Jeff Burkhart: Doing it not just for the money

“What is it that you do exactly?” asked my nosy neighbor, holding her young child close to one side, and her little yapping dog even closer to the other.

It was not the first time that I have been asked that.

Bartenders keep odd hours. When everybody else is getting home from work, we are often just heading in. In my nightclub days, there were many times I would be arriving home just as people started waking up. I can remember passing a stock trader in the hallway of our apartment complex morning after morning for quite some time before he finally posited that question. I did get the distinct impression that he was hoping for a different answer.

For some people, livelihood is identity. And that is a fragile balance. And a dangerous one — for both stockbrokers and for bartenders.

Such was the case when my postal carrier finally got around to asking me that very same question.

I was always outside doing home projects or working on my cars when he dropped off the mail. One of the things I have always loved about working nights is that it is like having two different lives simultaneously. You can get an awful lot accomplished from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And then you go to work!

This time construct helped me in college, and it has certainly helped me in my professional writing career. Hemingway famously wrote during the day and then drank his evenings away. For me, the situation is a little different. I too go to the bar at night — just not to drink.

The postman and I struck up a rapport over shared interests. I had noticed his A’s hat in the window of his truck, and, having spent most of my elementary school days in the East Bay, that became a conversational entry point.

As the years went by, we became friends. The Warriors and Kings were a constant source of exchange. Several days a week at around 3 p.m. we would have a lively chat about this, or that, out by the mailbox. We even exchanged holiday cards.

People often say to me, “You work for tips, right?” And I have to say to them that I don’t look at it quite that way. I am there to provide a service, not just “make tips.” Sure, that is how I make the bulk of my money, but I actually like meeting and talking to people — not every single person, to be sure, but the vast majority of them. Hemingway once noted, “Most people never listen.” “When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say,” he wrote. Perhaps that is why I gravitated towards journalism — and bartending — in the first place. The story is not necessarily always about you. But if you are busy talking, then it always is.

Our conversations went on for many years. A relative of mine was frustrated by my experience. Somehow, she had developed a different relationship with her postal carrier. I think it began when her dog bit the carrier. And then it spiraled down to the point where she was picking up her mail at the post office directly.

“I’ll show her,” said my relative.

I don’t think that was the way that postal carrier saw it.

Barfly is the name of this column, and sure, the punny double entendre was intended: a combination of “fly on the wall,” and the classic bar novel “Barfly” by Charles Bukowski. But I have always thought of this column more along the lines of a comic version of his first novel: “Post Office.”

Bukowski worked 15 years for the postal service in Los Angeles. When he retired, he reportedly wrote “Post Office” in just a few weeks. The sordid portrayal of the life of a postal employee put him on the literary map — and on the outs with the post office.

Ray, my postal carrier, retired this week after 25 years and I gave him a copy of Bukowski’s book.

But judging from Ray’s personality, there will be no scathing indictment, just plenty of wonderful memories of people gathering by their mailboxes waiting for their mail, and a conversation.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• If you enter the service business only for the money, it’s probably going to be a disappointing experience, both for you and for the people you provide that service to.

• It’s important to leave a service job when you have had enough, because not all of us have the literary capabilities of Bukowski.

• “I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they’re not around,” wrote Bukowski in “Barfly.”

• “Nice to see you,” said Ray the postman.

• The other day, my mail came after I had left for work for the first time in a quarter century — just saying.

• Congratulations on a great career, Ray; you will be missed.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com