Travis Culley was getting strangled by a trucker last month in the middle of Halsted, on a warm and clear Friday afternoon. The driver, a young man with short blond hair, was an inch or two shorter than Culley but much more muscular. As they struggled on the asphalt, Culley’s bicycle helmet was pulled behind his head, and the nylon strap tightened around his neck, pinning him to the pavement. His assailant climbed on top of him and began to throttle him with both hands. “I could not breathe,” Culley recalls. “I’m looking up at his face turning red. All of his weight is on my neck. There’s a blue sky behind him. I’m wondering if this guy’s gonna kill me.”
I first met Culley on a Critical Mass ride in the fall of 1997. Hundreds of bikers were meeting under the Picasso in Daley Plaza during the evening rush hour on the last Friday of every month.
“I thought, What if I don’t respond?” Culley writes. “What would that make me? Some kind of engineering obstruction? A malfunction? Would the driver get out and hunt me down or seek to punish me for assaulting his schedule? For tying up the tracks? Would he take or destroy my property? Would he kill me?
That’s why messengering has always been a tolerable day job for creative types: writer Henry Miller, singer Sade, comedian Janeane Garofalo, and songwriter Ron Sexsmith, for example, all worked in bicycle delivery. In cities across the country, couriers express themselves through messenger-themed magazines, art exhibits, and rock concerts.
Culley’s exuberance gives his agent, John Ware, high hopes for the book. Ware also represents Jon Krakauer, author of the 1997 best-seller Into Thin Air. “I’ve been an agent for 24 years,” he says. “I think there are a couple things working for Travis’s book. It’s unique in terms of its content. Then there’s the substantive message of the book. And the very role of bike messenger is resonating nowadays. In a modern era where there are not many urban heroes there is something heroic about the bike messenger that is old-fashioned, with shades of the Pony Express. You throw Travis and his enthusiasm into the mix, and I think people are going to be fascinated. I think we’re going to get good reviews and a lot of reviews.”
The book has been named as one of Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writers selections. Every season a panel of Barnes & Noble staff and other writers picks 15 to 25 “outstanding” works by new authors, usually fiction, according to Nicholas Bettress, manager of the chain’s Lincoln Park store. “His book will be featured prominently in a special showcase at the front of the store with other first-time authors,” says Bettress. “They will be in every Barnes & Noble in the U.S., about 600 stores, and on the Internet.”
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Two years later, Culley says, he ran away from home, initially living out of a gold Chevy Caprice Classic, a gift from his grandmother. He writes that he survived this period by working as a busboy and eating leftovers off the dirty plates.
