Tape 14, Side A
[Begin Tape 14, Side A]
Okay, we’re in London, 1967, fall; it’s all happening. I didn’t go to any museums or anything, but I went to a couple of... I rode around in the tube a lot: that was fun. Went to some movies out in the suburbs; just tried to see if I could get from point A to point B, that was, in itself that was a delight, see if I could master the mechanics of getting around. Went to see a great, great play: The Man in the Glass Booth, with Donald Pleasence. Ah… They made a movie of that later with Maximilian Schell, and it was written by Robert Shaw, the guy who was in Jaws.
The actor?
Yeah. And it’s about this, you know, this was around… Eichmann was in the news, you know, he’d been shanghaied and caught wherever he was caught and shanghaied back to Israel to stand trial there, and this was that sort of thing: it was this great capitalist industrialist who was uncovered as a concentration camp guard in Germany; he was kidnapped, put on trial in Israel in the glass booth. And you know it was Donald Pleasence at his height, he was just screaming and fulminating: now that he was caught he was proud to have been… you know, he extolled Hitler and the ideals of the Third Reich and he was proud to have taken part and he looked with disdain on the parade of witnesses who would come and say: Yes, that’s the one, he’s the…; and he’d say: Oh, I remember you; I’d love to torture you. And at the end of the play it turns out that he wasn’t that guy, you know, he was a Jew himself, and this was his way of showing how bad the Nazis really were. You know all the Nazis in the Nuremberg trial, except maybe one or two, they were all contrite: We didn’t know what was happening; it was somebody else; we were just following orders. He was going to show how it really was, that they reveled in what they were doing, but he was revealed to be this sad pathetic figure because he wasn’t really this guy. That was a swell play. I saw the movie too; it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful. Because there’s Donald Pleasence in this glass booth, I don’t think we saw the jury or anything, it’s just him on stage in the glass booth, constricted in that environment, you know, doing whatever he could do: maybe hammering on the windows and pacing, squirming around as best he could; so that was what was so compelling about that play.
I wonder what happened to Donald Pleasence, because he was in so many interesting things in those years, because I think Cul-De-Sac, which Roman Polanski directed; that was 1966 I think.
Yeah, yeah, Great Escape; and he was in a lot of horror movies, not so good horror movies: always fun to watch though.
Let’s see, what else… fish and chips, that was wonderful, you could go into a place and they’d give you some stuff in a newspaper, then you’d go out in the street and eat it. This is how they live; this is how those English people live. And you know that was kind of a quick trip but I remember those things, plus all those youth in long hair; I was ready to… And somewhere out there was the possibility if you got out of the army, if you ended your tour of duty in Europe, you could stay there in Europe for up to a year and the army would still pay your way back to the States; so in other words you had that free flight whether you took it then or took it within a year, and I was thinkin’ about that, thinkin’ about that, thinkin’ about going to London and staying there, and I met lots of guys later who did that—and damn, I should have done that, should have done that, but I didn’t. I got out a little… I think the tradeoff was I got out a few weeks early, you know, I didn’t serve the entire two full years; I got out a few weeks early, I don’t know, there was some kind of deal I could do that and so I got out and went back, flew back and was processed out in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Now do you remember did you have any sort of plan?
[Sheepishly] No…
Silly of me to ask.
I had no idea what I was gonna do. I had some money I guess.
Do they give you some bit of money at the end?
Yeah, yeah, you get some kind of farewell roll, and I guess I had some money saved up, so I had some hundreds of dollars or something like that, but that’s it, and I just was gonna go back to the beach, you know, Southern California, and see what happened there.
So Manhattan Beach was your destination you figured?
Yeah, Hermosa, Redondo, something like that, one of those beach areas, because that’s what i was most familiar with. I had no reason to go anywhere else. By then some of the people I had known had gotten out and they were in various places. One of them was in Chicago, one of the guys that I knew in Germany was in Chicago, so I decided I’ll just go to Chicago first, so I hitchhiked to Chicago; it took about three or four rides from New Jersey to Chicago, and it was like end of the year, so it was cold. And wound up in Chicago, called the guy up: he wasn’t home [laughs]. Of course we had made no plans to meet or anything like that but... So I decided I don’t want to hitchhike anymore: took a bus; took a bus to Southern California, and it was still cold, still cold out there in the winter and going through Bakersfield and Fresno—[Jon Wayne* Texas accent] look out Fresno! Modesto! But there are all them little towns, Indio—Look out Indio!
This is 1967?
This is right, yeah, the tail end of 1967. And, you know, turned around, the next day it’s 1968.
Revolutionary year.
Yeah, sure was. I knew I had to get a job of some kind. I was living in one of those hotels again down there in Hermosa Beach.
