August 2018: Air Conditioning
When I was little we lived in a brick row house, and in the summer months we opened all the windows to try and make it cool. There was an industrial fan my grandparents had handed down to us, which we called robo-fan. Some nights my father would roll robo-fan up to the living room window and face it outward and close the other windows. It wouldn't make any sense, but he promised us that it would suck out all the hot air. I was almost mad when it worked, this thing that didn't make sense in my young mind, the cool fan air being blown away from me when all I wanted to do was hog it all, sit with my face as close to the fan as possible and let it blow my hair around. I wanted to know how he knew that a fan facing the wrong way would work. It seemed to me that my father knew all sorts of things. Which plant in our tiny postage stamp of a back yard was mint. How to build a picnic table. How to build a bicycle. How to climb trees. How to make great pancakes. In our garage he had a tall red tool chest, and a magnet on it with his name in all capital letters. The magnet was from when he was a bus driver. When had my father been a bus driver? I only knew him as a septic sewer worker, the man who drove a red pick up truck and wore the same thing every day. When he came home from work he wouldn't come in the front door. He'd come in through the garage, past the red tool chest and the bicycles and the clutter, and he'd sit on a chair in the basement. There he'd change out of his work boots and put on his moccasins. Every day.
There was one summer that was hotter than all the rest, my first real memory of a heat wave. It was so hot that my family bought an air conditioner. They put it in my parent's room and my brother and I were allowed to sleep on the floor. There was a small TV in their bedroom, and I remember how festive it felt, for all of us to be in the chilled air, sleeping bags sprawled out, cups of juice balanced on night stands. The air conditioner was like a treat.
I think of that heat wave every time there is a heat wave now, which seems to happen with more and more frequency. When I was twenty two, I lived alone in Harlem and insisted that I could make do with one window fan. During one heat wave I woke myself up, panting for breath, so hot I could barely breath. The window fan had stopped and my bedroom door had swung shut, hot boxing me in the little room. When I moved to Brooklyn, the girl whose room I rented sold me her air conditioner. I carted it with me to my next apartment and kept it in a closet until I needed it. Everyone said you needed help to install an air conditioner, but I was stubborn. One day when the humidity was thick and the sky had grayed over with the threat of rain, I pulled the air conditioner out of the closet. I wrenched the window open, heaved the unit into the window, and slammed the window down onto the lip of the air conditioner. Then I did the same for my roommate, who always bemoaned that the only person who could install her air conditioner was her ex-boyfriend ("Bullshit," I said, wiping my sweaty hands on my jean shorts and climbing off her frilly bed, where I'd had to kneel to finish screwing the unit to the window pane). She asked me how I learned to do this, and it was one of those skills I didn't learn, I just plowed through. The kind of task you could do if you were stubborn and stupid enough. In our apartment now, Emily insists on helping me when we put in the air conditioner. It's an old thing left by the previous tenant, loud as hell and twice as heavy. When I turn it off in the morning I can hear my ears ring with the new quiet. "We're getting too old for this," I say. The older I get, the less I need to be so stubborn or stupid. The more I want to just surrender.
I imagine that my father knew to turn the heavy fan to face out the window because he had lived in Guam when he served in Vietnam, but I didn't know that yet. And I knew I could heave an air conditioner into an window by myself with sweat running down my face because I worked so hard, so very hard, to be able to do anything on my own. It would serve me until it wouldn't anymore. The kind of thing you have to learn over and over again. I spent the early part of this summer working with students, young people who want to work in publishing. I was part guidance counselor, part cheerleader, part tech help, part mentor, part comedian. When they asked for advice, I told them to drink water. To be gentle. To get some sleep. I told them it was okay to ask for help, which they already knew, they were so smart. They wanted to know what it was like when I was their age, when I was twenty two and freshly minted and launching myself into the world. I would tell them that it was hard, which was true, but it was hard because I was bottoming out on my alcoholism, I was trying to muscle my way through everything without help, I thought self-harm and self-sabotage were the best I could hope for. This summer I tried to address my younger self when I spoke to them, to toss some compassion her way. There's no way to go back and do it over, but there's always room to judge her less harshly. When I tell people that I used to install my air conditioner by myself, they say, "You're lucky, you could've hurt somebody." And I tell them that I know.
xo,
c