by Jason Milligan

Being a bike messenger was the best job I've had since I was 16, when I worked in my grandfather's toy factory. I say this even though it hurts me to type with my healing left wrist which I broke on May 23, 1995 at Park Avenue and 49th Street when a British diplomat sideswiped me while I was riding.


New York City Bike Messenger. One of those fantasy jobs like astronaut or fireman, where you get to dress like a Science Fiction Rebel Warrior and behave like world peace depends on your getting the treaty to the UN on time. The reality is working in the rain for fashion industry assholes, carrying six portfolios and a shopping bag full of fabric samples (please be careful with these) while Suits blithely jaywalk in your path and buses try to kill you. So what. When you get on your bike you become a superhero. You can fly, you are invisible, you have x-ray vision and you cannot be stopped.


The job itself is simple: don't lose the packages. Beyond that, being a bike messenger requires showing up for work with a bike, a beeper and a bag. With the aid of a manifest, you keep track of what to pick up, where to take it, and any special circumstances that may apply, like rushes or wrong addresses. There are no time clocks, desks, computers, or fluorescent lights. No one cares where you are or how you get the job done as long as the packages get delivered on time and nobody gets hurt.


BAG: The good bags come from the Globe Canvas Company on Mott Street. The Old Guy makes them there, and they kick ass. They are waterproof and durable and mine is orange.


When I started riding, I had spent the whole previous year touring with my band, on the road for a few days or a week, then back in town for the same, and it sucked. Most of our performances were at frat parties, or in hotel night clubs, or at bars in malls. It's hard to feel cool playing in a mall. It just is. Most of our tours started in Virginia Beach, about a nine-hour drive from New York, and moved south and west. We would drive down in our fume-filled bus and play two sets that same night. Then we would spend a few days hauling all over North Carolina and Virginia, waiting around in dorm rooms or in empty bars: waiting for the sound check to start, waiting for the social chairman to give us money for dinner, waiting for the stage to be built, waiting for the other band to leave, or play, or set up, or stop, waiting for batteries, coffee, beer, food, toilet paper, Ed. After the last show we would drive all night to get back to our couch and TV. I usually got the dawn shift.


Life at home wasn't much better. Our apartment was like Das Boot in Brooklyn. Ten or so people to four bedrooms. The living room was full of band equipment, promotional merchandise, costumes, and whoever didn't fit in the bedrooms. The kitchen held the overflow from the living room. When the microwave was on, the TV didn't work. When the stove worked we ate pasta. When it didn't we ate White Castle.


We ate a lot of White Castle. What had begun as joke in college ("Hey--let's start a rap band!") had long since lost its humor, novelty, and love. The songs had become tedious, the endless promises of recording contracts had become silly, the whole thing had become a wheezing, crawling self-parody, and my clown shoes didn't fit so good no more.


In the spring, Ed-the-bass-player's mom became very ill, and a nine-day tour was canceled. Though sorry for Ed, I was elated for myself. The next day I asked my friend Joey if they needed anyone at the messenger shop where he worked. I was in luck. I started riding that week.


Joey rode for Tom's Courier--formerly Joe's and later HardCore--which ultimately sold its client list to Breakaway, and is no more. Tom's was a small shop, with only four or five riders. Tom was in a band, and had no problem with my inconsistent schedule. His best rider had just moved to Wisconsin, so he was hurting for people. Things worked out nicely for both of us.


HQ was in a SoHo basement occupied by a force of rat-sized waterbugs, waterbug-sized pigmy rats and a vegetarian cat disgusted with so much easy prey. Decor was utilitarian: two computers on card tables, beer cans, magazines and inner tubes on the shelves and floor, pipes and dirt everywhere, a few chairs and a metal cabinet. Dispatching does not require much in the way of infrastructure. The place stank due to the no-flush policy on the broken toilet, the guy sleeping on the shit-stained futon, and the constant presence of sweaty messengers waiting for runs. To me it didn't look any worse than my apartment, or Mona's, the bar where most of Tom's messengers went after work.



RUSH: Normal packages had two hours to be delivered once they were phoned in. A rush job had to be done in one hour, and paid twice as much as a normal run.

DOUBLE RUSH: Had to be done in thirty minutes from being phoned in.

TRIPLE RUSH: People talked about triple rushes, but I never had one. Fifteen minutes from the phone call.

