LA to Philly

We heard about Oakland Andrew’s experience as an LA messenger back in the 90’s-Solomon let’s us know how its going down in contemporary times.

“I moved to LA about a year and half ago and hit the ground running working with Apex. The old head that owns it is some rich UCLA coke head that used to be a messenger in the 80s. Working there was one of the situations where you had to make sure each check was correct, payment was based of of hourly but if you put in enough work and went over your hourly wage the commission began. Rarely did this happen but when it did the check was legit for LA standards.

The messenger scene in LA is filled with 80 percent Mexicans and they are all crazy in the sense that they would never hesitate to pummel someone with the slightest provocation.‎ One OG turned wall furniture named Crazy Manny got into an absurd fight with a working OG Nick over Nick asking him to clean up after himself at the wall, the absurd thing is that the brawl ended with Crazy Manny smashing Nick’s head into a parked SUV until he passed out and we had to alert the Ambulance. I mean that guy was off the rails and I believe he was banned from the wall after the incident.

All those guys threw down with each other a crazy amount of times over a lot of things that did not seem worth it to me but I would always observe in the cut. In every messenger scene drinking seems to be the thing and in LA it was no different esp since you could get beer pretty much anywhere. Just 3 minutes from the wall there was a corner store right underneath a shitty messenger company called USA Legal, they sold 2 dollar tall cans of shitty of brand beer that we would all get down on. Usually someone would take the orders, hand down the money and come back with blunts and beers for the heads. Drinking for some of those guys started around 10am, usually around the time I would get done my daily runs.

One 20 year vet, who was originally from England, but came to LA and started gang banging, was always at the wall when I would arrive around 10am or so. His routine consisted of drinking Hennessey in the mornings and finishing off half the bottle with some pedialyte. This guy is dedicated to Hennessey to the point where the bottle is tattooed on his leg. He was a absurd person but always on point, being that he was our main source of all the drugs one needed, he even had blunts and lighters for sale. I don’t want to call out his name but dude was crazy. I remember three separate times where he would get a flat on his carbon Cannondale and instead of replacing it he would call his girl up and she would pull up in a blacked out escalade with another bike ready for him….crazy. I’ve got a lot of other stories about my time’s working in LA. It was quite different from the current philly messenger hustle, esp being a black messenger out there but I can get to that later.
Much peace, ”
solomon.