Post Office [1971] - Charles Bukowski

"She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn't go back. But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes."

Opening line: "It began as a mistake." Down-and-out barfly Henry Chinaski becomes substitute mail carrier, quits for awhile and lives on his winnings at the track and then becomes a mail clerk. The work is menial, boring and degrading. Our hero survives through booze combined with an extremely cynical view of the world.

Bukowski's first novel, Post Office, is "dedicated to nobody." The great love of Bukowski's life, Jane Cooney Baker ("Betty" in Post Office), was a widowed alcoholic 11 years his senior with an immense beer belly. She also served as the model for "Wanda" in the 1987 Bukowski-scripted film Barfly. Bukowski's first wife, Barbara Frye ("Joyce"), suffered a physical deformity - two vertebrae were missing from her neck, giving the impression that "she was permanently hunching her shoulders." After a little over two years of marriage in the late 1950s, she filed for divorce, accusing him of "mental cruelty." In the novel, Joyce is portrayed as a wealthy nymphomaniac.