Courier with Conviction
I’m that guy: sweaty with a large bundle of packages, smooshing you into the corner of the elevator. I’m also brown with a large, unkempt afro. And I want to say, “Hello, how are you today?”
There are times in this elevator when the tension is so thick that I want to scream. I want to make it everyone else’s fault. I stand there, hot, grumpy, and sometimes soaking wet, and it’s clear to me that the Christies employee in her Lord and Taylor outfit with crispy pearls can’t look at me because she doesn’t see me as a person. This banker-type with his banker-type uniform can’t glance my way because I represent some invisible form of underclass.
I am challenged by the difficulty unpacking what animus is real and how much is my projection. I’m discovering the power inherent in the piece of these interactions I can control: my response to what I think people think of me.
Most of the time, since I have been training myself, I’m able to say something. I say, “What’s up?” or “Whoo, it’s hot, isn’t it?” or “cold” or “Thank goodness it’s Friday,” or some similar conversational lubricant. It’s embarrassing how often I am surprised by the warmth, the quickness the gap between classes, perceptions, social isolation, and my own predictions are bridged. I’ve had hundreds, maybe thousands of these interactions in my year-and-a-half as a bike messenger in the city.
The hard-to-admit terror I feel moments before I say something is something I’ve learned to identify. My entire vision of myself is on the line as I interact with the world. The easy antidote to this terror is to HATE the external thing I think is causing it. Sorry, old Black lady who looks like my mom, your New York defenses that tell you not to acknowledge my presence makes my fragile ego want to hate you. Put any other demographic in that elevator. My fear plus their normal dense-population-self-containment equals horrible levels of emotional discomfort and unfair narratives that my mind holds up as reality. My mind is wrong.
So the first step is to make the awkward plunge into discomfort. This discomfort is the stuff a recent Wall Street Journal opinion writer described as one of the flaws of Critical Race Theory-based trainings for government employees. (This is the author of the memo Trump cited in his first debate with Biden. Oddly, the opinion writer didn’t actually attempt explaining why discomfort or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is bad. He lists the activities as if the list is proof of their lack of validity: “They made us write letters to people of color.” “They said we had privilege and this nation is founded in exploitation.” Uncomfortable, for sure, and he thinks that’s bad). But he’s wrong, my discomfort is incredibly informative. When I plunge into my discomfort I realize that it has very little or nothing at all to do with anything outside of me. No one is making me feel bad. I am responsible for the story I am telling myself.
One white banker guy and I rode up 23 floors. (I have a bias against banker types, pretty much against the whole capitalist machine, but that’s a different article.) I looked at the smug sneer on his face, and his indifference to my presence and around the 5th floor I tried the technique (it was a slowish elevator). I said, “I know this is weird, but I like to talk to people in elevators because it makes me feel more comfortable.” He laughed and said he understood. I asked him how he’s doing.
He told me he’d had a lump on his neck that he thought would go away, but didn’t. Then I noticed the taped bandage peeking just above his tight shirt collar. He said the doctors took it out, but he was still worried it might be cancerous. I told him that I hope he would be all right, and that it was brave for him to talk about it. I sincerely wished him a good day, and he enthusiastically wished me one, too. I spent the rest of the day riding around shrouded in the warmth of that human connection.
Every single time I stepped into my discomfort and led with vulnerability I’ve had rewarding, enriching interactions like this. I watched this happen over and over again in the scattered protest videos in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. A cop. A protester. Some vulnerability and true bravery. Voila, a new possibility emerges where moments before, there was little chance of a positive outcome.
I’ve got an Associates degree in Behavioral Science and 41 years of living in some of the crummiest neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey. I’ve also spent almost 9 years behind bars in county jails, Five Points, Sing Sing, and Fishkill Correctional Facilities.
This bike messenger gig is my first real job on parole, a sort of fulfillment of a childhood dream; and I love the autonomy. I love the blue sky over my head and the flow of orders and my agency in picking how I go about it. I love it all, except for days when I’m left holding that last package at 6pm. With an 8pm curfew and an hour and a half commute, each time this happens I’m faced with the rising desperate knowledge that there’s no way I can get this package back to base and make it home before curfew. Then there’s the extreme risk I’m willing to take and often suffer for to bend time and distance to my need to stay free. Pavement is notoriously unforgiving.
So were the cops when I got caught going uptown on 7th Avenue in the garment district. It took everything I had in me to stop and hand over ID and not run (RUN!). Overcome with dread that I’d be going back to prison from ‘police contact,’ I fully expected to be surrendering my freedom by complying with the officers. They gave me a $75 summons (more than my day’s wages) and I ‘fessed up’ immediately with my parole officer. (She laughed at my earnestness.)
I find myself leaning on honesty and vulnerability a lot on this job. Like the time I screwed up and went to the west side on a rush delivery instead of the same building number on the east side. I wanted oh-so-badly not to admit to my dispatcher that I’d made a foolish mistake that cost both of us money. With practice, I found it easier to admit I’d screwed up. There’s the time I exited the stairwell of that Wall Street office building (blocks from where I worked at my first startup 20 years earlier) and the loudest building alarm I ever heard went off. Perhaps I’m jumpy, but I legit called my dispatcher and joked that if he heard helicopters they were coming for me.
Or like talking with security guards (there’s a natural animosity between city security guards and couriers: they want to keep us out and we want the fastest access in), and finding out the pressures they’re under. They’re living on the edge of economic instability, monitored on camera, reported for any slight, responsible for anything that goes wrong.
Raw honesty, acceptance of the world exactly as it is, and relentless positive forward motion are the only way to survive being a courier. They are also probably the only way to survive on parole. On the bike I was incentivized to attitudes that shift my behavior. If I work smoother, I make more money. If I communicate better, I make more money. Without the #LessIsMoreNY act, there are no such incentives for parole.
I delivered items across multiple sectors of the economy: an older woman’s dentures, hearing aids, an executive’s forgotten-at-the-penthouse cell phone, indie films on hard drives, giant boxes, flowers, food, bottles of wine (heavy), copier replacement parts, box office tickets, makeup boxes for Broadway shows, untold amounts of haute couture jammed into my bag and strapped to my handlebars, rolls of architectural drawings to the landmarks preservation center at 1 Centre Street (POLICE PLAZA! I hated going through the magnometer). I once had a delivery to the Mayor’s office.
Through every cold winter, wet spring, hot summer day on the bike, I found a new love for the city I grew up in. I found a love for the pedestrians and tourists crowding the streets, the cops and the delivery guys and the bankers and the secretaries and sundry ephemera of our strange new new economy. I found a love for their pain and the humanity that is only just below the city-rind of defense. I became more comfortable asking for what I need and eventually, after many years of being apart from society, began to feel like I belonged.
More information about the Less Is More Act can be found at LessIsMoreNY.org. The bipartisan bill represents community leaders and law enforcement support for safer communities through intelligent, responsive supervision.
The Less Is More Act:
— provides 30 days off for every 30 days with no problems
— prevents people from being incarcerated for minor technical violations
— puts each potential violation in front of a real judge
