Combat Pay

To Messengers, the City is a Battlefield

By Stephen Franklin

Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1998

5:10 p.m. Another good day, good. Messenger No. 887, John Connor, relaxes,paycheck in hand, catching up on the word at the office at the end of theday and end of the week.

No problems with pesky security guards, making him sign in, slowingdown his deliveries, slowing him from picking up another assignment andmore money in his pocket..

Time is money and money lost is one whole minute on a slow freight elevatoror quibbling with a security guard over where to park one's bike whilemaking a delivery..

Neither was there too much inane elevator questioning about the weather..

"How cold do you really get on your bike?""

"How can you work in this weather?""

No. 887, a bike messenger for only the last eight months, who was, beforethat, a carpenter for a while down South, and before that a philosophymajor in college, brushes back his long hair and rubs his hand along ascraggly beard..

"Every day is a challenge, a real challenge," stoically saysNo. 887, who has put in his typical 35 or so miles of daily biking on thejob in downtown Chicago, feinting here and there to avoid cars in his way,and cars headed for him..

He expects to keep this up while he is young, which means, he explains,until he is 30. No. 887, thin, intense, wide-eyed alert, is 27 now..

In the gathering late afternoon darkness the others working the dayshift are coming in now -- the bikers, the drivers, the downtown walkers-- all of them filling up the garage at Arrow Messenger Service Inc., aclump of buildings just west of the Loop in an area that serves as thenerve center for most of Chicago's messenger services..

Nowadays the world may seem to move only on the Web or in ever morearcane high tech ways devoid of human touch..

But that is not the world of the messengers, who will breathlessly delivera contract across the Loop in less than 12 minutes, race to get a weddingdress to the appropriately nervous hands, or lug in their vans or cars,dozens of manuals ordered at the last minute for a weekend corporate trainingsession..

It is the simple idea of doing something important, something as criticalas that done by a doctor or lawyer, that has filled George Poe, messengerNo. 442, with the inner drive to be a messenger for the last 30 years.It gives No. 442, a polite, soft-spoken man, a special feeling to stepout of his pick-up truck with a much-anticipated package..

If only there were many more like 442 or 887 or the rest of her nearly200 messengers, then Phylliss Apelbaum, president and founder 24 yearsago of Arrow Messenger Service, would have fewer worries..

Having enough workers on hand is crucial, she says, what with competitionso fierce. She counts over 140 messenger firms in the Chicago-area as comparedto just six when she started her business..

She has had no problem holding onto her die-hards, the ones who lovebeing out there, around the clock, around the year. She has had no problemattracting her wannabes, as she calls them, the people who want to be doingsomething else; the painters, artists, musicians, the folks who need apaying job while they are waiting for the rest of their lives to begin..

But she has had problems lately getting the people in transition, asshe delicately describes the people who have been laid off, let go, frozenin job searches that go nowhere..

In the early part of the decade, there were many more of them and theysought out work at her company: many of them victims of corporate America'scapsizing..

Yet with record-level unemployment, Apelbaum, a veteran of four decadesof the messenger business, of the days when the basic office equipmentwas a telephone and hook to hang new orders, has seen the well of transitionalworkers slowly dry up..

In the meantime, she knows she can count on her stalwarts--someone likeRobert Kirby, messenger No. 141, who has been riding a messenger's bikefor the last four years, two months and three weeks..

At the end of the day, No. 141, a tall, hefty man wrapped from headto toe against the cold, traipses into the office with red cheeks froma heavy day's biking. He flashes a smile and others warmly greet him..

"Excellent day," No. 141 says quite sincerely with a sustainedsmile..

Before his current job, before he got into a routine of waking at dawnto exercise, choosing one of his three bikes to use that day and gulpingdown a hearty breakfast, he was, for a little while, a morning drive-timedisc jockey on WWBZ, the Blaze..

But the station changed its format and its name. He was out of a job,and after a few months of unemployment became a bike messenger. After thefirst two years of biking, it finally struck him that this was going tobe his job for the time being, not radio..

"It was very hard for me to figure out what I was getting paidfor before. To act like a moron and tell toilet jokes? Here I know whatI am doing."

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