I quit my civil litigation job. I needed a break. Litigation attorneys sit at desks all day, reading severely dry material, pushing paper and conducting ritual abuse on each other. Your body weakens as your mind focuses on other people’s problems. For the first few days of my self-unemployment, I hit the frigid soup of the Nor*Cal surf at Ocean Beach, the notoriously dangerous rip-tided water on San Francisco’s west side, that on a good day had world class waves. I surfed with my self made 6′1 thruster. Unfortunately, my liquid vacation ended each day when the west winds would come, chasing the fog, and junk up the surf. A few days of this and I decided to live out a long held fantasy, and turn my self-unemployment into a “working vacation.”

Ten years earlier, I’d commute from the Sunset, San Francisco’s misnamed, terminally overcast beach community. I would take the ‘N’ Judah train to work. I’d getting off at the Montgomery Street station. There is a granite wall that curves from Sansome to Market, where messengers gathered. Bicycle messengers call it the Western Wall. I envied the mess of eclectic couriers as I stumbled to my climate controlled cage.

Bored as a newly self-unemployed surf bum, I decided to become a bicycle messenger. Why? Bicycle messengers are cool. Naw, man. I mean KEWWWL. Bicycle messengers are the infantry of the financial district, the surly soldiers on the front lines. They are scarred with tattoos and piercings. All garish and grudge, they swagger and speak in exaggerations.

I searched the internet, looking at a lot of small courier outfits with crazy names like Spincycle, Black Dog and Dragracer Messenger Collective. How hard could it be to land a messenger job? Damn hard. The community is cliquish and suspicious. The small outfits are staffed by people who know each other. With no luck, I headed to the Western Wall. I found a messenger there. He was a Latino, thrasher dude. I asked him if anyone was hiring. He told me to hook up with one of the big outfits, like Western Messenger

Western messenger is housed in an old warehouse located on Columbia Street, between Harrison and Folsom, near ground zero of SoMa’s dot-gone revolution. The entrance is vandalized by visitor pass stickers from security desks of buildings around the city. There’s a bike rack, and four junk chairs in front. The building is not just nondescript, it’s ugly.

I entered and spoke with Pattie, a severe woman standing behind security glass. She gave me an application. I filled it out. She asked me some questions. I gave her some answers. “There’s nothing right now,” she told me. “When the weather’s nice, people deliver their own packages. If something comes up, I’ll let you know.” That was the end of my bicycle messenger ambition.

Ten days into my self-unemployment, the phone rings. I pick it up. It’s Pattie from Western Messenger. She tells me that there’s an opening for a messenger position. I abruptly take the offer over the phone.

A Day In The Life

How hard could it be to pick up and deliver packages? It ain’t easy. First things first. Once you become a messenger, you stop being a person. You are not Manuel, John, or whatever. You are assigned a number (mine having been 922) and are identified by that number.

The process goes something like this. You sit around downtown at one of three spots intersecting Market where messengers from the various outfits congregate (The Western Wall; Battery and Bush; Montgomery and Post). You watch the people drift to work. As you sit talking with the characters of the surreal messenger tribe, it comes; the first tag. The dispatcher tells you the name of the pickup client, the clients address, and the delivery company. You transfer the information into the manifest, and you’re off. As you head off to the first pickup, you start receiving additional tags. Two, three or even four other destinations are coming in. You can’t review the information because you’re in flight. As you move through the city, you pass other messengers who surf the asphalt waves. Messengers acknowledge each other with a subdued nod, and move on; no pretense.

When you have collected your parcels, and have no additional instructions, you call in. You are told to either clean up or retrieve additional pickups. This process continues almost non stop for the rest of the day. If you, reading this, work at a desk job or otherwise take for granted being able to use the restroom or take a break when the need arises, imagine being so pressed for time that it makes such niceties difficult. Granted, at some point, you’ll get a lunch break. But the timing and duration are uncertain, and if you need to piss at eleven in the morning, lunch at 1:17pm is a long time away.

Get Off My Freeway

When I say messengers are in flight, I’m being facetious, but just. There are rules of the road. Cars stop at red lights. People cross the street with the light. Traffic moves according to the direction required. These rules don’t apply to messengers. Messengers run red lights, go diagonally through intersections, cut off cars, ride fast on the sidewalk, and ride the wrong way down one way streets with oncoming traffic. Messengers move with a liquid fluidity that transgresses the dangerous place in which they work and scares the drivers and pedestrian with whom they travel. Why do they do this? The job demands it and the infrastructure encourages it.

