©Pamela Rice, 2005
It
wasn’t until I became a bike messenger myself that I really noticed
them: my disparate colleagues—mostly young black men in baggy tops and
mid-calf slacks—are seen all over town these days sporting boutique
goodie bags with colorful strings. It’s not that they’ve taken out from
their day to do a little shopping in the SoHo district or the Upper East
Side. It’s work-related toting. The glam-job ilk of our town is
buttering up its clients with pretty bag-encased gifts, and New York’s
messengers are employed to cart them to their destinations. They coyly
bedazzle you, dangling from spray painted handlebars, stimulating the
senses. Beyond that, the bags are really quite cumbersome and even
hazardous to the person on the bike.
Ultimately, the goodie bags
may hold accessories, cosmetics, shower gels. Who knows? In the custody
of the messengers, they’re emblematic of a sharply dichotomous world
into which I placed myself for a four-week stint this past summer.
Though my own background could more closely put me in league with the
goodie-bag people, I found myself at once part of the vast network of
lumpenproletariat where, from the bottom rungs, everything looks a lot
different. If I didn’t keep my nails clipped, they would tear off of my
fingers anyway. A path of leisure, this is not. This is hard
manual labor; make no mistake about it.
For me, being a bike
messenger was the equivalent of throwing up my hands in total
frustration, the culmination of an eight-month quest to find a real job.
Curiously, no sooner was I making bike deliveries that I got hired in a
more appropriate field, promptly ending my brilliant career as a
courier and landing me behind a computer. And wouldn’t you know it, it
was just about that time that I was getting to love the physicalness of
the job. Of course, no way could I have turned down the new offer. It
paid about four times as much, and even it represents no great pay in
New York City.
As I’ve already hinted, I was not your typical
messenger. There may be more than a few sideline writers working for the
city’s courier firms. But, I imagine, there are far fewer 50-year-old,
white, college-educated, female,
raised-in-the-lily-white-suburbs-of-Chicago writers, who are delivering
packages on bikes around this town these days, or perhaps ever.
Naturally, I’m tomboyish and fiercely athletic and have never been
typical when it came to anything. Still, this life’s detour was a bit
beyond the pale even for me.
Then again, the chronicler
ever-calls to me from my very bones, so it wasn’t long before I began to
fashion myself carrying on in the tradition of John Howard Griffin
(Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed). As I peddled
around the city streets and avenues, I knew I had to bring the bike
messenger’s story to light. But not just the utter exploitation and
danger of it all. I wanted to tell about the good parts, too. So, along
with all my other bike-bag gear, I carried with me a camera and a
mini-cassette tape recorder.
Today, as I sit cooped up in an
office, it is not difficult at all to direct my mind back to those
good-old messenger days. One in particular seems to repeat in my mind:
I’m coasting westward down the incline of the Transverse Road that
connects East 78th and West 81st Streets; I ponder the moment: Could I
really be getting paid to do this? Here I was in Central Park—albeit in
one of those dug-out roads that keeps cars invisible to the park’s
revelers above—and I’m taking it all in: the summer bouquet of scents,
the breeze filling in around my neck, and the chirps and chatters of
birds and squirrels.
I’ve been assigned to fulfill an order for
delivery. An otherwise mundane thing, yet I’m experiencing, excuse me,
unmitigated glee. This stretch of road, long ago dug out of mud and
Manhattan schist, has become my momentary easy street, one I never could
have anticipated traveling when I sent that Email of inquiry to
Breakaway Couriers about job opportunities. On such days, I could never
imagine working indoors again. Yet here I sit.
Most would recoil
at the choice of work, but messengering has always held a fascination
for me. So much about the job holds appeal. Albeit, it is tiring to
boot, but that’s just the physical challenge. There’s something inside
of me that welcomes making it all come together. The best messengers are
those who not only possess strength, physical coordination, and brawn,
but uncommon brain power, mental balance, and wit.
The mind of a
messenger has to be geared up to a place of hyper-cognizance without the
slightest intermission throughout the day. No flaking out, even for an
instant or the result will surely be hitting someone or something or
being hit. Zone out for a second and you may forget to lock your bike or
to get a signature. Drift into a daydream and you could end up going
out of your way to pick up or deliver a package. Once, I went to the
drop-off address before making the pick-up; that hurt. Essentially, you
have to be very smart and on alert all day—a day that must be
particularly long in order to bring in anything resembling payback.
Beyond
this, I admit, I loved being the oddity—the menopausal messenger, as I
called myself. And besides, I felt so rip-roaring cool with my helmet,
bike bag slung across my chest, my two-way radio hooked on the strap,
and the dispatcher beeping me for my position. “Second Avenue and 49th
Street,” I’d say, perhaps. “Coooopy that,” he’d reply in a seasoned
drawl that amused me every time.