So the hotels were…
Cheap.
So could you rent rooms month-to-month or week-to-week?
Week-to-week I think was basically it, yeah, week-to-week; and since my money was starting to run out, I mean I didn’t realize they had a hierarchy but I wound up going through a couple different stages of worse and worse rooms [laughter] till finally my last room I was in was some little closet [laughter].
What did you have? Was it still your X9 suitcase and…?
I think I still had my suitcase and a duffel bag; and a duffel bag: you can cram a lot of stuff in a duffel bag, so I still had...
Had you bought a lot of stuff?
I got rid of my combat boots and my class A pants, but I kept the jacket and the hat for some reason; came in handy later on for Halloween. And I had some, you know, some regular clothes, and whatever else I may have had; I don't know. [Gestures toward a book.]
He’s referring to his Ben Hur.
Here’s my Ben Hur. Maybe I had some records, yeah, I remember cramming some records in.
So you brought your Big Bill Broonzy back and some of those things?
I think by then I had transferred that to tape because I only remember having it on tape for a long time. But I brought my two Judy Collins records: they helped me get through Germany, and I had an Ian and Sylvia record and maybe I even had something weird like The Electric Prunes [laughter]. Somehow I had an Electric Prunes record, and I don’t know if I had a Dylan record or not because the tapes were more portable, so I was recording certain things just sticking the microphone up to the… or putting the tape recorder in front of the record player, so I’d transferred a lot of stuff already just to keep it small; and I had the British Parlophone version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that I bought in London that had a little bit of extra stuff at the end of it, a little bit of tape looping that they did that wasn’t on the American…
Was it the thing in the grooves where it said something?
Yeah, it said something; it sounded like [odd mechanical voice]: I will not sit down any other way I will not sit down any other way I will not sit down any other way I will not sit down any other way, you know, it would never stop, so that was a treasure; I thought I’d hold onto that.
Do you still have it?
No, it got stolen with some other records that I had; they broke into my apartment and stole it.
So my money’s running out; I’ve got to get a job. I think I applied at that time, I applied for a job at the Post Office in Redondo Beach because I’d hooked up with some of the people that I knew before and they said, you know…--Oh no, no, I must have had this in mind before because somebody told me—and it did prove to be true—that veterans get an extra five points on the test; ‘cause they give you a little test, you know, about mail trains or something like that, so I took the test, got my extra five points and so… That was something in the background, and I put the application in to the Redondo Beach Post Office, but they kept saying, Oh, this is gonna take a long time; so I had to get a job and I wound up working for this family-run candy-making operation out in Manhattan Beach, and this was just a guy and his wife and their son and the son’s wife and some retarded people.
Really? A lot of them?
No, two or three. And they were running… they had decided, well for some time, not a long time, they had decided to make candy, and it wasn’t a big operation but they were doing well. They had some various kinds of equipment in there that you use to make candy, and they were making candy canes and little candy kisses and other sorts of candy items.
And you didn’t have any experience with this except I suppose your restaurant…
Eating candy [laughter]. No, no, this was nothing like that because this was like factory work, but it was very small and there were a couple of guys in there that were already helping make the candy, and you know you needed, for certain operations you needed a lot of physical strength because these… What the intermediate phase of the candy making resulted in was a gigantic ball of hot gloppy candy, you know, and before it cooled down you had to get it into candy form, you know, into the cane form or the stick form or the little tiny piece form. So it was a huge monster…
So was it mixed up in vats maybe?
Here’s how it was: there was something called a water table, and a water table is a great big table with water pipes running under it; so yes, the candy at first was mixed up in these huge vats and, you know, flavorings were added and other things were added and as it cooled it became handleable and so you could pick it up, and the guys—I was one of them—were issued these, they had these long crowbar-like things that you stuck under the candy thing, maybe a couple of ‘em, picked the candy thing up out of the—oh no, there was a poring operation, that’s what it was. I may not have all the details right. Okay, so there was a poring operation. Oh, that was very tricky, that’s right. You pore it onto this water table.
And the water circulating through was just to keep the table warm?
Was to keep the candy cool, was to cool the candy; it’s cold water.
Oh, okay, ‘cause the candy was coming out hot.
Yeah, it was coming out hot, it was liquid, and it would flow out onto this water table and the water table had a recessed area of, you know, two or three inches or maybe even less deep than that, and the candy would gradually cool into this big slab, and that’s when the crowbar thing came into the picture because while it was cooling you had to turn it over a lot, you know, like a big giant pancake, fold it in on itself and put it back until it was sort of cooled uniformly.
So you were one of the stronger guys that did that part of it?
