Women's Sports & Fitness, May, 1987
by Deborah Frost
Most mornings in Manhattan, the traffic is something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. To top it off this Monday rush hour it’s cold and windy, and the rain is pouring down in sheets. Suddenly, a young woman with dark sunglasses and long, wet, blond hair appears out of nowhere on a 12-speed bike, dodging cars and sweeping around corners at a 45-degree angle. She misses a pedestrian by a few inches and swerves out of the way of an oncoming taxi cab. In the middle of a busy intersection, the light changes and she switches direction instantly, disappearing into the flow of cars and buses before anyone can figure out what has happened.
Her name is Marianne Sprizzo, but everyone knows her by her street moniker, Holmes. She’s only 22, has nerves of iron, and owns New York City in a way George Steinbrenner could never imagine. Her resume, if she had one, would describe her as a bike messenger, but that's like calling Martina Navratilova simply a tennis player, or Ronald Reagan just an actor.
New York has approximately 5,000 full-time bike messengers, who hand-deliver packages and letters for about $9 a pickup. Only a handful of them are women, but all messengers ride the streets as if they were starring in a bicycle remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! At speeds of 25 to 30 miles per hour, they run lights, dart treacherously be tween cars, race the wrong direction on one-way streets, hitch rides behind buses, and hop curbs as they try to hook up" as many clean runs as possible. Their relationship to the drivers particularly taxi drivers, who are also working against the clock and pedestrians with whom they share the streets is as cordial as the warring factions in Beirut. The weather is often brutal, and the pot holes and other hazards make every trip a gamble. A car door carelessly opened can mean the end of a knee, a career, a life.
The main thing is not to panic," says Sprizzo. You always have to feel that you have control of the situation. Fear is the worst thing to fall into.
In the year since Sprizzo a five-foot-eight, 130-pound Brooklyn native who could be successful, and a lot safer, modelling for Seventeen became an urban kamikaze, she’s had her share of ugly confrontations. Her fellow bike messengers dubbed her Holmes, as in prizefighter Larry, when a pedestrian pushed her over in the middle of an intersection last summer and she punched him out.
But to Sprizzo, who averages $75 daily, being a bike messenger is more than just a way to make a living. It’s a way to build speed and stamina for the racing career she hopes to pursue, like Nelson Vails, the former bike messenger-turned-racer who won a silver medal in the 1984 Olympics. Unlike her previous position in a suburban ad agency, riding in New York is a constant adventure, somewhere between roller derby and big game hunting. How many other jobs, for instance, give you a chance to knock on a door and be greeted by rock singer Debbie Harry in her nightgown?
Best Messenger Service’s second-floor office on Sixth Avenue is stark and barren. There is little furniture, and the only adornments on the walls are some large street maps and a team photo of the New York Mets. Outside in the streets, however, the sidewalks overflow with life and characters like Steve the Greek, a former male stripper with the look of a rock star who compares riding in New York traffic to skiing on a mountain that moves."
Some of the riders smoke marijuana in lieu of breakfast, but Sprizzo says she doesn't smoke or drink on or off the job. She’s heard of messengers in slightly altered states who have lost important packages such as masters for television commercials, and she worries that, unless she keeps straight, someday her reflexes might fail her at a critical moment, I'm putting my life in jeopardy every day, she says. I have to have the discipline to be alert. And although she admits that "junk makes up some of the 5,000 calories she consumes every day, she and her live-in boyfriend, Jon Coppersmith, who is a bike messenger and a chef, eat, if not to win, to deliver spending over $130 a week on fresh vegetables, fish, and healthy carbs.
On a typical day, Sprizzo does the hang (hangs out) with the men while shuffling through the green tickets detailing her day’s first runs. In her light blue parka and tights, she looks muscular and coiled, like a cat ready to pounce. She talks animatedly about recent runs to the bottom (downtown), and about "blowing lights, shooting the tube (the practice of squeezing between two city buses), and the rude treatment she gets from customers. If you hired a carpenter to work in your office, she explains, "you'd let him use the bathroom or give him a drink of water or let him use the phone, but basically, we're treated very badly. She pauses, then adds, But I get treated nicely compared to the men,
Sprizzo has several ladies’ pit stops, like the Plaza and Waldorf-Astoria hotels, and Doctors Hospital, where she also takes advantage of the free coffee machine. But there are not many other fringe benefits. Most messengers are independent contractors without any job security or medical insurance provided by their employers. During their daily rounds, they not only have to dodge irate pedestrians and drivers, but also the police who issue expensive tickets that, if unpaid, can cost them their driver’s license, and demanding bosses who may dock their weekly pay checks for tardiness, absences, or chronic late deliveries.
These mutual hardships have created a strong bond among the riders. Like Sprizzo, they see themselves as tough, cocky survivors. In a field where the only qualifications are two wheels and two strong legs, and where, as she notes, people disappear all the time," Best’s 30 or so regular riders are a team. Only one other is a woman, but Sprizzo shares a special camaraderie with the riders that she never felt for her parochial school track team, her high school volleyball team, or the fans of her favorite rock group, The Doors. The bike messengers’ lingo, costumes (a curious mix of bike tights and survival gear), and renegade spirit help set them defiantly apart from the rest of the workaday world. Like many riders, Sprizzo sometimes carries false ID to stymie the police, but unlike most, she declares and pays taxes on her earnings her father works for the Internal Revenue Service.
