URBAN SPEED DEMONS

August 2000

by Christopher Ketcham

“I know each one of us in this life has asked themselves, `Black Starof bitterness blooming inside my body, will you be able to take me allthe way?’ But for the cycle messenger there can only be one answer. Therereally is no question. It is a necessity.”
      -- a poet/messenger named Machine Wilkins 

 Images from the life: At Connecticut and K in Washington, DC,a banshee in spandex hangs on the hood of a swerving cab, beating out thewindshield with a U-lock. 
The cab disappears down a street that smells of cherry blossoms. And another bike messenger watches on, his heart bursting with pride. 

 In foul overcast December at New York City noon, a messenger’sballs begin to freeze in his third hour on the road.  Black watersin potholes splash his crotch.  Snow starts falling.  Soon hewill be navigating piles of dirt ice that resemble the leavings of prehistoricbeasts.
Or he’ll slalom 20 miles an hour in the stalled evacuations of rushhour.  Ride a sidewalk amid the lunchtime feeding.  Skirt anold woman screeching at him.  Jump a high curb, slide, recover. Bounceoff humid canyon walls of two buses stopped at an intersection.  Yellat a car trying to cut him off, that he cuts off with a scream.  Themule with raging blood. 

You know the bike messenger if you’ve lived in the urban core or workedin any big city office: the wrap-around sun-glasses, the proud outlaw swagger,chain around the hips, two-way Motorola Iden strapped crackling to bigmessenger bag, the guy who thinks he’s the toughest, looniest cat aroundbecause he gets paid the fat bills to ride a bike fast through hell’s ninecircles delivering the important packages for the important clients. 

You know these images, of the rebel and madman, the glamorous transgressor,the free man who laughs at slow humanity huddled under umbrellas at bus-stops. The bike messenger as urban legend, Hermes’ minion, the winged one. 

Refracted back on the urban landscape, they are as real as cardboardcut-outs.  They are the sum of what messengers envision themselvesto be and what the walking public would like them to be, what Hollywoodgave us in the 80s with Kevin Bacon’s Quicksilver, what CBS told us withsleek brainrot dramas like Double Rush.

More appropriate, perhaps, is the image of Bradley Minch, 20, a nativeClevelander, crushed to death under eighty-thousand pounds of illegally-operatingtractor trailer on Manhattan’s traffic-maddened 6th Avenue. 

Or that of a hundred riders standing in the fog on a moth-eaten pierthrowing a bicycle into the oily waters off San Francisco’s China Basin. The bicycle hovers a minute, drowns. It belonged to Thomas Meredith, 26,whose head was smashed open by a passing bus.  His brain swelled,and for a few days he held on. 

And if you’ve lived in the densest and darkest of urban cores, likeNew York City, you’ve seen the messenger’s actuality: a poor minority kidworking for shit pay, frustrated, exhausted; an ex-con getting ripped offon his rates; a guy just off the boat from Guinea or Colombia who smileswhen he receives a shorted check.  Guys with families, paid piece-meal,riding 30 miles a day, working 10 hours straight and barely making minimumwage, with no sick days, vacation days, health benefits. At day’s end,their faces are covered with a light soot, their eyes are bloodshot andburning, and when they cough or sneeze, their phlegm is thick and dark. In all this, the messenger resembles most the sweatshop laborer of a centuryago. 

No one really knows how many messengers are out there or how many getkilled or hurt on the job.  Since 1990, 201 cyclists have died onNew York City streets.  Last year, more than 4,000 cyclists were hitby automobiles. How many were messengers?  Unknown.   InNew York it’s said there are about 6,000 messengers - equal to all themessengers in every other city across the nation - fueling an industryvalued at some $700 million a year.  It’s said that two, maybe three,get killed there every year, speeding critical documents for the city’sbiggest advertisers, insurers, banks, modeling agencies, and law firms. 

As thanks, messengers are vilified, demonized and spat on by city governmentand citizens alike. 

I was one of them for a few months in the mid-90s, making three dollarsa package, about $200 a week.  I was, admittedly, a lazy rider, butit was a far cry from the glory days of the 80s, the salad days beforethe fax machine and e-mail, when the better riders took home $200 in asingle eight-hour stretch, untaxed, working for fly-by-nights.  Butthen came the recession of the early 90s, and a government crackdown onfree-wheeling companies.  Business constricted, competition intensified,wages deteriorated, and the hip, easy money was gone.

I worked for one of the most notoriously exploitative of the New Yorkcompanies, an operation called Eastside/Westside, which dispatched outof a filthy suite of cramped cubicles on 39th Street. 

