How to Be Alone (16 page)

The Postal Service, for its part, is not harmed by the flight to Wilmette. What does pose a threat is virtual flight, the flight to alternative information-delivery systems. Business-to-business correspondence, which the Postal Service estimates has diminished by a third in the last five years, is where the impact of faxes and e-mail is most visible. So far, this loss has been offset by a robust flow of first-and third-class advertising mail. And boosters of the Postal Service, like William Henderson, sound confident that its usefulness will survive the development of the national information superstructure that Vice-President Gore so warmly heralds. “Mail is the most interactive product in the United States today,” Henderson says. “You can put a letter in your pocket, read it anywhere. It’s the ultimate in interactivity.”

The problem is that the Postal Service need not lose much business to run into serious trouble. In his first appearance before Congress, in 1992, Marvin Runyon described how rising postal rates had already driven third-class advertisers to alternative forms of delivery, like television, or flyers hung from doorknobs. “As we increase our rates,” Runyon said, “the Postal Service will be privatized by outside sources. Not by us but by outside sources.”

Because of its commitment to universal service, the Postal Service has large fixed infrastructure costs. It can’t shrink and grow like most ordinary companies. For this reason, the Internet won’t have to render it obsolete in order to throw it into crisis. The information superhighway need merely exist as an increasingly attractive alternative. If enough mailers, private and corporate, begin to use it, an economic thunderstorm of upward-spiraling rates and downward-spiraling service and mail volume will ensue. When this happens, Congress will have two choices: either subsidize or privatize. Returning to federal subsidy of postal rates would require an honest admission that universal flat-rate service is an expensive ideal; it would cost taxpayers money. The possibility exists, therefore, that the Postal Service will be privatized, with lucrative markets like Wilmette and the Chicago Loop being sold off to the highest bidder, and the post office remaining as an underfunded rump, a carrier of last resort, serving the rural and urban poor.

AT 2:30 ON A HUMID
summer afternoon, I drive west from the Loop on a superhighway. While staying in the city I haven’t spent more than twenty-five minutes traveling to an appointment, on the El or on foot. On the national transportation infrastructure, by maneuvering aggressively, I reach the city limits in just under an hour. Traffic in the suburbs is no better. Cars stretch bumper to bumper into the western distance on roads that are being widened, or widened further, even as we drive on them. Only at my destination, a new mail-processing plant in Carol Stream, have the industrial parks and condos paused in their advance across the cornfields.

The Postal Service’s hopes of survival are pinned on growth. To avoid an upward rate spiral, losses in the volume of personal communication must be offset by gains in business-to-household mailings. Already, in the United States one in five advertising dollars is spent on direct mailing, and William Henderson believes that the figure will increase as companies realize the potential of sending out advertisements in envelopes that contain bills or that masquerade as bills. He’s particularly excited about the recent proliferation of credit cards.

To keep pace with rising volumes, the Postal Service of the future will also have to be further automated, and at Carol Stream full automation is close to being a reality. The plant is a technological showcase, with conveyor belts and hoppers and pathways all painted in gum-ball colors, and a control room on whose friendly CRT screens you need only touch an interesting or troubled node with your finger and it interacts with you. There are machines that shuffle and reshuffle envelopes into the order in which a carrier delivers them. There’s a machine that sprays a phosphorescent bar code on the back of each hand-addressed letter and transmits a video image of the address to Knoxville, Tennessee, where workers read and key in the zip code, which is then beamed back to Carol Stream and applied to the front of the envelope in the form of a black bar code. There’s a din from facer-cancelers, from optical character readers, from letter-sorting machines, from passing motorized mule trains, from hook belts and flat-sorters and delivery bar-code sorters; but it’s a level din, a supportive din. The only product of this plant is order. The fluid to which order is brought is predominantly white. It conforms agreeably to friction belts and robotic claspers. It floats, it whispers. It’s called the mail stream, and, unlike the mail at Chicago’s Central Post Office, it has no discernible personality. I’m absurdly pleased when I discover, in a small-parcel sack labeled “Nixie,” a solitary padded mailer, somewhat torn, that is addressed to a pouch number in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and bears a return address of Uncertain, Texas.

