For a brief moment in my life I took a summer job as a bicycle messenger in San Francisco. In the days before pdf’s and email, large business districts of major urban areas relied on folks like us to deliver important documents of all sorts. The job was basically like being a cab driver for papers. I had a radio, and a dispatcher, a bag and a bike. The thing that distinguishes being a messenger in San Francisco from other cities like say New York is, you guessed it, the hills. And when I say hills, I mean hills with a capital H. Other than that, I think messenger culture was probably fairly similar in most cities.

Financial districts have a very distinct caste system, and of all the castes, messenger is the absolute lowest. It didn’t take long to realize this. Drivers on the road hated you for weaving in and out of traffic and generally causing a vehicular ruckus. Office building folks hated you because by and large most messengers look like they are extras from the movie road warrior. One fellow I met looked rather normal. He had a baseball hat with longish hair coming out of it. Thing was, his head was shaved shiny all around the top, right where the rim of the hat began. His thing was that every time he would make a delivery, as he was leaving, he would tip his hat to the receptionist and wish her a nice day, leaving always a rather stunned expression in his wake. He was also known to write obtuse messages on his dome from time to time. The sheer creativity expressed in the diversity of shenannigans lead me to believe that this might be a culture in which I could thrive. But it was a closed culture, and I needed I guide to show me the underside of these invisible people. That person turned out to be Mike Mowhawk. He was named such because well, his name was mike and he had a bright blue mowhawk. We hit it off immediately. And slowly over time, he revealed many secrets of the downtown pariah.

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