If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

'Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

-Rudyard Kipling 1895

This poem was dropped in my lap one Sunday afternoon in the Sixties by my abusive father as I lay on our couch reading a book in Louisiana. He told me to read it and think about it. I was about ten or eleven years old. I have thought about it ever since that afternoon. There were many times on the Trail of Tears (my letter-carrier career of thirty years) that I heard those words in my head and felt them in my heart.

Never more than the time of which I will now relate. There was a unique post war apartment building on my route that had a strip-mall in front and the lobby entrance in the middle of the storefronts. Once a person entered here they could cross the floor to another set of rear doors and exit to a world hidden from busy Fraser Street. Here was a courtyard flanked on three sides by three smaller unadorned rectangular stucco Stalag styled buildings, which stood three stories high and contained six suites each.

For delivery purposes, I had to go around to each individual building. My method with such buildings was to ascend by elevator to the top floors and deliver crisscross down the halls, take the stairs to the next level down and finally do the ground floors last. It was much more efficient than waiting endlessly for ancient elevators. The tenants were a mix of Balkan, Polish, Carpathian, Romany and other flavours of Eastern Europe. The resident manager was a Romanian, who was an accomplished chess player, a Dee-Jay and as I learned over time, also the kind of guy that borrows something every time he sees you and returns nothing.

The stairwells in these individual buildings were grotty, dank and dimly betrayed much of the goings on of the sad-faced tenants. Some years before I came on scene, the building’s absentee owner had been forced to install panic bars on all the stairwell doors for fire safety. By design, they only opened if you were going down and out. The opposite sides had no handles.

I was heading down to the ground floor of the last building one day and subsequently spent forty-five claustrophobic minutes pacing needle-strewn and condom festooned fouled blue carpets in the glow of a sixty watt bulb. It smelled like stale pee and fresh tears. My incessant banging on a wall eventually summoned a working girl on the other side of the gyp-rock who dressed up and let me out. That was in the days before cell phones. That door had been installed backwards and was normally wedged open, unless she was turning a trick.

The mall out front had a laundromat, a café and a small independent super market. The café was handy for bacon, eggs, hash-browns, pancakes and coffee. Food that I loved but didn't indulge in much, in order to keep my expenses down. During my tenure on that route, a Vietnamese man took over the old original restaurant which resulted in better coffee and worse eggs. He installed several illegal slot-machines and business boomed.

A man who bore a striking resemblance to Baron Harkonnen from the movie Dune, always sat at one of the slot-machines with a fist full of twenty dollar bills. He wore a tee-shirt stained with his lunch and baggy shorts made from enough material to fill the sail-locker of a schooner. Thick eyeglasses that looked as if they had been cleaned with a strip of raw bacon and held by a miniature bungee cord running behind his skull, completed his outfit. His fly stayed open always and he wore an expensive watch and had rings on every finger in addition to a massive gold pendant that bore his initials hanging like an alloy albatross around his porcine neck.

I saw him as a pimp. Not the super-fly type of guy from old movies. But a dealer in human flesh, nonetheless. I will never know for sure but that was my assessment at the time. He was a resident of the attached apartment complex and I knew of him from delivering many packages to his door within the building. The first time I ever stood at his opened door is etched upon my mind.

Involuntarily, I beheld that the interior walls and ceiling, from my vantage, which included a view of the hallway, the living-room and the kitchen were papered over with hundreds of square feet of creased pornographic images torn from magazines with no names. The effect would have staggered a charging bull rhino. It was a vision from Dante's Inferno re-interpreted by Blake.

I did not like the creature and I struggled to call him a man because he didn't walk like one, didn’t talk like one nor did he look like my idea of a man. He was more like a Gollum character that had been inflated with a bicycle pump. The wretch got so many packages because his cash was apparently supplied by a Möbius strip of human suffering. I bit my lip, ground my teeth and held my breath every time my job dictated that I stand in his stench.

The Building Manager took me aside and asked me a few questions about some of the mail that was being received by some of his tenants. He was particularly interested in one name. I told him to explain what he wanted and why before I would consider answering him. He told me that a certain man had been letting the individual in question into the stairwells to turn tricks, inject drugs and sometimes sleep.

