Midaregami

I finished off my career as a bike messenger, fittingly enough, with the Halloween Alleycat, in which I placed second to last, but that’s one place better than last.

I didn’t get any decent pictures, and the event itself was pretty unremarkable (Kendall won, of course, starting off by getting from Downtown to Waikiki and back in 15 minutes; the guy’s an animal, a wolverine or something) but I had a good time and got another spoke card, which is really all I was in it for to begin with¹.

My newsie costume was a hit, and I’m still vaguely irritated that I didn’t get extra points for coming in a costume. Next alleycat (in December, apparently), I’m going to shoot for finishing mid-pack. That’d be pretty sweet.

Finally, I have a couple more observations about messenger work.

• I don’t like security guards. They exist essentially to enforce extra rules and policies beyond the law, which is apparently not good enough for people. The whole of a messenger’s advantage (over other delivery methods) relies on the mostly unspoken but understood fact that we can bend the rules—chiefly the rules of traffic, the rules of what constitutes a legitimate cycling area, and the rules of where one can reasonable lock a bike. This places security guards and bike messengers and odds with each other, and just as I’m sure they wonder why I don’t just follow the rules, I wonder why they don’t understand that my very job is predicated on not following the rules.

• My urban riding habits have been totally ruined by messenger work. I split lanes, run red lights, pop curbs (both up and down), and generally ride like a goddamn maniac, and I don’t even mean to. I used to be such a polite rider and now I simply can’t be bothered. I know it’s a bad habit; it reflects poorly on cyclists in general (because, of course, to a motorist, I’m not just one rider, but all riders) and yet I can’t seem to go back.

• Although it seemed to annoy the other riders no end, I never tired of being asked of I was a bike messenger. When the answer was “yes,” their inevitable impressed response was always fun. And if they went to so far as to ascertain that I just worked downtown, their shock at the revelation that our range is anywhere between Kahala and the airport (essentially the whole of Honolulu proper) was doubly pleasing. I’ve never had people be flat-out impressed with what I do at any other job, and it was a singular pleasure.

I will need to figure out a regular riding schedule now, so as not to squander what meager level of fitness I’ve acquired. I recently rode up Tantalus, so I’m considering doing it two or three times a week, maybe even doing a couple of laps if I’m feeling, y’know, saucy.

¹ Spoke cards are visible markers of indie bike cred, plus this one has a totally wicked demon with a messenger bag riding a single-speed—I think it’s safe to say that that crosses over from “radical” territory into “badical.”

This last Sunday, I rode my bike 100 miles up and down the southern and leeward coast of O’ahu. It was a blast, insofar as 3 hours of intense exertion followed by 4 of raw pain can be considered fun.

Oh, I’ll be doing it again, and soon.

Highlights:

• I had heard that there was a significant contingent of riders who fly over from Japan specifically to ride the event. I was unprepared for the spectacle of 4000 people, at least 2/3 of whom were Japanese, lining up for the ride.

• There were a lot of very nice bikes out there. Good ol’ Buster the Wonder Bike is no slouch—but once you’ve seen your third or fourth $9000 Cervélo/Kestrel/Pinarello superbike, you start regarding the $5000 Treks as mere dross.

• Speaking of Buster and of bicycles, I did a pretty solid round of maintenance on Saturday: New tires (cha-ching!), disassembled and cleaned chainrings and sprockets, cleaned and lubed chain, cleaned, greased, and tightened bottom bracket, minor wheel truing—the point is, somehow I got my bike in a state of tune I can only describe as “perfect.” It was nearly silent on the road. I had to laugh at the hyper-pricey carbon bikes with misadjusted derailleurs and creaking bottom brackets.

• Fellow messengers K. and Rob (who I don’t feel uncomfortable mentioning by name because he’s the the second-fastest messenger in the world) decided to crash the ride by going unregistered. Rob wore a ridiculous skintight time-trial suit, and K. wore an unbuttoned purple aloha shirt, skateboarding helmet, and motocross goggles, and rode his beat-up single-speed. Their buddy C. also rode a single-speed, along with a ridiculous ancient helmet and shirt and tie. What’s important to understand is that these three guys are three of the fastest riders on the island, and they dressed specifically to snub the road geeks. They passed me about 40 miles out, and they were hauling.

• Roughly 60 miles in, just past the turnaround point, I started hurting. Shortly thereafter I discovered an entirely new level of pain and suffering, but vowed not to give in. The final major climb saw lots of riders getting off and pushing; I dropped into my granny gear, but so help me, I rode up and down that hill.

• I wrote “Nihongo OK” (Japanese OK) on my jersey number, and had a couple of very pleasant conversations with out-of-town riders as a result.

• Muscle soreness on Monday was negligible, but my right knee was not amused. It voiced its complaint, loudly, every time I attempted to use stairs.

• I’m thinking of doing 70 miles or so this weekend. Just for yuks. I need a bike computer.

• Final time: about 7 hours, an hour more than I’d hoped. That’s okay. There’s always next year.

Spending as much time in the downtown milieu as I have been recently, one becomes acquainted with all manner of eccentrics. Here are a few.

The Bike Molester

In many ways, the worst kind of weirdos are the ones right on the borderline of normalcy. They possess only a thin veneer of sanity, and all it takes is eye contact to shatter it like the glaze of a crème brûlée. I discovered one such specimen, and comrades, let me tell you: this guy was a piece of work. I’d guess him to be early 30s, baseball cap, bad teeth, but mistakable at a distance of a few yards for a sane human. He coasted up to the bike rack on Bishop where I frequently stop; I was sitting there in front of the Starbucks, daydreaming between runs.

“Hey,” he says.

