How to Be Alone

by Jonathan Franzen

  Many workers keep their postal lives strictly separate from their private lives. Chicago clerks and carriers who live in rough neighborhoods tell me they don’t reveal their occupation to their neighbors, because working for the post office marks you as a person of means, a target for muggers. A high-level administrator tells me he’s learned to say that he works for “the government,” because otherwise people ask him why they didn’t get their mail last Wednesday.

  When postal workers hang out together, they talk about who slept with whom for a promotion, and which handler was found dead of natural causes on a sofa in the employee lounge. They speculate about the reason that Marvin Runyon’s eyes weren’t blinking during a television interview, about whether it was due to medication for his back pain. They revel in dog lore. I’m advised that if I’m ever set upon by a pack of strays I should Mace the one that barks first. I’m told the story of a suburban carrier who was forced to take refuge from an enraged German shepherd in a storage mailbox that he’d been throwing his banana peels and milk cartons into all summer.

  On a hot June morning, I stand in the comfortably shabby work area of the Cragin station, on Chicago’s West Side, while a carrier named Larry Johnson finishes tossing mail into his “case”—a console of pigeonholes with a slot for every pair of addresses on his route. Sorting a day’s mail takes a carrier anywhere from an hour and a half to four hours; the workday starts as early as 5:30. “It doesn’t take a hell of a lot of brains to do this job,” Johnson tells me, “other than the fact that you’ve got to know how to read.” He adds, with a laugh, that in the post office you can’t always take literacy for granted. Johnson is a burly man whose blue postal slacks ride low on his hips; he’s thirty-five, but his physical weariness makes him seem older. He gives me a canister of Mace (his own canister sees action two or three times a week), and I follow him outside to his car, a scarred burgundy Lincoln sedan, whose trunk he has to prop open with a tire iron while he fills it with bundles of mail and one shoebox-size parcel. In Chicago, not all carriers are provided with mail trucks.

  Johnson spends more of his workday in the station than on the street, but the street is where he finds whatever meaning his job has to offer. As he loads his mailbag for the first leg of the route, he tells me that he doesn’t socialize with his coworkers. “They talk too much,” he says. “They tell each other their business.” Like the majority of mailmen, Johnson moonlights; he’s the minister of a Protestant church. Johnson’s congregation doesn’t know he carries mail, and his fellow carriers don’t know he preaches. On the street, however, the old women waiting at their gates to exchange “good morning”s with him know exactly who he is. They give him letters to mail, money to buy them stamps, and news of the neighborhood. He points out to me a house whose owner died the previous Saturday.

  It’s a light mail day in a working-class neighborhood. Johnson has little but hospital bills and Walgreens flyers to feed the slots and boxes. His job is simply legwork and concentration. If he lets his mind wander—lets himself wonder whether the family at the end of the block remembered to lock up their crazy dog this morning—he forgets to deliver magazines or catalogues, which are pigeonholed separately, and he has to backtrack. His shirt darkens with sweat as we walk through the long morning shadows, through the vacancy of a residential neighborhood emptied by the morning rush hour. Children who stay home sick and writers who stay home working know this emptiness. It brings a sense of estrangement from the world, and for me that sense has always been sharpened and confirmed by the sound of a mailman’s footsteps approaching and receding. To be a mailman is to inhabit this emptiness for hours, to disturb five hundred abandoned lawns, one after another. I ask Johnson to tell me the most interesting thing that has happened to him in his nine years of carrying mail. After a moment’s thought, he says that nothing interesting has ever happened to him.