People were slipping on spent condoms and stubbing their sneakers on hypodermic needles cast about the grounds. The doors were being propped open at all hours and the Manager was getting fed up and clearly felt himself losing control of his realm. He had made some legal inquiries and had been told that there was a procedure that could be followed in order to get the man evicted. He got my full attention and wholehearted co-operation at that point.

The successful removal seemed to hinge upon a technicality. That is where I would come in. If the unfortunate addicted prostitute girl had been receiving mail in her name at the man's address, there would be sufficient grounds to legally proceed because of a clause in the rental agreement would have thus been breached and could also be documented and proven. I was overjoyed. There were children and elders in that building. Many of the elders I had spoken with had already endured the horrors of war and the horrors of Communist peace. The Manager himself had a bright, lovely wife and a fine young son.

My feeling was the feeling I get after having had a clogged sink and the Drano finally burns through and the pipe runs free again. I happened to have one of the crucial letters on hand and we marched to his office to photocopy the envelope. The Romanian asked if I had some binoculars. I had a big pair of ten by fifties and assumed it was for the mission, so I agreed to bring them next day. We shook hands on seeing the good project through.

Next day I brought my field glasses and they disappeared into a filing cabinet in the Manager's Office. I was told that I would be required soon to sign an affidavit and then the ball would really get rolling. I was starting to feel better about life on the very challenging piece of Vancouver real estate that was my route. The Romanian asked if he could borrow my World Cup Soccer VHS tape library and a few other items. I saw him nearly every weekday, so I acquiesced to his requests. His family were nice people and I was glad that soon they would be free of their resident evil.

I brought my VHS tapes and various other requested items on a daily basis in my mail pouches eagerly awaiting the signing of the forthcoming affidavit. In about a week, I was signing that paper to affirm the veracity of the photocopied letter which was used as the basis for the breach of the tenancy agreement in order to proceed with the needed eviction.

A short two weeks later, it was done. I did the Zorba dance in the lobby. All the women and children who knew the story were rejoicing. Some hadn’t cracked a smile in so many years that they seemed to have forgotten how. My heart was bursting with happiness and my mind with clarity. A small victory on my Trail of Tears! I went to the café to celebrate with a big plate of Hanoi Ham and Eggs. I ate with mucho gusto while watching the old man at his gaming table. As I rose to don my satchels, strap-up and go, he summoned me over in a stern voice.

I walked over to him and he produced a big sheaf of legal papers. My name stood out already highlighted in yellow marker. He stabbed a fat finger at my name and asked if that was me. I said that it sure as hell was. He looked at me as hard as a man with no viable moral fibre could and said nothing. I said that now that I was famous, I had better get going. I had already seen on his eviction notice that he would have to be gone by the end of that month. It wasn't long to wait, I reckoned.

The time passed and I brought various items from my home to fill the Romanian's ceaseless requests. Each item went into his filing cabinet drawers with the binoculars and tapes. I was proud of the man for standing up to the dark side. He was a father, a husband and in charge of a large building with some nice folks living in it. I was so proud of him that I lent him my chess set the following week.

A long awaited day finally dawned and I grinned as I pulled on my socks that morning. I cheerfully went to work with a song in my heart. When I got to the formerly blighted building later that day, I saw Gollum at his usual spot in the café. I reckoned he was just hooked on gambling and had driven over from his new lodgings, wherever that might have been. I didn't see the Manager anywhere around.

The next few days were the same. Finally, I cornered the Manager and asked him about it. He glanced furtively in every direction as he spoke to me. Getting information from him was like trying to comb a horses tail in a cloud of flies. Eventually, I gleaned that he had, for reasons he refused to share, decided to reverse the eviction on humanitarian grounds in consideration of the poor man's ill health.

Because he had a wife and young child, I didn't judge the Manager. He could have been easily compromised and coerced depending on the seriousness of the money making machinery above Gollum's head. To supply narcotics to a personal army of walking dead female slaves seemed to me beyond the organizational skills of that spiritual midget. Rather, I considered that the web had been shaken and now the spiders were awake.

I knew instantly that I was out on the ledge alone again and had better watch my own back. Weak people do bad things, bad people do worse things and scared people do inconceivable things. I took some actions the very next day, in two ways. Firstly, I went to the office and opened the filing cabinet drawer where all my loot was stashed. I put it in a mail bag and brought it home that night.

