Reader to Reader

A husky, somewhat disheveled older man took the last stool at the counter of a small diner near the Greyhound bus station. Beside him sat two gray-haired ladies with suitcases at their feet.

He ordered a coffee. After a minute or two, the woman next to him turned and asked, "What do you do for a living?"

He gave her a startled look and said gruffly, "I'm self-employed."

When he didn't elaborate, she prodded him a bit. "So you're self-employed?"

"Yeah, I am," he reasserted.

"So what do you do?" she persisted in a simple, kindly manner.

"Oh, I sell plastics," he said.

"I hear that's a good thing to sell."

"I make a living."

"What kind of plastics do you sell?"

"Plastic plastic," he said impatiently.

At last she got the message. "I'm sorry. We're just passing through, and I was trying to be friendly."

"Lookit, I've had a bad day, and I just want to be left alone," he said as he rose to his feet, tossed some change on the counter, and left.

The other lady turned to her friend, saying, "Mildred, I told you not to bother people. I wonder if he's one of those mafia guys?"

Reader to Reader

Two of us had been waiting with increasing impatience for an elevator on the 15th floor of an older downtown building. When it finally arrived, a bicycle messenger burst out. We stepped into the empty elevator and were taken up rather than down, as someone had punched the button for the 18th (and top) floor.

"Those messengers don't have any consideration for anybody," muttered my elevator mate.

"At least he only punched one button and not all three," I replied.

The messenger had apparently made his delivery quickly, for he was there when we stopped at the 15th floor again on the way down. My still-seething companion blurted, "We weren't too pleased to have to go up to the 18th floor."

"It never pleases me to have to wait for an elevator, and the wait can be long in this building," the messenger retorted.

"Don't you messengers ever think about anybody except yourselves?"

"Hey, I was sent here because someone had to have a document delivered in a hurry. I'm just trying to serve him as best I can."

"You're not the only one in a hurry."

"My job is to be in a hurry."

"Did you ever think when you send an elevator up like that it wastes energy and causes unnecessary wear on the elevator?"

"It would cause even more wear if it had to go all the way down and come back to pick me up."

"Listen, I own this building, what do you own?"

"I get to ride my bike all day, what do you do?"

At that we reached the first floor and the messenger was gone.

Tribune Messenger Lingo Article

Chicago Tribune June 15, 1994

Copyright 1994 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune


BYLINE: George Christensen.

Bicycle messengers are no different from any profession or tribe in having a lingo of their own, one that evolved to make radio transmissions snappier and to break the tedium of reciting numbers and addresses all day.

It's quicker and easier to say "Clean at the Apple" than "I've made all my deliveries and I'm at 35 W. Wacker." The Apple, the Leo Burnett building, earned its nickname from the basket of apples on each receptionist's desk of the advertising company. Messengers are always happy to make a delivery or pickup at the Apple as they, like any visitor, are welcome to help themselves to one.

It used to be the same with the Gum House-the Wrigley Building at 410 N. Michigan Ave. Every reception desk for the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. is lined with packs of the dozen or so brands of gum they manufacture and are also free for the taking. Unfortunately, messengers have recently been diverted to the gum company's receiving room off Lower Wacker Drive to make their deliveries and no gum is offered there. Some messengers have since taken to calling it the No Gum House.

Some of the other nicknames for buildings or locations are:

The Oil Can or the Can: The Amoco Building at 200 E. Randolph St.

The Rock: The Prudential Building of the insurance company known for the Rock of Gibraltar at 130 E. Randolph St.

The Hill: The only marginally significant climb in the city up Lake Street from Michigan Avenue past the Rock to the Can. One says, "I'm on the Hill," whenever he's east of the Can.

The Peacock: The NBC Building at 454 N. Columbus Drive.

Time of Your Life: The Time-Life Building at 303 E. Ohio St.

The Fat Lady: Oprah Winfrey's studio at 110 N. Carpenter St.

The M&M: The Merchandise Mart.

The Picasso: The Daley Center at 60 W. Washington St.

The Governor's Playhouse or the Playhouse: The James R. Thompson Center at 100 W. Randolph St.

The House of Confusion: City Hall at 121 N. LaSalle St.

The World's Tallest: The Sears Tower at 233 S. Wacker Drive.

The B.O.T.: The Board of Trade at 141 W. Jackson Blvd.

The House or the T: The terminal, the messenger company's base of operations.

Some buildings are known by their major tenant. Arty's Place is 33 W. Monroe St., thanks to Arthur Andersen. Kemper's Dock is 77 W. Wacker Drive.

