Folks, I didn’t know where to start here. So we’re gonna start somewhere near the beginning. Working as a bike messenger was probably my first gig after moving into the city. Last week I actually contacted John Stuart who’s namechecked in this post about a detail I was foggy about. I seem to remember a tag paid out $1.25. He seems to recall it was more like $2.00. I’m going with $1.25. It somehow seems all that much more pitiful. Expect more pics, and MP3s and songs and video and the like. For now I’m wading into the water with a story and a photo.
Get a job. Get a haircut. Do something.
Do I have to say it? Yes, this was before the Internet. This was the Old World. When everything was paper, children. Paper kept the world a turning and the wheels in motion. And it even kept people like me employed. In 80’s San Francisco, if you didn’t snag a temp gig leaning over a file cabinet filing paper, you could be a bike messenger moving paper around the city. There was always something that needed a signature, some legal brief, court filings, plane tickets or paychecks. They needed a messenger to move ‘em around town.
“528? We’re going to need you to come in and turn in your walkie-talkie. We’re putting you on dimes.“
First I was like, “What the hell?” Then it sank in. Everyone on the receiving end of that dispatchers voice (and there were quite a few) knew that 528 is a total loser.
I’m a loser.
Fair enough. They’d had enough of me jamming up the radio signals with my dumb-ass rookie questions. I could picture the dispatchers rolling their eyes every time I inquired about the address of the Transamerica Pyramid or some other prominent SF financial district landmark. The correct response when you’re given a tag is “10-4“ which translates to “got it". The incorrect response was "10-9“ which translates to “Can you repeat that, because I’m a dipshit”.
But I kept asking anyway!
After breaking into the airwaves with one too many lost and confused cries for help, they’d had enough. When I came in to headquarters to turn in my big-ass heavy radio, the woman behind the counter- my boss- would barely look at me (to be fair, she’d already dinged me earlier that day for not dressing in brown and was- as they say today, getting tired of my shit), she just gestured toward a glass candy jar on the counter filled with dimes. I reached in and grabbed a handful of shame. For now on, I had to stop and drop dimes into a payphone- call into the dispatcher on a land-line to get my tags.
People keep their distance from losers. And it was hard to find a friend. The dispatchers, not to mention the other messengers held me in contempt. I felt like I was in one of those 80’s Vietnam movies which were everywhere at the time. In these films, for survivals sake, the veteran soldiers made a point of not getting close to “new guys”. Don’t even learn their names.
My friend from High School, John Stuart (who was currently the drummer for Flying Color), got me the gig. He said bike messengers were like the "last of the urban cowboy’s”. I was sold. I was a romantic after all. He was speaking my language. I dug the Punk Rock sub culture of it all too. Even though I wasn’t having much luck making any money. At the end of the week, when they added up the tags, minus renting the bike from the company, there wasn’t much there. Like the cab driver that comes back after 8 hours without enough fares to cover the cost of renting the taxi. A cabby could bust his ass and actually OWE MONEY at the end of the day.
At the time, I was living way out in the avenues. And when I would get up in the morning early enough to catch that N-Judah train downtown, it was zero dark thirty AM. When I came home at night it was dark. Schlepping my body around sunup to sundown, I was beyond exhausted.
I wasn’t going to get the hang of this overnight.
I rode for Western. Western Messengers. I will never forget that my number was 528. Nobody was referred to by their names. Ever. I couldn’t help but think of that Hank Williams song my friend Ed had put on a cassette mix tape for me. The one where Hank sang "I'm a number not a name”.
All alone I bear the shame
I'm a number not a name
I heard that lonesome whistle blow
They had a uniform they required the messengers wear. It was brown. You dressed in your own clothes, but it had to be brown. Brown pants, brown shirt, brown jacket. I hated brown. I didn’t own anything brown. I wore black. This was the 80’s. I wasn’t down with no earth tones.
