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?