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Wild
West on Milk Street
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Oblivious pedestrians, nasty
drivers, bottomless potholes and The Man: A look at the life of local
couriers
By Dan Roche
Boston Weekly Dig, May 10, 2006
12:30pm
" ... So it'll get there?"
"We're on it," says Owen, the dispatcher, hanging up abruptly. With his
free hand, he picks up a two-way radio.
12:31pm
Nichole Keller finishes a Red Bull and glares at me. "Don't call me
'Cannonball' in the article. OK?" Her two-way radio beeps from the
holster on her shoulder bag.
"30?" comes Owen's voice from her walkie-talkie.
"30, go ahead," she responds, repeating her call number. She holds her
gaze, her clear blue eyes still regarding me with menace.
"I'm serious, don't."
I nod.
"I need you to go back up to Proskauer," Owen says. "Hot rush to the
DC."
"10-4."
"Come on." She mounts her bike and makes for the offices of Proskauer
Rose at International Place. She moves at a fluid pace, coolly
navigating through traffic and past construction sites. Nothing catches
her by surprise.
12:38pm
We enter the labyrinthine loading dock at International Place, sign in
at security and make our way up to the office. Stepping off the
elevator, she sees a harried lawyer pounding his finger on a slim brown
envelope, yelling, "This must be IN THAT COURTHOUSE by one o'clock. ONE
O'CLOCK."
"OK, it'll get there," the clerk says. "I just called the courier."
Keller saunters over, breaking up the discussion. "DC?" she asks. The
mailroom worker flings the package at her. Turning around, she hears
"ONE O'CLOCK!"
She heads back downstairs. As she kicks her leg over her bike, another
cyclist breezes down the sidewalk. Bill Leighton's legs lock his
fixed-gear bike to a stylish, skidding halt. Headphones clamp to his
temples like shock-therapy electrodes. Seeing her, he sings:
"C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-Cannonball."
She looks at the ground and mumbles, "Fucking Leighton." She clips into
her pedals and shoves off, a slight smile crossing her lips.
12:44pm
At the Moakley Courthouse in South Boston, Keller waits in line as
people run their possessions through the X-ray machine. She glances at
her watch. The line moves slowly.
12:55pm
Passing security, she leaves her bag with the court officers as a
matter of procedure. Dashing up to Courtroom 4 on the third floor, she
knocks on the door. Nobody's home. She peers down at her watch again.
12:59pm
A court officer approaches. "Hi."
"Hey, I got a package for the judge."
"I'll take it. Do you need a signature?"
"Yeah, please." She presents her clipboard and points to a slip, which
he signs.
"Anything else?"
"Nope, thanks, have a nice weekend."
"You too, now." He looks at the package, tucks it under his arm, and
unlocks the door of the courtroom, whistling.
***
Keller works for Breadrunner Couriers. She is in her mid-20s and has
been a messenger for eight years. She makes good money-roughly $800 a
week-as a contractor for one of the city's elite companies. Her job
allows her to eat lunch by the waterfront, her hours are flexible, and
she spends a decent portion of the day reading or hanging out with
friends. Owen, her dispatcher, is the closest thing she has to a "boss."
Her story is similar to those of many successful couriers; she began
her career at one of the city's largest services, working hard for
peanuts. There, she learned the lay of the land, how to ride a bike on
it, and proper traffic etiquette. It's no tea party, her job. Keller
knows that the car she blocks off one moment can speed up and catch her
rear wheel the next. She's learned to minimize risks and has developed
such an acute awareness of her surroundings that she knows at a glance
whether the person lurking between cars will dash out into the street
or is simply waiting for traffic to pass. Danger can happen.
And sometimes it does. A study released in 2002 by the Harvard School
of Public Health produced an eye-popping statistic: Out of every 19
hours worked by a bicycle messenger in the city of Boston, one hour is
lost due to injury. Jack Tigh Dennerlein, who conducted the study,
said, "The injury rate among bike couriers appears to be typical, if
not higher, than those of professional football players who only work
for part of the year." The comparison is apt. Courier work has been
likened to professional sports without the benefit of enormous
contracts or personal trainers. There is no off-season. Couriers work
in fair weather and fierce, and the work is there 52 weeks a year.
The public perception of messengers is that while theirs may be a
perilous job, riders bring the danger on themselves. If they weren't
blowing through traffic lights and bolting between cars, the popular
reasoning goes, they wouldn't get injured. This may be true in some
cases, but a courier learns on the job to minimize risks. Jaffney
Roode, who has been working as a messenger for two years, states that
couriers "are more kinesthetically aware than anyone else on the
streets-be they pedestrians, cabbies or commuters."
"A sixth sense develops," says Kevin Porter, who's been a messenger for
14 years. "There's an aspect of it which is inherent, and there's an
aspect which develops through the commission of the job." This is
evident in Keller's riding, as she edges away from spaces where
jaywalkers are about to dash into the street or a car door threatens to
snap open. "Either you have it or you don't," Porter adds. "It's just
constant attention, zen-like attention."
The occupational hazards, while always there, can largely be avoided. A
courier who identified himself as "The Rabbi" says, "Use common sense.
If you feel like you're going too fast, you probably are." The most
dangerous people on the road are new couriers who have not yet mastered
the art of self-preservation. The old employee handbook for Marathon
Messengers stated that "no job is worth losing your life over," though
new couriers tend to equate efficiency with raw speed. Raw speed may be
effective in the Tour de France, but in the Tour de Franklin Street, it
can get you killed.