A few other miscellaneous terms and expressions are:

Food Stamp Run: A long ride at a reduced rate.

Sucker Pole: "No Parking" or similar such signs that aren't bolted down. If one locks his bike to such a pole, someone can lift the pole from its foundation and make off with the bike.

A Kite: An oversized envelope 2 by 3 feet or larger that can catch the wind as one is riding.

Reader to Reader

Two young, fast-talking, yellow-jacketed traders waiting for the elevator at the Merc:

"When I'm at a bar and I have to wait more than two minutes for a beer, I'm out of there. It was the best thing that happened to me the other night though. The next place I went I met the greatest chick."

"What happened to Joanne?"

"Oh, I had to dump her a couple of weeks ago. She started acting like a wife, a beast of a wife."

"Hadn't you been living together a while?"

"Yeah, two years."

"That's too bad."

"Ah, but this new one's great."

"They all turn out the same."

"Not this one. I can tell she's gonna be different. She doesn't have any of that possessiveness shit like Joanne did. I could see it in her from the start."

Urban Heroes

Chicago Reader letter-to-the-editor

Urban Heroes

By George Christensen

[Re: Neighborhood News, August 14]

What's all this fuss about taming bicycle messengers? True they may seem reckless at times and give a fright or two, but rather than reviling them, they ought to be celebrated. They may well be the hardest working and most courageous workers in the city. For eight hours or more a day they ride their bikes at all-out speeds in traffic that few would dare. They have to be fearless as well as superbly conditioned. They have a spirit that ought to be admired. It is the same spirit that brought our forefathers to America and pushed the frontier from east to west.

So what if they don't always observe red lights or stop signs. Do any bicyclists? Or pedestrians for that matter? At least messengers have cause. They are trying to deliver a document that someone needs right away as fast as they can. Isn't it refreshing to witness someone doing their job to the best of their ability? If anything they should be encouraged and applauded rather than restrained. That they startle an occasional pedestrian may say more about the alertness of the pedestrian than a messenger's irresponsibility. As the messenger quoted in Ben Joravsky's piece said, messengers are highly skilled at what they do and aren't out to scare anyone. Let them be.

Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine Article on Messengers

Pedestrians May Swear At Bicycle Messengers, But Companies Swear By Them

By William H. Duvall III

Rolling down the center of a Loop street, pumping hard on the pedals of his mud-spattered black mountain bike, riding the median with its cracks and bumps, flowing with and against mid-morning traffic, stopping at stop signs and red lights only when survival dictates, the bicycle messenger goes about his appointed rounds servicing commerce and industry and, occasionally, even senders of flowers.

Dropping off, picking up, vulnerable to all the vicissitudes of Chicago weather, even more vulnerable to injuries inflicted by cabs and car doors and road conditions, he is a hardy, hustling breed of urban cat. No matter the weather, the pollution index or their physical or mental state, the two-wheel couriers pedal for eight to ten hours a day, racking up a minimum of 60 miles in the process and invariably pushing into the city's omnipresent wind, their most dreaded adversary.

The world of the bicycle messenger is a blend of hurry-up commerce and gritty aerobics and comprises a revolving roster of characters and personalities - students, family men, multiple jobholders, free spirits and transients - nearly all of whom speak of the sense of freedom, a word not often used in job descriptions, that they experience when mounted and moving.

Of the approximately 72 messenger companies in Chicago, Cannonball Inc. and Chicago Messenger Service are the largest. Cannonball, with 75 to 100 two-wheel workers, and CMS, with 80, also have large fleets of drivers servicing the city and suburbs. The two firms deliver anywhere in the country and offer worldwide service. Cannonball is the city's oldest such business, dating to 1933, and receives between 1,600 and 2,000 phone orders a day in addition to its regularly scheduled daily routes. Chicago Messenger Service isn't far behind.

A few firms employ messengers on foot who usually work assigned routes, but these couriers are a relatively small percentage of the messenger force. "Bike messengers," says Jack Rozran, Cannonball's chairman, "are the fastest, most efficient method of carrying and delivering light packages in the downtown area." Says Milt Buzil, general manager of Chicago Messenger Service, "There is no quicker way to get around Loop traffic."

And get around it they do. Adherence to traffic laws often takes a back seat, making the maneuvers of the bike messenger - the darting between moving vehicles, the traveling the wrong way on one-way streets, the riding on sidewalks (also illegal), the scattering of pedestrians - as common a downtown sight as panhandlers and gridlock.