Yeah, yeah. And then you did things with… from there it went into various other operations depending on what kind of candy you made. If you were making like candy canes or long strips of candy you picked this thing up and put it into this rotating canvas hammock sort of affair. When you put it in there, it is like a hammock, but it keeps rotating, the canvas is rotating under the candy so the candy doesn’t stick, and what you do is—oh, gloves on too—so you get at one end of this glob of candy that’s rotating under you and that’s starting to form the stripes, you know, like in a candy cane, and you start making a neck, and you start manipulating the candy so it gets into smaller and smaller things and it goes through a little series of forms and that makes it nice and smooth and then it cuts it, cuts it, or else right after it goes through the form give it a little twist up at the top and there’s your cane, or else it goes through a different kind of form and cuts it smaller. There were all sorts of other operations, and the retarded girls down at the end, they bag it up. So that was basically the candy operation and I did that for quite a… seemed like a long time; it was probably only a couple months. But what was interesting about that was what those guys did to the candy.
What did they do?
They would get up on the water table and stomp on the candy.
Was that something they were supposed to do?
No, you’re not supposed to walk on the candy! They would spit into the bucket [laughs].
Why?
They were just bad characters.
Really?
Yeah, and then they’d go: Ha ha, those little kids are gonna eat this! I’m sure no harm was done ‘cause that candy was hot.
So it was really sizzling hot.
Sizzling hot; I mean it was boiling.
So if they had tuberculosis or something it wouldn’t…?
It’d probably just cook it right up. But the candy that was on the water table, you could get up and walk on it, and they did. You know you were supposed to go outside to smoke but they would put their ashes in the candy. I don’t know; maybe they were underpaid or whatever it was, but I…
They were disgruntled.
Yeah, disgruntled candy-makers, yep. So I had made enough money actually to get an apartment, so I found an apartment and so I had an apartment and I was walking a very long distance to get to the candy company, ‘cause it was up in the upper reaches of Manhattan Beach and my apartment was in Hermosa Beach.
I just wondered what was the situation with Gene and…?
Oh, I had no contact with him at all. I didn’t want to and I wasn’t curious about them, so there was no situation.
And he had no idea how to get in touch with you at this stage. Had he kept in contact with you in the military?
No, nobody knew exactly where I was. I had that conversation with Gene where I said I was going to the ah, but I don’t think I wrote him or called him or anything. I was completely out of that as far as I was… I didn’t have any relatives. [grandpa voice] That’s the way it was, and we liked it! That’s just the way it was.
Were you angry or anything or you just…?
No, I just didn’t exist in that realm anymore.
It was a new life, I mean your life once you got drafted.
Yeah. I had more or less forgotten, in a way. And this is a characteristic of mine over the years: as people move away from me or I from them they start losing their reality, you know, they start getting real fuzzy and I don’t think of them anymore and it just becomes easier and easier not to, or it just becomes more and more apparent that I can only focus on what’s in front of my nose, and I can’t write these people, I can’t call them: they don’t exist really. I don’t know. I mean I’ve gotten better; it’s just a kind of selfishness or self protection or something like that to make it easier for me to be by myself [laughs], so I don’t have to think about my younger sister or brother or any of these other people. All I have to think about, all I have to be concerned about is what I’m doing, you know, and what’s happening to me. What could be more important? So no, I didn’t think about them at all; it’s just a zero. Maybe I’d have a mild curiosity: I wonder where Gene is. I wonder if he’s around in this area. What’s Bob doing? but no more than that.
Is it surprising that you didn’t happen to run into Gene?
No, no, ‘cause I wasn’t…
Was he still in Manhattan Beach?
I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t remember…. Yes he was, he was still down there because a couple years after this or a year or so I did have occasion to get in touch with him, so he was doing something in the area, I mean he was in the area. You know maybe I even looked him up in the phone book and saw that there was a Gene L. Scott somewhere, but that’s as far as it went. Oh, you know, this individual seems to be alive, seems to be, at least there’s a name in the phone book. But no, I was just totally absorbed in myself.
Then I got accepted at the Post Office, the Redondo Beach Post Office.
So it just took them that long.
It took them a couple months.
The whole candy-making thing was during the waiting period.
January, February. And okay, the Post Office: I can work for the government. I’ve been doing it. At least they don’t want me to shoot anybody.
Were there similarities with the way the Post Office was set up and the military?
No. I understand from, later on I’ve talked to people who worked in the big post offices like L.A. Central or—where did Bukowski work? In the Terminal Annex—that, you know, there was a lot more regimentation, but this was the Redondo Beach Post Office, kind of small…
A surfing post office.
Yeah actually; sixty routes: not that much, and all contained in two little buildings; and you see the postmaster every day, and maybe a dozen clerks and forty or fifty carriers, so there were clerks, carriers and supervisors.
