Ride Like a Varmint
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Every day on Instagram, a column of recreational road riders posts its grievance. Three across, matching kits, five figures of carbon fiber per man, taking the full lane at eighteen miles an hour and filming the outrage when an SUV crowds them. It's illegal, they say. Intimidation is illegal. Running us off the road is illegal. We are traffic. The indignation is genuine, the surprise is genuine, and the wrecks keep arriving on schedule, because the road has never once read the statute book.
I know what the road reads. In 1989 and 1990 I was a bike courier in Washington, DC, riding for WEx—Washington Express, founded in 1981, a hundred messengers strong in those years, the biggest courier outfit in the city. My call sign was 63. I rode a white Bridgestone MB-1 with a metal rack on the back—an MB-0 was the thoroughbred and nearly impossible to get, and the rack made me a mule anyway, which suited the work. I sat at the Dupont Circle fountain with a clipboard in my lap and a Motorola radio on my hip, listening for dispatch, drinking a forty of Schlitz in the sun, waiting to be sent on a five o'clock dash from a K Street law firm to a time-stamp machine on the Hill with minutes to spare. I wrote the poem about it later. I lost a lot of friends to taxis that summer.
Here is what the job taught me, and it is the basis of my entire theory of the street: I never felt entitled to be on the road. I rode like a varmint. A rat, a raccoon, a fox—something small and quick and uninvited, sneaking through the city, bunny-hopping onto sidewalks, running red lights, weaving through standing traffic, going the wrong way up one-way streets when the wrong way was the way through. Buses were weather. Cars were weather. Taxis were predators and pedestrians were obstacles with lawyers. I survived two years of ten-hour days in downtown traffic because I assumed, in my bones, that everything out there could kill me and nothing out there would be sorry. The varmint expects no force field, so the varmint never needs one. And the varmint never becomes a nuisance, because a nuisance is a target with a schedule: the moment a rat or a raccoon makes itself somebody's problem, out comes the air rifle, the poison, the .22, the CZ-452, and the problem gets solved. Unseen is alive. Noticed is a pest. A pest is dead by the weekend.
In thirty-five years of city riding since, I have wrecked exactly once, and the wreck is the doctrine's proof. I was in Germany, riding my Soma, in my lane, in the right. Another cyclist—an African immigrant, riding against me in my lane—came straight at me, and I heard the citizen's voice in my head: this is Germany, I am in the right lane, I am not going to swerve. He rode into me. Of course he did. My right-of-way was a legal instrument, valid in every courtroom in the Federal Republic, and it weighed nothing at all in the half-second before contact. The one time I rode entitled, I got hit. Every other mile of my life I rode like prey, and the record is clean.
The varmint had one more advantage the column will never have: nobody knew who he was. One afternoon on M Street, riding toward Georgetown on a run, a man in a bright red, brand-new 325i—the fancy 3 Series of 1989—cut me off and short-stopped at a light, close enough that I nearly ate his trunk. Then he looked back at me with the expression the entitled keep for varmints: so what are you going to do? He believed in his force field. New BMW, clean record, a life arranged so that consequences flowed downhill onto people like me. I had a U-lock on my hip, the way every courier rode, and I knocked the shit out of his entire rear window with it—safety glass, so the whole pane went at once and rained down in pellets, the way those windows are made to die. He got out screaming—who are you, I'll have you, the whole liturgy—and I asked him one question: "Do you know who I am?" He said no. I said, "Exactly," and I fucked off into traffic, and that was the end of his lawsuit, his complaint, and his force field. It could have turned out very badly. It turned out the way it turned out because he had an identity and I had a bicycle.
Now look at the columns again. Three across is not a riding formation; it is a claim. It says: our numbers, our indignation, and the law will hold this lane. People do not treat motorcycle gangs well when they ride slow, wide, and defiant, and a motorcycle gang at least brings mass and menace to the negotiation. The road column brings pride, monthly income, personal wealth, and a Colnago—and believes the Escalade will do the arithmetic of fear: if I hit them, I go to jail; if I hit them, I get sued; if I hit them, I lose my house. That scaffolding is the whole force field. Your protection is a stranger's calculation that your life is worth more to him than his freedom.
Sometimes the stranger declines to calculate. Suicide by cop exists because some men have exactly as much to lose as they intend to spend, and the demographic that buys giant SUVs is not famous for trembling before process servers. A man who doesn't care meets your force field and drives through it, and then the law performs beautifully: he is charged, he is sued, you win his house—from a wheelchair, drinking gruel through a straw, without the use of your limbs. The ledger calls that a win because the ledger reads money. Your body reads it as a total loss, forever, at eighteen miles an hour, in a matching kit.
The couriers understood this in their marrow because the job paid by the delivery and punished by the ambulance. We ran red lights the way a fox crosses a road: not from lawlessness, from literacy. We could read mass, speed, and intention at fifty yards, and we never once confused the reading with a right. Do not demand space. Take it only when there's no cost. That sentence is thirty-five years old in my head and it has kept me alive on two wheels in Washington, Portland, and Berlin.
So ride. Ride fast, ride everywhere, take the lane when the lane is free. But ride like the varmint, not like the column—because the Escalade is under no obligation to be afraid of you, and the day it isn't, your pride, your income, your wealth, and your Colnago will stop it exactly as well as my right-of-way stopped a man in my lane in Germany. Which is to say: you will finally be in the right, all the way into the ground.
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