The Secret to Surviving New York

A few months ago, at the beginning of a holiday weekend, I was waiting, for what seemed like hours, in a dingy Budget Rent-a-Car office on the East Side. I had a reservation, but there were no cars. I waited, and waited, stewing, periodically asking when my car would be ready and getting a helpless shoulder shrug.

Then a woman came storming into the office. “Is Jose here?” she demanded loudly. “Jose always handles my reservations.”

Jose? The other people and I looked at each other. Did this woman hold the answer to our rental car conundrum?

“Your manager, Jose,” she hissed.

“Oh…he is at another location tonight,” the employee said.

“Well, you need to call him and tell him”—she gave her name—“is here, and I have a car reserved.” Then she turned to her companion, who seemed either impressed or horrified, and said, “I come here all the time.”

She drove off soon thereafter.

At the time I remember being pissed off that this woman just strode in and got a car, while I was standing there, powerless, but also thinking: “Good for her! She’s BFF with the Budget Rent-a-Car manager on East 43rd Street!”

But then I realized that was, actually, kind of the point. She was a regular, and thus, she had power. In New York, there is obvious power: the mayor, or Anna Wintour. (Or to some people, the editors of n+1!) But we live in a city where it can be, at times, more valuable to know the manager of the car rental place than the mayor; it’s just that that’s not anything anyone tells you. Recent transplants to New York live with roommates they found on Craigslist in fifth-floor walk-ups they can’t wait to escape from; most of the 20-somethings I know have moved apartments almost every year. They have to find the laundromat and dry cleaners and the good deli, the one that has those little Tofutti Cuties for when they get a late-night craving. They have to figure out the quickest way to the subway. And maybe, if things go well, the guy at the pizza shop across the street will someday agree to sign for their UPS packages, though this usually occurs a month before they decide to move again in a quest to find an apartment without bedbugs/cockroaches/mice. Next Page >