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Easy Riders
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Excerpt from:
“Hope Dies Last”
By Studs Terkel, 2003
It was flight from Lincoln, Nebraska to Chicago. There was four-hour
delay. There were only five passengers: myself, my companion, Steve
Robinson; a young woman, busy with her laptop; a young woman dozing
fitfully; and a blond pony tailed kid with a whisper of a beard. It was
cold at the airport, Nebraska cold. A couple of kids in battle fatigues
and rifles at the ready were standing guard, having a slightly hard
time of it, what with the delay and the temperature. During the flight,
the pony-tailed kid was reading a book. In Chicago, as I slouched
toward a cabstand, the kid accosted me.
As he remembered it: “ That’s when I grabbed my book out of my bag and
jumped in front of you.” He flashed the cover at me. It was Will the
Circle Be Unbroken? Delighted, though half asleep, I scrawled a full-
page inscription. He told me his name and his work – a bike courier. He
was on his way home to New York. After he disappeared somewhere into
the vast empty corridors of O’Hare, I cursed myself. I knew I wanted
him in my next book – just a hunch – but I had neglected to get his
phone number. Damn After an absurd series of missteps, much like Peter
Sellers’s hapless detective, Inspector Clouseau, I found him.
- Studs Terkel
Andrew McNeil:
I’m thirty years old. In New York City for a little more than a year, I
am a bicycle messenger, a courier. I ride around all day with a big bag
on my back and a walkie-talkie radio to talk with my dispatcher. What
he does is he just fires off the different pick-ups and deliveries.
When we talked the other night, you used the word searching to describe
some people of my generation. That’s what I spend most of my life
doing, is experimenting and searching. Being a courier, especially, is
an incredible experiment and a search. I’m like a hyperactive mailman.
Most of the guys are pretty much new to the country. When I started out
on this messenger job, I thought I was gonna be a fish out of water,
possibly in a little bit of trouble. There’s some bad-ass-looking guys
out there. But they all got one thing which is nice. You can wear
anything you want. It’s mostly black guys in New York. The people who
deliver food frequently are Chinese and Mexican guys. The people who
deliver envelopes and packages are primarily black guys. It’s one of
the easier jobs to get, but it’s a difficult job to do. You’ve got to
learn the city quick. Everything’s about deadlines and speed. There’s
no greater comfort than in meeting tons and tons of strangers and
finding out that time and time again, it’s everything you hoped they
would be and more. They’re similar to me and they’re generous and
they’re helpful. I think we need to be afraid of grizzly bears, not
people. If I had a kid I probably wouldn’t encourage that kid to go
hitchhiking around until I felt like they were strong, but that’s not
how I did it. You’ve gotta go find out.
When you pedal your bike all day, your blood gets pumping, and you’re
an elite crew because it’s kind of a war zone with the cars and the
people. And when you see someone else who’s doing their bike and
negotiating the situation, you’ve got instant camaraderie. When you see
them at a stoplight, there’s just an immediate connection. You talk
about the weather, you talk about whatever. That job can crush you but
once you get on top of it, it really lights you up. And there’s
days when the weather is unbelievable, thirty degrees and raining about
as miserable as it can get, and it’s freezing and wet and you see those
guys and you’ve got that and you’re sharing it with them as well. And
people talk, people talk, they talk a lot of slang.
I don’t think I had a single bad encounter. I stopped at one
point because there was a black guy outside of a rental an argument
with his girlfriend, but also shaking her up a little bit.
I stopped my bike but I couldn’t figure really figure out what to do. I
don’t know if I could fight or what. I thought, maybe if that’ll make
that guy uncomfortable. Nobody wants an audience for a domestic
dispute. So he starts yelling at me and I’ve got a big space helmet on,
it looks like a motorcycle helmet. I made maybe a little bit of a storm
trooper impression, but I didn’t do anything. Now, he’s coming at me.
Suddenly, another messenger guy I’ve never met, short little black guy,
stops right up, gives me the biggest toothy grin ever and wants to get
involved. He sees what’s going on, like, like we’re going to get this
guy. The little guy came up and he and I together stood there, and then
the little guy talked the right talk and made it stop. You get to
do some creative complicated handshake and a big way “See you later,
dude.” That’s what I meant by camaraderie.
I got very lucky in the family department. I could not have a loving
and attentive mother and father. Most of my life when growing up, my
father was working. I don’t know the nature of it, but I always think
of it as businessman. He climbed the ladder. My mother was very active
in the community as an artist, and she’s partly responsible for two
different historic preservation districts.
I went to public school in Camden, New Jersey. Very large class. Five
hundred in my class. I was pretty intimidated through most of high
school. I went to five colleges, from Washington, D.C., to Alaska.
Wesleyan University in Connecticut, that’s where I graduated. I always
wanted to study psychology, and that’s what I did. After college, I
worked in special education for a while.
In New York, I worked at two different start-up companies, and I lost
my shirt both times. I just moved from Hell’s Kitchen to Avenue B in
New York. It’s the East Village. For the next month, I have a curtain
for a wall. There’s three of us in a two-bedroom place.
I’m just very driven to pursue my own interests. I’m not envious of my
friends, a lot of them successful, who are very tied down to more
serious, more demanding work. I feet a little bad sometimes for these
people carrying around a bit of an anvil. I have a lot of time to
pursue my interests and that’s what I do. I certainly have got money
shortages that are often crippling, but I’m too self-involved to be
envious! [Laughs] It’s up and down.
I bounce around. You might say I’m rootless. It keeps me motivated. I
feel alive and charged most of the time, but rootlessness can wear you
out, because I end up losing touch with people, and short of money.
It’s no joke, that’s a problem. I often felt that I was born with a lot
of privileges, and I was born into a country where there is a world of
things to do and it’s almost a crime for me not to give it a shot. Why
not try it. In the future, I’m looking to stabilize a bit. Teaching
psychology, I hope in my older age.
What was I hoping for as a kid? [Laughs] I hope to really, really love
someone for my whole life. I hope for a family. I hope for a chance to
be myself as much as I can. I think that’s why I bounce around. I think
it brought more hope to me, the fact that I’ve been able to find ways
in my life to try what I was curious about. It makes me more and more
hopeful.
The low moments are since I move around so much. I go months where I’m
not in touch with people that I would like to be in touch with. I’m not
always lonely but I just feel there’s an emotional isolation to really
doing what most of the people I love aren’t doing. I’ve got to readjust
and really tune in to my friends and my family when I see them,
otherwise we might not have a lot of things common.
There’s a great light bulb feeling when I get that next shock of
inspiration. And it’s a blissful streak. It must be pure hope because I
don’t have a single thing I could put out here as evidence that it’s
going to work out, but I feel it will.
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