Cartero Borracho (Drunken Mailman)

Memoir of a Mailman #19

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My life as a Reserve Carrier (RCA) got off to a rough start, there at the Otay Mesa Post Office, San Diego, CA, 92154.

Old timers like the Rammer (MM#18) harassed me daily, sometimes good-naturedly, sometimes not. To make matters worse, I constantly carried a different route. Sometimes I could bid on a route open due to the regular’s vacation, but that was a week or two of stability at most.

Letter Carriers are not complicated people, we don’t dream of complicated things. As I slogged along through Otay Mesa’s neighborhoods, dragging my satchel in the dirt, I daydreamed of having my own route, and leaving this instability behind. I was tired of getting the evil eye from customers who adored their regulars, and viewed all others like unwanted usurpers from another planet.

Basically I had two choices. I could get my own route in a rough ghetto station like Barrio Logan, and deal with the kind of problems I encountered in MM#15, or stick around Otay Mesa and pray for one of the old farts there to die, so I could move in and grab their gig.

Otay Mesa was a very geriatric station. It was the only Post Office in the South Bay area of San Diego that had not completely surrendered to the slow creep of Tijuana across the border. It contained mostly quiet, middle-class neighborhoods, drawing senior carriers who lived in Chula Vista and other South Bay locales.

None of these old-timers looked like they were going to kick off anytime soon. All of that walking kept them too healthy. Unless I arranged their assassination by pit bull — not hard to do in San Diego, where man-eating dogs are common, I would have a long wait.

Unwilling to resort to murder just yet, I bided my time.

Then one day fate intervened, and I was able to jump on an assignment for an extended period.

It happened when two of my coworkers, Manny and Barbara, were involved in a basketball tournament at a local gym. Barbara was a lovely Hispanic woman of Spanish-Catalonian origin, whereas Manny was a cantankerous Filipino.

During the course of the competition Manny got a little too cantankerous, and took out a ligament in Barbara’s leg. I don’t know all the medical particulars, but she needed a couple months to heal. In the interim her route was vacated.

Dying to do something, anything, on a regular basis, I immediately opted on her route, C027.

I thought it would be better not to be hopping around every day, but I soon discovered intruding upon somebody else’s territory comes with its own set of complications.

First of all, postal customers don’t like unfamiliar faces. Where’s Barbara? When is Barbara coming back? Did Barbara retire? — were the sort of annoying questions I had to deal with every day.

I also learned you have to take exceptional care to do the job right, because if you screwed up a regular’s route they were going to hear about it, and then you have to deal with the scorn of the entire station. You were labeled a runner — someone who does the route really fast but scatters the mail to the four winds, heedless of accuracy, to get the job done quickly.

Unfortunately, at this stage of my postal career I was something of a runner. I was about to find this out the hard way.

Barbara’s route was long, and had a little bit of everything — trailer parks, walking swings, and most of all, apartments. Large apartment complexes with hundreds of units, where you stood in the same place a long time, flinging mail.

I didn’t like delivering apartment complexes then, and I don’t like it now. I prefer to be a moving target for dumbshits who wait there to harass you. There’s always one grumpy old retired man, waiting for his social security check, who has nothing better to do than make your life miserable.

However, though it pains me to admit it, at that point I was the dumbshit. I deserved whatever abuse was heaped upon me.

I don’t know about other species trained to do the job, such as chimpanzees or octopi, but in human mail delivery the hand should follow the eye. Like stubborn men behind the wheels of cars, hands think they know the way without proper navigation, and make wrong turns.

Almost might be good enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, as the saying goes, but it doesn’t work in the postal profession.

There’s nobody as unloved as a blind mailman, unless it’s a drunken one. As my days on Barbara’s route progressed I got that reputation, even though I was legally sober.

I’m a little unsteady on my feet to begin with. I can’t walk or park in a straight line under the best of circumstances. I would fail a field sobriety test while never drinking a drop.

I think I did okay on the walking part of Barbara’s route, where I had time between houses to get the mail straight, but at the big apartment complexes my aim was not true. Therefore, the residents there gave me a new nickname for me.

Otay Mesa was just a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. You could look out the window of your postal vehicle and see the hills of Tijuana bristling with spindly power poles and tire fires, quite a picturesque site from a distance.

Being so close, many Mexican people immigrated north of the border. The majority of the occupants of Barbara’s apartments consisted of such immigrants. For that reason, any derogatory nicknames they made up for you were rendered in Spanish.

I think it was welfare check day when my unflattering nickname was applied. In those days government assistance payments still came by mail, rather than direct deposit.

A large crowd of eager people had gathered around the mailboxes, glowering at me impatiently, menacingly, as if that would improve my accuracy. It didn’t.

It’s difficult enough to get the right mail in the right box with your undivided attention focused on the task, but when you have to look over your shoulder because you fear being mobbed by angry villagers, the job becomes exponentially more daunting.

I stood there sweating, swooning, probably swearing a little under my breath. Meanwhile, the crowd pressed in tighter, desperate to grab their manna from heaven.

“Cartero Borracho,” some punk among the rabble said, probably thinking the güero mailman didn’t know any Spanish. But this white boy has a Mexican wife and a fair command of the language. I knew very well he was calling me drunken mailman.

A wave of mirth rolled through the angry horde. I went into a semi-hypnotic funk, half-angry, half-anxious, half-wanting to pop that mouthy punk in the teeth. But I was outnumbered.

Instead, I flung the mail into the boxes as rapidly as I could, unconcerned with the consequences of my haste, and got the hell out of there.

Over the next few weeks, until Barbara came back, I worried whether Cartero Borracho was a temporary tag, stuck on me by welfare mamas and their spawn, or if my performance was so consistently shoddy the tag would be permanently attached to my postal pith helmet.

I found out when Barbara came back. After hearing the complaints out on the street, she gave me a fiery dose of her Iberian wrath.

I’m happy to report my aim improved with age and experience, and Barbara and I remained friends until she retired and drifted away from Planet Postal. One day while delivering mail I ran into her at a party. She gave me a big drunken hug, apparently having forgiven the cartero borracho for screwing up her route.

I profited from that experience. I’m certainly not perfect, but I’ve learned to link my hands with my eyes so they don’t wander off course. I rarely get a complaint now, and Cartero Borracho hides in the shadows of history, lonely and looking for a drink, and maybe some mouthy smartass to punch.

Escritor borracho Mel scatters stories around on his personal website:

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