On my fourteenth day, a brunette popped out of her Lexus slapping hersharp door in my chest.  This is called getting `doored’ and it isa rite of passage.  I was thrown, smacked my elbows and skinned myhands.  Called up the office to say I needed a rest. 
“How’s the package?” was the first thing the dispatcher asked me. 

 In 1995, you didn’t need to call up a labor investigator, checkthe news morgue or run a court search to find the bad companies. You simply buttonholed the first ten messengers you saw, asked them ifthey liked their job, then asked them who they worked for.  More than 80 percent of your interviews would have been with a poorly educatedblack or Latino, which makes New York a distinct demographic, because messengersin cities like Washington D.C. and San Francisco are mostly white, manyof them well-educated.  There was about a 20 percent chance your manwould be on a prison work release program, and a 30 percent chance he’dbe a recent immigrant.  In age, he’d be anywhere from 16 to 45 yearsold, and in attitude he’d be resigned and tired and not really caring whetheryou exposed the bastards who were ‘exploiting’ him. 

 Luckily, I had a chance at the time to talk with an insider, a24-year-old ex-patriate from Liverpool, England, who was all for shovingit to his employers.  He gave me the bird’s eye view of the shadydealings that typified companies like Eastside/Westside.  A six-yearmessenger, dispatcher and then troubleshooter with a small New York firm,Conrad Allen had cherubic cheekbones and a crooked ironist’s smile. He delivered his indictments with an amused, thoroughly English detachment,as if there was no hope whatsoever for improving the messenger’s lot. 

The primary gripe, he told me, was rates.  Officially, a messengercould make on average about three and a half dollars a run back then, moreif he traveled far and fast.  But it often didn’t add up that way. 

There are a lot of special trips - rushes, double-rushes, truck andoversize packages - that are daily carrots for a messenger.  Whilea normal run should be completed in two hours, a rush pays double the regularrate for delivery in one; a double-rush pays triple the regular rate, butdemands completion in half-an-hour.  Any normal run that takes a messengermore than 20 blocks - about one city mile - brings a higher rate than thethree dollar base; any run with a package weighing 15 pounds or more (atruck run) or with a very large package, say, three feet or longer (anoversize), also pays more. 

But high-volume clients often negotiated price reductions, and at Allen’scompany more than half of the big clients didn’t pay the special rates. The messenger is not told this.  Instead, the dispatcher cajoles him:“I’ll hook you up, I’ll hook you up.  I’ve got three hot rushes justfor you, cause yer the best!” And the messenger gets juiced for a wildrun, races the red lights - thinking he’s getting the good money. 

It was all gossamer.  At the end of the day, he received no commissionsheet, no official tally.  Just a list of addresses that he’d visited,and a gross take for the day.  Bottom line is that he had no ideahow much each run paid, and certainly no idea which were the double-rushesthat got him the skinned knee, which the twenty pound truck jobs that gavehim the backache. 

You can imagine him scratching his head in wonder.  “Didn’t I dosix rushes?  Weren’t those worth $45 alone?  Then why is my grossfor the day only $28?”

And you can imagine the dispatcher: “What are you talking about, guy? I hooked you up.  And you’re complaining?”

So dispatchers and management and guys like Allen lied to messengersas a matter of course.  They lied with smiles. 

And if you were an immigrant or an ex-con or a kid who just droppedout of the 10th grade, you sucked it up.  You’ve got a job, man. This is the good life.  The guy on work release has more importantthings to worry about, like not going back to jail.  The immigrantmay not even have his papers straight. 

Take 41-year-old Rodrigo Gonzalez, a tiny man from Guatemala, who toldme through a thick accent: “I am beginning.  I don’t have informationon how much I get paid for any run at this moment.”  He shrugged. He wasn’t angry.  He hadn’t bothered to ask. 
But try protesting, and you were out. “I can fire a guy for any fuckingthing I want,” Allen told me.  “I do it all the time.  A clientwill call up: I’ve a hot, hot rush, I need it there in 10 minutes. A messenger doesn’t deliver it in 10 minutes.  The client calls backscreaming: If I ever see that messenger again in my office, this accountis gone.  So you fire the messenger on the spot.  You make himdisappear, poof!”

Allen wasn’t exaggerating.  One courier told me he was canned becausehe took three days off for the birth of his daughter - even though he’dspent five years with the company.  Another, a 30-year-old fatherof two boys, said he was fired the day after he got doored by a cabbie. “Insurance problems,” he said. 