And what was your job?
I was gonna be a clerk, not have a going out route—didn’t want to drive, didn’t want to have to classify with a vehicle—and sort mail. So the way they have you do it is… and the other thing about it is there were a lot of other youngsters like myself who had started work at the post office at the same time; I think Redondo Beach was just going through like some urban renewal and there was more work for the post office because more people were moving in in various places, so there were about three or four, five, well, half dozen kids who started the same time I did, and so we formed a natural core, especially in having to make sure that we passed the probationary period and got real jobs there, because what they wanted you to do was while you worked, you know, while you did some just basic sorting stuff: facing letters and getting letters from one part to another part, just physical movement of mail, and also sorting to cities, you know, they’d sit you down in front of a case and there’d be cities: cities in L.A. County, cities elsewhere in California and cities in other states, which anybody could do, you don’t have to have lots of skills to do that; but while you were doing all this grunt work they expected you—on your own time—to learn the city scheme of Redondo Beach so that given any address in Redondo Beach you knew what route that went to. This was called learning the scheme and you were expected to do this on your own because at a certain point after you’d been there you’d be given a test: if you passed the test you would be hired, finally, at the post office; if you didn’t pass the test you were out.
So you had to be self-motivated to the extent that you would be learning this without their telling you.
That’s right. They would help you; some of the supervisors would give you hints on how to study for the scheme or what to do, and there was a little [chuckles], you could get this little practice case, you know, it opened up and it had at least sixty holes in it, and you get this little practice set of cards with addresses on it throughout Redondo Beach, and you could learn the scheme that way, I mean that way you know you could self test. But the best part of having lots of people who were trying to get in at the same time was we studied together and we became pals that way and we all passed, we all passed through and we all made it in.
So you really helped each other just keep up with it and not slack off. Were there any real kindred spirits?
Oh yes, and as we moved through the various stages of postal work we sort of moved together; there were a few carriers out there too, although most of us were clerks and we didn’t have much time for the carriers. You’re nothing but a carrier, get out of here!
Really?
Yeah, in fact there were two separate unions as well too: there was a clerks union and a carriers union; I think there were actually two carriers unions; and so, you know, we all, as a group we all went through the different supervisors and we all had fun with that, all the different kinds of supervisors and picking up on the lore of that particular post office and who was who and who had done what and who were the nut bags and who are the...
In the organization?
Yeah. Once you get in—I think Nathaniel Hawthorne had a thing about government work; wasn’t he some kind of customs agent or something like that? he was talking about the addiction and lure of that kind of work—it’s very hard for them to fire you, at least it was then, and I’m here to prove it [laughter]. I tested it; I tested it as much as you can.
Really? Did you get back to being a bad boy?
Yes, yes. I started out good though, but there were people there who were lifers, so there were lifers, post office lifers too, and some of them were interesting: there were guys there who had worked on mail trains and they had lots of stories about doing the mail on mail trains, and I liked them because they had their own ring knives; they had little knives with a little hook, a sharp hook on it that you could use for tying off bundles: it was a ring knife.
And you cut the string with it?
Yeah, yeah. We had baling machines there so you could take a big hunk of mail and set it on the baling machine and it would wrap around once and then you do a ninety degree turn and wrap it around twice.
Are they like the ones at the library? Those things that kind of look like an oven or something?
Yeah, I think it’s like that one. It makes a big noise. But these guys, you know, it’s like John Henry: with their ring knives they could beat the bailing machine, they just take a thing and go… and they had a special knot-making trick.
So you liked those guys?
Liked those guys.
Those were usually older guys?
Oh yeah. In the service they had this thing called a profile. If you had a medical profile you could get out of certain kinds of work. Same thing in the post office, these guys, they didn’t call it a profile; you know, in the army if somebody asks you to do something you could say: Sarge I can’t do that, you know I’ve got a profile; and they couldn’t mess with you. If you had a profile they couldn’t mess with you. So some of these old gaffers they had excuses for not doing certain things. And they would not lift a finger; they wouldn’t even bend over to pick up a mail bag with two letters in it!
Bad back.
Yeah, bad back. That’s why they had all the rookies do it for them.
So the clerks that were on your level, a lot of them were roughly your age?
The new guys, yeah.
So you were…?
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Sixty-six I’m twenty, so yeah, I’m twenty-one going on twenty-two. And you know there were some other veterans there, two or three other veterans, got their five point lead-in, and we became real tight, real tight.
And some of them were into some of this wild stuff: Lord Buckley and…?
No, nobody was into that. The Firesign Theatre was coming around: some people were into that; and you know we were all of the same generation: so there was that; we were all into dope: definitely that.
Yep, gotta turn it over.
