Women's Sports & Fitness, May, 1987
by Deborah Frost
Most mornings in Manhattan, the traffic is something you wouldn't wishon your worst enemy. To top it off this Monday rush hour it’s cold andwindy, and the rain is pouring down in sheets. Suddenly, a young womanwith dark sunglasses and long, wet, blond hair appears out of nowhere ona 12-speed bike, dodging cars and sweeping around corners at a 45-degreeangle. She misses a pedestrian by a few inches and swerves out of the wayof an oncoming taxi cab. In the middle of a busy intersection, the lightchanges and she switches direction instantly, disappearing into the flowof cars and buses before anyone can figure out what has happened.
Her name is Marianne Sprizzo, but everyone knows her by her street moniker,Holmes. She’s only 22, has nerves of iron, and owns New York City in away George Steinbrenner could never imagine. Her resume, if she had one,would describe her as a bike messenger, but that's like calling MartinaNavratilova simply a tennis player, or Ronald Reagan just an actor.
New York has approximately 5,000 full-time bike messengers, who hand-deliverpackages and letters for about $9 a pickup. Only a handful of them arewomen, but all messengers ride the streets as if they were starring ina bicycle remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! At speeds of 25 to 30 miles per hour,they run lights, dart treacherously be tween cars, race the wrong directionon one-way streets, hitch rides behind buses, and hop curbs as they tryto hook up" as many clean runs as possible. Their relationship tothe drivers particularly taxi drivers, who are also working against theclock and pedestrians with whom they share the streets is as cordial asthe warring factions in Beirut. The weather is often brutal, and the potholes and other hazards make every trip a gamble. A car door carelesslyopened can mean the end of a knee, a career, a life.
The main thing is not to panic," says Sprizzo. You always haveto feel that you have control of the situation. Fear is the worst thingto fall into.
In the year since Sprizzo a five-foot-eight, 130-pound Brooklyn nativewho could be successful, and a lot safer, modelling for Seventeen becamean urban kamikaze, she’s had her share of ugly confrontations. Her fellowbike messengers dubbed her Holmes, as in prizefighter Larry, when a pedestrianpushed her over in the middle of an intersection last summer and she punchedhim out.
But to Sprizzo, who averages $75 daily, being a bike messenger is morethan just a way to make a living. It’s a way to build speed and staminafor the racing career she hopes to pursue, like Nelson Vails, the formerbike messenger-turned-racer who won a silver medal in the 1984 Olympics.Unlike her previous position in a suburban ad agency, riding in New Yorkis a constant adventure, somewhere between roller derby and big game hunting.How many other jobs, for instance, give you a chance to knock on a doorand be greeted by rock singer Debbie Harry in her nightgown?
Best Messenger Service’s second-floor office on Sixth Avenue is starkand barren. There is little furniture, and the only adornments on the wallsare some large street maps and a team photo of the New York Mets. Outsidein the streets, however, the sidewalks overflow with life and characterslike Steve the Greek, a former male stripper with the look of a rock starwho compares riding in New York traffic to skiing on a mountain that moves."
Some of the riders smoke marijuana in lieu of breakfast, but Sprizzosays she doesn't smoke or drink on or off the job. She’s heard of messengersin slightly altered states who have lost important packages such as mastersfor television commercials, and she worries that, unless she keeps straight,someday her reflexes might fail her at a critical moment, I'm putting mylife in jeopardy every day, she says. I have to have the discipline tobe alert. And although she admits that "junk makes up some of the5,000 calories she consumes every day, she and her live-in boyfriend, JonCoppersmith, who is a bike messenger and a chef, eat, if not to win, todeliver spending over $130 a week on fresh vegetables, fish, and healthycarbs.
On a typical day, Sprizzo does the hang (hangs out) with the men whileshuffling through the green tickets detailing her day’s first runs. Inher light blue parka and tights, she looks muscular and coiled, like acat ready to pounce. She talks animatedly about recent runs to the bottom(downtown), and about "blowing lights, shooting the tube (the practiceof squeezing between two city buses), and the rude treatment she gets fromcustomers. If you hired a carpenter to work in your office, she explains,"you'd let him use the bathroom or give him a drink of water or lethim use the phone, but basically, we're treated very badly. She pauses,then adds, But I get treated nicely compared to the men,
Sprizzo has several ladies’ pit stops, like the Plaza and Waldorf-Astoriahotels, and Doctors Hospital, where she also takes advantage of the freecoffee machine. But there are not many other fringe benefits. Most messengersare independent contractors without any job security or medical insuranceprovided by their employers. During their daily rounds, they not only haveto dodge irate pedestrians and drivers, but also the police who issue expensivetickets that, if unpaid, can cost them their driver’s license, and demandingbosses who may dock their weekly pay checks for tardiness, absences, orchronic late deliveries.
These mutual hardships have created a strong bond among the riders.Like Sprizzo, they see themselves as tough, cocky survivors. In a fieldwhere the only qualifications are two wheels and two strong legs, and where,as she notes, people disappear all the time," Best’s 30 or so regularriders are a team. Only one other is a woman, but Sprizzo shares a specialcamaraderie with the riders that she never felt for her parochial schooltrack team, her high school volleyball team, or the fans of her favoriterock group, The Doors. The bike messengers’ lingo, costumes (a curiousmix of bike tights and survival gear), and renegade spirit help set themdefiantly apart from the rest of the workaday world. Like many riders,Sprizzo sometimes carries false ID to stymie the police, but unlike most,she declares and pays taxes on her earnings her father works for the InternalRevenue Service.
