Welfare Wednesdays were always busy days on the Trail (my East Vancouver postal route). A letter-carrier’s sortation case is a piece of maple furniture and the desk portion of it is about three and a half feet wide. On Welfare Days, my route’s Welfare Cheques, when faced-up and tightly packed, would span three quarters of the way across that surface. Many of the addresses received multiple cheques, if not the majority.
At large apartment buildings I would be greeted on welfare days by a large crowds milling around the lobby mailboxes. Hands would go fishing into the opened boxes while other hands thrust every manner of counterfeited ID cards into the my line of sight in hopes of collecting a cheque. In those days, I was just learning the ropes. The day following the distribution of the Welfare Cheques were an exercise in avoiding the sprawled bodies of those whose monetary allowance was now being processed by their compromised livers. Retailers of heroin, cocaine, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, speed, meth, fast food and taxi drivers all posted their largest monthly profits on that day.
Sometimes my customers were desperate and thus behaved very aggressively. A missing cheque could easily bring out a lock-blade, a razor, a screw-driver or a good old-fashioned fistful of skull rings. Many of the mail-boxes were broken at the hinges from being pried open or simply left open as a remedy for lost keys. The cheques for those ruined boxes had to be hand delivered, which burned up precious daylight during the Winter.
It soon became apparent that I would need to learn various methods of crowd control in order to avoid scenarios where the inmates were running the asylum. Having dozens of strange people swarming you, reaching into your mail pouch and the unlocked mailboxes, was a negation of the principals of your job as a postal employee, not to mention an undermining of personal security. A verbal threat to walk out of the lobby with the money would only work once for dispersing a typical Welfare crowd.
The second instance of that same ploy was useful only to identify the most aggressive denizens who always came forward with threats of their own. The vacant wet eyes of unwed mothers and their pitiful snot-nosed babies, tugged my heart and made it impossible for me to get any consistency in the employment of my trial and error methods of staying safe and in control of the mail.
Once, when I was delivering to a new street of calls that had been added on to my route in a restructuring of my Station; I took a short-cut through a tall, stately cedar hedge. It was a Welfare Day on an upward sloping street of dilapidated, mouldering stucco houses with a large apartment building dominating the corner. The hedge was a living fence for those apartments. Unbeknownst to me, the building's foundations had been dug six feet into the hill when it was constructed.
Weighing one hundred and sixty-two pounds, my two satchels of mail added another seventy. I pushed open the yielding evergreen branches with a particularly beautiful shing-i move I had learned in pa kua kung fu lessons. Stepping into the void at speed maintaining one-point, which technique I had mastered in aikido years prior to these events, my legs cycled like a cartoon character's until landing among the exposed roots of the cedars about two feet forward of the wall.
It was muddy ground and the impact was greatly compounded by the weight of my burden. Landing like a cat on both feet, my knees rose up, split my lip, bloodied my nose and blackened both my eyes when they came to rest against my brow. Measurement proved that a good fifty paces of distance had been trimmed off my day by the venture. There were long, nasty scratches down both my arms and legs. My shirt was ripped where it had caught on a stubby branch.
I stood up cursing my luck in Swedish and brushed off most of the mess. I saw myself in the reflection of the apartment's lobby doors. My new welcoming committee of Welfare Cheque recipients was already fitfully assembled on their stained, blue carpet because I had arrived at an hour later than their previous postie’s schedule. I turned my Crown Key in the door’s micro-switch and let myself in. There was mud, blood and bark mulch all over me, my equipment and the mail itself.
A tight knot of people broke away from the wall of mailboxes like grease does when you drop soap into dish-water. There were murmurs, stutters, whispers and a few exclamations. No one asked me for any favours or special treatment as was usually the case at a new call. Not a soul showed me a fake ID. That alone was more than adequate compensation for the pain and suffering of my fall, in my estimation. It was as quiet as a casket showroom. I started to feel better. I deposited all the cheques that had working boxes without any molestation and locked everything back up snug. The remaining unsecured items were given to care of the resident manager, who sorted through the creative identifications.
On the way out of the lobby, I turned to the those assembled, grinned and said, “Y'all do not want to see what that other son-of-a-bitch looks like.”
Back on the streets, on any given Welfare Day, in front of every second house on average, there would be cars and trucks idling. ID would be thrust out of vehicle windows and claims would be made to have just moved in or to have just moved out of a particular premises nearby.
“Could I just hand the cheques into the car?” was the question.
Every residential mailbox in this neighbourhood got an average of a half-dozen different cheques dropped in. Some for the main floor and some for the basement. Many hardy individuals stood drenched in rainy front yards waiting to get "their" cheques rather than waiting nice and dry inside “their” houses.
