This is one way you know you're in The South (and I ain't talkin' about the Bronx):
Between this bike/pedestrian path and the ocean is a strip of land about 200 yards wide, consisting of more trees-- like the one in the photo-- with moss cascading from them, interrupted by roadside ice cream and hot dog stands, biker bars, gated communities and a Publix supermarket. Between this bike/pedestrian path and the Inland Waterway are a couple of state parks, a couple of convenience store/gas stations, a couple more biker bars and a couple of "professional buildings."
I stopped in one of the convenience store/gas stations. The latter is owned by Citgo, but the store is part of a local chain called Jiffy. This part of Florida, like much of the US, has experienced its coldest weather on record for this time of year. So, I had a yen for something I never craved in my previous trips down here: hot chocolate. Also, I started the day with a headache, which I incorrectly thought I could pedal off. So I also wanted aspirin.
While there, I got talking with Sharon, the store manager. I can best describe her as a redneck wife, and I don't necessarily mean that disparagingly. She's somewhere between my and my parents' age and has lived all of her life in this area. Business was slow, she said, but that's how it is everywhere: "Nobody has any money."
She said she'd seen a report saying that the county in which her store is located--and in which my parents live--has the highest unemployment rate in the country. It's hard not to believe that: Everywhere I've pedalled, and every place I've gone with my parents, I've seen empty stores and condo buildings. A so-called European Village consists of a pedestrian plaza ringed with restaurants and shops, about half of which were vacant. When I last saw it, two years ago, all of the spaces were occupied and business, although not booming, had yet to be wracked by the ravages of the implosion of the local and national economy.
Sharon says she's never seen anything this bad. In a nearby town, where she sometimes has to go on business, she sees "kids with eighteen siblings, and none of them have the same father." And, she says, "They're white."
Five years ago, someone with no job, no income and no assets could get a loan to buy a house. Today, this county and other places are full of young people with no job, no education and no future. Now, if they had education, they'd be like certain young people in the Northwest of England nearly four decades ago. What did they do? They became the Johnny Rottens and Sid Vicouses of this world. If, instead of education, they had religious dogma, they'd be suicide bombers.
But those young men and women truly believe in nothing at all. At least, they're not willing to die for anything, and they're living, not for the future, not for (much less in) the moment, and not even for the present or the Eternal Present. Instead, they are in a chasm that cannot be filled with anything, not even their own deaths.
You can see it on their faces. In fact, during the time Sharon and I were talking to each other, three of them--the "rock-heads," as she called them, came into the store. One young man used the bathroom and left; a girl, younger, tried to buy cigarettes and another bought a case of beer.
"You've got to watch out for them," she warned me.
"They look pretty scary."
"You're on your bicycle. You're a woman riding alone. Around here, that can be dangerous, epecially between here and the bridge."
"What do you mean?"
"They attack people and rob them. And sometimes they do worse."
I thanked her for her advice and wished her a happy new year. And she wished me a safe trip, which I continued under the trees with moss hanging from them.
Sometimes I wish I'd saved the bag I used when I was pedaling the canyons of Manhattan to deliver legal documents, fabric samples, slices of pizza (!),manuscripts--and a few envelopes and packages with their own unwritten "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies attached, if you know what I mean.
That was a strange time in my life. I had a college degree. I'd lived and worked in Paris. But I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do next. Actually, I didn't want to know: I knew that I could be turned into a writer and/or an educator, in some fashion or another, but I was too angry to want those things, or much of anything else. And I was stupid enough to think that sort of anger made me superior to-- or, at least, more sensitive or wounded than-- other people.
I told family members and my few friends (actually, by that time, one friend) that I wasn't ready to commit to a profession, or to even work in an office. The truth was that I couldn't have done those things, to please them or anyone else. And there simply wasn't anything else motivating me to do those things--or much of anything else, quite frankly.
A grandmother and an uncle who were very close to me had recently died. And a friend had committed suicide. Of course, I had other demons and ghosts as well. I didn't think anyone else could understand them; in truth, they didn't even make sense to me. So, I didn't want to talk, much less answer, to anyone unless I absolutely had to.
So what else could I have been, at that time in my life, but a messenger?
Remember that in those days--circa 1983--there was absolutely no status in being a messenger. It wasn't a job that hipsters (or their equivalents in those days) did. And only the really hard-core cyclists rode fixed-gear bikes; they weren't the status symbols of those who were trying to show, or make themselves or their friends believe, they weren't bourgeois.
At that time, messenger bags weren't fashionable accessories.
So, when I stopped messengering (Surely some English teacher told you "Gerunding nouns is wrong." I didn't listen. It just figures that I teach English now.), I sold my bag without thinking about it. I'd just begun to work for American Youth Hostels, when it was located on Spring Street and the neighborhood still had some halfway interesting art and sandwich shops with names like "Rocco and His Brothers." One guy, named Judah, used to hang out there when he wasn't making his rounds on his old Peugeot. He had been a messenger, it seemed, since before the rest of us were born. I used to see him on the streets when I was dodging cabs and pedestrians for my commissions. So, at one time or another, did every other messenger in Manhattan.
He told me that a friend of his was going follow him into the business I'd just left and therefore needed a messenger bag. I'd used mine for about a year. Smog, slush, rain, pizza drippings, spilled drinks-- and a couple of burns from cigarettes that weren't made by companies that contributed to the campaigns of Southern politicians-- left their almost-still-viscous mosaic on the once-bright green canvas. Still, the bag was as strong as it was the day I bought it. So, Judah's courier- novitiate friend paid me not much less than I paid for the bag.
When I bought it new, it was just like the bag in this photo--except, of course, that mine was green:
It was made--to my order--by a small company called Globe Canvas, which was located in the basement of some building in Chinatown, if I remember correctly. The guy who, it seemed, was Globe Canvas asked which messenger service I was working for. From my answer, he knew which size and color bag to make. He was an older Italian gentleman and seemed like one of those forces of nature that always did, and always would be doing, whatever you saw him doing. I hear that he died a couple of years ago. I'm not surprised, as he was far from being a young man even then.
Anyway, these days, it seems that every other company that makes a messenger bag--or, more precisely, a bag that reflects the self-conscious aspirations to hipness of its owner as much as the style of the bag I carried for a year--says that theirs is the "original."
I say that if any bag was the original, nobody would--or could--buy it. Only the down-and-out, reject-of-society messenger of yore could ever have had such a thing. And he wouldn't be bragging about it.
It was a great bag, though. Almost nothing you can buy today is as well-made. I'd love to have it now, even if I haven't used a messenger bag since the day I made my last delivery.