Indeed, in my two-score and 10
years on this earth I’ve found I tend to relish standing out from the
crowd, breaking the mold, shocking people a little. I’m a bit of an
exhibitionist, I guess. When someone said, “Ah, a lady messenger!”—or
something to that effect—a flash of pride swept over me. Or was that a
hot flash?
Actually, I soon found that repeatedly getting the
heart rate up, pressing one’s quadriceps to a low-level burn on the
city’s inclines all day, goes a long way to quell change-of-life
symptoms. In fact, I would heartily recommend the job to anyone who
suffers from hot flashes and/or, for that matter, anyone who can’t stick
to a diet. When you’re either on your feet or peddling for eight to
nine hours at a stretch, several days a week, figure you can eat just
about anything and as much of it as you want and not gain a pound.
Messengering has to be the ultimate diet strategy. Take on this job and
you can definitely shuck that $2000-a-year health-club membership,
pronto, and yet look as though you didn’t.
Oh, and when this
messenger eventually got home after her “workout,” food and drink was
noticeably more delectable than on any day spent behind a computer. And
sloughing the grime with a shower became the equivalent of a trip to the
spa.
Now that I’ve seen a healthy—no pun intended—dose of this
kind of work, I’m also prepared to say that it offers one of the best
views of the city anyone can ask for. It’s amazing the access a
messenger gets—if only for moments at a time—into many of the city’s
coveted inner sanctums. Unlike the UPS man, the messenger’s route is not
fixed. My day was always new and different every time I went out. On
occasion, I used the access to my advantage, dropping off résumés if I
thought a place looked interesting—though this practice was not the way I
hooked into my present situation.
In the end, do you want to see
this town in all of its richness and rawness? Be a messenger. Did you
hear that, tourists? Down in the bowels of the giant office buildings,
in the messenger centers where I went to pick up and drop off packages,
one doesn’t have to put up with phonies and sycophants, the bane of
every tourist, no? It’s for real here, very earthy—reality TV, without
the TV.
So, skip that Broadway show, blow off the Statue of
Liberty this time. Courier away your stay and you may even get a tan.
For sure, you’ll witness the rich underbelly of this great city like no
tour could ever show, and you’ll even be paid to see it. Meanwhile,
you’re able to take in that New York City ethos in a way you might never
imagine. Local color? This place is emblazoned with it, particularly in
the back corridors of the sewing trades, in the lobbies of Times Square
theaters, in that West side museum you never heard of, in the graphic
studios of the 20s, the galleries in Soho, and in the high-rent Fifth
Avenue residences along Central Park.
One day had me taking a car
elevator up to my drop-off point, a loft in the Meat District. As I
ascended, large gaps in the wall allowed me to see breathtaking vistas
of New York’s expansive harbor.
Another day had me in the same
elevator with the transit-beat reporter for New York 1, Bobby Cuza. I
was picking up a package from the station’s Ninth Avenue studio, and of
course I had to put in my two cents about how I hate SUVs that park in
the bike lane. He told me he’d keep my concerns in mind for his next
show.
All in all, I spent a lot of time in Times Square and
Midtown in the 50s. I once even delivered an envelope to “The Honorable
Henry Kissinger.”
Honorable. It looked odd to these eyes, I
recall. I took a moment to relay to my dispatcher the name on the label.
“Murderer is more like it,” I said, recalling Operation Linebacker II,
the no-holds-barred bombing campaign in the last throws of America’s
involvement in the Vietnam War, which provided the backdrop for
Kissinger’s Paris negotiations with the North. But I digress.
Seriously,
it crossed my mind: If only there were some program for tourists to be
messengers once they blew into town. Now there’s an idea for some
enterprising business person!
Or am I projecting? Do I love New
York City that much? Probably. I tend to be a person who relishes in all
those New York moments—the human condition on steroids, you might say:
the hype, the pathos, the absurdity, the despicable, the poignant, and
the sublime. There it was on display constantly, live and in color, as I
biked around the city. It was all so rich that even if my paycheck
could have supported it, I’d have little need for the theater, or, for
that matter, anything stimulating at all.
Day in and day out,
there I was negotiating rivers of densely packed crowds at
intersections, coasting along the magnificent expanse of Park Avenue in
the 70s, taking freight elevators 30 stories in solitude to get my
signature. What need I for canned entertainment? None. Absolutely none.
