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The last time I saw Richard, it was in late December, one evening as I was riding down Camp Street. I stopped to talk to him and his companion Pat for a little while. I found out Richard had been unable to work at his job as a bicycle courier for the past month due to an eye condition that was causing him to see double, not something you want to happen when you’re riding a bike in downtown traffic. Richard was his typically optimistic self, telling me he was going to Charity Hospital in the next week to have a specialist look at him. It was probably easy to fix, he said. It has happened before. I also had to let him know that we were going to Paris for the holidays and would have to miss the annual post-Christmas oyster shucking party. In the play mocking tone I had come to know so well over the years, he commented that it sure sounded rough, going to Paris and all. I laughed, maybe a little guiltily, at my own good fortune. I wished Richard and Pat happy holidays, and rode my bike home.

Another one of my friends who rides his bike almost exclusively called me this evening. When people ask if you are sitting down, you usually have a good idea that the next thing you hear is not going to be good news. Lee let me know that Richard had a stroke last night and that he’s not expected to be alive by the time you read this.

I can’t say I knew Richard really well. He was always an inscrutable guy, oblique in his answers and a little shady, like so many true New Orleans characters. However, we were fellow bicyclists that spent more time together than most friends did. We rode our bikes together almost every day for one year, until I got a job with regular 9-5 hours. At the time we were riding, our training schedule was rigorous. I was still serious that I would pick up bike racing again; Richard was just a very committed rider. Those rides were long conversations about great European races and riders and how uncommitted American bike racers were (in those days, Lance Armstrong was still dropping out early from the Tour de France). We varied our routes and Richard knew the streets of the city better than any other rider I had ever met. We rode along the Lakefront, rode our bikes over the Big Green Monster to Chalmette, rode to Metairie. After a couple of hours of hard riding, we would stop at PJ’s for iced coffees and pastries, our cycling shoes making what must have been an annoying click clack sound as we waddled on the brick floors of the PJ’s on Magazine Street.

After our rides, I would go home for a nap before I started my night manager job at PJ’s. Richard headed off to work at the Bikesmith, at the time a popular and venerable local bike shop not far from Tulane and Loyola. Richard helped me get a part time job at the ‘smith that helped me buy, on credit, a high-end mountain bike I used to ride on the levees uptown, back when the road was made of crushed oyster shells. One day, I had heard that the Bikesmith was now bankrupt, and everyone there had lost their jobs.

It seemed like a long time before Richard was able to find work. He had been the manager at the Bikesmith, a job that did not seem to give him a whole lot of career options in a city with only a handful of mostly struggling bike shops. But, after a long search, he became one of the small crew of bike messengers that work in New Orleans’ Central Business District. The job seemed to suit him well, even though he was easily three decades older than any other bike messenger out on the streets. I saw him a couple years back. He was tan, happier than I had seen him in some time and had the tone and fitness that I remembered him having so many years before. He still smoked cigarettes at traffic lights, an irreverent habit that is one of my favorite memories. His job was hard. A bicycle messenger works in torrential rain and killer summer heat for erratic wages. Cars had hit him a number of times and I remember that he actually worked at one point with in his words, “an unimportant broken bone,” in his leg from one particularly nasty encounter with a car.

Early last year, Richard talked me in to covering some shifts for a coworker whose vacation went on a month longer than anyone expected. Although I thought it would be fun and even a little romantic, it was a hard month for me, even though I was in reasonably good shape and a seasoned rider. I developed a deep respect for the mettle of this middle-aged man in a young man’s profession, and he took the job, but not himself, seriously. He worked to charm the people at every drop-off and pick-up point in every office building. He would ask me about the latest hubbub over bike lanes on Canal Street, he rode to mourn Lucas Cox, the cyclist who was killed on Camp Street and he was interested in being involved on bike safety issues, but he did not have a lot of time. Work usually kept him rolling from seven in the morning to late in the evening, and then he still had to ride to his Uptown home. But even though he wasn’t riding in Critical Mass or mugging for newspaper photos, Richard was an activist for cycling in the true sense of the word. He was truly active, using a bike every day, not because it was a novelty or a statement, but because it was his work tool. He used it to scratch out a living for himself and he did so with no great philosophies about transit, planning or politics. He just got up in the morning and went to work. And smoked too much.

-EM

Filed under: Transportation