”’Sup,” I reply by way of greeting.

“Girl problemth.” Oh god—the lisp of the socially maladroit. Also, at close range now, I see the glint of madness in his eyes. I should have run.

“That sucks,” I say.

“Yeah, she won’t let me talk to her anymore, she’th crathy!” The gentlemen begins yammering, and even through his incoherent relating of his “girl problemth,” I can pretty much peg the fellow as a man for whom the word “inappropriate” carries no heft. I start to worry. I still have no idea of the horror that is about to ensue.

“Chicks, man. What can you do?” I say.

“Yeah, she’th like…” I am vague on his monologue, because it was incoherent and I was rapidly becoming terrified. He starts to lock his bike to the rack where mine is, and begins wrenching my bike around to make room for his. Unacceptable. He doesn’t know it’s mine, but still—this I cannot abide.

“Yeah, well, good luck with that, man, I gotta go,” I say, and jump up from my seat, proceeding to unlock my bike.

“Oh, that’th yourth? I’m thorry, man…” and thus saying, he leans down lovingly and nuzzles the top tube of my frame, whispering some vile apology.

“WHOAH WHOAH okay buddy, I gotta go see you later” I hastily say, getting on the bike, sprinting away, and praying I never see him again. I haven’t so far.

The Weirdest, Saddest Delivery Ever

Recently I went on a run to cash a check for an old woman in the hospital. How would that work? Well. I don’t know this lady’s story, but she needed some cash from her account, and she was in the hospital. So my job was to go to her hospital room, where she would write a check to me, which I would take to her bank, cash, and return to her. Needless to say, this is a suboptimal solution to the problem of getting cash, because it involves complete trust in a total stranger.

I did this run, and the woman in question—I don’t know if she was homeless, probably not—but she was certainly alone and in poor health. She was probably a little crazy. She fished out a check from her purse that was tattered and water-damaged despite being blank, and made it out to me for $100.00. A hundred bucks. I had really expected it to be more, for some reason. I rode the few blocks over to the bank and cashed it, and returned the money. No big deal, just a slightly weird run.

But then I got to thinking, how lonely and desperate would you have to be to resort to such a roundabout way of getting money from your bank account? There must be nobody in the world who cares enough for that old woman to run a tiny errand for her, so I did it, and made ten bucks in the process.

I was depressed for several hours after that run.

Sudden Inexplicable Vulgarity

I’m unlocking my bike, and a shambling, dirty old woman in a black dress that must once have been alluring walks by, grinning. She is missing her front teeth, and it is not a pleasant sight. She leers at me as she passes, and yells—really shouts—“Blowjobs, extra extra! Blowjobs, extra extra!”

This was near the end of the single most exhausting day I have ever had in this job. All I could think was, “Huh?” In retrospect, did she think I was a paper boy? Was she impugning my supposed profession, or making some kind of unthinkable, horrific proposal? She sounded amused, like she had cleverly insulted me with a real zinger, as if she expected me to be really insulted. Or maybe it was just hilarious to her.

Whatever it was, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Um, so to speak.

In Conclusion

Insane transients of Honolulu: leave me alone. Thank you.

• My bike (recently rechristened “Buster the Wonder Bike”) was nearly stolen yesterday. I was making a delivery to an industrial section of town, and there wasn’t a convenient post to lock ol’ Buster to. I locked the bike to itself and ran upstairs to make the drop, then ran back down—30, 45 seconds, at the most. When I came down, a scraggly-looking fellow was dragging my bike away, and it looked like he was about to try and ride it off. I yelled at him—something incisive and indicting like “Whoah, hey, hey!” whereupon he handed the bike back to me and shuffled off. For a minute I thought perhaps he was just trying to move the bike because it was in the way of something, but no—the gentlemen was clearly attempting to abscond with it. I say, that was dashed rude of him! Fortunately the encounter did not degenerate into fisticuffs.

• There’s a hill on my old commute to school. I say “old” because now that we’ve moved, my commute route has changed, and I no longer have occasion to ride up that particular hill, though there are others. But as serendipity would have it, yesterday I had a delivery that took me up it anyway. Now, this hill once had the unique property of matching exactly my ability to push up it—I could climb it with some strength, but I would be temporarily exhausted right at the crest, and whatever speed I had managed to carry through the climb was all I would have in the subsequent flat, because my legs were completely tapped out. But yesterday I hammered up that same incline using a significantly bigger gear than I used to use, and still had sufficient anima to accelerate to a respectible cruse upon cresting the hill. I may not be as fast as the other messengers (as the alleycat unequivocally showed) but I’m a lot faster than I used to be. Onward and upward!

This report is late; the event in question happened on July 4. I refer, of course, to the K-VIBE (Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange) Independence Day Alleycat race.

An alleycat is essentially a glorified scavenger hunt on bicycles. Participants tear through traffic to track down a variety of goals. It’s associated with messenger and single-speed culture, but all kinds of people on all kinds of bikes showed up for this one. Given the participation of local messenger speed demons like Kendall and Rice, I knew I wouldn’t be in the running for the top places, but hey—a real live bike race! Count me in.

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Or, “The Best Shitty Job I Have Ever Had”

Thanks to Herself’s heroic efforts in the area of gainful employment and the mercifully lower rent of our awesome new apartment, I have been able to select summer employment based on the following rigorous criteria:

1. What I want to do
2. How much I want to do it

disregarding insignificant factors like

1. How much it pays

… I considered a wide variety of employment options, ranging from “working at a bike store” to “working as a bike messenger¹.” The latter eventually won. As of about two weeks ago, I am an honest-to-god bicycle courier.

And I love it.

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