Culley makes the story of his own fairly typical journey sing. Twenty-one and broke, he comes to Chicago with a theater degree from a Miami conservatory and big dreams of starting his own theater company. The buzz of urban life after his lower-middle-class suburban Florida childhood exhilarates him, and he hits the streets and organizes "an elaborate production at a little space in Bucktown." The world seems to be his oyster. But soon he's playing to "one or two shadows in an otherwise empty theater," and he's forced to rethink his plan.

Refusing to give up, he does grunt-labor jobs and desperately tries to keep his theater dreams alive. Things finally take a new turn when a girlfriend takes him to a bike rally spearheaded by Critical Mass, a group that holds loosely organized anti-car protests in cities around the world. "This was the theater I had come to Chicago for," Culley writes in an inspiring moment of lemonade-making. Soon he's a convert, captivated by the radically democratic potential of bicycles to transform urban life. The next time he's desperate for cash, he decides to apply for work as a bike messenger.

Culley writes best about the physical experience of the job. "Even in deep sleep, the world hurled forward at me," he says at one point. "I would have dreams that amounted to nothing but snapshots over a feeling of general motion -- the flash of an aluminum drainpipe, a bird on the grille of a building's ventilator duct, an upturned garbage can, a missing license plate, an ink stain, a pile of boxes on the other side of a dirty glass windowpane, then crack -- I was being thrown over a mailbox." From his bike messenger's perspective he conveys the thrill, beauty and harsh logic of urban life with a sharp, poetic eye: "I have learned to see in the city a distinct sense of order, a special geometry, a realm of necessity behind each unplanned lunge and skid."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"