From the Library: The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power

Even more than so than riders of fixed-gear bicycles, messengers have long been the most mis-represented faction of the biking world, and though The Immortal Class is now nearing the 20th anniversary of its writing, I don't think things have changed that much. Whether or not it was the authors intent, I read the book as an attempt to humanize not only the job, but also the people involved in it. Anyone who has ridden a bike over the past twenty, thirty, forty years knows that this is an on-going concern / problem. 

In The Immortal Class, Travis Hugh Culley begins with a little background to those years of his life as a messenger, how he arrived at that option, and how he progressed in it from novice to veteran. There are on-the-job incidents, everything from the mundane to the dramatic; the pick-ups, the deliveries, radio dispatch, injury, bike repair, off-hour alley cat racing, Critical Mass, and always the interactions with others - the office workers who deem the messenger beneath them, yet find their service indispensable, other messengers, other bicyclists, the police, and the motorists, always the motorists. The death of a fellow messenger, Tommy McBride, murdered by a motorist overcome with road rage, provides a segue into some contemplation, final thoughts (final, because the text has been sprinkled with them throughout) about the ways our urban areas have been organized for the automobile and the resulting consequences for our environment, and for society: "The private car, being ideologically anti-urban, has reinforced the poverty of the past hundred years by separating our communities and steamrolling our commons... The environmental impact of the automobile is an important issue and it should well be discussed, but too few people in America seem to care."

A final incident, an interaction with the family of the murderer, was a shocking turn, though hardly surprising. As Culley notes: "It is said that the only time people feel more important than the whole of their community is when they are insane - or when they are driving. This is the basis of car culture, the idea that the world and all of the world's people are merely in its way."

Culley, Travis Hugh   The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power   New York: Random House, 2001