Monday, November 27, 2017

Urban myth 9. Sitting at the bank

The bank in Baggot street became our central meeting point. If it rained we stood under the overhang of it's edifice. If it was dry we sat on the low wall out front. If it was dry and sunny it was the Costa del Dublin 2. By 2002 when I did my last Summer it had all changed. Or at least society had. The economy was thriving. Messengers were not. The pay was alright I guess, but the companies were charging customers an arm and a leg because the money was there. Couriers wages never rose exponentially but the size of courier company owner's houses and cars did.
The city was changing too... not quite Gotham but no longer Pleasantville. Traffic doubled as did messengers getting doored. Broken collar bones and shoulders seemed like an epidemic. If cycling the city had been a steady game of Space Invaders it was now on level 100 and there were way to many invaders to avoid. Drivers changed from fairly predictable hamsters on the city fly-wheel to coffee/ blood-pressure/ mortgaged stress balls willing to take you on in fisticuffs on the middle of the road. Cocaine was sniffed off cisterns all over the city to the point of normality, the whiff of joints as you passed cars in rush-hour slowness was common-place. Then the same people popped you with a door or wing mirror because they couldn't see you.
Jobs came in waves instead of a steady drip. You would sign-out by midday because you had done one job and go home only to hear of an epic afternoon. Or you'd lazily radio in from a warm bed in Rathmines only to be buried with 5 drops before you'd poured milk on your muesli. Receptionists became waitresses in Hollywood, i.e. they were only receptionists until something in HR or a bigger administration came along. So they stopped flirting/ making eye contact /caring /smiling /being receptionists. They'd question you if a delivery was late but not give a damn if you had to sit waiting on one of them to fumble a job into an envelope.
A lower class of motorbike couriers brought the standard down. One guy lost an envelope from his satchel on the way to the airport and swore he'd delivered it, including forging a signature, only for the envelope to be found on the verge and delivered. Instant dismissal. A pair of guys I used to work with had their own base robbed on wages day and couldn't be implicated as they'd not physically done it themselves and were miles away.
It was time to get out. I was mentally tired and not giving my all. The rain and cold were wiping the smile off my face. I didn't finish on bad terms...I just couldn't process everything anymore. But it was beautiful and horrible in equal measure. On one level I'll never have a better time. What an unbelievable way to spend my youthful energy! But I gave a lot. A hell of a lot. I miss the idea of being a bike messenger but not the reality. I needed a time scale with a finite number of months or years. I feel the love affair died out and took my soul with it for a while. So I shut the book and put it in my bag for safe keeping for fifteen years. Thanks for helping me open it! Sign here please.











Old age

Saturday was the last straw. Or maybe it was Sunday. I dunno, I get easily confused these days. No, actually it was fifth year English last week. Some of those pupils are as feral as a bearded-lady from a circus but most of them are smart. At least most of the time I don't smell burning when I ask them to think.... You see, at the moment we are charging through WB Yeats, and as sometimes happens' we arrived at 'The Wild Swans at Coole'. Not a bad poem but it can be tough for a teenage pupil to relate to an auld fella harping on about getting slower and feeling ancient. What has getting old got to do with the visceral energy of youth?
I guess those type of poems are written by saddened men remembering that energy and feeling, pretty sick that it ain't there any longer.
Imagine cycling up to Graignamanagh to chase up a girlfriend after cycling 200km that day already and then cycling home in the moonlight later? ENERGY!!!!!
Imagine working 12-hour days driving machinery or hanging out of a scaffold on a building site loading blocks before dawn in January and not being tired. ENERGY!
Imagine nothing phasing you as you leave your country and don't know how it's gonna work out or how long you'll be gone for! ENERGY!
Shakespeare wrote about time running out, Robert Frost wrote about his Autumn too. Yeats had a lot to regret. His unrequited love is famous. The most famous crash and burn of the literary set. He stares at the swans and wishes he was paired-off too instead of being the odd-one-out.
And worse still he ended up marrying what was really his third choice rather than being alone as he went grey.
On Saturday I found myself buying ECCO shoes: comfy, orthopedic, ECCO shoes.... As a young lad I saw older teachers in ECCOs and thought to myself "That'll never be me! I'll never look like a grand-aunt shuffling around behind a zimmer-frame!" How wrong was I?!! I have stress fractures in my feet,[probably from trying to catch and pass a thirteen-year-old a few years ago at a Saint Stephen's day turkey burner race]... but the fact remains that I am now one of those old guys. I'm not Yeats or Will Shakespeare or Bob Frost but I'm feeling their pain.
Yesterday morning I fell off my bike on a piece of ice so small I've had more in a G+T. But my instant reaction was to get up, get going again and not to acknowledge the pain or embarrassment, not to admit to feeling it, not yet giving in to the obvious.