  Perhaps the most important fact about postal work is that it’s seen by those who do it as lucrative and secure; a letter carrier with six years’ tenure makes better than thirty thousand dollars and can be fired only if he really messes up. Another important fact is that the work can be scary and unpleasant. The post office functions both as a springboard out of housing-project poverty and as a sanctuary for the downwardly mobile, for loners like Bartleby the Scrivener. (Melville ascribed Bartleby’s emotional damage to employment at the Dead Letter Office.) Managers worry about disgruntled clerks and carriers, since many postal workers are veterans with weapons skills, and almost everybody worries about punitive assignments—to the midnight shift, to a high-crime route, to North Dakota. The organization relies heavily on top-down military-style discipline to enforce productivity, and the flip side of this discipline is deception and resentment. There are carriers who will stop at a gas station to watch a baseball game if they can get away with it. Dope is smoked and whiskey drunk on loading docks. Further up in the bureaucracy, the drugs are legal: managers tell me about their prescriptions for Valium, Klonopin, Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil. I spend an evening drinking double margaritas with three administrators who are profoundly frustrated by incompetent colleagues. They tell me that once you enter the world of postal salaries and benefits it’s hard to leave, even if you hate it.

  “Most people say we’re overpaid and do nothing,” one of them says.

  “We couldn’t get a job in Chicago,” the second, a woman in her late forties, says. “We being with the Chicago post office? And looking for a job? I guess I could be a waitress somewhere. But they’d watch me very carefully.”

  “It’s like testing positive for HIV,” the third tells me.

  GAYLE CAMPBELL, THE PERSON who played the central role in the fall of the Chicago post office, is a captive of both the postal world and her own perfectionism. She is a lanky, handsome woman with large eyes, a communicative brow, and thick auburn hair that she wears pinned up or in a pageboy. She has an obvious intelligence, an intensity of gesture and feeling, that can inspire devotion. The customers she has helped all characterize her as a ministering angel. Robert Pope, an interior designer, tells me, “I have not spoken to one straight shooter in the post office, except Gayle Campbell. She’s a rare individual, a shining light.” Other admirers of Campbell, while no less enthusiastic, admit to being unsettled by the extremity of her dedication to the Postal Service. She has turned a processing plant upside down looking for some misdirected airline tickets. She has taken packages home to her apartment, in the Uptown district, and has got out of bed to deliver them to a customer in her lobby. She routinely spends seventy hours a week on the job, while getting paid for forty. There’s little boundary between her work and her identity. She calls herself a “mail freak.” Her husband is a letter carrier.

  Although Campbell’s history is exceptional in its details, it fits the model of the career postal worker who, as an outsider in the larger world, finds a mission in service and a home in regimental authority. Campbell was born in Canada in 1950 and grew up in Edmonton and Moose Jaw. Culturally, she still considers herself Canadian, and she describes her ancestry as African, Irish, and Native American. In 1962, her family moved to Harvey, a small town south of Chicago, and Campbell, an excellent student, finished high school there before her sixteenth birthday. She immediately enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam for two years. When she was home on leave, she took the civil-service exam and scored 99.6 out of a possible 100. Immediately upon her discharge from the Army, she reported to the postmaster in Harvey. “I was a child bride of the Postal Service,” she says. “It’s all I know.”

  Campbell worked as a letter carrier for fifteen years. In 1987 she was promoted into mail processing and began to rise rapidly. By 1991 she was a general supervisor of automation and mechanization in Chicago, with two hundred employees and thirteen supervisors working beneath her. Over the next year and a half she was shifted throughout the processing system as a troubleshooter, trainer, and auditor. In the fall of 1992, however, a reorganization of the postal bureaucracy eliminate
d several intermediate civil-service grades in mail processing; this appeared to preclude her further advancement. She decided to seek a slight demotion and move into delivery; her plan was to get training there, sit in an intermediate-level job for a year, and then try to jump back into processing at a high level. In January 1993 she became a delivery supervisor at the Hyde Park station, on Chicago’s South Side.

  That same winter, corporate customers of the Postal Service, including a consortium of regional banks known as the Chicago Clearing House, were lodging bitter complaints about their service. For fear of scaring customers away, the group never publicized the complaints, but they were in a state of acute distress about, among other things, the lockboxes, located in the Central Post Office, in which they received large checks from institutional and corporate investors. The Postal Service was officially committed to delivering ninety percent of lockbox mail in standard time. (For mail sent and delivered within the Chicago area, the standard is one day, i.e., overnight. For mail sent from Seattle, the standard for Chicago delivery is three days.) By the winter of 1993, the percentage of on-time delivery to the lockboxes was in the low sixties.

