I rarely get DVD orders anymore, since most people prefer digital downloads, but recently someone in Switzerland ordered both my documentaries on Jim Thompson on DVD. Off I went to the Hollywood Main Post Office, package and customs paperwork in hand.
Hollywood Main happens to be my USPS branch, but it’s no ordinary post office. An imposing 1937 Art Deco edifice designed by Claud Beelman*, the building could pass for a museum, a library or Masonic temple. Its soaring windows and heavy glass doors let in abundant light and air. Inside its double-height hall, giant replicas of stamps honoring movie stars like Shirley Temple and Gregory Peck remind customers that this is no ordinary post office. It isn’t. There’s marble on the walls and the floors are travertine. Also, Hollywood Main Post Office has an official alias (Hollywood Station), a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and its own Wikipedia page.
In contrast, the area’s branch post offices all date in the charmless post-war era of low ceilings and cramped rooms. Inside the light is dim; fortunately, there’s nothing to look at while inching toward the clerk’s window. Which is not to say the lines at Hollywood Station aren’t long—they are, and sometimes agonizingly so—but at least there’s natural light. There’s fresh air too, coming through the huge glass doors people come and go. And by people, I mean everyone: young, old, well-dressed, scruffy; people who mail packages for a living and people who’ve never mailed a package before; passport applicants, entire families with children in tow; people buying money orders; people moving away; people moving in—in short, the entire community. Along with the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, it’s the most democratic place I know.
In the days before digital downloads, I used to make one or two trip a week to mail DVDs. One day as I greeted Joyce, my favorite clerk, by name, a woman behind me in line muttered disapprovingly, “If you know their names, you’re spending too much time here.” Perhaps I was but I always enjoyed our transactions, and the wait was made bearable by communal sighs and occasional chats with fellow customers. During Covid, the lines were long and masks made conversation difficult. But there were still visual pleasures, like seeing a guy wearing head-to-toe Bob Marley gear.
Last week Hollywood Station was typically busy, but the line was moving faster than usual. No one was wearing a mask except me, a habit left over from my recent trip to Japan. The mood was light until a man in a blue suit stormed over to the package pick-up window and demanded to file a complaint against the clerk who had just served him. “He was so rude, and I was being nice!”, Blue Suit protested loudly, and proceeded to tell the second clerk and all of us about his grievance, which apparently concerned the contents of a package. “He said ‘I just need to know there isn’t a dead body in there!’’ Blue Suit cried, furiously filling out the complaint form. He then tried to enlist others to his cause, stalking from window to window and demanding, “Can you believe this guy?”
At that point, people’s forbearance broke. One man said, “Hey, you’re interrupting me.” Another said, “Sorry about your small dick” in a voice that was audible to everyone but Blue Suit. “What did you say?”, he demanded. There was a brief silence, after which a young woman said, as if projecting from the stage, “He said, Sorry about your small dick!”
I anticipated an altercation between the two men, but Blue Suit chose the messenger instead. First he mocked her pigtails, then chided her for wearing shorts, as if the Post Office suddenly had a dress code. He was still there when I left, taunting the woman and calling her Wednesday, so I don’t know how it ended. But there was electricity among the customers, as if everyone was getting ready to eject Blue Suit by force. In my eighteen years as a regular at Hollywood Station, I’ve never seen anything like it.
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*Beelman also designed Los Angeles’s greatest Art Deco structure, the magnificent Eastern Columbia Building.