MESSENGERS ARE THE CYCLISTS THAT BOSTON LOVES TO HATE. SPEND A DAYWITH THEM, THOUGH, AND YOU'LL WONDER HOW THEY LIVE THROUGH IT.

by Dan Wasserman

Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, October 20, 1996
 

``Fly, my pretties!'' commands dispatcher Dan Coyle as he hands bicyclemessenger Mike Budka his first two delivery orders of the day and waveshim out of the Back Bay offices of Marathon Messenger Company. Both jobsare ``rush'' -- guaranteed pickup and delivery in less than an hour.

Budka wastes no time unlocking his well-worn road bike, customized withstraight handlebars and plastic fenders. He throws a large, black courierbag over his shoulder so it rests in the small of his back and pushes offinto downtown Boston.

The trick to cycling in traffic, Budka explains over his shoulder ashe picks up speed, is ``to aim where the car just was.'' The advice soundsmore like a Zen riddle than a practical guide, because cars are everywhere.Budka, however, sees the seams, and he traces a weaving, darting routethrough downtown, from One Boston Place to 60 State Street to Temple Place,and then over to East Cambridge to deliver a package to a trial in sessionat Middlesex Superior Court.

The swarm of cars, buses, and taxis in narrow streets is punctuatedby double-parked delivery trucks that bring improvised bike lanes to anabrupt halt. Construction sites further choke the roadways, creating theeffect of a giant pinball game in which the cyclist is the pinball. Juttingside mirrors define a chin-high slalom course between lines of idling carsand trucks, and jaywalking pedestrians pop out, unannounced and unaware,from between parked cars. Sound effects come from jackhammers, revvingdiesels, honking horns, and the occasional canned palaver of a tour-busguide just above head level.

The deliveries are a swirl of lobbies, reception areas, and elevators,all eerily quiet, cool, and well-mannered after the din and fumes of traffic.Budka uses the calm of elevator rides to fill out paperwork and grab abite of a bagel.

He's one of 225 licensed couriers in Boston, according to the last countby the city's Licensing Unit. Their ranks were thinned and their earningseroded by the advent of the fax machine in the mid-'80s, but the businesssurvives on the delivery of packages and valuable papers: financial securities,original legal documents, plane and sports tickets, medical biopsies, anda monogrammed bathrobe for Mick Jagger during his last stay at the FourSeasons Hotel.

Although some work for themselves, most bike messengers work for oneof 27 licensed companies that hire them as independent contractors. Theylog about 10,000 miles in a year, working on commission, usually 50 percent.They average $3 per round trip (more for rush service), $300 to $500 perweek for a 40- to 50-hour week with no benefits and no paid vacation. Theybuy their own bikes and pay their own fines. Two of them died in collisionsin the late '80s. In 1995, a courier's pelvis was crushed when she washit by a truck on Franklin Street.

Budka's cycling skill belies his relative rookie status as a messenger.An electric bass player and former instructor at the Berklee College ofMusic, Budka, 41, began riding in March to pay the mortgage. ``If someonetold me 10 years ago I would do this, I probably would have told them theywere crazy.''

From the Cambridge court, he heads back into Boston by the Museum ofScience. Just past North Station, on Congress Street, a meat truck withan attitude tries to play a game of chicken, veering toward the curb forno other reason than to close off the lane to cyclists. The truck's loomingwall of white sheet metal is menacing and persuasive.

Budka notes the near-meat experience and waxes philosophical: Anger,he says, is a heavy burden to carry when you're riding all day. ``It'seasy to get mad. You have to keep it in perspective. You have to take careof yourself mentally and emotionally.''

That task is not made easier by public opinion. ``Because of the reputationthat couriers have,'' he explains, ``people will just jump to the conclusionthat I'm a scumbum because I'm a bicycle courier. It's not true of me,and it's not true for the other guys, either. It's like anything else --there are some bad apples, guys with attitudes, guys who ride very aggressivelyand very rudely. I've seen them, but we're not all like that.''

Budka's bad-apple analogy is lost on many downtown pedestrians and onmuch of the Boston Police Department. ``Personally, I think they're allsuicidal maniacs and are going to end up as hood ornaments,'' proclaimsPolice Department spokesman Lt. Robert O'Toole. Officer Paul Baker, ofArea A's Auto Accident Investigators, elaborates: ``Everybody hates them.''It's because of the ``perception of them being arrogant in their drivinghabits.''