When you start at Western Messenger, you’re handed a couple of pages from the Caltrans web page describing bicycle safety practices. The information tells you things like, “Stop at stop signs and red lights” and “Ride in the same direction as the flow of traffic.” But, there is no way to keep pace and follow the traffic laws. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that San Francisco’s streets in and around the financial district, are laid out to facilitate commuters, driving their fat ass SUV’s from faraway suburbs, to aggressively travel at dangerous speeds in and out of the city. This means a lot of one-way streets that act as dangerous inner city freeways. The liberal use of one way streets means that cyclists have to travel twice the distance to get to a road going the right direction. This may not mean much for a car, but if you spend your day cycling those streets under time constraints, it means a hell of a lot.

Because the roads are set up to facilitate automobile traffic to move fast on surface streets, drivers resent bicyclists as slow moving obstacles. I can’t count the number of times some indignant, self-righteous, irrationally frustrated driver (invariably on his way home to Petaluma or Alamo or somewhere) has tried to force me out of the way by positioning his urban tank dangerously close to me. Even the most diminutive women in a SUV becomes an aggressive and dangerous driver on the city streets. This explains why messengers are so surly and aggressive on the road.

Think I’m exaggerating? In Chicago, on April 26, 1999 in a fit of road rage, a man named Carnell Fitzpatrick driving an SUV, intentionally chased down a bicycle messenger named Thomas McBride, swerving behind the bicyclist over several blocks, he accelerated his Chevy Tahoe and ran over him.

This mixture of circumstances has created the perfect situation for messenger employers and the corporations that utilize them. Say for instance that a messenger is maimed or wasted breaking some traffic law. Everybody, except the messenger, is off the hook. The driver that creamed you has an “affirmative defense.” Yeah, he killed you, but the accident is actually the messenger’s fault. The messenger’s employer is shielded by the fact that they gave you the Caltrans bicycle safety instructions and never explicitly told you to break the traffic laws. The corporations that demand the speed and efficiency of messengers is shielded by “proximate cause” defenses, in that the accident was not a foreseeable consequence of utilizing the service. The beneficiaries of the messenger’s circumstance turn a blind eye toward these inherent problems because they bear no associated costs.

Men Behaving Badly

Once the tags stop coming, and you’ve loaded up with envelopes and parcels, you call in. “922 with six to go,” means that you’re carrying six pickups. The dispatcher on the other end speaks to you with the civility of a drill instructor. You are either told to deliver some of the pickups (often in a specified order), told to “clean up” or given a new address for a pick up. The instructions come fast and the dispatcher makes no effort to make clear the instructions. If you miss some vital detail and ask for clarification, the repeated instruction comes in a hostile, “Listen up moron,” tone.

As a messenger, there is no room for mistakes, and no thinking allowed. As an example, I sitting at the Western Wall one day. My first tag was at 9:38am, directing me to a business on the fourth floor of 230 California Street. I was subsequently tagged with two more pickups in short order. At 9:45am I had picked up the first envelope. I then made my way to the seventh floor of 475 Sansome, where I picked up a second parcel at 9:51am. I then made my way to the sixth floor of 930 Montgomery, where I picked up a third package at 10:02am. I received a beep at 10:03am. I called into dispatch, “922. Three to go.” The voice on the other end started yelling, “What’s going on? I gave you those tags over half an hour ago. What’s the problem?” Now, my math ain’t good. But even I, a lowly attorney turned messenger, know that the elapsed time from 9:38am to 10:03am is only twenty-five minutes.

The dispatcher’s transgression of the facts is less offensive than the basic disrespect he demonstrates for the work of the guy in the field. Think about it. Once you get that first beep, you have to record the instructions, cycle to the location, park and lock the bicycle, get past the security guard (sign in, leave an ID, get a pass or whatever), take the elevator to the appropriate floor, transact with the receptionist (who may tell you to take a detour to the mail room three floors down), get the envelope, make a notation of the pickup time, place it in your bag, go back down the elevator, deal with security, unlock your bicycle and make your way to the next destination, and start all over again. Each of these little events takes time.

Not only are you under tremendous time pressure, but you can’t take the initiative to relieve the pressure. For example, my first day on the job I had a round trip pickup at 101 California Street (one of the buildings that require messengers to use the freight elevator in the back of the building, which I’ll discuss later) to go to 650 California. I am then instructed to deliver to 650 California. I also happen to have a deposit to a bank at 590 California that I picked up earlier but have not been instructed to deliver. On the way from 101 California to 650 California (you can see where I’m going here), I take the initiative to make the deposit at 590 California.