It took about three days for me to get the job down, and about a week for my body to stop hurting constantly, but I loved it from the start. Bombing down Seventh Avenue from Columbus Circle in the late afternoon in April, heading to Vesey Street with the last package, the lights going green as I got there, I felt like the city was mine. People on the sidewalk and in cars and other messengers knew it too. It took less than 15 minutes to get from 59th to Houston on my first run, but that was enough time to cleanse the shit that had accumulated in me during all those months on the tour bus. And it was enough time to think, to let my mind do what I hadn't let it do all year, to go over what I'd gotten myself into, and to realize that it was all wrong. Legs, bike, eyes, back, bag, lungs, everything working on auto while my mind worked some things through.

Like some kind of Zen therapy, being a messenger crystallized my nagging feelings of doubt about the band into a plan of action. It gave me focus. Dodging traffic became my koan. Lock up. Unlock. Pick-up. Delivery. This is J. I'm empty at 59th and Sixth. Come down slow, I'll beep you if anything comes in.

Riding has its own unique pleasures--cutting down the right streets through the West Village, getting a good loop through Midtown, beating a cab, a limo, a bus--these things can make your day. Almost getting hit crossing Fifth Avenue by someone running the light and having the pedestrians cheer when you put a foot on his hood and give him the finger; this can make your week. Being On gets envious looks from the Inside People--secretaries, receptionists, execs--when they see your shorts, the dirt on your face, your freedom. It's all about freedom.

So I'm a little intense about being a messenger, so what. Go see Repo Man. I came home every day and told my girlfriend that I loved my job. She thought I loved it a little too much. Maybe I did. But the pride and freedom that came with the job made it difficult to justify the time I had spent as a copy boy, as a shop clerk, as a whole bunch of jobs that paid about the same and gave me a whole lot less. Any messenger will tell you that riding is not a long-term career. Very few people do it for more than a couple of years. The money isn't really that good, getting injured isn't fun, and after a while you just burn out. But until you do, you are a messenger, and that means something. When you see a guy blasting through Times Square looking like Mortal Kombat and ignoring the cabs missing his rear tire by inches, and you think that looks kinda fun, you are getting close to the truth. It's kinda fun like Chow Yun Fat is kinda cool.

When I was riding, my appetite reached a level it hadn't hit since I was 18, and I began eating enormous amounts of food. I became physically stronger than I had ever been. Nine hours of riding a day gave me mighty legs and even put a layer of lean muscle on my weenie upper body. My head felt clearer; I had a sense of stamina and confidence that I never had before. And my usual urban paranoia lifted a bit. I dealt with enough danger during the day that I worried a lot less about walking around at night. When people asked me what I did, I stopped mentioning the band, even though I was still playing gigs. I would tell them I was a messenger.

I was happy. Sometimes I would make up songs while I rode. Cruising down 9th Ave near Port Authority I gave the people a Bruce Dickenson-esque rendition of "Cross at the green, not in between."

New York looks different, feels different, when you are on a bike, especially when you are paid to get places fast. The cobblestone streets of Soho are a lot less quaint when your spine is getting jiggled into your head as you ride over them. The area around Grand Central Station is particularly full of dumb-assed pedestrians trying to die. Madison in the 40's is rife with Suits who assume that if there is no parade, they can step into the street anytime. (Some Inside People get a little disoriented when they go Outside.) For them, I developed my No Brakes game: when a crosswalk full of ad-types began moving against the light in front of me on a rainy day, I aimed at the most densely peopled area, took my feet off the pedals, dragged my heels in the puddles for the twin rooster-tail effect, and screamed "No Brakes! No Brakes!" As I swerved, spraying water from side to side, the Inside People would dance back and forth in the middle of the street with looks of wide-eyed confusion. Such was my payback for getting dissed in the Conde Nast mailroom and being taunted and delayed by the ID guard at the Helmsley building, for the endless waiting for unfinished packages, and for all the snide comments in elevators.

MOUNTAIN BIKE: Built for off-road riding, the heaviest and toughest riding bike. The gearing favors hills and traffic, but is too low to keep up with road and track bikes in the open. Good for going through the park; over curbs; and through glass, potholes, and other urban hazards.


TRACK BIKE, OR FIXED-WHEEL BIKE: Built for velodrome racing, these bikes have one gear, no brakes, and are extremely light and fast.

ROAD BIKE: Traditional racing bike with curved handlebars and 10-15 speeds. Medium weight and durability.

