For a city whose existence is predicated on utter, screeching chaos – sirens at all hours of the day and night, people stopping halfway down the street to scream at the top of their lungs before continuing on their merry way, rats scurrying at your feet outside restaurants, bars, or your own stoop (always towards the house, never away from it. Better or worse?) – New York has a lot of fucking rules.
Culture shock was not something I had expected to experience when moving to a country I had visited multiple times and whose language I was familiar with. I have lived in other countries and experienced it before, albeit in a benign, comfortable sort of way. Trying to get a paper signed by some government official in Italy taking a month, for example, because the office only opened when it felt like it. Or having to sleep in short, unsatisfying bursts when I lived in Spain, what with my classes starting at 8AM and nobody going to the club before 1AM: 8AM – 12PM: class. 1PM-3PM: sleep. 4PM-6PM: eat. 7PM-9PM: class. 10PM-12AM: sleep. 1AM-5AM: party. 6AM-7AM: sleep. I had expected it, been warned about it, and fairly early on adopted a go-with-the-flow attitude that I have since been unable to replicate in any aspect of my life. I was also 21, so it was all very charming to me. And perhaps having only visited the US as a tourist before, my tourism draped around me like a cloak, manifesting in giant backpacks or the excessive checking of Google maps or intentionally seeking out Times Square, I hadn’t been aware of the lifestyle rules that govern it. But when I moved here, and settled, and stopped being so obviously ~not from here~, it suddenly became clear that this seemingly anarchic city was a sinkhole of rules, spoken and unspoken, and I was going to have to fucking abide by them if I wanted to live here.
Rule number one surfaced almost immediately when I was invited, at 10.30AM, to get a bagel with a new coworker. 10.30AM, I thought, kind of early for lunch. I’m probably going to get a bagel for lunch, but maybe next time, I Skyped innocently, and was met with a barrage of insults whose upshot was that you don’t eat bagels for lunch, you eat them for breakfast, which you eat at 10.30AM. That’s right, you get up at 6.30, ride the subway, work for two hours, and then you eat breakfast and somehow don’t die of hunger. The nice lady in the bodega, also not from New York, did not chastise me for ordering a bagel at lunchtime. In fact she gave me a sticker that said ‘You’re Beautiful’, which I still have somewhere. You also can’t order weird things on a bagel, even though weird things abound in every bagel store, cream cheese flavours lined up like gelato. Remember when Cynthia Nixon ordered lox and cream cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel, and it threatened to derail her entire campaign for governor of New York? Yeah.
Getting drinks after work was another lesson. You order food at whatever bar you’re in, even if it’s 5.30PM, and even if said bar is hygienically abominable, so you find yourself shoveling spoonfuls of shepherd’s pie into your mouth in between gulping down your pint and trying to keep track of the conversation. While this is certainly an improvement on the British after-work drinks culture, where your two choices are a) have two drinks then go home and make dinner or b) death by alcohol poisoning, it was also single-handedly responsible for the fact that I would get home on a Tuesday night and find I’d spent $80 on what I thought would be a few margaritas at a bar called Mad Dog. And there’s no such thing as buying a round, and then someone else gets the next one. Instead one designated payer takes responsibility for the bill and the maths required to divvy it up between everyone present, and then will send you a request for the money the next day (or that same night if they’re that kind of person) on Venmo, this money app thing that I think is literally installed on every mobile phone sold in this country. If you don’t pay them immediately they’ll send you increasingly aggressive ‘nudges’ on the app even though you can see them sitting at a desk six feet away, glaring at their phone screen. I couldn’t download Venmo for the first few weeks of my presence here, so instead would leave folded wads of cash under my friend’s computer mouse like the world’s least subtle drug dealer.
I mistook bodegas for grocery stores for about the first month of living here. I would try and do a weekly grocery shop at some independent deli on my street, confused out of my mind. There was a bowl full of tangerines, but no bag to put the tangerines in. So if I wanted to buy more than one tangerine, I had to pile them up in my arms in a precarious pyramid while continuing to shop. I spent $8 on a single aubergine. Everything was Monopoly money. I finally discovered actual supermarkets after complaining to my bemused roommate, who pointed one out on a map for me. Having lived in the blessed city of London for five years, where you’re never more than ten feet away from a Tesco Express, I had assumed that the fact there were no grocery stores in my immediate vicinity meant that they didn’t exist. That’s why everyone says living in New York is so expensive, I would say to myself, idly boiling my $10 box of pasta.
