Blazing Saddles
By W. Hampton Sides ( New Republic Vol. 207, New Republic,12-21-1992, pp 16.)
Tuesday through Friday nights, the bike messengers congregate at a Washingtondive called Asylum for a little-known event, the "Courier Happy Hour."At 6 p.m. they come skidding in from the streets, Lycra spidermen withnames like Beaver, Beetlejuice, and Bam Bam. Concrete cowboys with shavedlegs and holstered Motorola radios, scabby knees and earrings, guys wholook like some weird cross between Greg LeMond and Sid Vicious. Soon theplace is reminiscent of the alien bar in Star Wars, all sorts of interesting-lookingbeasts and hard-shelled insects hobnobbing in the dim lounge, speakinga strange patois. " Made a major southwest slice, man. Cut a big holein thetraffic in front of this Murphy at Farragut and then I shredded 'em,man, had him eating my dust...."
The conversation often centers on perennial peeves -- jaywalkers, elevators,security guards, cops, potholes, tourists, Capitol Hill metal detectors,suddenly opened car doors, or, most common of all, cabdrivers. "Thiscabbie's cutting me off, so I kick in his fender. Then the prick flipsme the bird. So at the light I take out my radio, ride up to his window,and bash him good across face, like this."
The war stories told at Asylum are tinged with the doom of a dying profession."Send it by courier" was the catch phrase of the Reagan-era workplace.Not only was a bike messenger fast and dependable, he was your slave forthe hour. The courier epitomized the inflated urgency of the times. Sendingit by regular mail wouldn't do. You needed hot colors, physical toil, thefanfare of having some coolie handing over a document in person. As a result,courier companies became a multimillion-dollar cottage industry in the'80s. Messenger work appealed to a new class of urban malcontents who sawa way to find personal expression on a bike, while earning $800 a weekor more, depending on how fast they could pedal. The mystique of the courierwas romanticized in the movie Quicksilver, starring Kevin Bacon. "On the street, I feel exhilarated," Bacon's character rhapsodizes."I go fast as I like, faster than anyone. If the street sign saysone way East, I go one way West. They can't touch me."
But by the turn of the decade, telecommunications technology caughtup with the bicycle, and the new watchwords of the officescape were "Faxit," or "Send it e-mail," or "Modem it in ascii text."Today the bike messenger finds himself sprinting against fiber-optic lineslike John Henry racing against the steam engine drill. Anyone who worksin downtown Washington has probably noticed that there aren' t as manybike messengers as there used to be. The number of courier outfits in metropolitanWashington has dwindled from approximately seventy in 1988 to around thirtytoday. Five years ago, more than 700 bike messengers plied Washington'sstreets; today there are fewer than 300. And the few couriers who are leftmake half the number of runs and turn smaller profits.
Asylum is a smoky, fermented space above an Ethiopian restaurant ina derelict section of Northwest Washington that was torched during the1968 riots. The house drinks are Voodoo lager and Jagermeister shots. It'sthe kind of club that attracts extremely pallid people in extremely blackclothes who go for obscure local bands: Clutch, the Meat Puppets. Asylumis the only bar in town that welcomes bikes inside. The messengers liketo haul their battered Bridgestones and Cannondales up the stairs and arrangethem in a dense, circular formation known as a "clusterfuck."It's a symbol of group solidarity that dates back to the days when thecouriers used to hang out at D.C. space, a now defunct downtown club wherethey had to park their bikes outside. The messengers would lock their ridestogether -- as many as 100 at a time -- to keep them from getting rippedoff.
Once they've stashed their bikes, the couriers begin to peel away theirelaborate exoskeletons -- the knee and elbow pads, the helmets with sideviewmirrors, the velcro arm pouches and slick sheathings, the bad-ass gauntletgloves with the fingers ripped out. They sidle up to the bar for the night'sfirst Jagermeister shot, yelling their order over whatever skull-crunchermusic happens to be emanating from the Asylum tape deck.
At Courier Happy Hour you meet people like Scrooge, a quiet, imposingfigure in Olympian good shape with ocher skin, matted dreadlocks, and missingfront teeth. At 41, Scrooge is the dean of the Washington bike messengers.He works with Action Couriers (Dispatcher #135) and makes about $500 aweek. "We do real work," Scrooge boasts. "And we' re goodat it. We're like the Pony Express, man -- heroes, thirty times a day."
Scrooge's friend Suicide is a rangy, gregarious, hyperactive man witha sponge of frizzy hair and various black leather strips and thongs danglingfrom his appendages. A veteran messenger of nearly a decade, Suicide wonhis nickname years ago when he used to wear a Japanese kamikaze headbandon the streets. It was Su, as he is known to friends, who first organizedthe Courier Happy Hour at Asylum, where he sometimes tends bar.