And
there in the midst of all the intensity, as the rapid-fire dramas
played out, and they did without pause, I found that New Yorkers never
lost their signature blasé attitude. I once saw about 20 police cars all
at once career down Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District, sirens
blaring every one of them, and the pedestrians along the sidewalks, I
watched, barely looked up. It’s got to be a game of hold-out. How
seemingly unaffected can you remain while everything around you is vying
to raise your blood pressure to new heights. Don’t crack. As for me, I
tend to smile a lot, just to show ’em. But that’s me and another story.
Whenever
I could, I got into conversations with others in the trade. One wizened
geezer told me as he and I rode alongside one another on Sixth Avenue
that he’d been messengering the New York City streets for nine years.
His secret?—taking it slow but sure. He wasn’t like the young ones, he
emphasized, but he was alive to tell his tale. Had he known colleagues
who’d been hurt or even killed on the job? Had he known messengers who
are currently standing trial, liable for hitting a pedestrian? “Sure,”
he told me without hesitation.
Which leads me to traffic. Or
should I say, “Don’t get me started”? Two things work together in New
York to ensure that cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians will collide:
underpaid messengers, paid by the job, not the hour, and vehicles
hogging the road. I once yelled at a guy in an SUV parked in the bike
lane, “You can’t park here; you’re blocking two lanes and causing a
hazard.” “Eat shit,” was his immediate response.
So there you
have it. Damn, if only being a messenger wasn’t so annoying or, for that
matter, frighteningly dangerous and infused with potentially
life-altering pitfalls! Alas, the danger factor surely puts the courier
profession in New York City on par with Hollywood stunt work. No doubt a
few daredevils choose messengering because of the risk. However, most
do it because no other viable career choices present themselves. Some
will even tell you that it’s tough to get into the business unless you
“know someone.” Imagine that.
Indeed, the city’s courier
firms—Breakaway, Urban Express, and Flash, just to name a few—are paying
what the market requires of them. Messengers are not exactly a dime a
dozen these days, but close. The firms are regularly inundated with
applicants. At one time, the 1980s in particular, messengers were in
demand. The ad agencies were flourishing and computers had yet to make
significant inroads. These days, instead of physical proofs—bluelines,
Cromalins, or stats—the entire printing/publishing/advertising world is
transmitting PDF files in an instant via E-mail attachments. The
practice has dealt a blow to the courier business. And now, messengering
is simply not a viable job for anyone who actually needs to rely on the
pay to live.
When I interviewed, my orientation officer told me
that some messengers make as much as $700 per week. But even he admitted
that those in this bracket represent a rare elite. And during the slow
summer months, pay like this is essentially impossible to earn. And
then, if a messenger wants to keep much of this for himself, he is going
to have to keep expenses down somehow. This, despite the fact that he’s
responsible for just about all of them: bicycle purchases and
maintenance, two-way-radio purchase and minutes, and even the bike bag
(often advertising the company name) and flat tires on the job. (For the
record, a cab driver not in business for himself does not pay out of
his own pocket when he gets a flat tire.) Furthermore, for the bike
messenger, the cost for worn-out brake pads and cables must be borne by
him. Incidentally, numerous items can be purchased at cost from the
company the messenger works for. Is this the return of the detestable
“company store”? I think so. And when a messenger is victimized by
theft—a virtual inevitability—he can end up forfeiting pay representing a
week and a half or more just to buy another bike to get back on the
job. In the end, nearly all liability falls on the messenger, a person
who can’t even begin to pay for his own life or health insurance.
Finally, on his meager salary, which probably hovers more in the
neighborhood of $400 per week or less, he also, of course, has to pay
tax.
And what about fuel costs. Naturally, bike messengers burn
more calories than the average person. They must eat considerably more
food, which in New York City can, again, put anyone back substantially.
An estimate on that score, which was done by Ames, Iowa-based Bikes At
Work, shows that a messenger requires roughly 3,000 more calories a day
than the typical sedentary worker. I found that much of my income was
literally eaten up: fruit venders around town tended to be the
beneficiaries of my increased food needs.
In 1998, a
self-employed Toronto foot courier named Alan Wayne Scott won a 16-year
battle with the Canadian government to give him a tax deduction for the
additional calories he needed to perform in his job. As yet, the U.S.
tax code does not allow for this kind of break, even though counting
fuel costs as a tax deduction for car use to run a business might as
well be considered a God-given right.
Besides getting enough to
eat, a messenger must strategize in order to pay the rent. He must
ask himself how far away in bike miles from high-rent Manhattan—where
all the work is—can he physically afford to live. He has to ration his
energy carefully or suffer from exhaustion getting to and from his place
of employment. With any luck, our messenger actually lives in
Manhattan, necessarily in a rent-stabilized apartment and not far from
his first pick up. But that’s probably too much luck to ask for.