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Urban myth 8. Breadline

College isn't much fun when you are broke. A broke bike messenger is abysmal. The first summer's ignorance cost me dearly. Like a London cabby, there's a certain knowledge you have to have. I had all the physical energy of a greyhound pup but I didn't know my way around the inner city at all. So what I made up in speed I lost by getting lost.
Tom the dispatcher bless him, he must have cursed the newbie to hell. I knew flatland... Ranelagh/ Rathmines/ Donnybrook, like the back of my hand but put me town side of the canal and I was as green as the scum floating on the canal itself! Every second job I'd have to look in me street index. One minute I was Sean Kelly busting down Georges street but if I got multiple drops over the radio I'd instantly turn into the Dutch tourist standing on the side of the road turning the map for orientation.
My first job off the green was famous because I'd headed the opposite direction to where I should have. The guys said nothing and rightly so. I passed them a minute later in shame but going the right way.
 
You see, trying to be a courier was going to be tough initially. But before pay day you could be buying 6 bread rolls in Dunnes to fill your belly. Dinner would be pasta by the shovel with some shitty fake Ragu from the market. Still not as bad as Koka noodles and luncheon sausage by the tonne as I had in college and the subsequent worms that took up rent free residence in my bowels for a year.
That first summer I got a short haircut (affectionately called a Belsen by the barber) because the weather was hot and I promptly lost a stone because I was on the go and vaguely eating. Tuna and sweet corn sandwiches at lunch was my version of a Ritz afternoon tea. A can of warm Jolt kola to wash it down was better than Dom Perignon. And of course you had to have beers of a Friday evening to exhale. Which promptly put you into a precarious financial position the following week!
My family were shocked when I went home for the weekend mid-summer. So was I as I don't think I'd stood still long enough to look in the mirror for months. They thought I was doing drugs but ironically we were all pissed in the pub when that conversation came about....
I was living the dream in my head with no intention of quitting until I at least finished college. It's just that my body didn't get to do the same. It wasn't until I joined the tofu crew in Cyclone a year later that I learned how to look out for myself. Maybe knowing what its like to look on a shop floor for coppers to make up the price of a budget sliced pan has had a hand in forming who I am now?

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Urban Myth 7. Monster energy