And the compensation? You got paid something like $1.25 per tag. It wasn’t an hourly wage. It worked like this: When you completed the pick-up and delivery of a package, that was a tag. Didn’t matter if you picked it up and dropped it off across the street. Or if you found yourself an hour later over the 3rd street bridge, way out in the Dog Patch lost and searching for some elusive address. It was 1.25 per tag. Period. If you were new and if you weren’t in cahoots with the dispatchers, you got the long haul tags. If you knew how to butter the bread of the dispatcher, you might get seven tags at once that only needed to be dropped off a few blocks away. I didn’t figure that out right away. This gig was not only physically demanding. It was political. It was a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-pass-the-gravy-your-way world. In fact, in all my nineteen years, I’m not sure I’d ever heard that expression “gravy” before I heard a dispatcher say to a messenger one evening at HQ, after the messenger handed him a little carton of Pot Stickers from Brandy Ho’s. Huffing those babies down with chopsticks, with a dumb ass smile on his face, the dispatcher said, “It’s the least you can give me after all the gravy I’ve been giving you out there.”
Fucking cliques, man.
For my lunch break, I eventually worked up the courage to brave the Bike Messenger crowd that hung around Battery Park. I might as well have been invisible. It was a cliquish bunch. These were hardened vets. They would gather there with their cans of sardines and crackers. They were like pirates. Bike Messenger animals. Lifers. Yeah, a little intimidating. Tatted up with Mohawks, back when that was a dangerous look. Some of them would work in New York in the summers. And come out to San Francisco for the winters. The New York messengers were rumored to ride fixed-gear bikes. Kamikaze stuff. No brakes. No coasting. I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why?”. It was pointed out to me how it kind of makes sense. New York is flat. And a fixed gear bike is of no use to anyone, so who’s gonna steal it?
John Stuart took me under his wing. And eventually, with his guidance, something clicked. I started getting it together a little bit here and there. I even scrounged some brown pants and a jacket somewhere. Somehow I got back on the radio and got semi-cozy with a dispatcher or two. Still, I don’t know how I made it out intact.
I’m pretty sure we wore helmets. I don’t really remember. But I do remember what it was like to watch somebody get ‘doored'. Yes, the bane of all messengers. When someone opens a car door in your path. First it’s just a quiet “click” of the door and then? Trust me, you don’t want that. You don’t even want to witness it. Shit was dangerous. But, you could only be so careful. If you didn't want to starve, you had to hustle. That means there’s little time for obeying traffic signals (which to be fair are suggestions at best).
I’m not sure how I eventually got out of it. I’m pretty sure there was a Green On Red tour and I climbed in the van. And was only too happy to do it. I think I might have returned to the Bike Messenger gig a couple more times. I certainly don’t miss it. To this day, people practically stop me on the street and are like, “Oh man, I saw all those tour dates in your newsletter. Wow, I could never do that. That seems like a hard way to make a living.”
Whatever. Beats folding underwear at Mervyn’s as we used to say. Maybe I’m still schlepping documents around from here to there. Town to town. From one merch table to the next. And still trying to get the hang of it.
Towards the end of my time riding for Western, one of the messengers in the park finally acknowledged me and just kind of nodded at me with a “Hey”.
And then he asked, “Are you a friend of John’s?“.
“Yeah”, I said.
“So how do you know John?”
I sniffed and said, "John? Oh, we were in Vietnam together. But, we were too fast. They couldn’t catch us.“
I’ve always been a little bit full of it. I can’t help myself.
Before I go. Let me share this one practical life hack. I picked up a cool elevator trick which I might still sometimes use to this day loading amps and drums into an elevator.
You’ll need gaffer tape. But any tape will do.
Picture this: Let’s say you just waited fifteen minutes in the lobby to catch the elevator up to the Transamerica Pyramid, to say, the 68th floor to deliver one lousy tag? Once you step out of that elevator up there, It’s going to take forever for the elevator to come back, right? Well, one of my colleagues taught me to keep a piece of tape on your jeans. And after you step out, put that tape over the sensor light on the side of the elevator doors. The elevator will stay open as long as it senses something is blocking that light. You’re free to go about your business, the elevator will wait for you.
That came in handy. Sometimes I’d be up there so long waiting to get a signature or something, by the time I got back down to the lobby there would be an angry Shanghai mob spilling out of the lobby waiting for the elevator. But, what do I care, I’m a $1.25 richer, baby!
Onwards,
-C