  Facing heat on many fronts, Ormer Rogers, the Postal Service’s Great Lakes Area manager, set up an eight-member Service Improvement Team to identify breakdowns in the processing and distribution system and work aggressively to repair them. Some of Rogers’s appointments were political; others reflected professional accomplishment. The latter group included Gayle Campbell, who became the de facto leader of the team.

  There was no end to the trouble she uncovered. She found carriers walking their routes with makeshift plastic tubs strapped to their carts because no one had requisitioned satchels for them. She found carriers putting undelivered mail in corner mailboxes to be collected and reprocessed. She overheard a station supervisor shouting at a customer whose post-office-box lock had been broken, “Get the fuck out of here!” She found carriers who sat in their trucks on cold days from noon to 7:30 p.m. and then returned to the station, with all their mail, to collect four hours of overtime. She went to the airmail facility at O’Hare Airport and found that jets were being allowed to depart without their contractually specified complement of mail. She went to the NBC Tower, downtown, and found that mail was delivered in sacks that were left out where anyone could open them. She dropped test letters randomly in corner mailboxes throughout the city and kept track of when they were picked up and canceled. Some of the letters ended up at a dead-letter office in Minneapolis.

  Such findings, and the reports they generated, hardly endeared the Service Improvement Team to Chicago station managers. In October of 1993, Postmaster Jimmie Mason met with the team and urged it to tone down its reports. Instead of putting its criticisms in writing, he said, the team should endeavor to cooperate with the station managers; as outsiders, the team members didn’t understand the pressures that a station manager had to contend with.

  To Campbell, this sounded like a plea for business as usual. Her life was so bound up in the post office that she considered it an extension of herself. A “dirty” post office offended her like a dirty bathroom. Instead of toning down her reports, she made them even harsher. On November 15 and 16, during a follow-up visit to the Graceland Annex, a north-lakefront station, she listed the number of linear feet of mail that were “curtailed,” or left behind, when carriers set out on their routes. Case No. 5706 had seventy-seven feet of curtailment. Other troubled cases had eighty-five, a hundred, and ninety-three feet. Under Case No. 5709 the team discovered two large sacks of collected but unprocessed mail with week-old postage meter dates. On November 17, at the Lakeview station, Campbell found mail that had been held for vacations in July still awaiting delivery. At Case No. 1342 she found Priority Mail dating from October and an Internal Revenue Service communication from September. At Case No. 1346 she turned up General Mills cereal samples from June.

  Throughout 1993, Campbell had assured irate customers that Jimmie Mason was serious about cleaning up Chicago. Tenaciously optimistic, she still believed she would get a promotion for her long workdays and for the improvements her team had produced. But either she was wrong about Mason from the start or Chicago had changed him. In late November, according to Campbell, he promised a gathering of the city’s station managers that the Service Improvement Team would be gone by year’s end, and that they need not worry about further harassment.

  That same week, however, a man named Jerry Stevens went to the Graceland station to inquire about his business mail, which had failed to materialize for four straight days. Venturing briefly into a work area, he saw a mountain of curtailment. Ninety minutes after phoning a postal-complaint line, he got a call from Graceland’s station manager, who apologized for his poor service and then threatened him with arrest if he ever entered the work area again. Stevens immediately called the Chicago Sun-Times, and their reporter Charles Nicodemus made the anecdote the nucleus of a blistering account of North Side postal complaints.

  When the story appeared, on December 13, Rogers, the Great Lakes Area manager, ordered his staff to audit the north-lakefront stations, and requested that the Postal Inspection Service carry out a parallel study. The Inspection Service is a watchdog on a long leash: it investigates everything from employee pilferage and drug use to S&L fraud and Internet pornography. Having worked with the inspectors and found them trustworthy, Campbell had quietly begun to send them copies of her reports. Before Jimmie Mason could put the Service Improvement Team out of business, the chief postal inspector asked it to assist him in the audit.