I went to college at night to listen to a Japanese dude teach me about Noh theatre. Picture white powdered faces, traditional Japanese costumes and no words. I had done the serious bit of my degree and now I was doing the minor bit. I'd cycle out the rock road to soak up what was for me, something akin to switching off my brain's life-support two evenings a week. At least the other two nights were cerebral... Greek and Roman civilisation. Sure hadn't I just come back from a whirlwind alcohol tour of Athens, Paros, Naxos, Ios and Santorini? Perfect! But Japanese Noh theatre was just a noh noh!
But I'd cycled all day and then sat my ass down for 3 hours of college before cycling all the way back northside and getting a dinner after 10.
I wasn't the only one burning the candle at both ends. Sure mucho narcotics got swallowed, guys like Enda making the serious money up in Ballyfermot after dark with his deliveries. Energy was there to burn whatever way you wanted. Some guys had a different girlfriend every night, some could fit a nooner in at lunchtime. There was the Kiwi savage from the South Island that knocked out 60 jobs a day,tended bar in the Globe at night and still found time to launch a folk record label at the weekends. Or the Aussi that was always stealing jobs to bump up his wages and doing deliveries of a different kind after work. And he treated every day like rutting season. He was so busy he had forgotten to get a visa along the way! Some just delivered pizzas. One dude was a courier, security guard and musician too.My cousin was a messenger and sound engineer. His bestie was a juggler and kids entertainer. A hell of a lot were in bands. I don't mean like donkeys that own a drum-kit and deafen the neighbours.... I mean bands that sometimes got signed. Or at least played gigs. Anything from funk to punk. One of the guys was a session guitarist. Another taught guitar. Another one brought Chad Smith from the Chilli Peppers here for a drum school. It seemed everyone bar me played music. The guys often jammed together. One guy's party piece was to walk into serious music shops, sit at a piano and blast out a perfect classical piece... His talent coming from his Mom who happened to be a concert pianist! It was weird watching your fellow messenger on stage at a gig giving it Sox.
Three different blokes were DJs. My base dispatcher had a four track at home and made his own electro-synth CDs. And Amanda... Do you remember Amanda? Wow... Amanda could sing soul beautifully and turn your legs to jelly with that star smile.
But most of all there was a surplus of energy that was there to be used. In your twenties it just exuded from the life. I feel in some ways as if I wasted time listening to Jap drama when I could have been happier listening to my mates play serious music. Or I could have been sneaking about the underbelly of Dublin instead of looking at the long view. Que sera sera.

Friday, November 17, 2017

Urban Myth 6. Black Tuesday

I sailed down the North Strand like a super yacht with the spinnaker up. A lovely northerly and a spit of rain. Hello November! There wasn't much going on on the radio. A latte and a chat later, things sparkled into life. I slipped a plastic, bank coin-bag down over the wee rubber aerial to protect my radio from the rain and we were off like freaks in a discombobulated Grand National.
 Into the teeth of a storm. 
Bad weather drives workers indoors to actually work. No skyvin' out for a fag/ coffee/ sandwich/ chat. When your umbrella has been blown inside out, your shoes are shippin' water and it's unpleasant... you become productive.
That's lovely in a centrally-heated office with the percolator on and Mr Muffin delivering to your desk at 10.30 but its going to be a bad day for the bike messenger.
Like God turning on the weather it had all changed by 10am. A wheelie bin came at me across Leeson Street. My satchel was flapping in every gust like a landed salmon on a riverbank. Rain was finding every tiny angle to meander into my jacket. My shins were numb from the rain-water and wind. I only had mitts, so a quick return to base had me rifling rubber gloves from the kitchenette and an old pair of woolly socks from a pile of discarded odds and ends in a corner. The socks went over the gloves and made me look like Fagan. I didn't care. Nobody did. Some Messengers went home and switched off their radios. My signature sheets were fast becoming a clump. My mouth was numb, I couldn't ask for basic things without sounding like a stroke-victim. I kept going because I figured the consequences of stopping even for a minute would be damaging. By God it was busy. I probably did close to sixty jobs what with people forced indoors and not all our boys willing to work. My fingers were sore, then numb-sore. My whole being was cold despite gallons of snatched coffees and enough Snickers to silence Mr T. Around three I took off my socks and shoes and semi-heated them under a hand-dryer in a toilet under O'Connell street. An hour later I had to pee in a stairwell for a lack of any other place to go. Six o'clock saw me spent. Finally back to the base, I didn't have the strength to face the gloom outside. But when I did the rain had stopped, the wind had died and when I looked up to the amber street-lit sky, a jet was flying low over the buildings towards the airport.
And I knew I would soon have to do the same.