This innocuous detour might be seen as an efficient use of ones’ time. Yet, when I called in “clean” instead of “922. One to go,” the dispatcher went ballistic. “What happened with the deposit?” When I told her that I already made the deposit, you’d have thought that I pocketed the money to buy crack. The following tirade bordered on abusive. If this is the way your own side treats you, can you imagine how you are treated by the rest of the people you deal with? This brings me to my next subject; disrespect.

Being treated with disrespect is an every day, several times a day, experience for messengers. I assume this is because most of the messengers are young men without much life experience, resources, a network of support, or are from the fringe elements of the social fabric. Disrespect is shown by a wide range of persons on the front lines of the business establishment, from security personnel, to receptionists to mail room clerks.

One common situation is exemplified by a pickup I made at a major California bank, let’s call it…Wells Fargo. I was directed to 525 Market Street and entered the lobby toward the security desk. A pudgy little man briskly moved towards me. “Go to the back of the building through the freight elevator,” states the pudgy little security guard, in a tone I wouldn’t put up with from my mother. He pointed me back out the front door. “I have a pickup on the 12^th floor,” I respond. “You have to go to the freight elevator,” he repeats threateningly. I walk around the building, sign in with the unenthusiastic security guard, and wait for the one, slow moving freight elevator.

Although the violation of building etiquette is innocent on my part, the violation of human respect on the part of all those security guards, receptionists, mail room clerks and all their low level ilk that messengers have to deal with every day is not innocent, but malicious. This malice is tacitly approved by the very tenants and employers in these buildings that create the circumstances to make such behavior acceptable and routine.

When I walk into a building to deliver an envelope, I’m obviously not carrying freight. It’s not like I’m holding a couple of two-by-fours. Freight elevators are for freight, since freight tends to damage delicately decorated elevators or interferes with ingress or egress by the tenants and visitors. Envelopes are not freight. Secretaries, receptionists, executives, lawyers, visitors and even mail room clerks carry envelopes and similar parcels through the lobby every day. The requirement that I use the freight elevator is based purely on my appearance as a working person. When security guards require messengers to use the freight elevator, what they are doing is relegating low wage workers to the “servant’s entrance.”

Messenger Down

Who were my fellow messengers and what were they like? They have more street smarts than you or I will ever have. Messengers often fit into one of several archetypes. Many look like competitive cyclists who belong in a velodrome. They have high performance road bicycles and all the gear to do the Tour-de-France. There are the Thrasher dudes, who look like skater kids who grew up. Then there are the stoners. These are the same type of stoner dudes you went to high school with; the long hair grunge crowd twisted with chemicals. Some don’t fit into any category.

Messengers look out for each other. They’ll tell you when you’re doing something stupid. At the end of the day various messengers gather in front of the building and trade verbal jabs. Every day someone lit up a blunt and others drink beer. Not small beers, mind you, but large bottles of beer. JP, an eight year messenger veteran, stops me, blunt in hand. “You were hopping the tracks on Market,” he states, “Keep clear of the tracks. You’ll catch a rail.”

For those unfamiliar with San Francisco, Market Street is a disaster. It has two lanes in both directions. Market is a major thoroughfare, but its lanes are narrow. Traffic on market is heavy, with automobiles, commercial trucks, street cars and buses squeezed together. The tight fit is exacerbated by bus drop off islands between lanes at various points. The center two lanes of Market have street car tracks running down them. At various points there are metal grates that look like shredders, allowing for the circulation of air for the subway that runs under the street. Not just one subway mind you, but two subways systems run under Market; Muni and Bart. Streets north of Market form a “V” as they intersect Market at a 45 degree angle. The streets to the south are perpendicular. At any given intersection you have upward of four streets coming together at different angles. The intersections are dangerous and unpredictable, as is Market Street itself.

To vindicate PJ’s admonition, the next day I am sprinting down Market when a pedestrian jumps out from the curb. I swerve hard to the left, and straighten before riding into oncoming traffic. As I pull straight, my front tire catches a rail. My body takes a vicious twist as I spill. I tumble into the opposing traffic lanes. By the time I hit the ground, traffic going the other way has thankfully cleared. I live another day.

Conclusion

My life as a bicycle messenger was nasty, brutish and short, but definitely cool. Unfortunately, the spiritual benefits of the job were outweighed by the ugliness of being a low wage worker who interacted with a contemptuous corporate world. I think of the middle class riff-raff, commuting unbearably long distances in their urban assault vehicles, worried about joining their low wage contemporaries if they are displaced or outsourced by a business community only too happy to do it. The next time you try to push a bicycle messenger out of your way with your Hummer, remember that he’s a human being. Back off and show a little fucking respect.