would bellow, "Hey you!!" .... pick it up!" and fling your mail through the barred window, then glare at you while you stooped to pick it up.
It couldn't have
been pleasant for Andy, either. Ernie often told me later that he could hear
yelps of pain from Andy back there in the corner.
"I dunno, I guess he got in her way, or sumpin' .... but two, three times
a day, she'd give it to him good. Y'dint dast stand up to her -- she'd bust
yer hump."
Her behavior should have warned us but it didn't. Andy was one of the first
postal workers to find himself a victim of P.O.V. (Post Office Violence). He
was within reach whenever the madness overtook Helen .... and she'd give him
a good one. I suppose he figured that once it was out of her system she'd leave
him alone for a while, and maybe when this was all over they could open that
little dry goods store he always wanted. For a while he was right, she'd take
a swipe at him with the mail bag, or kick him off the step stool when he was
working on the top slots. Andy would pick himself up and scuttle out of her
way for a few minutes until it blew over.
Then it happened!
It was a week
before the opening of the new "First Class" Post Office on Westwood
Avenue, and already they were phasing out the old one. About 4:30 pm Helen decided
to close the "Second Class" Post Office in the hardware store early
in the day.
"Night, Ernie," said Andy.
"Yeah, humph," said Helen.
They stood in front of the store and it looked to Ernie as though Andy wanted
to go one way and Helen wanted to go another way. Suddenly, Helen reached down
and grabbed Andy by the throat, picked him up off his feet and began shaking
him as a dog might shake his master's slipper. Ernie was reluctant to step outside
and interfere, so he looked the other way for a moment or two. When he looked
outside again, Helen was still shaking Andy, and as Ernie later told the police
.... "Poor little bastard, looked kinda limp to me, so I sez to myself
I better step out there and stop it."
"Well," he went on, "I goes out there and I sez, 'Now Helen,
take it easy -- put 'im down before you hurts 'im. She don't put him down, see
.... she takes 'im in one hand, like you woulda bagga flour in the store, y'know
.... then she throws him at me!"
Ernie wasn't expecting that, but he did catch him and reeled backwards into
the store. There didn't appear to be much life left in Andy so Ernie laid him
on the counter. Helen followed him back inside the store and stood at the counter
and said:
"Sumbitch assole, drygutsore! .... Bullshit!!". At least that's what
it sounded like to Ernie. Ernie was a hardware man and had no knowledge of such
things as dry goods.
Almost unobserved
by both of them, Andy stirred a bit and seemed to be on the
verge of coming out of it. His eyes were still bugged out to the extent that
Ernie honestly felt they would pop out of his head. His nose and mouth were
bleeding, too, from the cuffing and all. Ernie tried standing him up in front
of the counter but he went spindly all over and collapsed like an unstrung marionette.
That's when he called 911.
Andy went to the hospital of course, and Helen was charged with assault. Ernie
tried to keep out of it, but like many innocent bystanders, he was the only
reliable witness.
Old timers here in Westlake Village often recall that event. It's hard to believe it was more than 35 years ago. Now our new First Class Post Office is beginning to show its age. There have been bizarre events there as well. Two of the clerks have pulled revolvers on each other. One actually shot out an overhead fluorescent light above the counter. One of the delivery men ran off with a sorter in a mail delivery vehicle and was later found in a motel in New Dorp, Pennsylvania. There seems to be something that triggers madness in postal workers and drives them to do things other people wouldn't think of doing.
Back there, behind the bars of the Post Office cage, Helen was a simmering volcano and Andy's innocent dreams of a dry goods store must have brought her simmering to a boil. "It could'a been me," Ernie remarked later, "could'a been anybody -- just happened she got her hands on Andy first."
©Harry Buschman 1998
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