Urban myth 5. Scalextric

The odd day you'd get it right. The wind would be at your back all the way from Ringsend to James's street. If you had a controller with robot-like spatial awareness they'd know more than your area, they'd know what door you were passing. A good day then would be the wind, the extra jobs along the way, surfing a bus to get to Trinity College. An exceptional day saw you racing another messenger across, along and through three lanes and laughing when you lost. Most days involved an altercation with a taxi-driver. Only a rare day saw you scratch their ride with the bike-lock key you wore on an elastic band around your wrist. Or better still, pulling the held-on-with-a-magnet radio-aerial off the back of their boot as they sped away.
You'd shimmy the pedestrian crossings on Dame street like a chess master, ache your way up to Christchurch and then have the beauty of a meander along Thomas Street passing the auld wans flogging industrial quantities of loo-roll and washing-powder to ghosts that lived in the Liberties.
Ah the beauty of it. And if it was a sublime, once in a season day, up at James's hospital the consultant's Secretary would be polite and actually look you in the eye.
A bagful of envelopes to keep you busy back into town and you'd smile all day. 
The bad days would be pushed further back into your hard drive allowing you to enjoy the moment. 
Funny; you saw everything and everyone at breakneck speed yet could remember the slightest details, dangers, daft moves and detours in ridiculous detail despite it being a split second in duration. 
It was mind blowing.
And the track lasted a couple of years. Survive the week, drink to your survival on Friday. Regain your strength over the weekend and rock up on Monday for another show; a combination of Mad Max, Gladiator, Ben Hur and Apocalypse Now. Then do it again and again and again. 
And as long as you didn't think about what you were doing too much, it became routine, almost banal, certainly normal.
It was just an awesome time.
For me, the green country boy, it could not have been more removed from where I'd come from. I'd always been getting away from something but now I was being given a wage for it. Everyone I worked with was doing it for the buzz. There were easier jobs that summer, better paying too. Yet the 'freedom', speed, risks and energy was unbeatable. We were ghosts in an endless summer of excitement; unseen yet glaringly obvious, invaluable yet outsiders, part of the electrical current running under the city.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Urban myth 4. Truth.

I don't know what it was. I think it was one of the bad days. It was the end of a tough year at Quickstream. A courier company that extracted the last drop from us. That day I'd hauled a postal franking machine to and from a post office, delivered a human stool sample (suitably sealed in a transparent test tube) from a hospital to a solicitor and around lunchtime I'd done the wages run from the bank to Pearse Street and watched as the Teller in Donnybrook had counted out 11,000 pounds in front of me. I kinda had a small meltdown. Now I'd blame the heat but back then I had stared at the cash before putting it in my satchel thinking how broke I was in night college, how much of a bloody Clydesdale horse I was for Quickstream and how tired I was.
Yes I delivered the cash but I'll admit a lot of scenarios ran through my head along the way.
My next job took me to a pick up in a nice office in Holles street. The Receptionist said I'd have to wait fifteen minutes. I radioed in the delay and asked to use the bathroom. The Receptionist was manic trying to get the delivery ready and told me the bathroom was on the next floor.
She didn't tell me it was super plush! Wall to wall tiles, showers, towels and infinite gels and shampoo....
Door now bolted, I stripped and had an unbelievable shower. In those few minutes I washed the dirt of the previous year's work as well as that day's carbon grime from my skin. The Receptionist noticed nada. But her urgency to get the package across town didn't stop me from a detour I'd planned in the shower. I rode around to a rival courier company and asked for a job. Quickstream was then behind me and I moved faster than ever in the city.