Baker's unit receives the reports of accidents involving messengers.He says collisions with cars average two a month, and he blames ``75 to80 percent'' of them on the cyclists. Collisions with pedestrians are morefrequent, and Baker again blames the messengers. He concedes that mostpedestrians who get hit are jaywalking but says Boston's jaywalking lawshaven't been enforced since 1976. The problem is most serious with olderpedestrians and in bad weather, says Baker, when people walk head down,heedless of the ``nitwits on the bikes.''

Hidden behind Baker's attitude toward cyclists is the peculiar statusof messengers in a city where auto traffic congeals more than it flows.Given their narrow profile and agility, bicycles can cut through congestionto help Boston's busiest people maintain the hectic pace of their fax-driven,beepered business lives. But not if they follow the rules. That's the dirtysecret of the industry. Clients -- a majority of them lawyers -- call courierswith the tacit understanding that they will break the law. If messengersobeyed all traffic laws and regulations, they'd be not only slower butpoorer. Just an extra two minutes per trip would cost the average courier20 percent of each day's pay.

``That's not the public's problem,'' replies Baker. Messengers are supposedto ``conform with the rules of the road.'' It's illegal to ride on thesidewalk in the business district, to travel the wrong way on one-way streets,or to ride through red lights. Many messengers do all three, he says, andthe Police Department is determined to rein them in.

As of 1992, messengers must, by city ordinance, be licensed, at a costof $20 every two years, carry their license, wear a helmet, and wear anorange reflective vest that bears their license number in large type, frontand back. Using the ordinance, police have adopted a policy of ``progressivepunishment'' that began with written warnings and has escalated to heftyfines. The messengers haven't gotten the message, says Baker. ``They haven'tcleaned up their act.''

Part of the messengers' ``act'' is on display on any warm lunch hourin Winthrop Square, a downtown pocket park wedged in between Otis and Devonshirestreets. Looking at the gallery of bold tattoos and facial jewelry glintingin the midday sun, the unsuspecting observer might conclude that a delegationof pirates with pagers had just landed at Rowes Wharf. The unofficial captainof the motley assemblage is a 6-foot-4-inch veteran rider whose nom deguerre is ``Elvis the Package King'' and whose rap is laced with linesand gestures from Mad Max, Mel Gibson's postapocalyptic road movie.

Messengers hang out in the square waiting to be beeped, working on bikes,drinking coffee. Most of them are young, lean, and evangelical about thepleasures of two-wheeled, human-powered travel. Their bikes range fromlow-tech clunkers to high-end, hand-built mountain bikes to super-light,fixed-gear bikes that force rider and machine to spin as one at all times,no coasting possible. Some riders are students. Many are musicians andartists attracted by the freedom and camaraderie of the courier business.They look out for one another and for one another's bikes. Women couriers-- a distinct minority -- are frequently harassed on the street, but theyfeel accepted and respected in the company of other riders.

From music and bikes, courier conversation moves quickly to their treatmentat the hands of the Boston police. ``It's pretty crazy,'' protests MatthewKendall, a courier for three years, as others nod in agreement. ``Theyhave you buy this vest for $20 and this license. . . . You pay your taxes,and in return you get harassed. You get treated like a criminal.'' He andother experienced couriers blame rookies and students working during thesummer for the industry's image problem. ``I don't have a problem withthe idea that we have to be regulated,'' says Kendall, ``but there aresome officers who are harassing us.''

Riders point in particular to the vest regulation, which they say isthe ultimate Catch-22. When worn as stipulated, the orange vest and largelicense number are hidden under the messenger's essential shoulder bag.When messengers began getting tickets for obscuring the numbers, they cutthe numbers off the vests and pinned them to the back of their bags, wherethey would be visible. They soon started getting tickets for failing towear the vests.

In recent months, some couriers have received single fines for amountsexceeding their weekly pay. Some pay the tickets, others challenge them,and some get off when officers fail to show in court. Even when they prevail,the couriers lose money in time away from the job. More ominous, they contend,is what they call the hostility of some police officers downtown, an antagonismtoward commercial cyclists that they say goes well beyond vigilant trafficenforcement.

