1968 – September, Handling the Mail, Picking up Brother Rick from Rayburn and Annika Ljung

[JMac1949 Memories]

http://swamplot.com/for-sale-downtown-post-office-box/2009-02-25/

September, Handling the Mail…: I don’t remember the interview or anything else about actually getting the job except that I think I started work at the new Post Office at 401 Franklin in downtown Houston sometime in August.  It may have been as late as the Tuesday after Labor Day, but the position of Mail Handler paid $3.85 an hour and I didn’t have to wear a stupid uniform, shave or cut my hair.  It had the distinct advantage that I was assigned to the swing shift, 2:30pm to 11:00pm, so I didn’t have to drag my ass out of bed before dawn or fight rush hour freeway traffic to get to and from work.  This also gave me the option of going to the University of Houston during the day while working at night, so if I wanted to go back to college and get a degree, I could do that with no great effort.

Mail Handlers are literally the grunts who wrestle and sort canvas bags of mail, mostly parcels, which weigh up to 80 pounds (although some weigh much more) out of the trailers of eighteen wheelers parked at the docks of a Central Post Office.  Our bags zoomed away on three foot wide conveyor belts that carried mail to various sorting and processing centers in that giant warehouse in downtown Houston. 

After we emptied the trailers, we deployed to whatever node we were assigned.  The mechanics and logistics of the process were set up so that any one letter or parcel might travel a mile or more inside the building before it landed in the mail truck that the carrier drove up to your mailbox.  Mail Handlers leap frog along and around those conveyors to make sure that grandma’s homemade cookies get to the kiddos.  Because I was the lowest of the low on the seniority totem pole, I worked from Wednesday through Sunday with Mondays and Tuesdays off and every weekday I woke up in the morning and drove my brother Rick to Sam Rayburn High School.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sam_Rayburn_High_School.jpg

…Picking up Brother Rick from Rayburn…:  On my first Monday off I drove over to pick him up around 3:30pm and saw Annika Ljung, who’d first arrived at Rayburn during the mid term of my senior year.  As Rick hopped into the passenger seat I asked him, “Isn’t she that Swedish transfer student who showed up last year?”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, “That’s Annika.  She lives just up the street on Dabney.”

“Well ask her if she wants a ride,” I said, which set in motion a sequence of events that would lead to yet another broken heart.

http://www.picowall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/young-woman-rena...

…and Annika Ljung: Although I’d experienced an intermittent dry spell since my return to Pasadena from Austin, I really wasn’t looking for a girlfriend.  To tell the truth I’d never recovered from the emotional wounds from my break up with Sandy Lee during June of 1967.  I’d grown comfortable with the relatively open and casual sex I’d experienced in San Francisco and Austin; so even though Annika Ljund was an exotic Scandinavian princess who looked like she stepped from the pages of a fairytale, she was still a sixteen year old high school virgin and I’d had my fill of wrestling with the conflicted emotional dance steps of high school virgins.  When I drove Rick to and from school, he rode shotgun and Annika and one of her girlfriends sat in the back seat and that’s pretty much all there was to it until Roger Grey asked me to do him a favor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lion_In_Winter1.jpg

Roger was dating Lily Chang and having problems with her family who didn’t care for the idea of their brilliant daughter spending time with a goofy white guy from Texas.  Roger and Lily used the old ploy of the double date to allay their suspicions and so they usually went out with Steve Jarrad and whatever girl he was going with at the time.  One Friday night Roger and Lily had plans to go see a movie… I think it may have been The Lion in Winter, but Jarrad got into a fight with his girlfriend and Roger asked me if I could find a date.  So it was on a Friday morning that I asked Annika Ljund if she wanted to go to the movies and called in sick.  I just thought I was helping Roger and Lily out with her folks, but things were about to get remarkably strange… much more to come.