  When the new reports were completed, in early February of 1994, Mason met with each team member to discuss what he called their “upward mobility.” Campbell told him she thought she would make a good station manager at Uptown, since it served her own neighborhood. Mason said she didn’t have the proper background. He offered to make her a supervisor under the then Uptown manager, Thomas Nichols—who had been a frequent target of her criticisms. She said no thank you. A week later, Mason reassigned her to Hyde Park as a delivery supervisor.

  THE CHICAGO POST OFFICE first became an emblem of an institution in crisis when, in October of 1966, it suffered a nasty seizure. A backlog of ten million pieces of mail overwhelmed the huge, obsolescent Central Post Office. Railroad cars and mail trucks were gridlocked on the building’s approaches. For nearly three weeks, delivery was paralyzed in the city and millions of letters and parcels headed elsewhere were delayed.

  Two years later, the President’s Commission on Postal Organization, known as the Kappel Commission, placed the blame for the shutdown on outmoded, poorly maintained facilities and on a variety of management problems, including a vacancy in the office of city postmaster over the previous six months, the “retirement of an unusually large number of experienced supervisors at the end of 1965,” low employee morale, “a sick leave ratio double the national average,” and “the lowest postal productivity record in the nation.” Plus ça change: the list is practically a point-by-point diagnosis of the Chicago postal crisis of 1994.

  The Central Post Office at 433 West Van Buren Street, now sixty-one years old, is still the largest freestanding postal facility in the country, and is a monument to all the ways in which vital information is no longer transmitted. The green waters of the Chicago River lap against its underpinnings. Its subbasements give onto the platforms of Union Station, to which trains have all but ceased to carry mail, and the eight-lane Eisenhower Expressway punches straight through its flanks. In the quiet, cavernous lobby, brass bas-relief medallions depict five transport options that the post office had availed itself of by 1933: sailing ship, steamship, airplane, stagecoach, and railroad. A freestanding Philatelic Center sells hummingbirds and self-adhesive squirrels and, in every shape and color, love, LOVE, Love—the cheery abstraction that American postage commemorates like royalty.

  The functions of the Central Post Office will soon be divided between a new plant being built across the street, at a cost
of a quarter billion dollars, and a smaller plant in the northwest corner of the city, which is beginning to come on line. For now, the old plant still processes most of the Second City’s mail. At six in the evening, workers of both sexes toil in the eternal diesely gloom of subterranean loading docks, taking plastic tubs of mail from collection trucks and sending them upstairs to the “waterfall”—a system of belts and chutes up which incoming letters must struggle like spawning salmon. A carpeted roller shunts everything unfit for automated processing (bent things, thick things, ragged things) into a hamper for special treatment. Automation and mechanization have vastly speeded mail processing since 1966, but over the same period the overall volume of mail has more than doubled. Four-foot shrink-wrapped blocks of TV Guide, brute cubes of commercial matter, sit idly on pallets. Supervisors wear buttons that say, “I am part of the solution.” There’s a backwater dustiness to the place. Sooty windows spread evening sunshine onto battered parquet floors and government-issue gray furniture. Clerks moving neither swiftly nor slowly carry trays from egress points to ingress points. The plant, in its antiquity, is appallingly vertical. The upper-floor loading ramps were designed to accommodate dray horses.

  My official guide through the Chicago postal system is a sunny, petite, softspoken communications specialist named Debra Hawkins. Everywhere we go inside the Central Post Office, she meets former coworkers plangent with delight at seeing her, and Hawkins is eloquent on the theme of “the postal family.” She speaks of postal bowling teams, postal golf teams, postal basketball teams. “The atmosphere is very close-knit,” she says. “We have individuals here with fifty-plus years of service. This is their real family. They live to come to work at the post office.”