Houston's Bike Couriers Soar As the Free Spirits of the Business World
By Randall Paterson
Houston Post, April 10, 1994
On a vivid spring morning, a man on a bicycle flashed by Jones Hall with a happy grin and sailed into the oncoming traffic.
Milam is a one-way street rushing south, but he peddled north down the middle, wonderfully alive as death passed on either side. Cars honked; bike couriers on the curb cheered for the bike courier . Breaking the law was all in a day's work, one of them declared. Another just smiled and said, "There's a fine line between lunacy and genius."
In another place, they would be surfers. In another time, they would be the pony express. But in downtown Houston, in the formal world of official business, a twentysomething crowd of free spirits has found happiness as bike couriers. Amid the coated and tied, the heeled and hosed, bike couriers have long hair and tattoos and pierced body parts and nicknames like "Crash" and "Chrome" that recall their latest wrecks. "They're just sort of funky," said one of their own bosses, Darrell Donaldson of Hot Shot Messenger Service. "I don't particularly like bike messengers, but they've become a necessary evil."
Traffic is heavy and parking is rare, and no one can carry an official document faster than a bike courier . They were introduced downtown about 10 years ago, and now there are about 50 of them, working through about 10 different companies. Back and forth they peddle, tower to tower, traveling to and from people with whom they have nothing in common.
"The difference between us and them," said courier Rebecca Reilly, "is that we don't postpone our enjoyment. We're like the Dead Poets Society. We never know when we're going to kick it, and so we seize the day."
Between runs on a recent Friday, they were gathered in the shadow of the Pennzoil Tower, their bikes leaning against the wall. Some played hacky-sack; others smoked and told disaster stories - the August afternoon when someone blasted out a window on the 71st floor of the First Interstate Building and glass rained down on Timothy Bleakie, the day in October when two window-washers dangled 45 floors above the ground on one cable.
With the same relish, they began telling of their own tragedies - what it is like to be catapulted by a car and dragged by a bus and even blown over by a tornado. Everyone had a story, though not everyone wore a helmet. Marlon Solano was smiling as he recalled breaking a windshield with his face. "The adrenalin is the best part," he said. "You know you're about to buy it, and your heart starts pumping - BoomBoomBoom!"
Just as Solano spoke, Allen Wilson looked up from a story in Discovery magazine. "Man, it would suck to be eaten by snakes!" he said, and it was strange, because a reporter was thinking the same thing about being a bike courier . But he had brought helmet and bike, and they were waiting and so was Rebecca Reilly. And as courier and reporter rolled away together, Patrick Blankenship, the veteran of a 15-foot launch by a car just a week earlier, called out: "Word to the wise, man- always look behind you!"
There is a group of cyclists downtown who wear creased uniforms and follow all the traffic rules. The supervisor of these 15 Houston police officers said no one worries about bike couriers.
"Some of them probably are not as safe as they should be, but they're hazards to themselves," said Sgt. John Savage. "They're the ones who get hurt by not obeying the rules."
No one worries about bike couriers: At the first light that day, Reilly stopped to ask if hand signals were necessary. No, they wouldn't be understood anyway, said the reporter, and Reilly just shook her head and pushed off, and that was the last red light she stopped for. She cut across four lanes in a flash and weaved through moving cars as though they were still and at the intersections, didn't even slow down. Down McKinney, La Branch, Jefferson and Jackson she flew, until at last she rolled into the driveway of a printing company.
"I'm a speed junkie," she said, as the reporter gobbled air. "When you're out in all that chaos, it's like a high, and you just get off on it."
Three years ago, Reilly graduated from a small Michigan college with a degree in business administration. She mailed out 150 resumes seeking a marketing position, but no one wanted a marketer without marketing experience. She finally took a job in Washington, D.C., as a bank teller, and six months later, she was fired because of "a calculation error." At that point, Reilly abandoned the search for an office job and became a bike courier .
They called her a powder puff in Washington, until the week she had five wrecks, and then, in respect, they called her "Crash." In Chicago, she was known as "Dart" for the way she moved through traffic. Now, in Houston, where she is one of only three female couriers, Reilly is known as "Chicago," the Buddhist bike courier .
She rides a battered Fuji she found in the trash thousands of miles ago, and on her forearm are Chinese symbols she studies as she rides. She has been a bike courier for two years and says she will work two years more before writing a book about it.
"The typical bike courier has been jerked around a lot, and maybe came from a bad home situation and had some trouble with the law," said Reilly. "We look like hoodlums and people think we're shiftless, but we have a real desire to work in a job and be respectable."