She's indebted to the guys who've taught her to ride standing on her pedals, and how to dip around cars heading directly toward her in an intersection and barge through pedestrian-filled crosswalks screaming "I have no brakes! She speaks about the "brilliant, death-defying" feats of messengers like Joey Joe, who hitches rides from firetrucks, with almost the same reverence she reserves for Bruce Springsteen and her greatest hero, The Doors' Jim Morrison, whose music blasts all day on her water-resistant Sony Walkman.
She knows she shouldn't ride with headphones, but music helps temper the rage of being cut off and sometimes hit by indifferent motorists. Some of her closest calls to date came because she was wearing headphones. On one occasion, she was sent flying when a limousine door opened unexpectedly; on another, she barely escaped being hit on the head by a crane because she couldn’t hear the construction workers yelling at her. But she’s gotten into worse scrapes without the headphones. Furious at being knocked over by a Cadillac on 14th Street, she remounted, caught up to the car two blocks away, and smashed the windshield and side window with her bike lock. Another time, when a cabbie hit her, then spit at her, she shattered his windshield, too, sending him into a parked car. Sayonara!
Although Sprizzo recognizes the risks of wearing her Walkman, she feels no similar twinges about not wearing a helmet. She says she wants "total sleekness," that a helmet will inhibit her movement or the strap might get caught when she squeezes between vehicles. Despite several minor accidents, the odds of serious head injury or death, and the nightmares she, like every messenger. has of something just popping you," she is convinced that if I go down, it will be under the wheels of a car and no helmet will help me."
On a recent morning, Sprizzo stuffed her vinyl ticket folder covered with building visitor passes into a waterproof canvas bag and slung the bag across her shoulder so it sat tight and low on her back. Then she unlocked her battered, mud-caked $230 Japanese bike with a bald back tire to give it extra speed and make it less at tractive to bike thieves and took off for her first call, a photo lab. There, she waited at least 15 minutes before being told that the photographer for whom she was making the pickup had no account and she would have to pay for his pictures. Because he was a regular client and had once given her a photo of John Lennon, she came up with $17 of her own money for his bill.
En route to her next stop, the photographer’s studio, she passed a car double-parked on a narrow Greenwich Village street. As navigation became difficult, even for a bicycle, a police traffic buggy appeared. "Hey," Sprizzo shouted, thumping on the car’s hood, "give this guy a ticket! The officer gave her an odd look. Oh, she laughed, "it’s you. (She used to date the policeman’s partner.) "Say hello to Hank! she shouted cheerily and continued south, never changing gears and always standing on her pedals, except for taking curves.
When she arrived at the studio, the photographer gave her a $20 bill and told her to keep the change. (She used to refuse tips, she says, but now she figures she deserves them.) Then she jumped back on her bike and took off for SoHo. Heading down Seventh Avenue South, she suddenly jammed on her brakes nearly giving a pedestrian who had stepped off the curb a heart attack and looked off in the distance, calling Su-ee! Su--ee!" as if calling hogs home. All at once a rider who had been only a speck on the horizon a moment before materialized, breathing heavily, and skidded to a stop a fraction of an inch in front of her bike. He gave her a peck on the cheek and a report on his day's lucrative runs.
You're gonna be the star of the company!" she exclaimed with genuine awe. And for a minute, you could see just what messengering means to her. It’s her way of transforming this mean city with its millions of strangers into a small town full of friendly encounters and street-corner epiphanies.
After a quick drop at an office in SoHo, she was back in or on top of the saddle again, bombing toward Wall Street, where she was frustrated waiting for the elevator in a massive modern tower filled with busy stockbrokers and law firms. "Messengers hate elevators, she sighed. You kill yourself to make five minutes on the road and then you wait forever in some lobby." She delivered an envelope to a stock brokerage and thawed out in the elegant waiting room while the receptionist let her use his phone to check in with Best. ''Thanks, bud," she waved.
While most of the city’s workers were enjoying their lunch hour, she was flying again, slipping like a ghost between the cars with sublime maneuvers and a firm grip on her handlebars. Nothing could pin her. Everything around her was a moving picture and only she decided which way the picture was going to move. She was completely unattached to everything but her bike and her dispatcher. It was something she wasn't sure she could even describe. It was like no other feeling she'd ever experienced. It didn't matter that there were easier ways to make a dollar in this town and that most of her greatest stunts had no audience. After errands ranging from racing crosstown and back again to buy chocolates at Bloomingdale’s for a guy at Penthouse, to trucking gallery paintings and 75-pound packages at 10 or 15 degrees below zero, she not only knew every address in Manhattan, she knew how much her body could take anything. And with Born in the U.S.A. or "L.A.. Woman screaming in her ears, she could almost forget that she was heading for a $9 pickup in midtown and pretend that she was racing instead to Olympic victory.
This spring, Sprizzo will get her first chance to compete, as a member of the team sponsored by New York’s City Cycles store. But even if her raw power doesn't quite translate into winning strategy, she's had a chance to do something unusual, to break away from the pack. Even passengers in limos roll down their tinted windows because they can't quite believe what the blond woman with the great legs is doing and the speed and accuracy with which she's doing it. And then there was the time she saw Bruce Springsteen two days in a row, once at Greene and Houston and again at 53rd and Third. The second time, she could hardly contain herself and told him so.
"You’re running me all over this town, he replied with a laugh.
Bruce," she told him, I’m a bike messenger. "Well, then." said the Boss, "be careful."
Deborah Frost is a New York writer and rock singer.
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