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"I have no magic power; I make inward strength my power." | |
| 1 | Why would you immerse yourself in a world with no security but that of likely disfigurement or death? My soul wouldn't rest until I got the answer by following the blacktop samurai on this unpromising road completely unlike my own. |
| 2 | I had an easy, interesting job close to home. My boyfriend of three years made plenty of money and I was free to dally in various part-time whims. But I couldn't let it last. |
| 3 | I had started riding a bicycle shortly after moving to Manhattan. As I wheeled down to my Wall Street job wearing stockings and an Oxford shirt tucked into a skirt, I saw these men, black men with thick, gnarled dreadlocks, white men smoky with smog-smudged skin, glowing with a divine focus. With large canvas bags molded to their backs, gleaming tubes of important papers thrusting up from behind their shiny helmets, they combed with ease and authority through snarls of taxis and limos, scoffing at the helpless horsepower stuck on the tiny, winding streets of downtown. It was an image of freedom that I captured in my heart and then shoved aside as I pursued a career. |
| 4 | As I felt more trapped in a workplace where overweight white men dropped dead from eating corned beef on rye while trading paper, I began to stop and watch those aloof men on steel-tubed steeds. The seemed to hold a secret power. How would I ever know what it was unless I rode with them? I quit my career and got lost in other trivial pursuits, knowing I would eventually bike in lycra through New York City with the same assuredness as Lady Godiva on horseback. |
| 5 | For a year I sold girdles and fake breasts at Lee's Mardi Gras Transvestite Boutique. One day when I just could not pull down the twenty-third pair of size 14 pumps for a boa-clad drag queen, I quit. I announced to my boyfriend that I was going to be a bike messenger. When he demurred amid concerns for my safety, I said the point was to step out of safety and see if I got hit. When he finally acquiesed, I kicked him out anyway. I couldn't be distracted by his worried breathing fogging my conscience. I didn't have a particular goal in life but if I could slice unscathed through the suicide streets, I would carve out any new life I wanted. If I fumbled, then I would die, and goals wouldn't matter anymore. |
| 6 | I had ridden NYC streets and I could read a map. I had a bike and I was ready. Hardly. |
| 7 | I found out immediately that my bike was too heavy, my lock was too weak and my helmet was too hot. I was sore and exhausted and I plunged forward. |
| 8 | Soon I was bandoliered with thirty pounds of bag and chain crisscrossing my chest. In addition to hauling model books, artists' portfolios, camera equipment and whatever (I once bungeed a ten foot roll of carpet to my body), I packed in tools for repairs and flat-fixing. The massive chain and lock, designed for securing motorcycles, were impervious to the freon and crowbars of the thieves always slipping out of sidewalk cracks as soon a messenger was swept through revolving doors. |
| 9 | I built a bike worthy of this battle. It was a mountain bike that saw only mountains in reverse, jagged potholes in pavement. I chopped the handlebars narrow for instant response and to fit between the swaying buses dueling down Broadway. (They just weren't strong enough to hold the buses apart had they decided to mate with me in the middle). The bearings ran silently and smoothly, thickly greased in their races. Brake cables were taut and slid frictionlessly in their sheaths of housing. The waxed chain danced effortlessly up and down the freewheel without hesitation. Every week I tore this bike down and built it back up, over and over, each time closer to mechanical serenity. It was a geometric skeleton hung with my skin and as I cared for it, it would save me. |
| 10 | I got hired on at A to Z Couriers, the elite among road warriors, who had turned me away in my amateur days. Our distinguishing coat of arms was the two-way Motorola radio each of us had bound to the bag strap at the shoulder. With the radios we were a constantly connecting web of foul language and rapport. (The FCC must not consider "bloody wanker" to be a curse since our English dispatcher never got fined for his tirades against free-ranging messengers.). |
| 11 | This instant communication made it easier to uphold our short code of conduct, one of which was to help out other messengers. If one saw his ride being lifted by sticky fingers, he could radio in the direction it was taking and we would swoop in on the shocked thief with instant justice. Once as I was evading a scooter cop for running a red, I leapt onto sidewalks overflowing, shrieked down the middle of 57th against startled, braking traffic, and wove through the chaotic tapestry of rush hour, consequently flaunting all the rest of the traffic laws. I alerted my comrades and they rallied to waylay him with taunts while I escaped from countless tickets and fines. Another rule was to never steal from a customer or another biker, unless of course the biker was a thief or a party-crasher. It was severely uncool to trip up another messenger by invading his "zone" and cutting him off. As for pedestrians, they were fair game in the streets but on sidewalks they had the right of way. (We did not ring little bells and expect them to yield). So the challenge was to thread silently through the oblivious clusters, to open up a way where none seemed to exist. I snaked with precision without touching a swinging arm or a swerving high heel and was gone before anyone felt my whisper. |
| 12 | In such an intensely crowded arena as New York, where there are possible combinations endlessly clicking into place for your demise, you learn to accept that you alone are accountable for your survival. Car doors suddenly swinging open, metal grates grabbing skinny tires, lethal taxi hoods biting into your body, the fates of going different routes. They are meant for you and you have to respectfully acknowledge them. Every time you wade into this gooey stew of events you have to cut to the right way, the way which means you live for another thick, barren night. As you accept the quiet voice leading your way, it will integrate with your body and melt into your nerves and there becomes a complete synchronization of knowing and action. When I saw a tiny flash through a car window, I reacted simultaneously to avoid a ped who would soon pop out from between parked cars. There was no pause for thought. Inattention would be ambushed. It seemed magical to avert danger so blithely but there was a seamless flow of valuable information that just has to be filtered from the distracting swirl of the streets to crystallize as power. |
| 13 | As in the martial arts, we not only used ourselves as weapons but we turned our opponents' strengths into our own. We used the taxis' speed as ours, clinging to the side of horsepower, hooking our fingers to fenderwells and bumpers, used to our destinations then discarded. Some would try to shake us off, burrs to be smashed under tires. We also used the yellow cabs as shields when we ran red lights with them. They blocked us from determined peds and vehicles gunning the green. If we got T-boned with the cabs, then we went out with a crashing smash and not a clattering tinkle. |
| 14 | To relax ourselves, we performed the beer ceremony. As the phone's ring sputtered and the city loosened its tie, we would slowly skim down the receding avenues in the pink and gold lull of the evening. We gathered in the dusk of our basement and sorted out cash. The time to sheath our blades was announced with the hisses and pops of opening bottles. In the morning I would squeeze the laxity out of my body with tight lycra and a smashed-down helmet; and the momentary crushing weight of the chain as I swung it around my chest would serve as a wake-up call. |
| 15 | If it looked as if I rode with supreme uncaring of my own and others' lives, I earned that look with an unwavering awareness of my surroundings and myself. These were the streets of hell but on them I found nirvana. I left my bike on those streets with the same wholeheartedness with which I joined it. I was free to take my lessons with me on other roads. The fear of starting anew waned with the siren carrying someone who looked away. But I was focused on appreciating life by the single-minded purpose of the present moment. This secret of the crazy men on bicycles was all that I needed. |
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Nominated by TIM SCHELL, ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
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