Dealing with liars and cheats on a daily basis is taxing, to say theleast.  Dealing with an entire urban race - secretaries, mailroomattendants, dispatchers, doormen, pedestrians, cops, cabbies, motorists- that seems to hate your existence can be soul-destroying.  For the messenger, it’s a matter of a hundred subtle slights every day. He’s harassed by building security because they think he’s a thief. A stink of old garbage runs through an office, and the secretary chimesin, “Even the messenger smells it, can you believe it?”

“Once I was given 12 jobs in a row, all late,” recalled Allen, “andat one office the package was hours overdue.  As I left, the clientthrew something hard at my back, and said, ‘You piece of shit!  Whydon’t you get on welfare like the rest of the niggers?’”

Of 25 messengers I recently interviewed, only one had no complaintsabout the job. He was a white guy, a musician who’d been doing it a month. He kept talking about the `thrill ride.’  He’ll probably sing aboutit some day.

 I remember how bitterly Allen laughed when I asked him about this. “If you’re a guy who’s been messengering for five years and never got apaid vacation and never got a raise in percentage pay per job…and you gotfour kids by two different women and you’ve got child support docking yourcheck and when your missus comes to your job - the kids need pampers, thekids want an ice cream cone, the kids want hundred dollar Air Jordans -it’s not a thrill to you anymore.  Fuck the thrill.  My kidsneed to be fed.”

As a result, few riders last long. The courier industry in New Yorksustains some astonishing turn-over numbers, because messengers are constantlygetting fired, quitting or splitting for the competition.  BreakawayCourier Systems, known as one of the better companies, turned over morethan 700 employees last year alone.  At Allen’s company, an averageeight messengers quit and another 12 were hired every month. 

This too differs New York’s messengers from those in almost any otherAmerican city.  San Francisco’s small and stable circle of 300 ridersforms a distinct community.  They know each other.  A majorityare lifers, stakeholders, professionals who’ve stayed with the same companyupwards of ten years.  Some of them recently formed unions, the firstever in the history of the business. 

Back in 1994 and 1995, the Teamsters tried to unionize employees atfour Manhattan companies.  Stories of union-busting abounded. Immigrants were menaced with deportation; convicts on work release weretold they’d go back to prison; some workers were threatened with beatings,murder.  On the eve of the elections, a dispatcher at one companyappeared with a wad of tens and twenties.  Here boys.  Take this.Remember where it came from.  Vote no on the union. 

Which 89 guys did, countered by 89 who voted in favor.  There werea half-dozen contested ballots.  It didn’t matter.  In a reportissued a full year and a half later, the National Labor Relations Boardconfirmed what everyone knew: The vote was a fraud. 
And by that time, it was too late.

In a fluid, shifting workforce of largely indifferent men, who’ve noreal sense of fealty or design, who flit from company to company and thendisappear altogether, there are few bonds beside the bottom dollar, fewchampions to spearhead change.  “What’s the bike messenger ‘community’like?” Allen told me.  “It’s two guys smoking weed together. That’s not a very strong bond.”

It’s the kind of bond you make when you have to bribe your dispatcherfor runs. These friendly kickbacks took the form of cash, drugs, beer,food, to the extent of $40 to $50 a week.  Such corruption was rampant,and not just in the back rooms.  It was institutionalized in policy,in loan-sharking and illegal “service fees,” and it thrived on vulnerability,transience, ignorance and desperation.  You need a radio or a pagerto work here, kid.  Oh, you don’t have one?  It’ll cost you $15a day.  Your kids need new shoes and you ain’t got the money? Sure, here’s a hundred bucks.  You owe me $120.  A messengerneeds vital repairs; he goes to a bike shop where the company has an account,where he can charge shoulder-bags, patch kits, pumps, tubes, rims. (Heprovides his own bike, of course.)  That was a $50 repair, he’s told. You owe us $70.  He takes off work because it’s sleeting or he’s downwith flu or his mother has died.  You missed Monday and Tuesday becauseof the blizzard?  Well, we’re going to dock you ten percent of yourgross for the week. 

 “These guys are violating labor laws on a daily basis,” Joel Lefevre,secretary-treasurer of Manhattan Teamsters Local 840, told me at the time. 

“Nearly half the industry does not carry workman’s compensation insurance,”Lefevre said.  “The industry earns hundreds of millions of dollarswithout any scrutiny or regulation as to methods or responsibility.  There is no regular licensing system of employers requiring adherence toany safety standards for employees.”

Implicated in all this, he said, are the multimillion-dollar clientelewho depend on the messenger industry. “The securities, banking, insurance,fashion, legal and accounting industries, along with their Fortune 500clients in New York, have gone into the wholesale discrimination business.”