Couriers cite the case of Michael Loomis, a slight, soft-spoken studentwho rides to help finance his studies at the School of the Museum of FineArts. On August 29, 1995, Loomis says, he was stopped on Washington Streetby Boston police officer Julian Turner after swerving his bike to avoida meter maid. Turner stuck out his foot to stop Loomis, Loomis says, thenaccused him of running over it, struck him on the side of the head, cuffedhim, and dragged him away as a crowd cheered. Assault charges against Loomiswere dismissed after Turner failed to appear for four court dates, anda witness' complaint against Turner to Internal Affairs ``was sustained''in March, according to a police spokesman, who would not comment on whetherdisciplinary action was taken.

Loomis had to wait several weeks to get his bike out of impoundment;he lost four days' work for the court appearances and was charged $100for a public defender. Now, he continues to ride as a courier, and he thinksabout the people who cheered his arrest: ``A lot of people interpret ourspeed as aggression -- being aggressive on a bike means that we're aggressiveagainst people -- and that's not necessarily true. I do everything in mypower to avoid people. I don't want to hit anybody.''

Dan Coyle has hit people. He's been riding for 12 years, only recentlytaking on part-time dispatcher duties for Marathon. At 37, he's an oldman in the business. The tattoo of a sailing ship on his forearm datesfrom his service in the Coast Guard, not the Museum School. Short, stocky,and balding, he is smooth and graceful on the bike, but he walks with alimp, the cumulative effect of being knocked down by car doors ``10 to15 times.'' Winters are particularly tough, he says, because ``the snowis murderous''; he crashed three times last winter, riding across steelplates he couldn't see under the snow.

One pedestrian collision stands out in Coyle's memory. ``I'm going downTremont Street. I was going at a good clip, maybe 30 miles an hour. That'spretty fast on a bicycle. And coming up to the corner of Stuart and Tremont. . . a woman stepped off a curb before the intersection. Mind you, I hada green light. I didn't expect her to step off at all. She was lookingto her right. . . . I was coming practically as fast as I could go fromher left, and she stepped off the curb almost simultaneously from whenI got in front of her. There was nothing I could do except hit her.

``I knocked her for a loop. I felt terrible. I didn't knock her out,and I didn't really hurt her, but I knocked her down. She got up, and shesaid, `You almost killed me! What do you think you're doing?' I said, `Lady,you stepped off a curb out of an intersection. That's illegal, number one.And, number two, if I was a car, you'd be dead right now. So you got prettylucky that I hit you.' I asked her if she was all right. She said, `Leaveme alone,' and I just left. That kind of incident really upsets me, becauseI didn't mean to hurt anybody, but pedestrians think they just can walkacross the street at any moment. The main reason why we hit them is becausethey don't see us. They don't look both ways. We don't make any noise.That's why I yell sometimes when I see somebody who's going to do that.''

Coyle has watched with a mix of amusement and annoyance as messengers'image has evolved. ``A lot of people think this is a sort of `underground'kind of work. But it's just a delivery boy, that's all. It's like workingfor Western Union. It's hard, physical work if you want to make a goodweek's pay. You got to go, go, go from 8 a.m. to 5:30 or 6 o'clock.

``Everybody thinks that it's underground,'' he continues, ``becausemost messengers have a lot of earrings and nose rings and you-name-it ringsand tattoos. I do it because I need to make a living. I need to pay mybills. And it's the job I've chosen to do right now. As far as thinkingI'm an outlaw -- not hardly.''

Asked why couriers are such lightning rods for others' anger, Coylespeculates: ``We get around the city faster than they do. They think you'rea geek, some sort of hippie bike goof. People think bicycles equal communist.That doesn't make any sense. Usually bicycle equals poor, not communist.''

Coyle's boss is Stewart Tabakin, president and founder of Marathon MessengerCompany, Boston's oldest bicycle courier service. In the company's ninth-flooroffices on St. James Avenue, Tabakin looks like a middle-aged accountantwho's stumbled into the wrong nightclub. Forty-five years old, dressedin a white shirt, with a neatly trimmed mustache, graying hair, and wire-rimmedspecs, he's at the center of a parade of couriers sporting purple hair,Lycra shorts, tattooed limbs, Doc Marten boots, dog collars, and tonguestuds.