She's indebted to the guys who've taught her to ride standing on herpedals, and how to dip around cars heading directly toward her in an intersectionand barge through pedestrian-filled crosswalks screaming "I have nobrakes! She speaks about the "brilliant, death-defying" featsof messengers like Joey Joe, who hitches rides from firetrucks, with almostthe same reverence she reserves for Bruce Springsteen and her greatesthero, The Doors' Jim Morrison, whose music blasts all day on her water-resistantSony Walkman.
She knows she shouldn't ride with headphones, but music helps temperthe rage of being cut off and sometimes hit by indifferent motorists. Someof her closest calls to date came because she was wearing headphones. Onone occasion, she was sent flying when a limousine door opened unexpectedly;on another, she barely escaped being hit on the head by a crane becauseshe couldn’t hear the construction workers yelling at her. But she’s gotteninto worse scrapes without the headphones. Furious at being knocked overby a Cadillac on 14th Street, she remounted, caught up to the car two blocksaway, and smashed the windshield and side window with her bike lock. Anothertime, when a cabbie hit her, then spit at her, she shattered his windshield,too, sending him into a parked car. Sayonara!
Although Sprizzo recognizes the risks of wearing her Walkman, she feelsno similar twinges about not wearing a helmet. She says she wants "totalsleekness," that a helmet will inhibit her movement or the strap mightget caught when she squeezes between vehicles. Despite several minor accidents,the odds of serious head injury or death, and the nightmares she, likeevery messenger. has of something just popping you," she is convincedthat if I go down, it will be under the wheels of a car and no helmet willhelp me."
On a recent morning, Sprizzo stuffed her vinyl ticket folder coveredwith building visitor passes into a waterproof canvas bag and slung thebag across her shoulder so it sat tight and low on her back. Then she unlockedher battered, mud-caked $230 Japanese bike with a bald back tire to giveit extra speed and make it less at tractive to bike thieves and took offfor her first call, a photo lab. There, she waited at least 15 minutesbefore being told that the photographer for whom she was making the pickuphad no account and she would have to pay for his pictures. Because he wasa regular client and had once given her a photo of John Lennon, she cameup with $17 of her own money for his bill.
En route to her next stop, the photographer’s studio, she passed a cardouble-parked on a narrow Greenwich Village street. As navigation becamedifficult, even for a bicycle, a police traffic buggy appeared. "Hey,"Sprizzo shouted, thumping on the car’s hood, "give this guy a ticket!The officer gave her an odd look. Oh, she laughed, "it’s you. (Sheused to date the policeman’s partner.) "Say hello to Hank! she shoutedcheerily and continued south, never changing gears and always standingon her pedals, except for taking curves.
When she arrived at the studio, the photographer gave her a $20 billand told her to keep the change. (She used to refuse tips, she says, butnow she figures she deserves them.) Then she jumped back on her bike andtook off for SoHo. Heading down Seventh Avenue South, she suddenly jammedon her brakes nearly giving a pedestrian who had stepped off the curb aheart attack and looked off in the distance, calling Su-ee! Su--ee!"as if calling hogs home. All at once a rider who had been only a speckon the horizon a moment before materialized, breathing heavily, and skiddedto a stop a fraction of an inch in front of her bike. He gave her a peckon the cheek and a report on his day's lucrative runs.
You're gonna be the star of the company!" she exclaimed with genuineawe. And for a minute, you could see just what messengering means to her.It’s her way of transforming this mean city with its millions of strangersinto a small town full of friendly encounters and street-corner epiphanies.
After a quick drop at an office in SoHo, she was back in or on top ofthe saddle again, bombing toward Wall Street, where she was frustratedwaiting for the elevator in a massive modern tower filled with busy stockbrokersand law firms. "Messengers hate elevators, she sighed. You kill yourselfto make five minutes on the road and then you wait forever in some lobby."She delivered an envelope to a stock brokerage and thawed out in the elegantwaiting room while the receptionist let her use his phone to check in withBest. ''Thanks, bud," she waved.
While most of the city’s workers were enjoying their lunch hour, shewas flying again, slipping like a ghost between the cars with sublime maneuversand a firm grip on her handlebars. Nothing could pin her. Everything aroundher was a moving picture and only she decided which way the picture wasgoing to move. She was completely unattached to everything but her bikeand her dispatcher. It was something she wasn't sure she could even describe.It was like no other feeling she'd ever experienced. It didn't matter thatthere were easier ways to make a dollar in this town and that most of hergreatest stunts had no audience. After errands ranging from racing crosstownand back again to buy chocolates at Bloomingdale’s for a guy at Penthouse,to trucking gallery paintings and 75-pound packages at 10 or 15 degreesbelow zero, she not only knew every address in Manhattan, she knew howmuch her body could take anything. And with Born in the U.S.A. or "L.A..Woman screaming in her ears, she could almost forget that she was headingfor a $9 pickup in midtown and pretend that she was racing instead to Olympicvictory.
This spring, Sprizzo will get her first chance to compete, as a memberof the team sponsored by New York’s City Cycles store. But even if herraw power doesn't quite translate into winning strategy, she's had a chanceto do something unusual, to break away from the pack. Even passengers inlimos roll down their tinted windows because they can't quite believe whatthe blond woman with the great legs is doing and the speed and accuracywith which she's doing it. And then there was the time she saw Bruce Springsteentwo days in a row, once at Greene and Houston and again at 53rd and Third.The second time, she could hardly contain herself and told him so.
"You’re running me all over this town, he replied with a laugh.
Bruce," she told him, I’m a bike messenger. "Well, then."said the Boss, "be careful."
Deborah Frost is a New York writer and rock singer.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at messvilleto@yahoo.com