Leaving Carol Stream, I drive past soybean fields and a plant that bottles Zima. At the end of a strip mall thirty-seven hundred feet long and one store thick, I happen on K’s Mail Center, a bright, clean outfit that offers not only mailboxes and United States stamps but also a notary service, plain-paper faxing, desktop publishing, key duplication, wrapping paper, and humorous greeting cards. The proprietor, a personable Nigerian immigrant named Chris Kator, keeps long business hours and provides every imaginable shipping service. Kator tells me he acquired his franchise because of the synergy among the services he offers, the opportunities for growth. He says he has no complaints with the Postal Service, although few of his customers choose it for sending packages.

In the air-conditioned cool of Kator’s store, amid unhumming beige equipment in its Powr-Savr mode, the march toward privatization—toward a fragmented republic of terrific bargains and unconscionable gougings—seems to me irresistible. So does the idea that the place to which Americans should go to participate directly in the system that governs them is not a small-town post office with Old Glory in its lobby but an exurban retail outlet with Day-Glo banners (
WE SELL BEEPERS
) in its plate-glass window.

Back in the city, however, after another unpleasant superhighway experience, I succumb to nostalgia. I think of the delight with which Mary Ann Smith describes the Christmas card, “with a gold-foil envelope and a gold-stamped return address,” that a former alderman sent her from prison. I think of my own delight when I discover that before Debra Hawkins became a communications specialist she was a clerk in the Central Post Office who sorted mail for the neighborhood of Pilsen, and so may have personally handled the letters I sent to my brother in his apartment there. I think of the Evanston carrier, Erich Walch, who says that the customers on his new route all hated their ex-mailman and therefore hated him. “It took over a year for some of these people to look at me as a human being, to not grunt when I said good morning to them, but I’ve changed their perceptions,” he says. I think of the old Polish-American women who stand on their porches and break into smiles as they take envelopes from the hand of the African-American carrier who is also, in his other life, a minister. I think of the mail piling up for me at home in Philadelphia, and I feel a keen anticipation.

What makes the sight of a person in postal uniform a welcome one is not simply the possibility that he is bringing us a billet-doux or a sweepstakes check. It’s the hope and faith that the Postal Service
serves
us. Ever since it came by stage rider to remote Appalachian settlements, the U.S. Mail has offered to a lonely people a universal laying on of human hands. It’s as sacred as anything gets in this country. The burning of mail in a viaduct deals the same blow to our innocence as the pederasty of priests; and as soon as a sacrament is administered virtually, in the manner of televised evangelism, it reduces worshippers to consumers. Of all the Chicagoans I’ve spoken with, not even the most despairing has suggested that the Postal Service be dismantled.

On August 1, Rufus Porter granted Gayle Campbell’s long-standing request to be transferred from the Hyde Park station. She is now coordinator of the External First-Class Measurement Team. When Campbell told her doctor what her new job entailed—monitoring the pick-up and delivery of first-class mail without being able to affect what she monitors—he said, “They’re trying to kill you.” She recently paid $278 of her own money to a Kelly girl who entered measurement data for a day, and when even this didn’t satisfy her she got up at two in the morning to enter data herself in a notebook computer. “If I don’t do it,” she says, “who will?”

Campbell and I differ on what’s killing her. As the actual victim, she looks for agents. She sees an evil alliance of deceptive managers and arrogant unions who are trashing her ideal of customer service. I, on the other hand, am afflicted with a double vision of the personal and the structural. I see a woman whose work is her life. I also see an economic system killing the city that Campbell lives in—the very city that invented the modern commodities market. Chicago’s post office is a relic of an older system of responsibilities, from which its own management in Washington is scrambling to distance itself. To survive in the corporatized world, the Postal Service now aspires to be just another medium—to be the same efficient collector of consumer dollars and transmitter of products that the Internet, for all its champions’ pious talk of “nonlinearity” and “pluralism,” is going to be. Technological capitalism is an infernal machine. It always has its way with us. If it doesn’t dismantle the Postal Service from without, it will steal its soul from within. The attachment of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia. It’s the double vision of a people whose hearts don’t like what their desires have created.