 Over the past five years, major publicly-traded corporations -$200 million giants like Consolidated Delivery & Logistics, DispatchManagement Services, and Dynamex, the largest - have been feasting on smallprivate shops, buying up dozens nationwide.  In the process, observerssay, they’ve brought the industry out of the jungle, because their operationsare answerable to an arm of the federal government, the Securities andExchange Commission. 

At the same time, Internet commerce has exploded, energizing the courierindustry, and dot.com pioneers like Kozmo and Urbanfetch, with their onlinepromise of one-hour delivery of everything from candy bars to CD players,frantically grab up the best riders - outfitting them, as the Times ridiculouslynotes, in very colorful and pretty costumes, as comely as those on theboys at Fed-Ex. 

Luke Howell, a 15-year New York vet, has nothing but good things tosay.  He enjoyed the rush of quick cash in the late 80s, perseveredthrough the fax and e-mail onslaught, suffered through the lies and swindlesof the mid-90s.  And now he’s riding high, legitimately. 

 “The Internet has transformed the industry,” enthuses Howell.He says he’ll make some $45,000 by the end of 2000 - triple his 1995 gross- working days as a traditional courier and nights as a Kozmo e-liverer. 

Howell is a professional, and he’s getting treated like one.  He’sgot a retirement plan and contributory health insurance.

“There are no more bad guys,” he tells me. “Everything’s according toplan now.”
For some, perhaps, for a very few, for the veterans.  But spenda day on the streets talking with the average messenger - the newbie, therookie - and the hype turns to dust. 
The business model hasn’t changed.  In investigating San Franciscocompanies last year, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union uncoveredlabor violations little different from those Conrad Allen told me about. 

The roads haven’t changed.  Last year, a bike messenger in Chicagowas murdered by the driver of an SUV, who intentionally and repeatedlyran him over.  A courier in Ottawa was stabbed by a motorist. A record 35 cyclists were killed in New York City.  At least 6 mayhave been messengers. 

The demographic hasn’t changed.  Of the two dozen messengers Ispoke with, almost every one was black or Latino.  Eight were justout of jail.  More than half were immigrants, men from Ivory Coast,Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, Barbados, Nicaragua, Colombia. 
At least ten said they weren’t told their rates - or were making commissionswell below the average five years ago.

“There are always good companies and bad companies in every city,” offersAndrew Brady, the affable head of King Courier in San Francisco. “You can’tchange the bad companies. They are an evil that needs to exist.  Theguys who are still smoking crack need that bad company.  It’s theirapprenticeship.  You start out as a shitty messenger, work for a shittycompany.   You become a good messenger, move on to a good company.”
 Brady, 35, once a messenger himself, seems like a nice enoughguy - sympathetic to the cause, so to speak - but I wonder if he understandsthe mean implications of what he’s saying. 

For who are the crackheads?

Is Albha Diallo, 31, from Guinea, Africa, a crackhead, a shitty messenger? I ask Diallo who he works for. 

“Dynamex,” he says proudly.  “Good place.”  He’s been in theU.S. for four months, and two of those have been with Dynamex, the newclean corporate player.

 “How much do you make a run?” 

“Don’t know,” he says, still smiling. “It’s alright, though.  Ido good. Dynamex-Eastside/Westside, my company.”

I look at him. Eastside/Westside?  I was told they went out ofbusiness.  Later I do a little research.  Of course.  Itall makes sense.  Dynamex bought Eastside/Westside back in late 1997. 

Alex from Senegal, a handsome man with sad eyes, has just delivereda two-dollar package to 1345 Avenue of the Americas, 40-odd gleaming storiesin Midtown, and now he’s sitting in the spring sun murmuring into a two-wayradio that he needs another run now, right now.  He tells me he’strying to get a degree in statistics and it’s time to pay the tuition.

 I think of statistics.  The tall glass tower behind him housesAvon Products, valued on Wall Street at $6.7 billion; branch offices ofSalomon Smith Barney and Travelers Group, subsidiaries of Citigroup, whichhad $10 billion in profits last year; securities giant Morgan Stanley DeanWitter, which made $4.8 billion last year; and Oppenheimer Capital, whichmanages $35 billion in assets. 

 “The clients pay the companies well,” Alex says.  “And thecompanies pay us bad.  Every payroll they steal your money. This isn’t a life.   I go home soon, home to Senegal.”
Or maybe he should stick it out, like Luke Howell.  Fifteen yearsisn’t such a long time to wait for the money to trickle down.