Image via Complex Original
It takes courage, drive and a certain amount of adventurousness to leave your hometown and move to the Big City, and the last thing you want to hear after making that journey is how you’re not a real New Yorker. Yet so many do, struggling every day to shake off that perceived (whether real or not) stench of not belonging.
New New Yorkers will always feel the need to adapt, change, and fit in, whether they’ve been here two weeks, twenty years, or helped the Yankees win a World Series (sorry A-Rod, you could fly a time machine back to the 1600s and help found the damn city and you’ll still never be one of us.) Most of them learn early on that the best strategy is to fake it til you make it.
New York is a melting pot, and nobody wants to be that gunk of frozen chicken broth that won’t dissolve in with the rest of that delicious, multicultural soup. Here’s a few tips to help show everyone else that you’re just as much of a native New Yorker as that cabbie from Hoboken who doesn’t speak a word of English.
Except you, A-Rod. You’ll always be that gunk of frozen chicken broth. Always.
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10. Never Stop at the Top of the Subway Stairs
You might pat yourself on the back just for getting on the right train and getting off the right stop, but even Jason Voorhees managed that when he came to town. The real trick is knowing which way to walk once you've headed up the stairs out of the station.
You'll be outed as an outsider immediately if you stop at the top of the steps and hold up all the New Yorkers behind you who actually know where they're going. Pacing in small circles on the corner while gawking up at street signs (or these days, burying your face in Google Maps) isn't helping, either.
Native New Yorkers just keep walking, never stopping and never slowing down, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn and ditch their babies. If you haven't been here long enough to feel the city's magnetic field instinctually guiding you, you can always glance up at a prominent landmark (the Empire State Building or WTC 2.0, for example) and deduce your direction from there.
At the very least, walk a couple of blocks and note which way the numbers are progressing. You might have to about face and pass the subway station again, but anyone who might've recognized and ridiculed you is at their destination already.
Extra credit if you can figure out which stairway out of the station you should be using in three guesses or less.
9. Eat Street Meat Without Fear
Nothing is more New York than eating questionable meat off of a cart with no hand-washing sink or refrigeration system. Rookies make the mistake of avoiding these, thinking that classic hot dog stands are for tourists and the terminally ill with nothing left to lose. They're partly right—visitors do like to get a picture of themselves sticking a boiled foot-long in their mouth. But it's the other carts that really separate the wheat from the chaff.
Whether it's construction workers or CEOs, the lines for coffee and two-dollar egg sandwiches at seven in the morning consist of nothing but New Yorkers. The food is fast, cheap, and you don't have to worry about wasting time with the guy behind the glass telling you about his band's next gig at Cafe Wha?
The halal carts are even better. For 5 dollars you get enough rice with your meal to feed a small village, usually with two or three random french fries, no charge. And there's never a line because the signs are usually in Arabic, and to a lot of ignorant people, Arabic is the Devil's Language. (Never mind that half the time it's actually Farsi or Hebrew or Spanish.)
Finally, eating meat off the street provides solid proof that you've been in this city for decades and decades since it takes about that long for your stomach to build a tolerance to whatever is in that amazing white sauce.
8. Play Law & Order Bingo, and Play It Well
Native New Yorkers don't just play Law & Order Bingo—they win it, every time. Simply watch one hour-long installment of the Dick Wolf procedural. It doesn't matter which one, whatever horrible offense strikes your fancy, whether it be brutal rape or Vincent D'Onofrio's face. Obviously, Law & Order: UK doesn't count, you pretentious ass.
Whenever a chalk outline or a Jerry Orbach zinger shows up in a location you recognize, yell out "Hey, I know that place! That's where I—" and fill in the rest with "do my laundry" or "got that public urination summons" or whatever anecdote you have up your sleeve. Once you've done this five times during a single episode of Law & Order, you win; we get it, you're from New York.
7. Detach Yourself In a Way The Buddha Never Meant
In the grand scheme of things, New Yorkers are an empathetic lot. When the world gets dark, we stand together. We give blood, we clean up storm-ravaged homes. We just recently shared in heartache and showed a boundless capacity of goodwill toward Boston, the Sabretooth to our Wolverine.
But day-to-day, we're cold, heartless pricks. If you're going to go anywhere in this city by subway, bus or car, you kind of have to be. Every time we're running late it seems, some jerk winds up getting himself killed, and we're the ones who have to pay for it by being fifteen minutes late. Do they really have to the hold the train in the station just because some poor bastard's corpse is laying on the tracks two stops ahead? Can't we just ride over him? It's not like he's going to feel it.
When a murder/suicide/murder-suicide impacts your commute, roll your eyes. Feel nothing. If we see you show an ounce of compassion, we'll know you're not one of us, and that's a fate worse than death. Although, not really that much worse because at least you're not holding up the goddamn train.
6. Give Tourists Directions, But Make Them Work For It
What better way to prove you're a native than by helping non-natives navigate their way around the Big Apple? However, giving them a straight path from Point A to Point B like some human GPS is a big red flag to other New Yorkers listening in. You've got to give these lost souls the most complicated, convoluted route you can think of, like they're dodging Leonardo DiCaprio's dead wife in Inception.
