The Real New Yorker

A Self-Diagnosed Condition

You’re a New Yorker when you say you’re a New Yorker.

Period.

My partner, born in Bellevue and raised on the Lower East Side, Bushwick in Brooklyn and Parkchester East in the Bronx, spent the better part of twenty years in Vermont, raising his three kids. He was never going to be accepted as a Vermonter or a New Englander. Not born there? Flatlander. Pffffft. Now maybe, just maybe, his kids can be considered Vermonters because they were born there but there are parts of this world that don’t accept even that as a criterion for belonging.

Not New York City.

Nobody else gets to judge your belonging in this chaotic, gorgeous, filthy, fantastic, confusing welter of a city. Nobody has the time. Nobody is actually all that interested.

There are, however, any number of possible criteria that you can tick off yourself once you’ve taken the plunge and moved here to reassure yourself that you’re staying.

• The first time you fling yourself into the closing subway doors, have them actually close on you and then open again, so that you make your train.
• Hailing taxis without thinking about it but only after midnight.
• Getting a slice of Joe’s pizza and walking, eating, laughing with friends.
• Writing a bad check while counting on overdraft protection to cover first, last and security on an apartment.
• Telling the super of the building not to show that apartment to anyone else.
• You step aside but don’t stop reading when a rat runs down the subway platform.
• Doing your grocery shopping at Fairway in the middle of the night when it’s a little less crowded.
• Working three different part-time jobs so you have time to pursue your writing/acting/singing/dancing dreams.
• Having overlapping sets of friends that share your wildly different ideas of fun.
• Going out to Brighton Beach in the cold weather for decent borscht and to check out the fur coats for sale in the dollar stores (not for a dollar, though).
• Staying in on Saturday night and going out on Tuesday night until the sun comes up.
• Giving away your car to a friend upstate.
• Knowing six different ways to get where you’re going by train and bus on the weekends because you know the subway is fucked then.
• Offering fast, precise directions to confused tourists and then moving on.
• Avoiding Times Square and the entire area around World Trade One (not the “Freedom Tower”).
• Sending out of state friends to the Highline but not going yourself.
• Hating on Hudson Yards.

So if you’ve done any of the above or have another ten, twenty, fifty items to add to the list, yeah, you’re probably staying.

One final description I read somewhere:

You’re a New Yorker when the New York that was is more real to you than the New York that is.

You don’t have to have lived here very long before you find yourself remembering what used to be on that corner or how much you used to like going to that diner that’s gone now. Things change quickly here and before you know it, you’re diagnosing yourself with this very particular condition.

You’re a New Yorker.

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