Every single bike messenger I have met has been injured seriously enough to miss work. Whether they kept working or not is a different story. Getting doored, tagged, sideswiped, or just run over is part of the job. Joe was hit three times, resulting in two new wheels and a few days off. Julian's new ultra-light Cannondale earned him the name Crash by propelling him into a couple of collisions the first week he had it. He broke some ribs last spring, but kept riding until a construction job took him off the street to make more money. Ted broke a rib when he got doored, and he kept riding. "I can't go to a doctor," he said, "because a doctor'll just tell me to stop riding until I get better, and if I do that, how can I pay him?" The day after the blizzard, Ted was in another accident: he fell in the path of a car that had been following him. But traffic was going pretty much in slow-motion on account of the storm, which allowed him to put his foot up on the license plate of the oncoming car. The driver hit his brakes and pushed Ted down the street for a while, plowing him through the snow. Eventually, the car stopped moving and Ted got up, unhurt.

Messengers don't get much in the way of benefits. If the shop is legit, they are covered under the state insurance plan, a dubious outfit that still owes me a considerable sum. If they get paid under the table, they have to lie their way through the emergency room and hope for the best. When a messenger gets killed, there is sometimes a messenger vigil, or a bike parade. A messenger gets killed every year in New York City.

On the day I crashed, I had just done a pick-up from a friend of mine at Park and 57th. He asked me if I could get his package delivered within the hour, and I assured him that it would not be a problem. I had one other pickup nearby; after that, I'd deliver his package. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon. Sunny, but not hot. I headed down Park in the middle lane, because there were too many vehicles turning for me to be in the right lane. The light was changing as I entered the intersection at 49th Street. I started to turn as somebody tried to run the light and pass me on the left side. They caught me with their mirror and threw me off the bike. I do not remember going down because it happened so fast.

Suddenly, I was lying in the street, facing downtown. My bike was about eight feet behind me, and I wondered if it was destroyed. My knee was bleeding, my shorts were torn, I had Park Avenue all over me, and the feeling was rapidly leaving my left hand and arm.

I stood up quickly and looked to see if there was oncoming traffic. I was safe. Cars were just moving around me. There was another messenger there, watching. Once he saw I was up, he wished me luck and took off. Then I turned around and saw the car that had just hit me, its broken mirror dangling off its side in an ironic imitation of my left wrist. The car had diplomatic plates. Its driver came over to me and asked me if I wanted to do the paper work. Two police officers were there almost immediately. They were involved in some nearby taxi dispute, and took a break to officiate at my accident, though they hadn't seen it happen. I dragged my bike over to the sidewalk with my right hand and waited for the police to finish getting the diplomat's statement. He said that I had drifted into his car and caused the accident. I hadn't.

A man with a broom came over to me. "You should have just laid down in the street. Make them take you away, that's what I would do. Just lay down in the street till they take you away." He was right.


Standing in the afternoon sun at Park and 49th, holding my numb and swelling left hand, I knew that it was all over. I knew that my wrist was broken and that I could not ride for the rest of the summer as I had planned. I knew that by the time my wrist healed, I would be a different person: out of the habit of riding, perhaps even afraid to ride. I would be a civilian. And I knew that meant I would probably never be a messenger again. By the time I got to the emergency room at St. Luke's, I was very calm, calmer than I had been in quite some time. Something definitive had happened. When they let me out, I announced that I was quitting the band. I did a few more shows wearing my new cast (in North Carolina, I had to stick my arm in an air-conditioning duct to harden it back up between songs), and then walked away from it. My girlfriend and I got a place together, and we settled in. We now have a dog, Calphalon pots, a garden on our fire escape, and steady, reasonable employment--in offices. And most of the time, we're happy.

I had stayed away from my bike for almost a year when I found the new pair of tires that I'd bought the day I crashed. Kevlar slicks with an inset tread to shed water; they were fast and light and still in the box. I put them on last weekend, after replacing the pedals which had been mangled in the accident. Then I got on the bike and caught a gust of memories and mixed emotions. I was scared, but under the layers of regret about giving up on my band and messengering, the fear of getting hit again, the guilt for selling myself out and taking a desk gig--beneath all the mingled melancholy that the whole messenger experience meant to me was the pleasure of riding, the joy I get from moving fast on a light steel frame, from accelerating and then coasting downhill, and from watching the city go by in the springtime. My wrist still hurts, but I'm back on the bike. I've been riding to work. Up through Greenpoint, over the Newtown Creek into Queens, across the 59th St. Bridge and crosstown to the west side. The whole time I was a messenger, I felt like I was riding for reasons just beyond my comprehension; now, sometimes, at the door to my office, I think about turning around and giving Breakaway a call. "This is J. I'm empty at 59th and Sixth."