One fellow I remember was always enjoying the latest big-screen TV model and had an old but immaculate Cadillac parked outside. He sat on his sofa smoking a bong and was always quick with a snide comment about how easy my job was. He particularly loved to tell me that I was late. A serious provocation for a postie, as we work with a wide array of variables, all of which are beyond our personal control. In fact, there is no guaranteed set time of delivery officially extended by the Corporation to any given address beyond a commitment to whether or not a given call will see mail before or after noon.
Seven out of ten people on any East Vancouver street will stop and look at their watch when they see a mailman go by and this used to irritate the hell out me. That is, until I realized how ridiculous they looked. After a year or so on the beat, I was able to spot those seven out of ten and beat them to the punch. My cheap spiral notepad was whipped out after I consulted my own wrist-watch and my disapproving glare usually helped to put their thoughts back upon their own business.
Another guy I will always remember, was a young father with a little son. He met me every Welfare Day out on the street at my relay box where I loaded up my satchels with mail. He always bummed a smoke and I always let him roll one of my Drums while I dug out his cheque. He was a big, strong guy and he talked a lot about his pretty wife and his beautiful baby boy. Their address was a basement suite down the block. I figured he was just lonesome and anxious to get to the cheque cashing window at the Money Mart as quick as possible. We spoke of many things over several years.
One Welfare Wednesday he came out for his cheque as usual but this time he looked distraught. We had a smoke and began our chat. To my complete surprise, he began to cry. Not a loud blubbering, only a red face with salt-water streaming down into his black beard. He fidgeted with the cheque and told me that he couldn't carry on what he was up to.
I asked him what he meant exactly by that. He told me that he didn't live at the address on the Welfare Cheque, nor did he even live in that neighbourhood! He was collecting multiple Welfare Cheques from multiple addresses with fake IDs he bought for a few bucks in Chinatown. He said that guilt was eating him up like a grub working its way through an apple.
He was ashamed and said that he really, truly did have a pretty wife and a beloved son. He said he was going to stop the con-artist, bull-shit hustle and begin to sweat for his daily bread as an example to his son. He handed me back the Welfare Cheque and it was my turn to get itchy eyes. We had another smoke and I clapped him on the back, shook his hand and assured him that honesty would in no way be an easy road but that's why the Great Spirit had gifted him with physical strength, a stout heart and a functioning brain. I never saw him again.
Not long after that incident, I was at the Cadillac man's house and he hoisted his bulk off the couch and came out to his rusty screen door to register his disapproval of the Post Office, letter-carriers, the System and me in particular. He had pizza sauce on his tee-shirt and he smelled like a dead thing. It made me angry.
An old Texas Cherokee saying came to my mind. Something my Grandmother had said to me in anger at her kitchen table in Beaumont, Texas. I was about five years old and had been overly fickle about my preferred breakfast that morning. She had already prepared bacon and eggs and then some pancakes. I wouldn't eat either and suggested we have grits. She gripped my tee-shirt in her fist and pulled me up close to her face.
“Stand up on my back and I'll carry you for as long as my strength holds out; but if you try to wipe your moccasins, I will tear you a brand new ass-hole!”
With that sentiment, I started up a little project the very next Welfare Day. One that took four full years to complete. I had to use my Swedish love of perfection, my German expertise in organization, my Welsh enthusiasm, my Irish gift of the gab and my Cherokee love of grits. I will sketch it out here for you.
I systematically knocked on every door of every house, basement suite and apartment on my route every Welfare Day. The task took four years because many people were not home on any given Welfare Wednesday and I only had one chance of personal contact per month. I was verifying the residency of the names on the cheques. I also only accepted the officially approved ID options. I did not deliver to car windows nor to rainy hands lurking in the front yards.
Sometimes this practice made for comical scenes. There was one guy who had been standing in an ice cold rain for hours in “his” front yard. He was unable to produce any ID. He then gave a version of an opera that I had committed to memory in its essence, though in detail it was always tailor-made. It involved moving in or moving out, a mean, negligent landlord, a fiercely psychotic girlfriend, a tragically lost ID and Inter-Provincial legal hassles of all kinds. When the tale was told, I asked use “his” toilet inside “his” house since he had “just moved in.” Then, we could forgo the lost ID, I told him. He stammered that he had meant to say that he had “just moved out.”
I reminded him that the old man who actually lived there for fifty years had died only a week prior and neighbours had already disconnected his TV cable and ran it through their basement window. Three dudes waiting thirty feet away in a van, began to laugh so hard it made the guy I was dealing with dangerously angry at me when I re-pocketed “his” cheque. The value of the cheques in those days was around $350 each.
