by Tom Holland
Dirt Rag #56, March 1997
Last Thursday I was dropping a package at 3 Mellon Bank Center, where I used to work, and I stopped off to take a piss. So I'm standing there, just doing my thing, when my ex-coworker John pulls up to the urinal next door. There aren't any partitions between the urinals so it's kind of hard (difficult might be a better word here) not to do the old long dong peeing contest. But, to divert that train of thought, we start comparing clothing. See, he’s wearing a blue suit with a tie and the de rigeur wing tip shoes. And I'm sporting a stylishly sweaty messenger bag accented with a blaring radio over a chic pair of dirty shorts and black tights. And this is kind of funny, because I was a bank program mer for seven years, and I used to dress just like John.
Now, it may sound kind of dreamy, getting paid 40 G's just for showing up late, taking a 2-hour lunch and leaving early, but actually, it sucked. All I did was slouch in my little, gray cubicle and play Doom, or attend pointless, inter minable meetings arguing some inane point with other guys in suits and brains the size of peas. Then we'd pull out our planners, square up our stack of hand outs (corresponding to the overhead slide presentation) and trudge to an other meeting. And all the time I'm looking out the window, and even if it's 30 degrees and raining I'm thinking, man, I'd rather be out there, riding.
Here's a situation I'll bet Sarte wishes he'd thought of you get 40 grand a year to sit eight hours a day in a prison cell with annoying prisoners do you do it? Yeah, for a while, maybe but screw that, that's no way to spend your life. So one day I just quit, packed up my bike with everything I needed (I had a lot of time to make lists in those meetings), and rode 3000 miles across the Southwest. I went through Yosemite and Death Valley, past the Grand Can yon and even spent a week in Moab living with a band of hippies in a blue trailer and swimming naked in the steams. Somewhere meetings were still being conducted in little gray rooms, but I was laying out on a grand expanse of pink slickrock and digging the sun set reflected off the mountains.
Then I came back to Pittsburgh and got a job as a messenger. Actually, first I spent two months lying in bed drinking beer and washing myself with a rag on a stick, but anyway...
Now I put in 60 miles on a good day, and I don't care if it’s cold and raining, because it beats sitting in some damned meeting. When it's slow I sit outside in Market Square drinking coffee and eating raisin bagels with honey-walnut cream cheese and talking bikes with other messengers. Life is good. And when I wanted more than a month off this summer to go back to the great Southwest, I just asked at the messenger company and they said hey, no problem. So when we were zipping up and John asked me how the big change agreed with me, I just gave him an understated "oh fine." No need to gloat when you win a peeing contest.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at messvilleto@yahoo.com