Mechanical Husbandry

the crew

From a PNWRiders forum member, March 31:

“I responded to your post awhile back about the couriers, and was wondering if I could get some more info.

How did you get started running deliveries? It sounds like a fun gig for those of us who love to ride.

Any helpful info is greatly appreciated.

Thank you”

It was the best job I’ve ever had, and unfortunately the party’s over. Over a period of several years I’ve logged about 130,000 miles, and murdered three sportbikes. How did I get started, you ask…  This is a great chance for me to launch into a rambling, self-indulgent odyssey about my career as a courier. It probably isn’t the helpful info that you’re asking for, and will no doubt be more fun for me to write than for you to read. Nonetheless, let me start at the beginning.
It was the summer of 1994, and the place was Seattle. I was a 19 year old hayseed from Winthrop, Washington, and fresh off the turnip truck. Seattle was actually a somewhat affordable and interesting city back then, and I was easily dazzled by the skyscrapers, the urban grime, and the throngs of exotic-looking heroin users on Capitol Hill. I needed to find a job, so I did what any socially challenged high school drop-out with an addiction to Ernest Hemingway novels might have done: I got hired as a bicycle messenger.

The first six months of messenger work were sort of a fantastic nightmare- I got hit by a car, I made minimum wage, I smelled bad and was starving for calories all the time. But I soon came to love the job, and the co-workers were the most fascinating bunch of weirdos that I had ever seen. There was 45-Carl, a friendly punk rocker from the East coast, who would shoot heroin in the bathroom while waiting for jobs from the dispatcher. There was the car-board dispatcher, a calm, bearded man, who was somehow high on cocaine every single day. There was 61-Travis, who should have been a professional cyclist, and could destroy an entire field of seasoned bike racers whenever he put the bong down long enough to enter a mountain bike race. It was an occupational culture that seemed to attract drug users, hippy jocks, and broken athletes. I suppose not much has changed.

The “Quicksilver” era of the late seventies and eighties may have been the true zenith of bike messenger culture, but things were still pretty good in the mid-nineties. You could easily jump on a Greyhound bus and land in any one of a number of cities- New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Baltimore, etc., and immediately get hired as a courier, as long as you had a bike and the look (cut-off Dickies over lycra, cycling shoes, rampant body odor). After several years of working in Seattle, I decided to check out the scene in San Francisco, which is where I first saw an actual motorcycle courier.

San Francisco has a place called “the wall” on Market Street, sort of a concrete pavilion in the middle of a city block in the financial district, and at any time of day it was possible to see several dozen couriers there, picking at their scabs and “burning down.” Upon my arrival in the city, I went to the wall to find out about who might be hiring, which dispatchers to avoid, and where could I find some of the hemp-oil chain lube that people had been talking about.  I noticed a guy with a messenger bag sitting on a beat-up, flat black FZR600. I realized that he must be a courier when I heard his radio squawking, and I watched him say something to his dispatcher, put on his tattered helmet, and start his machine. In a split second he was pointed down Market street in the middle of all the afternoon traffic. There was a loud bark of exhaust, and his front wheel shot up in the air like a salute in a massive, perfect wheelie- going right down Market into third gear, probably traveling 60 miles an hour before he let it back down. The rest of the messengers watched and murmured a collective “ho-HO!”, before lazily turning back to their hacky-sack games and hand-blown glass devices.

When I was hired later that day at Go! Couriers, I was surprised to see that half of the crew rode motorcycles. Four bicycles, four motorcycles, one car. The motorcycle messengers were a totally different breed of animal than any of the bike messengers I had worked with. Bike guys were into pot, food, fitness, and Campagnolo parts. The motorbike guys were hard-drinking, leather-clad tavern brawlers who cheated death on a daily basis, and were into wheelie stories and whiskey. After work, these two seemingly incompatible stereotypes put their differences aside and got drunk together, at messenger bars like Zeitgeist.

Years later, say 2004, I found myself working as a bicycle messenger in Seattle again. To my knowledge, Seattle has simply never had motorbike couriers, for whatever reason (the weather? hello?), but the motorbike idea was somewhere in the back of my mind. I didn’t own a motorcycle at the time, but I’ve had my endorsement since high school. Still, I didn’t give it much thought until I heard about a guy named Devin, who was apparently making a killing at IndyStealth Couriers on one of those big Honda scooters. We heard that he was clearing nearly twice the number of jobs as the other car drivers, and raking in the commissions. That was when the light bulb came on: since email and electronic file transfer had become ubiquitous, it was nearly impossible to make real money on a bicycle, and bike messengers had been in a slow, downward spiral for years. Drivers, on the other hand, who were able to cover a much wider area, were still making decent commissions.