Urban myth 3. Skeletons

Scotty walked up to the 'Green and said hallo to us. It was quiet and there was a good bunch about. It was Autumn. No more idle lunches sitting on the grass or sunning ourselves in the park whilst watching the slowly basting office talent.
Scotty was agitated. His tanned and skint head bobbed with what he had to share. A big and pulsing vein popped on his forehead. He stood into our circle and swore us to secrecy.
"Noot a menshun rye?" It was alright with us. Sure we'd wait til he'd gone before spreading whatever it was like wildfire.
"Soo aye wer dune n da fookin sella agin en aye wer diggin lye a JCB, ri?" "Right", we chorused although to be fair only two of us spoke pidgin scots.
"Wha deed aye deeg oot de wull oonly a fookin skull! A hool skeleton aye til ya! A hool fookin ole vikin! Sword n all! Am no kiddin ya!"
Scotty was doing a nixer while scratching the welfare so he landed a labouring job digging a basement in a Dame street pub. Digging up a Viking skeleton wasn't the problem. Sure Temple Bar was Viking central. The problem lay in declaring the find. If the builder rang the authorities the show would shut down 'til the Archaeological boys had sifted the site. Months. No work for Scotty, no finished pub, no builder paid.
We were all curious. Scotty looked happy. We should have guessed. "What did you do Scotty man, don't keep us in suspense!"
He sucked a centimetre off his badly constructed roll-Up.
"Ye min da skeleton?" He was some boyo for building tension. "Ooh aye....Ach wee fooked et inda skip!"

Urban myth 2. Lunch break

Marks Brothers was ahead of it's time. Really healthy food and a cheap and cheerful young crowd without even a whiff of the Hipster era to come decades later. Sitting in at the back with Kiki, one of only a handful of female bike-messengers for company, I was enjoying my Friday. I was planning beers and hours in the arms of Morpheus. Kiki had other ideas. We had a josh about other bikies and plans for the new place she was moving into. One of the lads had joked that he'd have loved the contents of the hoover when Kiki was cleaning her old place up. She was planning to buy a motorbike to do bigger jobs and earn real money. We wolfed down our food and as I had just got paid I stumped up for lunch. It was good to have her rapier-wit and Scottish put-downs for company. She had just got back from the GPO after posting a cassette tape to one of her friends back home, filled with fifty quid's worth of cannabis and a whole lot of curry powder to throw the sniffer dogs off at the sorting office.
Fridays were always flat-to-the-mat. As if every firm in the city felt they had to show something for their salaries by sending documents post haste. Messengers could do savage numbers on that one day, saving a quiet week. Kiki was flat out too. After wolfing down her healthy grub she reached into her satchel and brought out a wrap of speed and unceremoniously emptied it into her orange juice, stirring it with a dessert spoon until it dispersed enough to swallow.
"Something to get me through...." And that was that. Kiki liked to party. A lick of amphetamine would get her through a manic working day and into Friday night where the real stuff started. Out Friday and Saturday and back to work Monday it was a vicious, candy-consuming circle. I was having lunch with her at the point when a little whizz got her through Friday, followed by a savage weekend with Bacchus as company. And Mondays needed a little pick-me-up to jump start the working week.
I was never into tarot card readings but that day I could have predicted the future like a clairvoyant.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Urban myth number 1

Pickles was as skinny as a lat and white as a ghost. His welfare glasses and baggy trousers made him look worse in every way. He was always pale, even in that three months of heat-wave we had in '95. On those blue-sky mornings he was the white, fluffy cloud. Joint in hand, slowly circling Stephen's green to where his mates hung out. I'd watch him from my perch on a stool outside Bendini and Shaw at the top of Grafton Street. He cycled like treacle. On Moroccan black.
I didn't see Pickles very often as his company gave a lot of motorcycle jobs to the push-bikes. They could be anywhere...out in the docks, Chapelizod... mindlessly boring runs for a pittance. I felt very lucky jobbing between the canals by comparison.
And then all changed. In Bruxelles our gang heard the news over a pint. Pickles...was still alive!! 