[End Tape 14, Side A]
Okay, we’re in London, 1967, fall; it’s all happening. I didn’t go to any museums or anything, but I went to a couple of... I rode around in the tube a lot: that was fun. Went to some movies out in the suburbs; just tried to see if I could get from point A to point B, that was, in itself that was a delight, see if I could master the mechanics of getting around. Went to see a great, great play: The Man in the Glass Booth, with Donald Pleasence. Ah… They made a movie of that later with Maximilian Schell, and it was written by Robert Shaw, the guy who was in Jaws.
The actor?
Yeah. And it’s about this, you know, this was around… Eichmann was in the news, you know, he’d been shanghaied and caught wherever he was caught and shanghaied back to Israel to stand trial there, and this was that sort of thing: it was this great capitalist industrialist who was uncovered as a concentration camp guard in Germany; he was kidnapped, put on trial in Israel in the glass booth. And you know it was Donald Pleasence at his height, he was just screaming and fulminating: now that he was caught he was proud to have been… you know, he extolled Hitler and the ideals of the Third Reich and he was proud to have taken part and he looked with disdain on the parade of witnesses who would come and say: Yes, that’s the one, he’s the…; and he’d say: Oh, I remember you; I’d love to torture you. And at the end of the play it turns out that he wasn’t that guy, you know, he was a Jew himself, and this was his way of showing how bad the Nazis really were. You know all the Nazis in the Nuremberg trial, except maybe one or two, they were all contrite: We didn’t know what was happening; it was somebody else; we were just following orders. He was going to show how it really was, that they reveled in what they were doing, but he was revealed to be this sad pathetic figure because he wasn’t really this guy. That was a swell play. I saw the movie too; it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful. Because there’s Donald Pleasence in this glass booth, I don’t think we saw the jury or anything, it’s just him on stage in the glass booth, constricted in that environment, you know, doing whatever he could do: maybe hammering on the windows and pacing, squirming around as best he could; so that was what was so compelling about that play.
I wonder what happened to Donald Pleasence, because he was in so many interesting things in those years, because I think Cul-De-Sac, which Roman Polanski directed; that was 1966 I think.
Yeah, yeah, Great Escape; and he was in a lot of horror movies, not so good horror movies: always fun to watch though.
Let’s see, what else… fish and chips, that was wonderful, you could go into a place and they’d give you some stuff in a newspaper, then you’d go out in the street and eat it. This is how they live; this is how those English people live. And you know that was kind of a quick trip but I remember those things, plus all those youth in long hair; I was ready to… And somewhere out there was the possibility if you got out of the army, if you ended your tour of duty in Europe, you could stay there in Europe for up to a year and the army would still pay your way back to the States; so in other words you had that free flight whether you took it then or took it within a year, and I was thinkin’ about that, thinkin’ about that, thinkin’ about going to London and staying there, and I met lots of guys later who did that—and damn, I should have done that, should have done that, but I didn’t. I got out a little… I think the tradeoff was I got out a few weeks early, you know, I didn’t serve the entire two full years; I got out a few weeks early, I don’t know, there was some kind of deal I could do that and so I got out and went back, flew back and was processed out in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Now do you remember did you have any sort of plan?
[Sheepishly] No…
Silly of me to ask.
I had no idea what I was gonna do. I had some money I guess.
Do they give you some bit of money at the end?
Yeah, yeah, you get some kind of farewell roll, and I guess I had some money saved up, so I had some hundreds of dollars or something like that, but that’s it, and I just was gonna go back to the beach, you know, Southern California, and see what happened there.
So Manhattan Beach was your destination you figured?
Yeah, Hermosa, Redondo, something like that, one of those beach areas, because that’s what i was most familiar with. I had no reason to go anywhere else. By then some of the people I had known had gotten out and they were in various places. One of them was in Chicago, one of the guys that I knew in Germany was in Chicago, so I decided I’ll just go to Chicago first, so I hitchhiked to Chicago; it took about three or four rides from New Jersey to Chicago, and it was like end of the year, so it was cold. And wound up in Chicago, called the guy up: he wasn’t home [laughs]. Of course we had made no plans to meet or anything like that but... So I decided I don’t want to hitchhike anymore: took a bus; took a bus to Southern California, and it was still cold, still cold out there in the winter and going through Bakersfield and Fresno—[Jon Wayne* Texas accent] look out Fresno! Modesto! But there are all them little towns, Indio—Look out Indio!
This is 1967?
This is right, yeah, the tail end of 1967. And, you know, turned around, the next day it’s 1968.
Revolutionary year.
Yeah, sure was. I knew I had to get a job of some kind. I was living in one of those hotels again down there in Hermosa Beach.
So the hotels were…
Cheap.