Suicide also aspires to be the Eugene Debs of Courierdom. He wants toorganize Washington's messengers and strike for better wages. Courier companiestake advantage of them, he insists. Since messengers are considered "independentcontractors," companies refuse to pay benefits or worker's comp. "Ifwe could have a work stoppage," he says in brittle tones, "you'dhear it around the world! This city would grind to a halt, man, just completelyshut down! They would never fuck with us again."
Su misses the halcyon days of the late '80s. Then, he and Scrooge usedto play in a rock band called Scooter Trash. Among their more popular songswas "Happy Trails," a raucous sledgehammer of a tune that becamesomething of an anthem for D.C.'s messengers. "Well, my brakes aren'tworking quite like they should," Su would sing:
So I left him lying in a pool of blood One less pedestrian but who cares?Shouldn't have been there in the first damn place The " Don't Walk"sign means don't walk, of course Laid him out, man, no remorse, I don'tcare, I make my own right of way I got a rush red alert so get the Fuckout of the way!!!
The few messengers who are still around tend to be diehard romantics,a leaner and meaner breed scrapping for a dwindling number of pickups.They know that, beleaguered as it is, the courier business is not likelyto vanish anytime soon. There will always be vital documents that mustbe notarized, blueprints to be hauled crosstown, depositions and payrollsheets in need of signatures. The laws of human procrastination being moreor less constant, one can assume there will always be people with packagesthat absolutely, positively must get there in fifteen minutes. And therewill always be a handful of American business districts -- New York, Boston,Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington -- where crowds and thick trafficmake bicycle travel the only practical form of express delivery.
The couriers are detached from the establishment that depends on them-- and they like it that way. As much as they may hate the drudgery oftheir jobs, they share a kind of mordant chauvinism in working at the bottomof the city's food chain. Once Scrooge was called upon to deliver a fishto a taxidermist; another time it was a six- pack of "sample bricks"from the National Brick Institute. Once he delivered $6.5 million to aWashington bank. Messengers sometimes get calls from government fat catswho've left an umbrella at a restaurant or a shirt at a hotel room tryst.They even get paid for waiting in lines. Say a lobbyist wants to be guaranteeda seat at an important committee hearing on the Hill. Instead of waitingin line himself, he'll pay a messenger to save a place for him. "That'sour job, man, " Suicide says with a raspy laugh. "To do dumbshit for people."
Even so, Scrooge says that many of the "squares" he passeson the street would gladly trade places with him. It's hard for deskboundwonks not to envy the couriers. They're in terrific shape. They get tobe buccaneers every day. They don't have to wear monkey suits, and theynever get hung up in traffic. What's more, they don't have to answer toa real boss, only a disembodied voice crackling over a radio.
The bike messengers who don't go to Asylum usually hang out at DupontCircle after hours. At dusk they ride up to the white marble fountain withsix-packs of Heineken in their fannypacks, unclip their Shimano shoes fromthe pedals, toss their "brain buckets" on the grass, and fallinto the easy, familiar body language of boon companions. Scrooge coastsover on his Trek aluminum. He nods at Suicide, who is splayed out in thegrass sipping a bottle of HydraFuel. Heavy metal pours from a blaster,and a couple of West African drummers are on the far side of the Circle."Murphy! Murphy!" someone squawks over Scrooge's Motorola, codelanguage for "cops ahoy!" Scrooge passes the word on to the otherbike messengers -- "Murphy! Murphy!" Thirty seconds later anofficer from the U.S. Park Police jumps the curb at Dupont Circle and noseshis patrol car beside the fountain.
Couriers love to hate the police. The antagonism animates them. Theyscramble to clean up the scene, stash their beer cans in the shrubs, snuffout their joints. Murphy jumps out of his car and, inexplicably, slipson a pair of rubber gloves. He forges into the crowd with an eye towardbusting somebody or impounding an unregistered bicycle. The messengerswhisk their bikes off the pavement and stand defiantly in the officer'spath.
"You gotta problem, Murphy?" demands one of the messengers.Murphy sniffs the air suspiciously, then scowls at the wall of fluorescentSpandex. "Go home, Murphy!" Murphy gives them the evil eye, butfinally relents. He slips back into the patrol car.
The West Africans resume their polyrhythmic pounding. Scrooge and Susit on the fountain wall, eating bean burritos. Scrooge says he's thinkingof trying out couriering by Rollerblade. "Why not, man?" he says."Blading's the way of the future." But right now Scrooge is spendingmost of his free time noodling on his new laptop computer. He's thinkingof publishing a courier newsletter. And he's got bigger plans afoot --a hacker's dark conspiracy. "I'm going to create a virus that willruin all the fax machines. You know, kind of like a Michelangelo for faxes,"he says. "I'm gonna send it out over the phone lines like an epidemic.Then watch out. All the bike couriers of the world will unite! And we'regoing to take this country by storm! "
W. Hampton Sides is the author of Stomping Grounds:A Pilgrim's Progress Through Eight American Subcultures (William Morrow).
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