Oh man, I am loving this courier book Scott got me (The Immortal Class) It’s this guy’s memoir of his days as a bike messenger in Chicago. Which is, apparently, twice as cold, five times as violent, and immeasurably gnarlier than Portland. Couriers get into fights with cabbies, menace belligerent drivers with their U-locks, routinely “skitch” on moving vehicles (Snow Crash-style), do sixty tags in a day… The author knew one Puerto Rican courier who just gave up on pedaling and skitched everywhere on a BMX bike, protected by full hockey gear.
Not that Portland couldn’t be harsh. In summer, hot car and bus exhaust hangs close to the ground, fills your lungs and burns out your sense of smell. In winter, the cold freezes your hands into useless, inarticulate claws. The skin between your fingers gets waterlogged and turns opaque white, like toejam. When you get home, all your extremities are red and novocaine-numb. You strip off all your gear: helmet, courier bag, gloves, rain coat, rain pants, company shirt, t-shirt, soaked and dripping shoes, waterproof booties, shorts, boxers; and stand in a hot shower for a half hour getting some warmth back in your body. Then you lie in a chair utterly stunned for a half hour, seeing pavement and cars rush through you every time you close your eyes.
I never skitched; I even stopped for red lights sometimes (thanks to Gaston the Safety Nazi, who my company employed to keep their insurance down. You would become more and more law abiding as you got close to base, lest he spot you violatin’). My company uniform was bright red, my courier number was prominently displayed on my helmet. I don’t think Portland is anarchic enough to really let you get away with towing on peoples’ cars regularly. Maybe I’m just a pussy, though.
You start out so timid. Ooh, all the big bad automobiles! You almost want to ride on the sidewalk. After a month the continuous motion gets into your head and you weave through moving cars and trucks like they were stationary. The ground turns into a fluid that moves under you. People scream at you to get out of traffic if you can’t keep up; you turn, sneer, and leave them 3 blocks back, stuck behind 80 white vans, 30 SUVs, 20 sedans, etc, etc, the slow-moving glacier of rush-hour traffic. Even in fast-moving traffic, everything is going about the same speed; so relative to you, the cars are stationary. It’s just the ground that’s moving.
When the ground stops moving, you get uncomfortable. You are on an elevator, or at the curb waiting for Base to call. Maybe you’re at a pay phone calling base because your walkie-talkie died. You close your eyes and see a blur of pavement and cars, see a spotlight circle of pavement thrumming through your belly, feel wind eddying around the inside of your body. It even gets into your dreams. I dreamed I was biking through an ocean of rain, so hard the splatter frothed up waist-high and made the pavement invisible. Blurry gray hints of buildings to either side, when a wall of even thicker rain, shaped like the prow of the Titanic, rose up in front of me and I slammed through it. I think this dream symbolizes the fact that it REALLY FUCKING RAINS A LOT here in winter. I also dreamed I was a street pirate, riding with a cutlass in my right hand and, en passant, separating the business-suited masses from their valuables.
M-8 to base, M-8 to base.
Go ahead, M-8Dropped off the Schawbe, I’m clean in the core. Can I go home now? It’s 5:30 and I can’t feel my feet.
Do the DEQ mail run first, M-8, overson of a …! 10-4
Ahh, those days…