Friday is the busiest day of the week for a courier , the day when all the bankers and lawyers and businessmen turn in at once what they have procrastinated on all week. There's nothing like it, said Reilly, to bring out "the raw, beautiful power of a messenger in traffic."
Down the middle of the street, she rode the white line. She calls it "the DMZ," the demilitarized zone, and when cars crossed it in front of her, Reilly shouted like a soldier, or like a cowboy tending herd. "Hey!" she yelled, and "Watch out!" and "What are you doing!"
"Sometimes, it gets pretty ruthless out here," she said, "and you've got to put your foot down."
The journey up Gray and Louisiana back to the Pennzoil Tower is another two miles, and for every round trip, Reilly earns $3. Most couriers work on commission and make anywhere between 50 cents to $5 a delivery, $14,000 to $24,000 a year. Most are independent contractors, which means they pay their own taxes and buy their own health insurance.
"Boy, y'all are some brave souls," said a woman on the sidewalk. "I'll bet you have good insurance."
"Not a lick," Reilly replied, passing by.
The most dangerous thing out here is parked cars, she said. "Nothing hurts worse than hitting an open door at 25 miles an hour," which is something she has done four times. She has never been seriously injured, but she cannot count all her wrecks.
Her legs are a map of her travels, a landscape of scars and bruises. This is where the scissors came through the bag and pierced her knee when she fell. That's where she hit the handlebars, and this dark spot is always that way, because she keeps falling on it.
Every blemish is a badge of honor.
"If you get really messed up and come back to work, people have a new respect for you," she explained. "But it bothers my mother. She's a very professional woman, and she says to me, 'Those are permanent ! You've ruined your legs!' "
On Travis, two tow trucks sped by, on their way to a parking problem. Reilly's beeper kept beeping. At One Allen Center, Cheryl Bobb was telling the cars at the curb to move along, but when Reilly leaned her bike against a pole, the meter monitor just said, "I don't have a problem with y'all. I just want to take your bikes and ride."
At 909 Fannin, Reilly jumped the curb, locked her bike and rode the elevator to the 18th floor. The doors opened onto a plush lobby, and with all her bruises and bicycle grease, Reilly marched out. She took a package from the desk and said thank you, and the big-haired receptionist said, "Ah hah," without looking up.
Then the elevator doors closed again. Sometimes, when skies are blue and the wind is cool outside, elevator people say they wish they had Reilly's job. The jobs are not hard to get, she tells them, "but they always have a hole to back into, something that prevents them from doing what they want to do." And she can't understand that.
On other elevators, there are people who can't understand her. Descending from the 18th floor of 909 Fannin was a red-haired woman with a Gucci purse, the vision of corporate success. She scanned Reilly from head to toe - and frowned. She did not speak, and Reilly did not speak to her.
"The impression we get from people like that," Reilly said in the street afterward, "is they think they're superior to us because they have nice jobs and stock options and fancy cars. I know there are nice office workers out there, but when you get hurt, you stereotype, and so we say they're all like that - all suits and zombies and breadheads."
So she rode away. She locked and unlocked her bike, raced in and out of towers, rose and fell on the elevators, and never knew what was in the packages she carried. The day became a succession of big-haired receptionists, between whom everyone and everything was an obstacle.
When Reilly rode through a turning lane, a turning car slammed on the brakes. On Lamar Street, a blue Chevy pickup backed out of a parking space into Reilly's path, and she howled like people do when they're falling, just before impact. But the truck stopped, the impact never came, and Reilly got by ...
It is never very far from her mind that she could be killed or maimed. But in Chicago, Reilly once witnessed the death of a woman who stepped in front of a taxi, and now, Reilly figures it is better to lead a risky life than to risk losing a dull, safe one in a freak accident.
"A crate of oranges could drop out of the sky and kill you at any moment," she explained.
In the traffic, she cuts and glides, into the cool shadows of glass towers and out again into the sunlight of a spring day. Reilly loves the breezes and the sun on her skin and the feeling of freedom when she is sailing through the streets.
But she is a person who lives from goal to goal, a competitor, and these great buildings, these well-dressed people, represent a goal she has never achieved. More than anything, Rebecca Reilly still wants to be an office worker, a New York stockbroker.
At the end of a 50-mile, $60 day, Reilly took another elevator ride to the 38th floor of the NationsBank building, where the receptionist at Paine Webber gave her a week's worth of old Wall Street Journals. It is a regular trip for Reilly.
"I'm 24, see, and I figure if I'm not going to be making the best money and I'm going to be kicked around, I might as well do something I want to do," she said. "To tell you the truth, I'm trying to drive it out of my system. I'm trying to do this hard and fast so that when I get to New York, I can put my bike up and get settled and say, 'Finally.' "
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