``Most people can't figure out what I'm doing here,'' Tabakin says ina mild-mannered, slightly nervous voice. ``You have to get past what theylook like, and I've trained myself to get past.'' He is interrupted byone of the company's 10 phone lines. ``Marathon,'' he answers, taking oneof 500 to 600 daily delivery orders. ``Hi. Going where, please? We'll beright over.'' He knows many of the customers by name and has worked withsome for nearly two decades, since he founded Marathon.

Working in New York in the '70s, he saw Manhattan's bike messengersas a business opportunity he could take to Boston. With no courier experienceand a skeptical response from all quarters, he nonetheless gave it a try.By the early '80s, he had built a business that reached a pre-fax heydayof 1,000 orders a day.

Marathon's fleet is 40 bicycle messengers, nearly half of whom havebeen with the firm for more than a year, and a handful of car messengers,who handle longer trips. As the couriers drop in through the day to processpaperwork, Tabakin greets them with avuncular warmth: Jeremy, the rail-thinyouth who periodically retreats for a week in the woods to clear the cityout of his head. Pierre, the French student and sometime bike racer withcalves like tree trunks. C.J., the 50-year-old bald photographer whosebusiness is slow and career plans in flux. Richard, the purple-haired philosophygrad with a stuffed toy rabbit hanging off his bag. And Brit, the apple-cheekedSalem schoolteacher who became a courier because she wanted outdoor workfor the summer.

Peter Weinberg, one of Marathon's car drivers, comes through the officeand is asked about his two-wheeled counterparts. ``They're nuts. They'renuts. You gotta be nuts. . . . They're all nuts. You have to be nuts inthe winter . . . just drive a bike all day. You gotta be nuts.''

Tabakin is quick to agree: ``It's a hard job out there.'' He hires peoplewho want to work hard, he says, even if they have no messenger experience.Asked about adherence to traffic laws, Tabakin recites the regulations.``We go by the rules,'' he insists. ``If they don't, I'm not down therepolicing them. I just encourage them to go correctly down one-way streetsand to be extremely careful and courteous. This isn't a game of speed.It's much more important to be organized.''

In midafternoon, Budka is temporarily ``clear'' -- no pending pickupsor deliveries. He stops for coffee, the official drug of the courier business,and reflects on the ironies of riding a bike for a living at age 41. ``I'mtwice the age of some of these kids. . . . I'm not the oldest courier,. . . but I may be the only one with a wife and two children and a housein the suburbs, who's a Boy Scout leader and plays in an R & B band.

``This is a good job for someone like me,'' he explains. ``I'm not reallygood with bosses. I have sort of boss anxiety. Even though I might be agood worker, they still make me nervous. Even when I was the boss,'' hesays, referring to several stints in retail management positions, ``itmade me nervous. I made myself nervous.'' But, he continues, ``I alwaysthought of myself as an intelligent, creative, artistic person. This jobis none of those.''

Budka, however, manages to inject creativity into the job. He makeshis rounds with flair and curiosity, and unlike some of his younger, moresullen colleagues, he engages with secretaries, receiving clerks, peoplein crosswalks. Looking clean-cut and friendly, he draws them out, chatsthem up, harvests a rolling sample of the urban buzz. After a close brushwith a pedestrian, he breaks into a chorus of ``Getting to Know You,''prompting a smile. When a tourist offers admiringly that all the exercisemust ``give you a huge heart,'' Budka puffs himself up and replies, ``Yeah,I had to get a new chest.''

The last two deliveries of Budka's nine-hour day are double rushes,guaranteed in less than half an hour. They take him from South Stationto Columbus Avenue in the South End, where he offers calming words to aflush-faced young lawyer, panicked over getting two packages out on time.Budka drops them into his bag and races back downtown at rush hour. Hetravels along Columbus, Boylston, Essex, then down High Street the wrongway, past packs of pedestrians and gridlocked commuters. One of the ``cagers''-- courier parlance for the carbound -- erupts at the sight of a cyclistwhizzing past his sport utility vehicle, even though Budka has plenty ofclearance. He lets loose a volley of obscenities. Budka doesn't react.

It's almost 6, and the law-office destination for the double-rush packageis locked and dark. Budka pushes the after-hours buzzer. A frazzled womanin a business suit soon appears and opens the glass doors. Budka handsher the paperwork, observing, ``This is a lawyers' office. I knew someonehad to be here.'' The woman, signing for the envelope, looks up sheepishly.``Yeah, isn't it pathetic?'' she says. With a smile, Budka replies, ``Youpeople need to get out and recreate more.''