James Norton, who owns Revolution Bicycle Repair at 753 Atlantic
Avenue, and is himself a courier, offers this. "If I were to give one
piece of advice to rookies, it would be: Chill out. You don't need to
go full-speed constantly to make good money. Go fast when it's safe to."
"You got your kids on their shiny track bikes who don't really know
what they're doing," says Leighton, who, after more than a decade on
the road, is starting his own company. "I try never to interrupt the
flow of traffic, and if I ever do anything stupid, I say I'm sorry."
The Rabbi adds, "Most of us are professionals who know what we're
doing, so that asshole that almost killed you in the crosswalk was
probably just some trendy art-school kid on a bike he doesn't know how
to ride."
Road riding is like swimming with dolphins. The flow of traffic and the
intuitive sense Porter mentions inform couriers like sonar as they zip
from building to building. What looks dangerous to bystanders is often,
in actuality, reasonably safe. The couriers interviewed for this piece
commonly stated that the real danger is the pedestrians, who often dash
blindly into the street from behind parked cars and cross against
oncoming traffic, as Boston's jaywalking laws go woefully unenforced.
Jonathan Gladstone, who famously and fatally plastered bank executive
and school committee member William Spring in the fall of 1997, said on
Cycling.org that "I would hope that publicizing an accident like this
would make everyone realize how dangerous the streets can be, and be
more careful. I'm ... impressed by how willing pedestrians are to run
into the street, ignoring the dangers around them."
Bicycling Magazine perennially ranks Boston one of America's worst
cities to bike in, consistently citing lawless pedestrians. While
cyclists disobeying traffic laws are a concern, it's safe to say that
mom was right-you should look both ways before you cross the street.
***
As you'd expect, the unusual and intense working environment fosters
some serious camaraderie among couriers. In a sense, they feed off each
other's casual jadedness. A courier starts out as a "rookie"-hated,
scorned or just ignored. Much depends on how one rides. The
aforementioned art-school kid hacking around on a track bike, utterly
oblivious to his surroundings, is an affront to the professionalism of
established couriers and a potential safety hazard in a job where a
simple mistake can cause a major accident. It's nothing personal.
Respect comes with time.
Years ago, messengers congregated in Liberty Square and at the DeLux
Café after work; these days, the usual haunts are Winthrop
Square and JJ Foley's downtown. New riders often decry the low-key
hostility they encounter from the Winthrop Square elite. "It's just
like high school" is a common complaint-though within a year or two,
they'll often be hanging out with the same people they formerly
despised. The sense of community (or cliquishness) engendered by
couriers is a necessity due to the demands of the job-a psychological
self-preservation method-and it can take a while to gain acceptance
into the flock.
This can extend into a sort of "us against them" mentality regarding
the businesspeople who alternately provide couriers with work and sneer
at the dash of sweaty or slush-soaked Wild West ethos that bumps up
against staid corporate America. It's rarely adversarial, though, and
often a healthy working relationship arises. Both need each other for
business and for the conduct of business, but there's a perceived lack
of respect (one could say a class tension) between the business
community and couriers.
"When you're in an elevator surrounded by businesspeople, you're just
some schmuck, and if anything goes wrong, it's always your fault," says
Brendan Burke, who currently rides for RS Express. "But then when you
bang out some important job for them, you hear nothing."
In response, couriers band together. While there is a hierarchy-a newer
rider is expected to move aside when a more experienced one is passing
them in the lane, and rookies who land good jobs are often met with
suspicion-there's also a sense that they're all in it together. A
newcomer seen slogging through sleet and snow is immediately granted a
measure of respect that a 'fair-weather' rider who works only in the
spring and summer cannot expect. It's true that social adepts may gain
acceptance sooner than curmudgeons who keep to themselves, but
acknowledgement can also come in the form of friendly nods or elevator
banter. In many ways, it's a very solitary job-most couriers are
independent contractors, and they're left almost entirely to their own
devices during the workday. However, it's a solitary job shared by
dozens of people in Boston, and thousands worldwide.
The social milieu develops on a personal level almost unique to this
workforce. Despite the fact that, as contractors, couriers are often in
direct competition for work, there is seldom tension between
co-workers. To the contrary, they hang out together during downtime.
They check out each other's bands and invite each other to parties.
It's a mixture of the personal and professional, and people of wildly
divergent backgrounds work as couriers during the day and drink beer
together at night.
Mentioned in nearly every media representation of the messenger
world-and unfortunately intertwined with its public perception-is Puck
from MTV's The Real World. Puck, it should be noted, was a messenger
for two weeks before realizing he wasn't cut out for the job. He
remains a pet peeve of many messengers, who resent being stereotyped as
tatoo-bedecked punk rockers. Sure, the punks are there, but they're
riding right alongside trance-hop DJs, cello players and rockabilly
kids, as well as unassuming bike geeks who left the corporate world
behind, and quiet, responsible family men.
Whatever their backgrounds, the perils and pleasures of being paid to
ride a bike in the hustle of the naked city bind Boston's couriers
together. It takes all types to schlep a package, to flow with the raw,
visceral pulse of the city. If Nelson Algren were a 25-year-old college
dropout with a taste for Schlitz, he'd likely be a messenger. There are
down-and-outers, meticulous professionals, and some who are a bit of
both. Some are in it squarely to make a buck, others follow the freedom
of the unfolding asphalt.
"I pursue other forms of work, but this one is my favorite, the one
thing in my life to which I always return," says Laura Nelson, who
works on-and-off for Fly Over the City. "Basically, my bike is my
liberty, and if I can get paid to ride her, all the better."
Dan Roche is a freelance
writer and bike courier. Regarding the latter, he says, "I loathe the
job with a vehemence you can never understand, but I wouldn't trade it
for the world."
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