The starlet Sue Lyon who Stanley Kubrick cast to portray Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was contemporary to the era and her features were similar to Annika’s.  I found this video which streams her images along with Sunshine Superman to telegraph how we came together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuPbJLqFKI&playnext=1&list=...

Next up on JMac1949 - Memories, 1968 –  Working at the Post Office, Dropping Boxes of Drugs…

Except for attributed video, photos and text, all content is copyrighted © 2013 JKM (an apparently ineffectual boilerplate joke?)

[Chicago Guy]

Keep it going! Yes!

[koshersalaami]

Incomplete story. Worked in mailroom, met high school girl, was going on date. If you're writing a serial, fine. If you're writing a series of self-contained stories, no. This isn't a story, it's an introduction.

[Steel Breeze]

R & L....

[Jonathan Wolfman]

'Lion' takes me back to a community theatre production in the '70s...at the end some character laments  Oh! This is Terrible!"...and an audience member shouted "You're damned right!"

 

:)

[Zanelle]

Yikes  You can't leave us hanging like this.  Lolita has always been an interesting idea and movie for me.  It was so hot.

[Rosigami]

Oh I totally agree with Zanelle! C'mon, now...! 

[James Mark Emmerling]

Sue Lyon! Lolita! Nabakov!

You are into very heavy territory here. I have a hard time imagining how that film was received  50 yrs ago….

~

Lolita: ...I-I learned some real good games in camp. One in particular-ly was fun.

Humbert: Well, why don't you describe this one in particular-ly - good game?

Lolita: Well, I played it with Charlie...Charlie? He's that guy that you met in the office.

Humbert: You mean that boy...?

Lolita: Mmm, hmm.

Humbert: You and he?

Lolita: Yeah. You sure you can't guess what game I'm talking about?

Humbert: No, I'm not a very good guesser. [She whispers in his ear and then giggles] I don't know what game you played. [She whispers a few more words]

Lolita: You mean you never played that game when you were a kid?

Humbert: Oh, no.

Lolita: [smiling] All righty then...

~

 

• Lolita is one of      our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an      unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work,      a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving      patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the      world.
  • Joyce Carol Oates

`

Your own cliffhanger remembrances  have already reached the region of high literary merit, JMac. That you write it in this format in no way demeans its distinction. You have already written a novel or two. And we are still in the 60’s. This work will stand. Believe me.

~

Annika, eh? Your own little bundle of foreign Lolita fun…you know I am screaming more more in my heart….

 

~

Hee haw as art james might say.

• “Lolita,      light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.      Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the      palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo,      in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in      slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But      in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did,      indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all      had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the      sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was      that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style.      Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the      misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of      thorns.
  • Opening       lines

[Matt Paust]

I guess you hadn't heard of the more relaxed sexual mores of Scandinavia.  I'm guessing she brought you up on the learning curve.

[Donegal Descendant]

Yes, the Lolita references really are a real tease! We are waiting with baited breath. On a more mundane workaday level, I had a termporary appointment as a Postal Clerk in San Francisco's Rincon Annex in 1965. We usually sat on high stools in front of a 49-pigeon hole case, 7 rows across and 7 down, doing "primary sort" of letter-size mail,  forbidden to speak with one another. We  got one 12-minute break in a six hour shift. Take 13 or 14 minutes and you got yelled at. It ws hot & stuffy  inside so we dressed light even for the night shift. The,n being lowest of the low,  one night they put us out on the loading dock as mail hadnlers, with the cold wet  wind blowing in off the Bay, throwing those 80-pound sacks around with no coats and no gloves. The regular outdoor mail handlers dressed warmly and had gloves but we weren't prepared for the change of assignment.  We made about $2.50 an hour, about twice the minmum wage at the time....

[Rob Neukirch]

Swedes are tough.  One broke my heart later in life, we lived together for a time and I spent a Christmas in Sweden...enough!  Apres me she married and remarried the same man. They're no longer together.  Her Dad keeps in touch with me, bad-English emails...