The Dresser

OK. So for those of you who don’t know, getting furniture in New York is difficult. I’ve been trying to help a friend who has been living off of their floor and out of a suitcase for about seven months now, a dresser to hold the various items that I inevitably have to step over when I come to visit. "Are you just like, going to pick those pants up off the floor tomorrow and wear them to work?" I ask. He looks at me for a moment wondering, perhaps, what is wrong with doing such a thing, and says, "Well yeah. I mean, they’re clean."

Young twenty-something’s in Manhattan who don’t have a job in investment banking, are most likely living paycheck to paycheck. After rent, what little we have left over is saved for important things like: clothes, brunch, vodka sodas, shoes, beers, and dinners. We have no extra income for the fairly inconsequential things like superfluous costly furniture – namely, dressers.

We are a group of people who would rather store our clothes in a nice pile (clean) on the floor, than risk missing brunch for two months just to save up for a dresser. We do, after all, have our priorities.

However, the other thing about Manhattan is that you can, if you look hard enough, furnish the necessary things (like some plates, say, or a mattress even) without spending an arm and a leg. Craigslist is there for those of us who have arrived (not me) and are willing to sell their old stuff for cheap (Ikea) and actually invest in something new (like, not a futon). Their trash is our treasure (yes please!), and I made it my mission to find my above mentioned friend the least trashiest trash dresser on the island.

(Note: The Dresser is also a 1983 movie (and play) starring Albert Finney (and no one who was born after 1920), that premiered with the tagline, "What happens backstage is always true drama. And often pure comedy").

In the end, it was in fact an investment banker younger than me (ugh!) getting rid of her fairly nice trash dresser with a chestnut finish, and moving across town to Riverside Drive with her boyfriend. Really? So she's able to leave behind perfectly good furniture and her rather large studio apartment to officially grow up and invest in not only a new dresser, but a relationship as well? Surely her trash-to-not-trash changeover happened too soon?

My friend and I scoffed inwardly, bitterly wishing someone nice with furniture from CB2 loved us on the West Side too, just before we proceeded to carry a dresser 12 blocks uptown.

By 68th street the sound of the wheels from the make-shift moving-cart I borrowed from my doorman was loud enough to drown out a passing fleet of fire engines, however didn’t succeed in suppressing my overall hatred of a place that does everything in its power to test you in order for you to prove that you’re worthy just to live there.

Everyone who passed us looked at us with faces of confusion or sheer entertainment. What?! My face shot back. Have you never seen a dresser before?! Sorry we all can’t be rich and successful enough to actually buy one from somewhere real and have it delivered by actual men whose job it is to deliver things!

I was at a low point. I was no longer fabulous New Yorker on the Upper East Side. I was sad poser New Yorker who resided in 10021 but was dragging a large wooden box up 2nd avenue.

After we ruined the ear drums of a few more diners alfresco, we arrived at my friends apartment and then proceeded to carry the large wooden box up five flights of stairs.

When it was finally inside, standing in all its glory, a lone piece of furniture on an otherwise barren wall, I felt a sense of satisfaction (maybe it was the fatigue) flood over me.

My friend would no longer be sifting through piles in the morning to figure out what to wear to the office, which would inevitably save him time and frustration. We had, through hard work and determination, successfully moved one more step towards the American dream – to live in a home full of…furniture.

Yes, we may not have a lot, and no, we may not be investment bankers making six figures living on the West Side in a successful relationship heading towards what might be marriage in an apartment with plush new couches and tall sturdy dressers - but by God, I thought, we’re certainly New Yorkers, where what happens backstage is always true drama - and certainly pure comedy.