Secondly, I vowed to have coffee every morning in the café at a table right next to the man I saw as a sad vampire. We showed each other our teeth for months and months. I made mental notes of who he spoke to and what correspondence he received. I never chatted with the Manager again. I changed my delivery pattern every few days at random.

One afternoon back at my sortation station, I was given an urgent message by a postal colleague. He said that my customer, a Mr. Laptev, was out to have my head. I knew the name. he was a new immigrant from Bulgaria who lived in the unlucky building that is the focus of this story. I hadn't met the man yet but he regularly received bushels of third class bulk mail.

Evidently, he had stormed into the station fully livid and would have crushed me with his bare hairy hands had he found me. I was shown a junk mailing that was torn in half. It was a common scam run by publishers promising millions of dollars and delivering only unwanted subscriptions to substandard publications, along with endless bills, while silently selling the victim’s name and address to other print pirates.

I remembered getting the piece stuck halfway into the minuscule mail-slot, attempting to pull it out and accidentally tearing it in twain. I simply shoved the two halves into the slot, as it was obviously only garbage anyway. My customer must have come home moments later to retrieve his mail. He knew enough English to see that he had Won a Million Dollars! He also knew enough about life to see that the mailman had purposely torn the all-important verification code in half, out of brazen spite and naked, reckless envy.

This situation had to be nipped in the bud. I was fading enough heat and responsibilities on several other fronts. I assembled a little show and tell educational kit before leaving the postal station and making a bee-line back to Misery Manor. It had seven or eight pieces of junk mail and my boss's good magnifying glass. My co-worker tried to stop me and reiterated that this dude was in his opinion, certifiably homicidal.

I sought the Romanian because I needed his assistance for my project. He was a clever man and he was also conversant in Bulgarian. Their two respective countries shared the Danube, after all. Off we strode to the Laptev's door. I sent the Manager in first to ascertain if Laptev was armed. They spoke loudly for a few moments. The Bulgarian's voice finally piped down a few octaves and I was allowed in.

Three of us sat on a beat up green sofa. I spread the junk mail across the coffee table. I put the magnifying glass down. The Romanian's eyes lit up and he asked me in hushed tones if he could borrow it. I told him no and that it was already borrowed. Laptev eyed me with distrust. There was a garlic stench of the seventh magnitude of pungency issuing from his pores and my eyes watered as I prepared his lesson.

The Romanian was asked to translate my instructions, so that they could not possibly be misunderstood. He agreed. I first asked Laptev to get a pencil or pen. This gave him something active to do rather than just passively sitting, which no man likes to do. He returned with a pencil stub and was asked by me to look at a single word that I had written in big block letters on another scrap of paper. The word was if.

I next asked the Romanian to clearly define this word in Bulgarian. Then we started our classwork. Laptev was given the task of finding the if word on each different junk mail that I had laid out and circling it in pencil. He was allowed to use the magnifying glass to speed up his search. I could see his facial tension change when he sat back after the last if had been circled. and he had heard accurate translations of the sentences involving that word.

The two men had a brief spirited conversation in Bulgarian and then we all had a shot of some kind of liquor that tasted like plums and gasoline. Laptev showed me a picture of his young boy child and I showed him pictures of my sons. He handed me back the magnifying glass and the junk mail.

Then in very passable English, he said, “Doze cock-sucker-son-a-bitch! If and only fucking if! And I was go kill you! Million dollar if, go kiss my ass.”

Many years later, I saw a man that looked like Laptev selling delicious smoky hot-dogs from a licensed cart in Stanley Park. I approached him to verified the name on the license plaque. It was him! He talked about his girlfriend who was “much younger but very sexually satisfied” as I munched a jumbo with onions and gulped a soft drink. He leaned in close to tell me that the secret of his success with the ladies was eating raw garlic. I left so abruptly, I actually forgot to pay him.

After another passage of many more years, I was walking to the Old Main Post Office in downtown Vancouver on Georgia Street and I saw Laptev's cart once again! This time, there was a different guy cooking. He was a big, friendly younger fellow. I bought a jumbo smoky with onions and told him that I had knew Laptev. The young man smiled broadly and told me that he was Laptev's son. I mentioned that I had been his father's mailman when he first came to live in Canada.

The young man warmly gripped my hand for a hearty shake and said, “So..., you are the guy who told my Dad about if!”

fin