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Welcome to New York! So, you have a job-esque thing and an apartment (or at least a sofa to crash on), and maybe a few friends from college who are working in mysteriously overpaid marketing roles who want to drag you to a bar with FREE SHOTS in the East Village—you’re going to be a star!
Except for the fact that you’re not. If you’re going to make this town yours, you’ll need a few more characters—and I don’t mean the confidantes who sit on a big purple couch with you and drink coffee all day, because lol, in your dreams. I’m talking about the stock characters that will turn this rosy period of your life into memoir material: actors, designers, roommates who steal from you, bartenders with tattoos of your name, people who live in big apartments (…with their parents), people who live in closets (with two significant others), PR chicks, sexy baristas, other baristas, #lifestyle #blogger #s, and people who are famous, and people who just think they are famous. They may not be your friends for life—you may not even know some of their names!—but these are the people who will fill your cosmopolitan existence with joy and happiness, envy and pain, drinks and free drinks.
Among that maddening crowd, there are very particular New York archetypes you are bound encounter during your tenure here—whether it’s lifelong or just a few months. They may seem unusual or even shocking at first—but just know, their presence is as reliable as the J train is not. They are as varied as a packet of Skittles, and no one knows where all their money comes from or what…exactly…they do? But one thing’s for sure: They’re all going to tell you which Girls cast member went to their high school.
Let’s meet your new friends!
The Prolific Tweeting Mute
A real cool way to meet people in New York is on the Internet, because there are no restaurants, bars, or bookstore-cafes here in New York. You’ll find some rad person who’s tweeting gems like, “11:31 AM: JUST SPENT 3 HRS PLUCKING LEGS OFF FLIES SO THEY CAN PULL A TINY SLED I MADE OUT OF PAPER” and “11:33 AM: HEDI SLAMPIECE” and “11:35: I SEE YOU INSTAGRAM HONEY DUNKAROOS TAKING YOUR SELFIES." You’ll think, “If this guy is coming up with all these, er, bon mots every two minutes, he must rule in real life.” So you’ll slide into his DMs like, “Let’s meet IRL” and he’ll be like, “I DON’T SEE NOTHING WRONG WITH A LITTLE BIT OF BUMP N’ GRIND,” and inside your heart is pounding like, “I CAN’T WAIT,” and then you’ll get to some sticky watering hole in Nolita, and he’ll be like, “Haha, Hi.” “Yeah.” “Totally.” “I’ve gotta go, I’m getting hungry."
I’m Down To Earth, I Eat Sandwiches Model
You’re totally gonna meet a model, and she’ll wear awesome outfits and be like, “Thanks, I get all my accessories at Oriental Trading Company,” and carry around a copy of Remembrance of Things Past, because nothing is fair and, like, sometimes the snow comes down in June, sometimes the sun goes 'round the moon. But the worst is that (if she knows what she’s doing), she’ll be waving sage sticks around her apartment every morning while blasting Stevie Nicks, then hopping out of her apartment for a bowl of carefully composed, rainbow colored food that she Instagrams and then forgets about while she tells you about some guy in Bushwick who’s teaching her to play the rainstick.
The Existential Investment Banker With A Heart Of Gold
Yes, your roommate’s college best friend’s life is a horrible techno haze symphony of endless spreadsheets that determine the economic health of our entire country and the bottle service industry. But sometimes, when he has had too much of the number one vodka of the year 2033, he will pull you aside and be like, “I know we don’t really talk a lot, but, like, I'm reading this book and it is really making me debate the merits of our society. Not only do I feel challenged by my suburban upbringing, but I feel like when I look at the moon it’s like, ‘Wait, who’s to say the EARTH isn’t orbiting around the MOON?’ To distill everything into one question: Do you ever wake up and just question everything around you? Like, I woke up to go running this morning and was like, ‘What if I already WENT for a run in an alternate universe?’”
Weird Non-Working Dude Who Still Lives In 1988
A distant cousin of the Existential Investment Banker is some guy who went to, like, Dartmouth and wears sport coats everywhere and belongs to those weird “gentlemen’s clubs” that line Park Avenue. Whenever you ask him what he does for a living, he laughs and says something you can’t really understand, because he talks in some weird Cary Grant accent that sounds like water bubbling through 100 marbles. Unexpectedly, his natural habitat is a divey East Village bar where he drinks a lot of beer and puts his arm around you like you’ve been best friends 4ever and says, “I can’t get fat, because I have Mayflower blood.” And you're like, “Let’s never touch again.”
A DJ
Fact: For every female on the island of Manhattan, there are 4 guys with some $10 iPad app and 100 Lupe Fiasco remixes who call themselves DJs and do Instagram stories with the neon caption, “Switching the faders back and forth tonight come thru.”
That Guy Who Always Underpays For No Reason
Yeah, his sliver of cultural cache can get you access to weird fashion after parties and good concert tickets, but whenever you are splitting dinner, he'll always insist he had only two drinks, not three, and should only have to pay $38, instead of $67 like everyone else. Except, he rents an apartment on, like, Diamond Avenue and Boulevard of Disposable Income, and he replaced his hands with literal bags of gold because his dad fucking wrote “Lady in Red.”
The Guy Who Thinks This Is Still His Fraternity
Everything he does is “just like college.”
“This bar is just like college, because it’s loud.”
“This job is just like college because it’s like a class.”
“I like her because she’s like someone I would’ve dated in college.”
“That subway car is just like my college dorm.”
“This Domino’s Pizza is like a Domino’s Pizza I totally would’ve eaten in college.”
“New York is just one big college, man.”
That Girl You Get Stuck Living With Who Wants To Work In Fashion Really Badly and Shuts Her Door to Cry Loudly All
This girl has had eight unpaid internships with a whole slew of designers and Teen Vogue and Seventeen and Teen Times and whenever she gets home, exhausted and lightly abused, she tells you, “I live for fashion. Fashion is art, and fabric is paint. Or maybe it’s marble. Whatever, I just really want a job.” And then she goes in her room and closes her door and sobs for three hours, calling her parents and screaming, “I LIVE AND BREATHE AND DIE FOR THIS DREAM!” before hanging up and calling them back to repeat her directive.
That Person Who’s Like You, But Just A Little Better
Let’s say you’re a twenty-five-year-old graphic designer who’s likeable and dresses cool and has reasonable success with girls and a comfortable apartment in Brooklyn. At every turn is a twenty-five-year-old guy who started a graphic design firm and is in a band with like, Fred Armisen, and has a closet of infinite shackets and who lives with his French artist girlfriend in a Chinatown loft.
A Bunch Of People Who Are Not Here To Stay
Everyone wants to move to New York and make it, because if you make it here, you can make it anywhere or whatever Liza Minelli sang when she was turning off lamps. Some people should just, uh, go make it somewhere else. Like, if you’re too busy writing the alphabet on a sheet of graph paper (or whatever it is accountants do) to walk around everyday kissing the ground beneath your feet and weeping and screaming, “I JUST WON THE SUPERBOWL! WHAT’S NEXT? I’M GOING TO NEW YORK,” you should probably go back to San Francisco or Paris or wherever.