What is so important that it must be transported so feverishly? It isn't always a question of importance or urgency but simply a matter of being the quickest, most efficient way of conducting business. A video, of course, cannot be faxed; nor can an oversized graphic illustration; nor can a signature. And, of course, the couriers are paid by the delivery, not by the hour.

Accounting firms, law offices, banks and other financial institutions are the biggest daily users of messengers. Arthur Andersen & Co., which uses four different services, averages about 250 orders a day, according to Carlos Chavarria, the accounting firm's operations manager. "On busy days, such as April 15, we may do 300 or 400 orders," he says.

Video and film postproduction companies, publishers, newspapers, talent agencies, photographers and design studios also rely on bike messengers every day. Computer parts and just about anything under 10 pounds can be sent by bike.

The messengers, though, usually do not know what they're transporting - their job is simply to pick up and deliver. When they do find out, though, it can be a shocker. Dave Janis, a Cannonball dispatcher who worked the streets for five years, once picked up a box at the First National Bank of Chicago, put it into his bicycle basket and blithely made several other stops, not realizing that there was $30,000 in singles neatly packaged and stacked inside the carton. Someone had made a mistake, though: Messengers, as a matter of policy, do not transport cash.

They don't carry contraband either - not in Chicago. But in New York an enterprising soul used bike messengers to run a $30,000-a-day drug operation that delivered marijuana anywhere in Manhattan. Before he was busted, the entrepreneur, one Michael Cesar, the self-styled "Pope of Pot," would dispatch a biker with marijuana after a customer placed an order on his toll-free line, 1-800-WANT-POT.

The rigors and frustrations of the job, which also include waiting for slow elevators and dealing with imperious security guards, not surprisingly contribute to a high turnover rate. That fact, coupled with the reluctance of some firms to reveal employee counts, makes it difficult to accurately calculate the number of bike messengers in Chicago. Estimates, though, range from at least 400 to as many as 600 or 700. Only a comparative handful are women.

The maximum number of deliveries in a day for most hard-core messengers is generally considered to be in the 60s. But Cannonball's George Christensen, who has been riding three to four days a week for a year and a half, might hold the one-day record with 73.

"It was a complete fluke," Christensen says. "I think I worked 11 hours." He was already having "a really good day," he says, when he made one pickup that entailed having to deliver press releases to 24 different stops.

Speed, quite obviously, is key, and a number of companies claim to be the fastest. Two, Velocity and Deadline Express, guarantee 30-minute service and treat every order as such unless one-hour service, which is cheaper, is specified. Velocity's half-hour rate of six dollars is the lowest in the city. Deadline charges $6.50. These rates apply only in the downtown area.

All of this pell-mell pedaling is sure to generate an appetite, yet there's no such thing as lunch hour or break time in the messenger racket. When a delivery is a rush order, that doesn't mean after you've finished eating. Cannonball's Christensen says he usually eats on the run, between deliveries, while he's waiting for the dispatcher to call his number over the radio. He always comes to work with his bag well supplied with nuts, bite-sized candy bars, fruit and sandwiches. When his food supply is depleted, he knows he can always stop by the Wacker Drive ad agency that sets out baskets of apples for hungry passersby.

Christensen's eating habits and health consciousness may be more the exception than the rule. Most bike messengers tend to be junk-food junkies rather than health-food freaks, so most opt for the fast and cheap. "Everything downtown is expensive," says one delivery man, "so I usually just grab a dog, a burger or a beef sandwich. I can't think about what I'm going to eat for lunch at 6:30 in the morning, let alone make it."

The weather? The worse, the better, the real pros assert - it means the day will be all the more lucrative. Bad weather usually does not affect the demand (for deliveries), but invariably it will influence the supply (of messengers). "When it rains," Christensen says, "it means the dispatchers will be calling my number more often, which means I'll be making more money."

Inclement weather, seasoned riders say, separates the men from the boys. Only the hard-core courier can wake up in the morning and smile at the news of an overnight blizzard or a period of heavy rain, high humidity or subzero cold.

One messenger who not only accepts the harsh realities of the street but seems to thrive on them in some twisted way goes by the name Rock 'n' Roll (otherwise, Jonathan Elseng). The 35-year-old Rock, a man who probably is lucky be alive, is the godfather of the hard-core messengers, the rebel rider "with an attitude problem," a man well known in messenger circles. Currently with Deadline, he has been riding for 10 winters, a measure of time used by the veterans to calculate true tenure. Hardy survivor Rock has a steel plate in the back of his head, several pins in his right knee, scars all over his body, and he walks like a cowboy who has been on horseback too long. He has fractured his skull, broken his right shoulder, his tailbone, his right ankle, both knees, both wrists and many ribs. In 1981 he was sandwiched between two buses, and both his knees were crushed. In 1987 he slammed into an open car door. The edge of the door cut through several ribs, the momentum causing him to flip over the door and land under the tailpipe of a cab.