So could you rent rooms month-to-month or week-to-week?
Week-to-week I think was basically it, yeah, week-to-week; and since my money was starting to run out, I mean I didn’t realize they had a hierarchy but I wound up going through a couple different stages of worse and worse rooms [laughter] till finally my last room I was in was some little closet [laughter].
What did you have? Was it still your X9 suitcase and…?
I think I still had my suitcase and a duffel bag; and a duffel bag: you can cram a lot of stuff in a duffel bag, so I still had...
Had you bought a lot of stuff?
I got rid of my combat boots and my class A pants, but I kept the jacket and the hat for some reason; came in handy later on for Halloween. And I had some, you know, some regular clothes, and whatever else I may have had; I don't know. [Gestures toward a book.]
He’s referring to his Ben Hur.
Here’s my Ben Hur. Maybe I had some records, yeah, I remember cramming some records in.
So you brought your Big Bill Broonzy back and some of those things?
I think by then I had transferred that to tape because I only remember having it on tape for a long time. But I brought my two Judy Collins records: they helped me get through Germany, and I had an Ian and Sylvia record and maybe I even had something weird like The Electric Prunes [laughter]. Somehow I had an Electric Prunes record, and I don’t know if I had a Dylan record or not because the tapes were more portable, so I was recording certain things just sticking the microphone up to the… or putting the tape recorder in front of the record player, so I’d transferred a lot of stuff already just to keep it small; and I had the British Parlophone version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that I bought in London that had a little bit of extra stuff at the end of it, a little bit of tape looping that they did that wasn’t on the American…
Was it the thing in the grooves where it said something?
Yeah, it said something; it sounded like [odd mechanical voice]: I will not sit down any other way I will not sit down any other way I will not sit down any other way I will not sit down any other way, you know, it would never stop, so that was a treasure; I thought I’d hold onto that.
Do you still have it?
No, it got stolen with some other records that I had; they broke into my apartment and stole it.
So my money’s running out; I’ve got to get a job. I think I applied at that time, I applied for a job at the Post Office in Redondo Beach because I’d hooked up with some of the people that I knew before and they said, you know…--Oh no, no, I must have had this in mind before because somebody told me—and it did prove to be true—that veterans get an extra five points on the test; ‘cause they give you a little test, you know, about mail trains or something like that, so I took the test, got my extra five points and so… That was something in the background, and I put the application in to the Redondo Beach Post Office, but they kept saying, Oh, this is gonna take a long time; so I had to get a job and I wound up working for this family-run candy-making operation out in Manhattan Beach, and this was just a guy and his wife and their son and the son’s wife and some retarded people.
Really? A lot of them?
No, two or three. And they were running… they had decided, well for some time, not a long time, they had decided to make candy, and it wasn’t a big operation but they were doing well. They had some various kinds of equipment in there that you use to make candy, and they were making candy canes and little candy kisses and other sorts of candy items.
And you didn’t have any experience with this except I suppose your restaurant…
Eating candy [laughter]. No, no, this was nothing like that because this was like factory work, but it was very small and there were a couple of guys in there that were already helping make the candy, and you know you needed, for certain operations you needed a lot of physical strength because these… What the intermediate phase of the candy making resulted in was a gigantic ball of hot gloppy candy, you know, and before it cooled down you had to get it into candy form, you know, into the cane form or the stick form or the little tiny piece form. So it was a huge monster…
So was it mixed up in vats maybe?
Here’s how it was: there was something called a water table, and a water table is a great big table with water pipes running under it; so yes, the candy at first was mixed up in these huge vats and, you know, flavorings were added and other things were added and as it cooled it became handleable and so you could pick it up, and the guys—I was one of them—were issued these, they had these long crowbar-like things that you stuck under the candy thing, maybe a couple of ‘em, picked the candy thing up out of the—oh no, there was a poring operation, that’s what it was. I may not have all the details right. Okay, so there was a poring operation. Oh, that was very tricky, that’s right. You pore it onto this water table.
And the water circulating through was just to keep the table warm?
Was to keep the candy cool, was to cool the candy; it’s cold water.
Oh, okay, ‘cause the candy was coming out hot.
Yeah, it was coming out hot, it was liquid, and it would flow out onto this water table and the water table had a recessed area of, you know, two or three inches or maybe even less deep than that, and the candy would gradually cool into this big slab, and that’s when the crowbar thing came into the picture because while it was cooling you had to turn it over a lot, you know, like a big giant pancake, fold it in on itself and put it back until it was sort of cooled uniformly.
So you were one of the stronger guys that did that part of it?
