Under the Bridge, Into the World of Bike Messengers

Mario Lopez is coasting toward the towers on Bunker Hill. The low, dreaded drone of an MTA bus has crept up behind him as he glides on his mountain bike. He hates buses--constantly edging him into curbs and belching fumes in his face. Like some big, breathy predator, the thing hovers on his tail before it passes. In the world of the bike messenger, buses are the enemy.

Lopez is 24 and riding in the glare to the outdoor office for bike messengers in downtown Los Angeles. His backpack is filled with documents he has to deliver for the district attorney’s office. Spry, with a kid’s face, he wears a Thrasher skate cap and ragged Adidas shoes.

He’s had a busy morning. He launched off a favorite sidewalk hump in the Wilshire District and almost ate it on the pavement. He dodged people and ran red lights. He tried to serve a summons on some guy in an apartment building on Alvarado. But the guy wasn’t there.

So now, on this humid December day, he’s headed to hang with his fellow couriers.

He swings a rapid U-turn between moving cars and hops the curb into the shade of the 4th Street overpass at Flower Street. The smell of pot hits first, then urine. Gnats hover in the shadows. Bike tires and inner tubes dangle from a eucalyptus tree that has had its lower branches snapped off. Trash is everywhere.

For years, this spot of concrete and battered tile has been where the hundred or so bike messengers have gathered to wait for dispatches coming on their pagers and cell phones. On national bike messenger Web sites, “The Bridge” is listed as the place to hang out in Los Angeles.

That is not to say the couriers love this dark corner of the city. Just a couple weeks ago, as they were kicking a hacky sack around or playing cards, a man’s body fell from the bridge. He landed on the rocks behind them, his head split open. No one knew if he was dead. Emergency crews came and removed him.

Although their hangout is about 50 yards from the sparkling Bonaventure Hotel, the bikers’ makeshift office feels like a forsaken cave. It is always dark, backed by a bank of river rock, gunite and concrete columns. Homeless people sleep in dirt recesses and leave their syringes in the morning.

Occasionally, the messengers have tried to migrate to more pleasant, sunnier terrain at a corporate plaza a block away.

“The thing about over there,” Lopez says, “The girls are beautiful. It’s like a fashion show.”

He and some close friends still spend part of their days at that bank plaza, soaking up the sun, joking and commenting on the passing parade. But whenever they start to gather en masse, security guards and police send them back under the bridge. “They just leave us alone right here,” he says.

After Lopez arrives here, he starts winging a football over traffic on Flower Street to a fellow rider. Others drink beer. They are loud and messy. Passersby put their heads down and walk fast. Don’t make eye contact, they seem to be thinking.

“They see the trash and all the loud noises and try to stay to the other side of the street,” says Jonas Lanford, 30, a veteran messenger and bike racer. He has tried to get his buddies to keep the place clean, he says.

Lanford is a hard-core courier. He has crashed through a windshield and a van door. The nerves in one arm are shot. A foot-wide tattoo of his nickname--Broken Spoke--crosses his back. And thick, puffy scars line his arms where he branded himself with a scalding-hot bike cog--a symbol of brotherhood between himself and five courier friends.

An Eclectic Mix of Cultures

This is not just a job, after all. In many ways, bike messengers are an underground culture. Or mix of cultures. Lopez is a skater who used to do his runs on a skateboard. Lanford is a cyclist all the way. There are a few gangbangers, some jocks, some stoners and some hip-hop dudes. And hairstyles run the gamut. There are dreadlocks, Afros, shaved heads, ponytails, plats, cornrow braids and--the old standard--short back and sides. Almost all are men, mostly in their 20s.

The jobs generally pay less than $10 an hour, whether they consist of straight wages or commissions. In Los Angeles, the couriers mostly carry documents for legal firms, often racing to the courthouse to file before the doors close.

Technically, the lawyers and couriers are working toward the same goal. But with the wage and culture gap, the 4th Street bridge seems something like a guerrilla camp from which messengers mount incursions into the opulent towers.

“They rely on us for multimillion-dollar cases,” says Scott Free, 29. “And they don’t even tip you when you risk your life to get there in 4.5 minutes.”

Sometimes when he locks his bike out front and enters a marble lobby, Free says, security guards tell him he must use the service entrance. “We can’t be with the suits,” he says. “It’s because they pay more for their haircuts.”

He and others say they have given up better-paying jobs because they like the freedom of cruising around the city all day. On slow days, they pass most of their time at the bridge waiting for calls. They hold occasional races through downtown streets. And they even ride in their free time.

Lopez, who commutes on his red Porsche mountain bike from his Alhambra home, is trying to get a T-shirt company going on the side. His goal is to quit messenger life after two more years, he says.

His Glendale-based courier firm mostly works for the district attorney. He gets a load of papers that he must deliver by the end of the month, in addition to daily deadline items. While most couriers stay within the court and high-rise office districts of downtown, Lopez rides farther, out past MacArthur Park or into Boyle Heights.

In the afternoon he’s got to serve another “homeboy” with a summons at a sweatshop near the Los Angeles River. From the bridge he rolls. Down Flower, east on Olympic, then 9th.

On a bike, you notice things you’d never notice in a car. The whole city is in sharp relief. And it smells. As Lopez moves south, the clean ramparts of Bunker Hill give way. Even the asphalt starts to get grimier--oilier and rutted. His bike clatters over manhole covers and railroad tracks. You can smell sewage, diesel and tortas. In the produce district rotting red peppers and tomatoes slicken the road.

Lopez is riding with no hands, juggling a pager and answering a cell phone as the lug nuts of heavy trucks spin close by. He rolls past a pinata outlet and Sam’s Hofbrau--where the topless dancers start at 11:30 a.m.--to the garment shop where the alleged deadbeat dad works.

He locks up his bike and begins walking through the pallid corridors looking for No. 114. Inside the doors, hundreds of people are hunkered down over sewing machines, each one buzzing intermittently. He finds the right shop and talks to the owner, who appears to speak only Korean. Every question he asks--Do you know this person? Have you guys been here long?--gets a blank “No.”

He leaves. Another no-go for the district attorney, though Lopez will still get paid for the visit.

Up Alameda, through skid row, through a movie shoot on 5th Street to his favorite spot in front of the Starbucks at the Citibank Plaza. Lopez figures bike messengers see more sides of the city than anyone else. Now he’ll wait until tomorrow to go back to the bridge. He starts spinning tales to his friend Damian Torres about women he’s seen on his route.

Their conversation soon degenerates, as conversations can do with no female co-workers. And there is no boss to carp about their idle time--a freedom the messengers relish. Lopez nods in agreement as Torres, 23, sums it up:

“If I was a millionaire, I’d still work as a bike messenger. But just like two hours a day.”