Such life-threatening experiences might cause some people to consider a career change or, at least, to exercise more caution. Not Rock. "They actually made me more aggressive," he says. "Does Richard Petty stop racing just because he crashes? I'm a concrete cowboy riding with steel cattle."

Gabriel Morales is another messenger notable, but for a different reason - he is arguably the fastest and the highest-paid messenger on wheels. And perhaps the most independent. Unlike 99 percent of his brethren, he doesn't work for a messenger company.

After a period of dues-paying - 3 1/2 years with Cannonball, a year each with Metro Express and On Time Couriers Ltd. and a short stint with Deadline Express - Morales approached the owner of a graphics firm about being its sole, private messenger. Though skeptical at first, Chuck Anzo, owner of Anzo Graphics, finally agreed, and Morales has been riding for the company exclusively for the last year and a half.

Many of Anzo's deliveries are urgent and on a deadline, requiring immediate attention and expeditious transport.

Handed one such envelope recently, one destined for a client in the Amoco Building, Morales bolted through the glass doors of Anzo's offices at LaSalle and Chicago. Mounted on one of his dozen or so bikes, he burned a zigzag trail south on LaSalle, east on Illinois, blowing through the intersection while casually sipping a can of 7-Up, steering with one hand, his head cocked toward the sky. Then it was south again, on State, where he dismounted and carried his bike down a flight of stairs to continue east on Hubbard, then south on Lower Wabash. Dismounting again, he climbed another flight of stairs to emerge from behind the Wrigley Building, then he headed south on Michigan, east on Wacker and south on Stetson Drive to 200 E. Randolph, the Amoco Building, where he hopped off his still-rolling bike, swung it against a pole, secured it with a black U-shaped lock and moved through the revolving glass doors.

Walking through a lobby filled with businessmen and women in pin-striped suits, Morales, wearing black Nike leggings, a blue Gore-tex windbreaker, lightweight mountain boots, fingerless gloves and his helmet and bag, delivered the goods.

That one delivery was worth $5 to Morales, which may not sound like a lot, but it is at least a dollar more than he'd receive working for a messenger firm. As an independent contractor, he keeps 100 percent of what he bills the graphics firm, minus taxes.

Morales' personal quota is 40 runs a day, although he has no control over how many he will get. But 40 at $5 each is $200 a day, or $1,000 a week. Some weeks, however, aren't that lucrative. In fact, during the last six months, Morales, because of the recession and other business fluctuations, has had weeks that were worth only a couple of hundred dollars.

Some of that income, of course, must be invested in his rolling stock. The day he was first hired as a messenger, Morales borrowed $13 to buy a heavy old bike from a thrift store. His most recent purchase, though, was an $800 Cannondale mountain bike that can be lifted, literally, with two fingers.

Successful or not, Morales is still vulnerable to his occupation's hazards. Last February he was hit by a car doing about 30 miles an hour. It was dark, the car had no lights, and Morales, riding south on North Wells Street, had run a red light at West Ontario. The impact lifted him and his bike onto the hood of the car and carried them almost a block away, where he was dumped back onto the street when the car abruptly stopped. Amazingly, he suffered only minor cuts and bruises. But it could have been different: A large four-inch chunk of plastic was missing from his helmet.

"These things are 90 bucks a pop," he says, incredulously, "and that was the third one in six months."

Yes, Morales concedes, the world of the bicycle messenger is "not for everybody. I've got three kids to support. If I could make the kind of money I'm earning as a messenger sitting behind a desk, I would."

But not all would agree. "It's the greatest job in the world," says a fellow man of the street. "I hope I'm doing it until I'm 50. The only other thing I'd really like to be is a stuntman."


GRAPHIC: PHOTOS (color): Bicycle messengers from a number of Chicago messenger services gather at the site of the former Erie Street Bridge, where some of them go to party after work. Opposite page: Messenger Jonathan Elsing on one of his deliveries.
PHOTOS (color): Above: Elsing poses with a graffito he painted himself of his messenger nickname. Far left and left: Gabriel Morales astride his bike and retrieving it after making a delivery at 676 St. Clair St. PHOTOS BY JAMES F. QUINN, a Tribune photographer.