Which
leads me to how the terrorists won in post-9/11 America. Or rather, how
the messengers, particularly in New York City, lost. Layers of
increased security in the city’s office buildings only delay a
messenger’s ability to get his packages to their destinations. Again,
where seconds count for a person paid by the job, those layers
only work to hurt him. From a civil liberties point of view, the
messenger just better assume the security cameras are on him almost
incessantly. To get into buildings these days doesn’t exactly
necessitate a cavity search. Yet a messenger usually has to sign in with
the lobby guard. He may be subjected to interrogation if he lacks
proper identification. And his packages may have to be electronically
scanned. It all adds up to costly delays for the messenger. One time I
was asked to talk into a little ball of a video camera to state my name,
messenger number, and firm. No doubt in a computer somewhere that file
still takes up disk space for all of posterity. How long will it be
before messengers are implanted with homing devices to track their every
move via global positioning systems?
Besides security, another
time eater is actually finding addresses. Experience counts here,
although no messenger is going to know every building in the city. With
each pick up or delivery, I hoped that I was going to be lucky and the
address would match the one in the Email from my dispatcher. Half the
time it didn’t. The real address was more likely than not a “messenger
center,” which was perhaps 10 to 50 yards away from the address of the
building. Usually, I had already parked my bike, so all the more would I
be losing valuable seconds and even minutes getting to the real
address.
Who’s benefiting?
So what is so important that
it has to be messengered same-day across town? I almost never knew for
sure what I had in my bag, but usually I had a hunch. I feel pretty
certain none of it was contraband, although, again, I never really knew.
From the sizes, shapes, origins, and destinations of the packages, I
figured that often it’s checks that are being transferred. Blueprints are
another thing hitching a ride. A model’s portfolio may need careful
handling, the kind that cannot be trusted even to an overnight firm. A
stack of one-of-a-kind magazines: these need special services as well.
In the garment trade, I’ve found, wholesale items are reviewed by buyers
on the spot. They need 90-minute turn-arounds, too. In the end these
are just a few of the kinds of items that legitimately need quick
transport, that which can only be provided via bicycle.
Goodie
bags? These could go overnight, but would lack a bit of panache going
that route. Then again, there is that ready workforce waiting, willing,
and eager. And so it happens that messenger companies have strangely
come to see the overnighters—FedEx, DHL, and the like—as their
competition, matching prices with them. Who wouldn’t go for the faster
method if it didn’t mean paying more.
So without a union and
without adequate labor laws to protect him, a messenger delivers
packages for roughly $15 a piece, out of which he makes a small cut. The
service ought to go for $25, and the messenger provided a living wage. But
first, the words “ought” and “should” don’t have a place in market
economies. And second, the word “wage” is a misnomer. Again, messengers
are normally paid by the job. So, ultimately low-ball prices translate
into low-ball pay for messengers.
A company like Breakaway—and I
don’t mean to pick on them—keeps competitive by offering same-day
turn-arounds for the price of overnighting. People who could afford to
pay more for the luxury of a ninety-minute turnaround are, without
knowing it, placing the burden of such a bargain on the shoulders of the
lowly messenger. In turn, the people who regularly send those gift
bags, or whatever else, soon grow to expect the insanely low prices.
Out and around
An
Email comes in on my two-way. I dismount to write down seven pieces of
information on my manifest for each job. Unlike FedEx or DHL, the
information is never available to me in an electronic format. I must
make a detailed entry for each package I pick up and deliver. If any bit
of the information is missing I can be docked for the job. If I don’t
get a signature upon drop off, similarly, I will not be paid. And
ultimately, if I lose a package, I’m fired on the spot.
If I
screw up anywhere along the way—a real possibility under the pressure to
get as many packages as I can delivered within the course of a day—I
can pay for it dearly. And even if I don’t screw up, people at a pick-up
location may not be ready for me. So I wait. In my case, I couldn’t
receive compensation for a customer’s delay until “wait time” amounted
to ten minutes. Nine minutes would not cut it.
Messengering can
be full of frustration, yet people I ran into at times could be terribly
nice, too. In one instance, for which the word nice is scarcely
adequate, happened when I inadvertently forgot to properly fasten my
secondary lock back onto my bike at a stopping point. It inevitably
fell off onto the street as I rode away. I would’ve had to fork over a
day-and-a-half’s take-home pay for a new lock if it weren’t for a little
old lady in tennis shoes, literally, who raced frantically after me on
what appeared to be a BMX stunt bike for four blocks. Acutely
embarrassed by the situation, I thanked the woman profusely—something
she simply shrugged off.
I’ve seen acts of kindness in this town,
but rarely to this extreme. Afterward, I knew I could never make
generalizations about New York City again. I couldn’t have bought this
one with a credit card, as they say. No. This was something that was
truly priceless.
