New York IRL: The Table and Chairs
By: Connor Meek
I’m from Scotland where it’s dark and wet and there’s not much to do besides drink so we watch a lot of movies and TV. After a while, all that doing nothing got too much for me and I moved to Australia. Three months in I found myself living and working on an avocado farm, where there’s not much to do besides drink so we watched a lot of movies and TV. The weather was nice.
Now I’m in New York and this is the first in a small series of articles about being here after the consumption of all those movies and TV. I came here to spend a summer with my long-distance girlfriend. It’s my third visit, but my first extended period. Every time, arriving here has been monumental for me. Emotionally monumental, as I’d get to see my girlfriend after so many months, but culturally too; all of the media I’d consumed over my 25 years has engrained this city into my mind. Into a lot of minds, I’d presume.
Everyone knows that New York is ‘iconic’; IKEA have been plastering the walls of living rooms and coffee shops across Europe with black and white, Big Apple themed canvases since I started noticing interior design. A single yellow cab in the foreground, colored in. You know the one. How many romantic comedies’ can you count with the opening credits helicopter shot, spanning Manhattan to a 90’s college-rock hit? We’re all familiar with the images. Now that I’m here, these are the things that excite me; the scenery of the city, the props, and the subtle iconography.
Someone told me recently he’d been in LA and he’d been able to visit the set of a sitcom he liked. He told me it was amazing to be there. ‘Like, on the set?’ I asked. ‘No, I mean it was amazing to be amongst the tables and chairs.’ And I knew what he meant, because that’s what I feel here every day.
The ‘table and chairs’ of New York are its props. It’s yellow taxis, the subway’s ‘green pokeballs’, fire hydrants, food carts and steaming manholes. The stuff that’s in all the exterior shots in New York sets, the stuff we walk past every day. I’d seen them all through the screen but never with my own
eyes, IRL. My girlfriend tells me it’s ‘cute’ when I get so enamored with red fire hydrants I have to post a picture on Instagram; I’d genuinely never seen one before but I’ve seen enough movies to know that if it were hot enough (and it has been, this summer) we could always pop the top off and the neighborhood kids would play by it.
I had always thought that the steaming manholes were just how 80’s action movies accounted for a decade-long, worldwide love of smoke machines — they just had to have some dry ice — but they’re the real deal. Where does that steam come from? Why? How do they know when to shove one of those chimney things on top? Now I can smell them and feel them and they’re pure New York. They amaze me.
My girlfriend is a New Yorker, so she’s immune to this by now, but I’ve been able to share the amazement with some fellow Scots. One such guy in a bar told me he was in Manhattan for one night. I asked him what he thought about it and he said it was weird to see all these things; ‘even just seeing American traffic lights’, he said. Between Scots, he didn’t have to fully form the sentence, we both get it. It’s weird not because they’re different, although they are, it’s weird because they’re already familiar.
Last time I visited I met with one of my best friends. We were awaiting the walk signal to cross the street while a guy crossed towards us, bold as brass, and a taxi attempted to turn the corner. The driver slammed his horn, the guy raised his arms, shot him a look and shouted ‘I’m walkin’ here!’ We’d never thought we’d be privileged enough to hear that “quintessential” New York soundscape with our own ears; I’d always thought that phrase was pure caricature, riffed in sitcoms and comedies. It was hilarious now because we thought it was caricature, but he’d proven it was real-life New York. We laughed harder now because we knew it to be true, and we made damn sure he never knew we laughed at him.
