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A Book Review
(Actually, It's More)
by David Teall
The
Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power by Travis
Hugh Culley, Villard Books 2001 324 pages
 I first heard of The
Immortal Class listening to an NPR interview in which the author,
Travis Hugh Culley, was trying (with mixed results) to defend his
central thesis: that the conception of the American metropolis has
centered around the personal automobile as the only practical means of
getting from point A to point B, and has done so to the exclusion of all
other means of transit—especially the most efficient human powered
machine, the bicycle. The NPR interviewer, Noah Adams, was more
interested in the lurid, hard core world of the bicycle messenger than
Culley’s political statement. You’ll find both the politics of
cycling and the hardest of the hard-core cyclists in this book.
I read the first hundred
pages of The Immortal Class in the Emergency Room of Flower
Hospital. It seemed the obvious choice to grab off of the shelf as I
went to get my forearm stitched up and, with its black and white jacket
cover, disdainful messenger juxtaposed by bicycle wheel, an appropriate
text to hold in my hand as I answered all of those
so-you-fell-off-your-bike questions. As I began reading in the waiting
room I noticed an eerie parallel to what was unfolding on the pages and
were I was. The author got serious about bicycle activism after he
sustained serious injury following a crash. Culley got "doored"
by cab Number 876 (visualize the verb, i.e., door opening as
unsuspecting cyclist speeds past parked cab on busy urban street), while
I, the reader, went down in a tight echelon on Williams County Road V.
The uninsured author had his girlfriend stitch up his gash; stitches
were the only thing the reader, insurance card in hand, wanted from
Flower. "Did you hit your head, Mister Teall?" asked doctor
Vickers-McKenzie, as she suspiciously perused the imprint of a Bell
Nemeses Pro air vent on my forehead. "No," I lied.
"Really, I can take care of the superficial stuff; I’ve done this
before. It’s just this open wound that I need . . ." Back to
the book, where the author was treated quite differently by the system,
beginning with the police officer who wrote out the accident report.
"What were you doing riding a bicycle anyway?" This
"what are you doing on a bicycle" sentiment becomes a thread
throughout the book in its us-against-them portrayal of urban cycling.
As for that mysterious,
somewhat romantic figure, the bicycle messenger, Culley quickly dispels
the general perception of an occupation peopled by hard-drinking,
uneducated derelicts and replaces it with overeducated, underemployed,
pot-smoking, vagabond workforce. Some of which consider the bicycle a
means to an end; others regard urban cycling as an aesthetic, like the
messenger who rides a track bike with no hand brakes. (I thought this
was total B S until the end of the chapter, where there’s a photograph
the track bike and the messenger. They both look real.) Whoever they are
we all know what they do: they deliver parcels within the largest and
most congested urban areas on a bicycle because the bicycle is more
efficient than anything else in such a setting. But that’s only true
if the cyclist takes chances. Serious chances. After chronicling the
risks messengers all run and their eventual aftermaths, Culley
introduces a statistical formula for something he calls "exposure
time." The messenger can work only X number of hours before he or
she will likely be involved in a serious accident. How serious? The
penultimate chapter, "Requiem for the Working Man", is about a
messenger who was killed in action.
Parts of Immortal
Class are, for me, a bit too much like a Disney sports film, like
the messenger race that the author, having no experience or race
training, defeats an all star field that includes a professional
cyclist; or the part where his trick knee gives out one day and he and
the dispatcher exchange jobs and, you guessed it, he becomes, for that
one day, the greatest dispatcher who ever lived. It’s not my intent to
spoil the end of these particular chapters for any prospective reader.
Believe me, you’ll see it coming. But those are the only corny parts.
For the most part, Culley heralds the bicycle messenger as the vanguard
of the revolution against the auto-centered city. This is why the
messenger raises his U-lock against the road-raged motorist, smashing an
occasional window here or denting a fender there. It is why the
messenger takes the Critical Mass movement to its lunatic-fringe
furthest, blocking the busiest intersection with nothing more than his
person, bicycle held overhead in defiance. On balance, Class is a
very good read.
Post Script
Since reading and writing
about The Immortal Class, I’ve been wondering what the author
would make of our own microcosm of cycling. I’m fairly sure he would
have a hard time with 50 or so suburbanites driving their respective
SUVs or sports sedans 30 or so miles to a remote rural location where
the ritual we call Thursday Night begins. As for tossing a water bottle
into the path of an oncoming minivan, though it might fit in the pages
of Class, I think that the author would view this particular act of
aggression as detrimental to the preservation of our beloved Thursday
Nights. The bicycle messenger tries to utilize an unoccupied space that
exists on the urban street. The enemies he encounters are those who
become enraged when the bicycle gets through traffic faster than their
automobile, doing things, like riding between lanes of traffic, running
red lights, that their automobile physically can’t do. The enemies we
encounter are those who become enraged when they see us impeding their
progress on the rural roads that we tenuously share with their
automobiles. It’s reasonable to assume that the driver of the minivan
had never before encountered an oncoming, berm-to-berm mass of cyclists.
He or she had every reason to expect that the giant amoeba would
elongate itself in such a way to permit passage. Which is what happened,
the minivan gave way to the narrow berm, the peloton reluctantly
elongated itself, and both safely proceeded on their respective ways.
That should have been the end of it. We don’t need to make any
enemies.
Next
03/19/08
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