Let me explain! Pickle's company had the blood run. Pelican House up on the canal was where the Blood Transfusion Service Board had a ready supply of blood. And the quickest way to get emergency bags to city hospitals was by bicycle. Think about it! No traffic lights, no jams, no waiting.
Pickles was halfway through his run, two bags of A-negative buried in the satchel over his shoulder when, even at his snail pace, the worst happened. A Daisy. Daisy , a derogatory term given to the old dears on high-heels tottering out of office blocks all over the city, ramped up on Prozac or valium or whatever it took them to get through their grey lives; Daisy happened. She stepped out off a kerb at Busarus (pronounced Bus R'Us by yank tourists) and Pickles was knocked onto the broad of his back in the middle of the road.
So far,so good. But there was a perfect storm brewing. A newbie cop from around the corner in Store street station kept the crowd and traffic away. Pickles was alert. Life was about to go on. Blood. A pensioner saw blood. Blood flowing from Pickle's head. A lot of crimson blood forming a fan shape around a very pale and disoriented accident victim. Some old dear screamed. An ambulance was called. Pickles tried to sit up but was forcibly held down lest he parted with a wee bit of his brain.
Pickles protested. His glasses were out of reach causing him to squirm and search like a desperate man. His radio, attached to the satchel underneath him crackled and barked orders looking for 16. "Sixteen where are you?","Come in sixteen!". The Guard wouldn't let Pickles budge. The newly arrived ambulance crew tried to comfort the obviously brain-damaged kid who was fighting,fighting with all his might and shouting that it wasn't his blood! Not his blood at all!
We all sat in Bruxelles that evening, heaving with laughter, celebrating Pickles finest moment.

Monday, November 6, 2017

Fiction

Doctor Hutch in Cycling Weekly often speaks of his cycling buddy Bernard, a semi-fictional friend who often becomes the butt of funny incidences. My Coach's friend Russell is the same. Even though I've met him, the way Coach talk's about him its obvious he is semi-fictitious....

And in my life right now its Mick. Honestly, he exists! Mick is a mine of information and generally has me in stitches on an average [steady-hard] bike ride. A reformed character once fuelled by IPA or a crisp, he is great company. Sunday was no different. He has a cold. I'd just feel miserable, hot and bothered by the remains of a chest-infection. Mick however was "sweating like a gypsy in a tax-office" after our first and only drag.
He is in the middle of beet harvesting at the moment. He has a super reliable harvester that seems to have nothing electronic in it's operation. Just levering and clutching to beat the band. Mick is understandably tired after a long, dawn to way-after-dusk day and I suggested it was like driving a stair-master. Stair-master? He wouldn't hear of it...driving a whole gym was more like it. For twelve hours a day. I was left picturing Flann O'Brien's character who cycled so much he was half bike/ half human.
And it's not all joking and joshing. Mick can speak in depth on most subjects that affect his fellow man. More cerebral than your average cross-bar jockey. The balance is there....Yet he has no time for the pretentious. Rounding a bend and encountering what I described as a murder of crows reciprocated a withering look from said Mick.
Somewhere in there on Sunday was a knee-op that became a...dare I say it...well, something quite sexual [You had to be there]...and be careful what emojis you use and when.... just make a good fist of it....
You wouldn't want to be afraid to pick up a shovel or brush around Mick either if needs be, you'd get a well deserved bol***king.
And as we are both early risers 'coz we have a lot to get back to, I'll mention this little gem from before 8am around harvest time.... Cresting a hill side by side somewhere not too far from Ramsgrange, Mick takes a sharp inhalation of the morning air, smiles, and says dead-pan..."I love the smell of Roundup first thing in the morning...!"
So what's the moral? Well I'm not very good at maths but if my friend Mick is anything to go by and there's lots of like-minded bike-nuts that I'd call friends, then an algorithm suggests that as a tribe, cyclists are generally good fun to be around. If I know lots of cyclists with both a sense of humour and a head full of ideas and opinions, then most cyclists must be as lucky as me, so exponentially the world is full of fun-lovin' cyclists by the thousand. Go find your Bernard or Russell or Mick, laugh out loud, shoot the breeze, inhale the Roundup and live a little.