The subway is unspeakable. Beyond the vomiting, urinating, screaming, cockroaches and rats, all of which you are expected to accept without comment, it also makes no fucking sense. There is a board in maybe 1/10 stations that tells you when the next train will come; otherwise, you’re on your own. You might have missed the last train, who knows? Guess you’ll have to wait an hour and see if one shows up! And hope that guy singing to himself while openly masturbating on the platform doesn’t push you onto the tracks! Coz that happened to someone yesterday! There is no list of stops anywhere that tells you which direction you’re going in; stations basically direct you either uptown or downtown, unless you’re at the Bowery J train stop in which case your options are downtown or Brooklyn, which is downtown. Half the time it just gives you the name of the station at the end of the line and you’re expected to know where the fuck Forest Hills is. The G train goes uptown, downtown, and sidetown, so good luck with that.
And tipping: ah, tipping, that thing you’re supposed to do in any civilized society when the food was really good or the waitress was really nice, but which you are not just expected but forced to do in the US. You have to tip a bartender for handing you a beer can from a fridge, that bending motion being apparently worth an extra dollar. You also are meant to just leave these cash tips on the counter, which I didn’t realize at first and waited patiently for the bartender to come back so I could press the dollar into his hand, look him in the eyes and accept his reverent ‘thank you’, which never came. Apparently the fact that service industry workers are paid literally nothing is your fault, not America’s fault, so it’s up to you to rectify it by tipping them out the ass.
And if you fail to abide by these rules, you’ll instantly be branded with that most insulting of retorts: you’re not a New Yorker. I’m not from New York. I never claimed to be. And you know who else isn’t from New York? The college kids who moved into the city from their liberal arts enclaves in New England and started enforcing the commandments of New York living with all the zeal of SS army officers.
Even Carrie Bradshaw, famed unrealistic New York icon, uses this platform to spout her dubious wisdoms. Namely, to spurn and ridicule the use of a scrunchie as a hair accessory in her new boyfriend’s novel, claiming that ‘no New York woman would be caught dead running around town in a scrunchie’. I’ve got news for you Carrie: you’re not fucking from here either. In fact we don’t know where you’re from, which is weird, actually, but I’m pretty sure you’re from Ohio. You’re definitely not from here, because one time you used the phrase ‘when I first moved to the city and I was poor, I used to buy Vogue instead of dinner’. From one outsider to another, Carrie, I’m pretty sure no ‘New Yorker’ would ever buy Vogue instead of food, you unbelievable hypocrite.
But the most important rule of living in New York is that you’re not allowed to be shocked by anything. Anyone can one-up your tale of woe, everyone has had a worse landlord/roommate/commute/Uber ride. If you tell someone that you saw eight cockroaches in the space of half an hour in your apartment last night, they will laugh self-effacingly and say ‘Welcome to New York!’. This city is a competition to see who can stick it out the longest, and the second you express any kind of discomfort at the level of apathy it takes to succeed in this city, you’re done.
In the spirit of embracing anarchy in my everyday life, I’m changing it up again this week. I’m not doing one good thing and one bad thing, because one extremely bad thing happened this week and I don’t want to talk about it on the internet. Yet. So instead, please enjoy:
Two good things that came out of the bad thing
While trying to find a bar to go to this evening I (half) sarcastically googled ‘Best bars to cry at in NYC’ and found this excellent tumblr account, NYC crying guide: https://cryingnewyork.tumblr.com/. Highlights below.
I also made this playlist entitled ‘Kill me’ which is full of classics that you can cry along to on your way to the places that are good to cry in, assuming you can find your way there on the goddamn subway. It’s collaborative, so go nuts.
Sending you big big hugs as you navigate the extremely bad thing. Here's to crying in public!
Gosh this was toooo relatable - and the fucking bar 🙃 thank you for sharing the crying New York tumblr which made my day and the playlist which I think I’ll manage to get some use of. :-)