I decided to try a new tack and I told him to that for 5.72% of the take, I could deliver cheques right to the van window and he wouldn't ever have to get wet. I had calculated a fair share a few days before as a matter of social systems research. At twenty dollars per cheque, I could siphon five grand a month off my route with this modest non-residence charge alone. My prospective partner’s face screwed up and he started to clench his fists, spit and stammer. His mates in the van had to drag him back inside the vehicle by his Metallica tee-shirt in order to go to the next bogus address.
The turnaround time from a person's death to their mailbox being co-opted in this neighbourhood was about three days. In the whole four year exercise, I found not one fraudster willing to share twenty dollars out of their ill-gotten gains in return for my cooperation. Even when I explained to them that if I knowingly gave them a bogus cheque, I would be an accessory to fraud and thus I would be entitled to a share of the loot. This honour among thieves angle always rankled, like artificial pearls before canny swine.
The bogus cheques I culled out were always returned to the Welfare Department properly endorsed with the reason for their return. One particular house had been the recipient of a half dozen Welfare Cheques and an additional half dozen Unemployment Cheques. I had never found anyone home to verify these items. Finally, one day, three years into my project, I was relieved to see a man cleaning up the tall weeds in the front yard.
I asked him about each recipient of my fistful of cheques. He replied that he was an absentee owner and that his house had been vacant now for about ten years. As I endorsed the bogus dozen cheques for return and the homeowner began nailing plywood over the windows, a guy in a black leather jacket coming down the sidewalk came up to me. He was rude in demeanour and vehemently demanded the dozen cheques. I told him no and he began to size me up. Walking away slowly, I kept my eyes on him. He followed behind me, uttering threats. I stopped and asked him if he'd ever seen a raccoon get riled up. Evidently he had.
Over his shoulder I could see a café on my route where a pimp played slot-machines with twenty dollar bills earned by heroin addicted girls in apartment stairwells. Several doors down in the other direction was a house where a boy had recently stabbed his father to death. Across the street was a house with bullet holes all down the wall next to the mail box. My ears were all the way back and I guess it showed. He stabbed the air in front of me with all his skull rings and bracelets and told me to watch my back. I watched his back as he stomped down the sidewalk, crossed Fraser St. and headed toward the café.
At the end of the four years, I had remaining only about four inches of legitimate Welfare and Unemployment Cheques to deliver on Welfare Wednesdays. Did I make any exceptions? Yes. One. Let me explain why. I spoke to a woman one afternoon who had previously been a Social Worker. She explained to me that many of the people coming in from war zones had literally been born and raised in transit camps and detention centres. In those realities, corruption rules by necessity. She had experience working with Vietnamese war refugees in Vancouver.
When such people are relocated to host countries, they don't automatically unlearn what they already know. Neither do their children figure out new ways of behaving sometimes for a generation or so. This phenomenon has no race, age, creed nor gender. My own research into gypsies had taught me much the same things that this woman was now explaining to me. When you put metal in fire, you harden it. When you put people in dire straights, you foster their cunning.
In gypsy culture, for example, there are many taboos to do with males and females. These restrictions seem very strange to the gadjo but are completely logical and understandable. In the distant past the Rom had been put into transit camps and concentration camps while being transported to the Middle-East from India as human gifts to a foreign dignitary for the amusement of his own over-taxed subjects in order to entertain them and thus avert a revolt.
While in those camps, the women and the leading men had created a new culture of mystique surrounding the powers and dangers of the females. Males could not use the same implements as women nor even touch certain things belonging to women or girls. The worst curse that could befall an unfortunate man (and there were some bad ones) was to be “flashed” by an offended woman. This entailed her raising her skirts in the direction of the male being cursed and showing him her genitalia. Anyone, so cursed had not long to live and he knew it as surely as the sun comes up.
Why do that? In the unnatural environment of closely quartered and harshly imprisoned men, women and children, it is only a matter of time before women and children begin to suffer at the hands of men. That is, unless there are some cleverly-wrought taboos in place for at least two generations, so that they become baked into the psyche and culture to act as deterrents. In a natural healthy environment, much, but not all of this becomes unnecessary, in my reckoning.
Back to my one exception, she happened to be a pleasant Vietnamese woman whom I guessed was about forty-five years old. Someone's sister, someone's mom, someone's wife, someone’s daughter. When I asked her about the names on all the cheques that came to her house, she broke into tears. Sobbing, she gripped both my arms, pulled me inside her house and closed the door.
When she could speak, she told me that the names were all Vietnamese Canadian young men who had never lived at the address. She knew some of them from her own extended family and some of them were total strangers. She had already been threatened with serious violence if she didn't continue to receive those cheques. The boys would be coming to her house later that same day to pick them up. I gave her the cheques and my word to continue to do so for as long as I walked her Trail.
fin