I found a cheap SV650, and bought it. I was working as an independent contractor at the time, and started contracting for a messenger company that needed a driver. They were already using one motorbike rider, a guy named Steve. Like me, Steve was a long time bike messenger who saw an opportunity to keep riding while making a bunch more money. He had bought a brand new DL650, and we compared notes on rain gear, maintenance, and the danger factor.

The danger factor was something I hadn’t really expected. The job was so terrifically dangerous that it was impossible to even talk to anyone about it. I’ve never been a crab fisherman or a choker on a logging crew, but I can’t imagine the potential for bodily harm being any higher than it is for a motorcycle courier in a metropolitan area. Consider this: of the characters in this story- myself, Devin, Steve, and Earl (who I will introduce shortly), I’m the only one to avoid a serious collision with another vehicle. That isn’t due to me being a better rider; just more cautious, and lucky.

Of the four of us, Steve went down first, one day on Fifth Avenue in downtown Seattle. Steve was a fantastic rider, with a unique, authoritative riding style. He would always sit perfectly upright on his DL, the way that the motorcycle cops sit. He had this tremendous respect for the motorcycle cops, and use to watch them at their training facility, performing maneuvers. The day that he crashed, he says that he “saw a gap, went for it, and the gap closed up too quickly. It was my fault.” He was hit and briefly pinned under the front bumper of a yellow cab, but somehow emerged in one piece and was able to ride the next day. He was wearing a Dainese chest protector, and some part of the underside of that cab punched a hole through the protector, but didn’t punch through his rib cage.

Then we heard about Devin’s gruesome accident with the UPS truck on 15th Avenue West. Devin was traveling North towards Ballard, and saw the UPS panel truck stopped in the middle turn lane. The truck abruptly went into reverse, and started backing into the oncoming lanes. The driver later said he was trying to quickly back up to a loading ramp. Devin says he just had time to think that he might be able to get around, ahead of the backing truck. He didn’t have time, and when he hit the truck’s rear end, his bike went underneath and Devin got tangled up in that little step-up deck that the UPS man stands on when he’s unloading stuff. Devin was mashed, and his leg was hideously mangled. He had to use a walker to get around for close to a year, and he’s lucky to be walking at all today. This was in 2007, he has not ridden a motorcycle since, and will never again.

Enter Earl. Earl is in his 50s and a father of four, and was the most reckless rider I had ever seen. We had all known him for years, when he had been a bike messenger company owner. Everyone also knew he was a little crazy, had beat up some cops and done some jail time, and everyone had a notorious story to tell about him. He claimed to have been a cowboy, a logger, and a professional downhill skier. He was an excellent rider and incredibly fit for an older dude, but also a manipulative sociopath and a chronic liar. When he began contracting for the same company that Steve and I worked for, he was determined to be the fastest courier on the crew. He idolized Valentino Rossi and talked incessantly about MotoGP results, and rode his SV650 like a cat perched on a bulldozer. One of Earl’s memorable claims was that he drug his knees in corners- while in downtown Seattle intersections. To back it up, he took the knee pucks from his riding pants and applied them to a belt sander, grinding them down to make them appear “well used.” Anyone who has done a track day knows what worn- down knee sliders look like, but Earl hasn’t, so he didn’t. It was funny in a pathetic sort of way, like the way he put a Yoshimura sticker on his stock SV muffler. When Earl T-boned an old lady’s car at Third Avenue and Lenora, no one was very surprised, but what we didn’t realize was that Earl’s crash would effectively kill Seattle’s motorcycle messenger experiment. Virtually overnight while in the hospital, with his pelvis shattered and jacked up on morphine, Earl became an anti-motorcycle evangelist. The guy who used to rant about the motorcycle-messenger-as-samurai-warrior, who used to tell everyone how to take corners, was now vehemently against motorcycles altogether. There was wild talk of legal liability, even though we were all independent contractors. He threatened to expose the fact that we didn’t carry the proper commercial driver insurance, and couldn’t be bonded as drivers. The company owner freaked out and dropped us, claiming his clients were demanding proof of proper insurance. I frantically called my old friends at Go! Couriers in San Francisco, hoping to find out how they had worked around the insurance conundrum. I was told that Go! had been sold to a conglomerate, and they didn’t use motorcycles anymore. To this day, I have not found any insurance company that offers the proper commercial driver coverage for motorcycles.

And that was it, no more motorcycle messengers. Steve immediately quit, and never rode a motorbike again. I showed up to his house with a van and picked up a couple of his dead bikes, including his original DL650 with over 120,000 miles on the odometer. Earl is currently working downtown as a bike messenger. Devin works for some printing company. And me, I’m going to law school this fall.

tacoma overpass

end of the road