Yeah, yeah. And then you did things with… from there it went into various other operations depending on what kind of candy you made. If you were making like candy canes or long strips of candy you picked this thing up and put it into this rotating canvas hammock sort of affair. When you put it in there, it is like a hammock, but it keeps rotating, the canvas is rotating under the candy so the candy doesn’t stick, and what you do is—oh, gloves on too—so you get at one end of this glob of candy that’s rotating under you and that’s starting to form the stripes, you know, like in a candy cane, and you start making a neck, and you start manipulating the candy so it gets into smaller and smaller things and it goes through a little series of forms and that makes it nice and smooth and then it cuts it, cuts it, or else right after it goes through the form give it a little twist up at the top and there’s your cane, or else it goes through a different kind of form and cuts it smaller. There were all sorts of other operations, and the retarded girls down at the end, they bag it up. So that was basically the candy operation and I did that for quite a… seemed like a long time; it was probably only a couple months. But what was interesting about that was what those guys did to the candy.
What did they do?
They would get up on the water table and stomp on the candy.
Was that something they were supposed to do?
No, you’re not supposed to walk on the candy! They would spit into the bucket [laughs].
Why?
They were just bad characters.
Really?
Yeah, and then they’d go: Ha ha, those little kids are gonna eat this! I’m sure no harm was done ‘cause that candy was hot.
So it was really sizzling hot.
Sizzling hot; I mean it was boiling.
So if they had tuberculosis or something it wouldn’t…?
It’d probably just cook it right up. But the candy that was on the water table, you could get up and walk on it, and they did. You know you were supposed to go outside to smoke but they would put their ashes in the candy. I don’t know; maybe they were underpaid or whatever it was, but I…
They were disgruntled.
Yeah, disgruntled candy-makers, yep. So I had made enough money actually to get an apartment, so I found an apartment and so I had an apartment and I was walking a very long distance to get to the candy company, ‘cause it was up in the upper reaches of Manhattan Beach and my apartment was in Hermosa Beach.
I just wondered what was the situation with Gene and…?
Oh, I had no contact with him at all. I didn’t want to and I wasn’t curious about them, so there was no situation.
And he had no idea how to get in touch with you at this stage. Had he kept in contact with you in the military?
No, nobody knew exactly where I was. I had that conversation with Gene where I said I was going to the ah, but I don’t think I wrote him or called him or anything. I was completely out of that as far as I was… I didn’t have any relatives. [grandpa voice] That’s the way it was, and we liked it! That’s just the way it was.
Were you angry or anything or you just…?
No, I just didn’t exist in that realm anymore.
It was a new life, I mean your life once you got drafted.
Yeah. I had more or less forgotten, in a way. And this is a characteristic of mine over the years: as people move away from me or I from them they start losing their reality, you know, they start getting real fuzzy and I don’t think of them anymore and it just becomes easier and easier not to, or it just becomes more and more apparent that I can only focus on what’s in front of my nose, and I can’t write these people, I can’t call them: they don’t exist really. I don’t know. I mean I’ve gotten better; it’s just a kind of selfishness or self protection or something like that to make it easier for me to be by myself [laughs], so I don’t have to think about my younger sister or brother or any of these other people. All I have to think about, all I have to be concerned about is what I’m doing, you know, and what’s happening to me. What could be more important? So no, I didn’t think about them at all; it’s just a zero. Maybe I’d have a mild curiosity: I wonder where Gene is. I wonder if he’s around in this area. What’s Bob doing? but no more than that.
Is it surprising that you didn’t happen to run into Gene?
No, no, ‘cause I wasn’t…
Was he still in Manhattan Beach?
I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t remember…. Yes he was, he was still down there because a couple years after this or a year or so I did have occasion to get in touch with him, so he was doing something in the area, I mean he was in the area. You know maybe I even looked him up in the phone book and saw that there was a Gene L. Scott somewhere, but that’s as far as it went. Oh, you know, this individual seems to be alive, seems to be, at least there’s a name in the phone book. But no, I was just totally absorbed in myself.
Then I got accepted at the Post Office, the Redondo Beach Post Office.
So it just took them that long.
It took them a couple months.
The whole candy-making thing was during the waiting period.
January, February. And okay, the Post Office: I can work for the government. I’ve been doing it. At least they don’t want me to shoot anybody.
Were there similarities with the way the Post Office was set up and the military?
No. I understand from, later on I’ve talked to people who worked in the big post offices like L.A. Central or—where did Bukowski work? In the Terminal Annex—that, you know, there was a lot more regimentation, but this was the Redondo Beach Post Office, kind of small…
A surfing post office.
Yeah actually; sixty routes: not that much, and all contained in two little buildings; and you see the postmaster every day, and maybe a dozen clerks and forty or fifty carriers, so there were clerks, carriers and supervisors.
And what was your job?
