SF Timeline

Zoro robbed a bank in the mission and then walked back to his apartment and the SWAT team came, he was high as shit on crystal, as were most messengers in the mid to late 90s. The bag of money had the Ink grenade and the fucking GPS thing, what a dumb ass. There was a thing here called, “Messenger mouth”. Many were afflicted with it with devastating results. ODDS TKO stole a mini keg once and brought it to 1 Post. When it was slow I used to catch pigeons in a box and put a piece of tape on a box that said ,”Free Kittens” and sit back and watch the hilarious events that followed. That was in Summer when it was slow and everyone got wasted drunk all day and spent the evenings fucking and or fighting. Cubby and Abdoul would sit at The Wall and play chess with this guy named Jason that would smoke PCP while paying chess with them. Those guys ran the drug trade mostly back then. Some big drug deal went bad and this guy tried running off with the stereotypical aluminum attache case filled with money and a bunch of us rode after him. I kicked the guy in the ribs really hard while I was riding and he went down then a bunch of other messengers beat him down. Abdoul got his suitcase back and he kicked me a zipper for my trouble. There was a messenger that had serious mental health issues and he rode a fixed gear with no handlebars, he used a file to make deep grooves in the stem so he could hold on to it. His name was Crazy Seth and he was around for a few years and then disappeared. There used to be a liquor store in the Tenderloin called, “HomeBoys” and Crazy Seth lived above it in a little SRO. People were always trading bikes and shaving their head because they busted a cab driver with their ULock or got into some dumb fight. I was Hubba Hideout with PunkRockJim and some dudes came to rob us, PRJ had a fucking Discman that the robbers wanted, and he took it and threw it on the ground and stomped on it. The robbers were freaked out cus he was so crazy and they just walked off all confused. The first time I rode a basket bike for work I went through the projects in Western Addition and some guy had a RC CAR that he was making play chicken with me and there were tons of kids watching, I thought I would fuck up the little toy car so I plowed at it head on and when I hit it the front wheel went funny and flew over the bars with the whole block laughing at me. There was a bike cop that was targeting me for riding a fixed gear and he gave me 3 tickets in one month, when he gave me the second ticket he said he was going to impound my bike if he saw me riding it again. A week later he saw me and made me pull over and started talking about impounding it so I just rode up to a pole and locked it up and took my key off my wrist and out it in the storm drain. He was so mad he took the air out of my tires and said he was going to call the fire department to cut the lock. I called in to dispatch and they fired me over the radio. I had a spare key in my bag so I just walked around the corner and waited for the cop to leave and then got my bike. Some other guys quit in protest of me getting fired, that was at Silver Bullet and they had a no fixed gear policy so I was already on thin ice. I still have the tickets and he made a point of writing in big letters, “SECOND TICKET and THIRD TICKET”. What a dick, I still see that cop, he has a big ugly birthmark on his face and his name is Officer Robbles. One company called Lightning used to have Fight Night and this was before the fight club movie came out, it was a huge coke party with an actual ring and a referee. I fought there once in Sidis and got my ass kicked, there are pictures somewhere. SF had a lot of super hot lady messengers that were serious cyclists, they were all trouble though. There was a bar that everyone went to called Cassidy’s. it was like home for hundreds of messengers and there would be messenger groupie girls that would come through, usually art students, the bar tender there called them,” Messenger Mattresses”, the ironic thing was that that bartender herself was a messenger mattress, she just had more discriminating tastes as to which messengers she would chop rails with and fuck. I still run into some of these people around town and the ones that never stopped partying like they are 20 something are now 40 something and their faces look like an old baseball glove with a cigarette hanging out of it.
-Oakland Andrew