You told them you were nineteen. They didn’t check. They were looking for warm bodies that could spend 8 hours on a bike, riding around Beverly Hills and Century City, delivering envelopes to offices and avoid getting killed.
You and your buddies – delivery boys for Ace Messenger Service.
Perfect summer gig. Outdoors – Sun – Secretaries. The more deliveries you made the more money you’d make. Jackpot was the 9000 Building on Sunset. Visions of a fat wallet doing victory laps around your head.
You had it all down – the four of you would spend Summer raking in money making deliveries – sock it away – stuff it in the bank and spend it next year on Summer in Europe.
You called yourselves The Demon Squad – you were gonna get t-shirts made. You were gonna break speed records.
First day on the job – up at 6. Assembled in the Dispatch room. Fifty of you. You and your buddies were the new guys – you had to wear new-guy T-shirts. Itchy Cobalt Blue Polo shirts with the Company logo slapped on the back; A Bicycle with Wings in eye-watering White. Only size they had was Men’s Double Large – a family of four could fit comfortably inside.
You had to wear it during probation. Once you made it past, you could wear whatever you wanted. Probation was two weeks.
First day – everybody got deliveries, except the four of you. You died of boredom. The Dispatcher loved Soap Operas and was glued to the TV on the wall in the waiting room. He smoked constantly and was a good 100 pounds overweight. Clearly, he was not Messenger material.
Your friends were starting to wonder how good an idea this was. Everybody else was coming back from deliveries and going back out again with more assignments. You were invisible – you sat. You couldn’t leave in case an assignment came in. You were starving and had to piss like a racehorse.
You finally got up and told the Dispatcher you had to go to the bathroom.
Having his concentration on the plot twists of The Young And The Restless disrupted, he shot you a healthy dose of red encrusted stink-eye and nodded his head. The other three took the cue and darted out, joining you on your Field trip to the men’s room.
Hovering over the urinals you complained loudly and threatened to take a vote on whether to stay or quit.
Just then, one of the stall doors opened and a sun-baked Messenger wearing a sweat stained Wife Beater handed you some advice. The only way you were going to get any assignments was to give the Dispatcher a cut. Basically, a bribe.
You asked how much would he take. The informer shrugged his shoulders, cocked his head sideways, grinned and wandered out.
With no clue what the going rate for bribes was, you pulled a figure out of the sky – 50/50 sounded bad but better work than no work and so you approached the Dispatcher with your offer.
Yes, 50/50 from each of you. He glowed like an Atomic night-light and smiled broadly. You knew you were offering him too much, but you were stuck with it.
The next day there wasn’t one but five trips to the 9000 Building. Narrowly missing getting pulverized by a “See The Stars” double-decker tour bus and T-boned by Sheriff’s car in pursuit down Sunset.
The Secretaries were gorgeous but treated you like Waste Product. They wouldn’t let you use the phone in reception to call the office in case there were more assignments – you had to go to the Lobby and terrorize the payphone just like everybody else.
By the end of the day there were parts of your body incapable of moving – you were living testament to overdoing it.
Your Demon Squad was now reduced to two. First one lost his brakes going down the hill at La Cienega and Sunset, finally careening into a prickly hedge right next to a Chevron station and sliding into an island of gas pumps and oil slicks.
Second one, racing at top speed ahead of quitting time and the client going home managed to get nailed by a Monza, whose driver flung open his door, sending your pal vaulting through the air, landing on the roof of an idling Yellow Cab. Broken arm, neck brace and “who is your insurance company?”
By the end of the week you got your paycheck – after the Dispatcher took his cut and the IRS took theirs, you netted an anemic $100 for your Adventure in Summer Employment.
That left just you to soldier on to dodge traffic and pedestrians.
The final straw came when the receptionist at a Lawyers Office on Century Park East told you her boss wanted you to move an Executive Chair from his office to another office on Century Park West and it would be worth a “generous tip”.
But . . .you were on a bike.
You managed – you somehow managed. When you arrived, with your right arm clinging to the chair and your left arm negotiating your bike, you limped into the office in question on the 20th floor.
Where the receptionist at THAT office promptly blurted out it was the wrong chair and demanded you take it back.
Handing her a look only reserved for a corpse, you turned, walked back out, walked to the elevator and pressed the Down button. Arriving at the ground floor, you walked out with your bike, leaving the chair to make trips to every floor of the building before Maintenance took over and put it out of its misery..
By then you were gone – handing in the really ugly T-shirt, picking up another anemic paycheck and putting that Growth Opportunity to bed once and for all.
Perhaps it built character after all.
And to go with it, here is an hour’s worth of KHJ and Charlie van Dyke as it was heard on June 14, 1976