When I finally get back home to Philadelphia, two inches of mail are waiting for me. William Henderson will be pleased to know that I’ve received four separate credit-card solicitations, each forwarded promptly and at no extra cost from one of my previous addresses. There are also bulk mailings from representatives whom I personally did not elect, bills for the credit cards I already have, four issues of the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
, whose yellow forwarding stickers urge me to Notify Sender of New Address, a large envelope with Ed McMahon’s face on it, three meaty Val-Paks which I’m certain hold interesting offers of discount carpet shampooing and bonus pizzas at Little Caesars, and a solitary first-class letter from a friend of mine in England. Although he must have sent it weeks ago, I tear it open urgently. He asks me why I haven’t written.

[1994]

For three years, when I was in high school, I was the packing boy for a German émigré couple, Erika and Armin Geyer, who operated a small business, Erika Imports, in the basement of their gloomy house in suburban St. Louis. Several afternoons a week I left behind a pleasant-smelling world of liberty and sanity and climbed the stairs to the Geyers’ dark front porch and peered into a living room where Erika and Armin and their overfed schnauzer were typically sprawled, snoring, on old wooden-ankled German chairs and sofas. The air inside was heavy with schnitzel grease and combusted cigarette. On the dining-room table were ruins of
Mittagessen
: plates flecked with butter and parsley, a partially trashed whipped-cream cake, an empty Moselle bottle. Erika, in a quilted housecoat that gaped to reveal an Old World bra or girdle, continued to snore while Armin roused himself and led me to my work station in the basement.

Erika Imports had exclusive contracts with workshops in Communist East Germany that produced handmade giftwares—enameled Easter Bunny and Santa figurines, cunningly painted wooden eggs, deluxe carved crèche sets, hardwood tangram puzzles, candle-propelled Christmas carousels in sizes up to three feet tall—that gift shops throughout the central tier of states were forever mad to buy. Erika could therefore be high-handed with her customers. She sent out broken merchandise or merchandise reglued, by Armin, with insulting carelessness. She wrote her invoices in a German cursive illegible to Americans. She slashed the orders of customers who’d fallen out of favor; she said, “They want twenty—ach! I send them three.”

My job in the basement consisted of assembling cardboard cartons, filling them with smaller boxes and excelsior, checking the invoices to be sure the orders were complete, and sealing the cartons with paper tape that I wetted with a sea sponge. Since I was paid better than the minimum wage, and since I enjoyed topological packing puzzles, and since the Geyers liked me and praised my German-language skills and gave me lots of cake, it was remarkable how fiercely I hated the job—how I envied even those friends of mine who manned the deep-fry station at Long John Silver’s or cleaned the oil traps at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I hated, in part, the arbitrary infringements of autonomy: the Saturday afternoons torpedoed by Erika’s sudden barking, on the telephone, “Ja, komm immediately!” I hated the extravagant molds that grew on the sea sponge in its pan of scummy water. There was also the schnauzer and everything relating to the schnauzer. There was Armin’s disinclination to perform any manual task without first licking his fingers; there was his stertorous breathing while he pecked out UPS slips on a manual Olivetti. There was Erika’s powerful body odor and the powerful perfumes with which she failed to mask it. And there was the kitschy, high-volume side of her business, the seasonal flood of Styrofoam bells and sentimental snowmen and cheap plastic toys that caused me to imagine all too vividly the aesthetic wasteland of heartland hospital gift shops.

The main reason I envied my friends in the fast-food kitchens, though, was that their work seemed to me so wonderfully
impersonal
. They never had to see their supervisor’s blue-veined stomach falling out of her housecoat, a toppled glass of cheap champagne soaking into the rug by her feet. Hamburger fragments and parsleyed potatoes weren’t decaying in a dog’s bowl at their job sites. Most important, their mothers did not feel sorry for their bosses.