Not roundabout directions, of course. You're still giving them a quick and easy trajectory; it's just that "quick and easy" has a completely different meaning to native New Yorkers. That's exactly why when you're rattling off an insanely intricate series of subway transfers and throwing in your own homemade shortcuts through office buildings, you need to act like you're just reciting the alphabet. The more confusing the route, the more confident you need to sound. Try to say it all in one breath, and remember never to repeat yourself.
If the family who trusted you to guide them to the LEGO Store ends up in a missing persons report on the five o'clock news, that's not your fault. You speak a language only other natives can understand, and woe to those who find themselves lost in translation.
5. Have a Yankees Cap
It doesn’t matter if you don’t even like the Yankees. Even Mets fans have that other NY logo somewhere in the depths of their closet. Native New Yorkers are born with these things on—it makes the delivery that much more complicated.
Having a Yankees Cap doesn’t prove anything—posers from Lebron James to Tom Cruise (we get it, you’re relatable!) don the Bombers brim. Jesus Christ was probably performing miracles up and down Galilee in one. But not having the hat proves everything, giving away in one deft glance that you’re not from here. It’s a big Scarlet A, not to be confused with an Oakland cap, which...why?
It doesn’t matter if it’s hot pink, or green, or graffiti-style, just make sure you’ve got one and model it from time to time. Except you, A-Rod. That hat doesn’t make you a New York Yankee. Nothing will. You gunk.
4. Settle Into a Business Class Hot Spot
Business class hot spots are just that—trendy parts of the Big Apple that aren't quite first class, and definitely not coach. While tourist traps have some serious negative connotations surrounding them, Native New Yorkers want the best of what their city has to offer, too. But we'll settle for their slightly-less famous cousins though, in order to better avoid the gawking masses.
Instead of Times Square, we'll show our friends Herald Square. Rather than relaxing in Central Park, we'll laze in Prospect Park. We can wait in line for hours to see The Daily Show, but we'd rather wait in a line for hours a few blocks away at The Colbert Report, thank you very much. We know that, like us, these institutions have character and heart.
New Yorkers are only human. Just because we have to have the newest or the most obscure whatever, doesn't mean we don't want some overpriced, overhyped kitsch just as much as the next guy. Just not the kitsch everyone else is doing. The one that almost everyone else is doing is how we roll.
If you want us, we'll be sipping coffee over at a The Bean.
3. Own the Crosswalk
To native New Yorkers, a crosswalk is just more sidewalk, with no discernible difference from the rest of the ground under their feet. The fact that cars are legally allowed to drive through it, considering that it's actually part of the street, never occurs to us. We are colorblind: red, yellow, and green lights are not distinct from one another in any way.
This is a true test if you want to convince the world and potential insurance companies that this is your city. It's not easy to just walk straight ahead with no regard for personal safety, hoping that the drivers coming toward you will slam on their brakes and swear at you rather than just plow through you. At least not at first. But it gets easier. Though the first time might be like Indiana Jones taking a leap of faith into the chasm of the Holy Grail, crosswalks will soon become your Red Sea, and you will be Moses, parter of traffic, creator of gridlock.
You're a New Yorker. This is your world, and you don't need to look both ways when it might result in your being five seconds behind on Kanye's Twitter feed.
2. Robin Byrd is the Word
Native New Yorkers grow up with New York public access, so you better bone up on your local TV. Like all community television, New York's public access is filled with freaks and weirdos who have been showing their peers what we didn't even realize we never wanted to see.
Ex-porn star Robin Byrd and her show have been taking the sexy out of sex for over thirty-five years. Despite regretting it the next morning, every New Yorker has at some sleepless point stumbled upon The Robin Byrd Show and watched a few minutes out of morbid curiosity.
New York's local TV is important to our culture, a tiny but vital part, like the pituitary gland. And like the pituitary gland, Robin Byrd is behind some of the most awkward moments of our puberty.
Know the name, know the show. But don't know too much or you become that kind of New Yorker, and no one wants to be that, pretend or otherwise.
1. Ignore the Weather
Centuries, if not decades from now, cities will be contained within insulated, weather-controlled domes. Always ahead of the curve, New Yorkers tend to act as if that’s already the case, doing or wearing whatever they want, despite what the mercury is telling us.
It’s almost May and typically, this is when the city in springtime blooms: when we throw our coats in the closet and never look back, when our parks become filled with sunbathers and people pretending kickball isn’t just as lame as hacky sack. But it's still cold. Damn cold. For some reason, the weather hasn’t gotten our Facebook invite.
But despite that, we’re still going out in skirts and tank tops and dressing like it’s the summer we’ve been waiting all winter for. If a few of us end up dying of pneumonia, so be it, we’re not going to let Mother Nature tell us how to spend our weekends.
New Yorkers are their city, we’re its attitude, we’re its arrogance, and pomp and its neverending energy. We play by our own rules and dress to our own five-day forecasts. All you got to do if you want to be one of us is to be and do all these things, too.
And to hate Alex Rodriguez, for no discernible reason.