I was gonna be a clerk, not have a going out route—didn’t want to drive, didn’t want to have to classify with a vehicle—and sort mail. So the way they have you do it is… and the other thing about it is there were a lot of other youngsters like myself who had started work at the post office at the same time; I think Redondo Beach was just going through like some urban renewal and there was more work for the post office because more people were moving in in various places, so there were about three or four, five, well, half dozen kids who started the same time I did, and so we formed a natural core, especially in having to make sure that we passed the probationary period and got real jobs there, because what they wanted you to do was while you worked, you know, while you did some just basic sorting stuff: facing letters and getting letters from one part to another part, just physical movement of mail, and also sorting to cities, you know, they’d sit you down in front of a case and there’d be cities: cities in L.A. County, cities elsewhere in California and cities in other states, which anybody could do, you don’t have to have lots of skills to do that; but while you were doing all this grunt work they expected you—on your own time—to learn the city scheme of Redondo Beach so that given any address in Redondo Beach you knew what route that went to. This was called learning the scheme and you were expected to do this on your own because at a certain point after you’d been there you’d be given a test: if you passed the test you would be hired, finally, at the post office; if you didn’t pass the test you were out.
So you had to be self-motivated to the extent that you would be learning this without their telling you.
That’s right. They would help you; some of the supervisors would give you hints on how to study for the scheme or what to do, and there was a little [chuckles], you could get this little practice case, you know, it opened up and it had at least sixty holes in it, and you get this little practice set of cards with addresses on it throughout Redondo Beach, and you could learn the scheme that way, I mean that way you know you could self test. But the best part of having lots of people who were trying to get in at the same time was we studied together and we became pals that way and we all passed, we all passed through and we all made it in.
So you really helped each other just keep up with it and not slack off. Were there any real kindred spirits?
Oh yes, and as we moved through the various stages of postal work we sort of moved together; there were a few carriers out there too, although most of us were clerks and we didn’t have much time for the carriers. You’re nothing but a carrier, get out of here!
Really?
Yeah, in fact there were two separate unions as well too: there was a clerks union and a carriers union; I think there were actually two carriers unions; and so, you know, we all, as a group we all went through the different supervisors and we all had fun with that, all the different kinds of supervisors and picking up on the lore of that particular post office and who was who and who had done what and who were the nut bags and who are the...
In the organization?
Yeah. Once you get in—I think Nathaniel Hawthorne had a thing about government work; wasn’t he some kind of customs agent or something like that? he was talking about the addiction and lure of that kind of work—it’s very hard for them to fire you, at least it was then, and I’m here to prove it [laughter]. I tested it; I tested it as much as you can.
Really? Did you get back to being a bad boy?
Yes, yes. I started out good though, but there were people there who were lifers, so there were lifers, post office lifers too, and some of them were interesting: there were guys there who had worked on mail trains and they had lots of stories about doing the mail on mail trains, and I liked them because they had their own ring knives; they had little knives with a little hook, a sharp hook on it that you could use for tying off bundles: it was a ring knife.
And you cut the string with it?
Yeah, yeah. We had baling machines there so you could take a big hunk of mail and set it on the baling machine and it would wrap around once and then you do a ninety degree turn and wrap it around twice.
Are they like the ones at the library? Those things that kind of look like an oven or something?
Yeah, I think it’s like that one. It makes a big noise. But these guys, you know, it’s like John Henry: with their ring knives they could beat the bailing machine, they just take a thing and go… and they had a special knot-making trick.
So you liked those guys?
Liked those guys.
Those were usually older guys?
Oh yeah. In the service they had this thing called a profile. If you had a medical profile you could get out of certain kinds of work. Same thing in the post office, these guys, they didn’t call it a profile; you know, in the army if somebody asks you to do something you could say: Sarge I can’t do that, you know I’ve got a profile; and they couldn’t mess with you. If you had a profile they couldn’t mess with you. So some of these old gaffers they had excuses for not doing certain things. And they would not lift a finger; they wouldn’t even bend over to pick up a mail bag with two letters in it!
Bad back.
Yeah, bad back. That’s why they had all the rookies do it for them.
So the clerks that were on your level, a lot of them were roughly your age?
The new guys, yeah.
So you were…?
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Sixty-six I’m twenty, so yeah, I’m twenty-one going on twenty-two. And you know there were some other veterans there, two or three other veterans, got their five point lead-in, and we became real tight, real tight.
And some of them were into some of this wild stuff: Lord Buckley and…?
No, nobody was into that. The Firesign Theatre was coming around: some people were into that; and you know we were all of the same generation: so there was that; we were all into dope: definitely that.
Yep, gotta turn it over.
[End Tape 14, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:16 PM
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