When I wrote Postal Service I didn’t have a name for my main character until I was pretty far along. I wanted to reference Johnny Cash’s rendition of The Ballad of John Henry since I was a carrier and the Postal Service was banking its future on machines that would replace the clerks and carriers. Once I put that song in I decided to name the mailman Henry Johnson, which quickly became just plain Hank.
Since Hell on Earth, a love story is the story leading up to Postal Service, Hank picked up his second leading role. But I wanted to pay tribute to another singer in this book.
John Prine is a great songwriter and storyteller. Like Hank, he was also in the Army—Hank in Vietnam and John in Germany. Some of Prine’s most famous songs dealt with the Vietnam War and the similarities don’t end there. He also just happens to be an ex-letter carrier who delivered mail in Chicago, which is where Eddie Repulski set the door-to-door vacuum cleaner selling record of 60 machines in one month.
In Hell on Earth I write about the Bob Hope Show and the influx of GI’s coming to Long Binh to watch it. There was a fairly large amphitheater but it was not big enough to accommodate everyone. So many of the men were content to watch the show from the top of a telephone pole “the way John Prine listened to Little Richard sing Tutti Frutti on a beach in Indiana when he was nine years old.”
A novel can be many things but it is almost always a string of individual and often unrelated events that when brought together somehow gives new meaning to them all. Take a little war, an interesting part time job, a lot of other not so interesting jobs, a favorite song, an idea you get riding home from a date one night, a Charles Bukowski poetry reading on Halloween night and before you know it you have a book staring back at you on the computer screen. And that’s not all you have.
You should do a followup post to this one, including your photo interpretation. The writing you submitted for your interpretation reads like your last paragraph here, only it is the Jackson Pollock version, visually full of dots and squiggles and blobs instead of times and events and people. Both serve the same purpose though. This last paragraph is written beautiful, as though you are flipping through a stack of pictures, each representing one of these events, each bringing you instantly back to an isolated moment in time. I think one of the biggest technology losses we will never fully feel is the shift from film to digital because there is something about holding a picture in hand that can transport you anywhere in time.
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