I ring the doorbell. This house has an item of registered mail that requires signature for delivery.
No one answers.
Typically, I would keep moving. Registered mail is different, though. If I lose a piece of registered mail, I could lose my job. People ship high value items via registered mail. Everyone who touches it has to sign first, like a chain of custody log for the confiscated cocaine in a drug dealer’s trial.
I do not want to carry a piece of registered mail with me back to the station. I want to get rid of it now, so I ring the doorbell again.
Finally, the door opens, and I am startled.
There stands a beautiful, red headed woman, completely naked except for a tiny white towel wrapped around her.
She sees my facial expression and gives me a small, knowing smile.
“Uh… I have some mail that you have to sign for ma’am,” I say.
“Oh, thank you,” she says. “I have to apologize. I was in the bath when you rang.”
She speaks with a foreign accent- European, but I am not sure from what country.
I hold out the paper and pen for her to sign. She takes the pen and leans over, giving me an up close view of almost the entirety of her two breasts. It is an image that is immediately seared into my brain for the rest of my life.
She is watching my reaction. “I apologize for me,” she says.
There is a sexual ease to her, the way she moves and speaks. Her skin looks soft and smooth, and she seems to be quite comfortable with her naked body.
I cannot manage to say anything, and she takes pleasure in that. In another instant, the door has closed and I am left to return to the toil of the day.
Some of the other carriers at the Post Office make jokes about the women they are stopping in to see along their routes. I think that is all they are- jokes. For me, it is simply a fantasy. Even if I was invited by a woman, there is no time for that. I could never finish the mail route. I have to call the office for help on a daily basis as it is.
Many of the small letter envelopes are pre-sorted by machine. In the mornings, I pick up the plastic trays for these letters on my way out to load the truck. Again, it would be helpful to put rubber bands around the letters for each house, so that it is easier to sort when I am out on the street. This is not the way the Post Office wants it done, though. I am instructed not to touch the individual letters in these machine sorted trays until I have started my route.
There is a precise method to delivering the mail on the street that the Post Office wants me to use. Almost all of the routes in Old Town are walking routes. I park the LLV (long life vehicle) at the corner of designated block, or at least as close as I can get to that corner. I open the back of the LLV, and hopefully I have loaded the mail correctly so that the trays and parcels that I need first are right there in order. Parcels and packages go in the satchel that I wear on my shoulder. Next, I look at the trays of mail that I personally sorted this morning. These are primarily flats, or large envelopes and magazines. I balance the flats on the underside of my left forearm, also using my stomach as necessary to keep them from falling. Now, I look into the tray of machine sorted letters and find where the break is for the next block (Often, I make a mistake in this regard and either grab too many or too few of the letters). These are to be held in the left hand. I close the door and lock up the truck.
I begin walking the block. The idea is that as I make deliveries on the block, it will all be in order and will guide me around the block, back to the LLV when I have distributed all the mail in my hand, on my arm, and in my satchel. As I walk toward a house, I should be fingering through the letters in my left hand for those that go to that house. I pull them and place them on my forearm on top of the corresponding flats. Then I finger the flats for that house and fold them over the letters. Hopefully, I have done this by the time I reach the house. I put the mail through the slot and move toward the next address, repeating the sorting process for that house.
Maybe it is just me, but there are a number of things that slow me down, even if I do park in the right spot and grab the right amount of mail, in order.
People in Old Town receive lots of mail. Many houses get stacks of magazines on a daily basis. The mail for a given block is often too much for me to carry in one load. I have to pass out everything I can carry, and then come back to the LLV for two and three loads, when the Post Office has calculated the time needed to carry this block is for one trip. The packages and parcels are very often too many, too large, and too awkwardly shaped to all fit in my satchel.
Old Town Alexandria is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the whole country. I deliver mail to Senator John McCain, Governor Mark Warner, and General Colin Powell. At the same time, I also deliver mail to housing projects, usually very close and within plain window view of the nice homes. One postal worker has told me that a certain housing project here has more diagnosed cases of AIDS per household than anywhere in the United States- though I do not know his source of information.
The disparity in the amount of mail between rich and poor amazes me, too. There are addresses in the projects that never get mail, it seems. Sometimes old men or women are standing or sitting outside waiting for me.
“You got my check today?” they ask.
Sometimes I do have it, sometimes I do not. They are not happy when I do not have it and they think there has to be some mistake.
The Post Office has taken into account this disparity in mail volume, though. Routes that have housing projects on them are considerably longer (more addresses) than those on the affluent streets. I generally prefer carrying mail in the projects if given the choice. I would rather walk longer with less mail in my arms. Also, the people in the projects look at me and talk to me as if they respect my occupation. This is not true in the rich neighborhoods. I am becoming very class conscious in this job. Also, if I tell the truth, many of the women in the projects are just as physically beautiful to me as the women I see getting into Mercedes and living in the fancy townhouses of Alexandria. These women in the projects often give me warm smiles. The other ladies give me smug smiles if they look at me at all.
The mail slots in the townhouses are very old and very small, for the most part. They were not built for sliding large amounts of magazines through them. I fold the magazines over and do the best I can, but often I have to stand at a door for a while, putting magazines through the tiny slots one at a time, tearing the covers against the sharp metal corners. Again, the Post Office has calculated that I should be able to put all mail through the slot in one motion and keep moving…
Dogs. All the stereotypes that you have heard about dogs and mailmen are true. It is a puzzling thing.
A dog is frequently waiting behind the door for me, like they can sense when I am there. The vicious snarling is really something to hear. Sometimes I will just stand at a door, listening to the dog on the other side foam at the mouth, literally ramming parts of its body against the door. When I stick the mail through the slot, I have to be careful not to put any part of a finger through as well. That is what the dog wants. The mail gets torn to shreds as they snatch it from my hands with their teeth through the door slot.
I like dogs, and dogs almost always like me. Something happens when I am wearing the Post Office uniform, though. I become the enemy. They look at me dead in the eyes through windows of a house, snarling and trying to bite through the glass. There is no question that they would attack me if given the chance.
I walk down the street in one neighborhood. A big, black Labrador retriever is being held on a leash by a young woman. Labs have some of the best temperaments of any breed in the world. I have never met one that was not friendly.
Despite the time crunch of the day, I want to greet the dog. It is a stress reliever.
“Is it okay if I pet your dog?” I ask the lady.
“Sure,” she says. “He does not bite. He’s very friendly.”
I reach down and let the dog smell my hand. He stands quietly while I pet him on this throat and chest. I give his ears a squeeze.
After a few moments, I stand back up.
“Thank you,” I say to her, and am about to continue walking. The look in the dog’s eye changes. Suddenly he snarls and lunges straight at my crotch. The woman pulls back on the leash just as his jaws snap an inch from my zipper.
“Whoa! What the hell is wrong with him?” I yell.
The woman is shocked herself, but she says, “There’s nothing wrong with him.”
She looks at me as if I was the one who did something wrong as she holds tight against the leash.
Maybe it is the smell of the mail and how it gets on the uniform. Maybe it is because mailmen are always moving so quickly from door to door and into the dogs’ territory that annoys the animals. At any rate, I learn not to mess with them when I am in a Post Office uniform.
To be continued…
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