Keeping Cool
Keeping Cool There are no un-air-conditioned social classes anymore. Last Wednesday, on a night of 98-degree heat, I picked up a six-pack of beer—Old Gumption Limited Edition Woodchuck Valley Pale...
...My wife's in agony...
...An oafish 20-year-old stockboy looked up wide-eyed from where he was stacking boxes in the corner...
...What's the matter...
...It seemed to stunt people emotionally, too: Kids with air-conditioning were weird, antisocial types who spent beautiful beach days in the thrumming cold of a dark basement rec room, communing with their televisions...
...In Los Angeles and Phoenix, outdoor restaurants are air-conditioned and misted...
...And a good thing, too," I said...
...The fellow clearly didn't belong to the air-conditioned classes himself...
...Where I grew up, in a coastal town north of Boston, to have air conditioning was an unequivocal embarrassment...
...As I drove home, I looked at the houses in my neighborhood: Every last one of them, except ours, had its windows closed, the kind of Plexiglas windows that seal shut with a loud thlirp...
...Midway through last week's heat wave, the papers did their what-people-are-doing-to-beat-the-heat stories...
...When I told him yes, he gave a crisp Tsk...
...and let no air in or out...
...and a slight nod, like a small-town scold in the presence of a moral menace...
...Now that's the way the whole country is...
...You nuts...
...You live in the Dark Ages or something...
...We don't have air conditioning...
...Now everyone just stays inside...
...He didn't belong to orthodontia-, deodorant-, or mouth-wash-using classes, either...
...Last Wednesday, on a night of 98-degree heat, I picked up a six-pack of beer—Old Gumption Limited Edition Woodchuck Valley Pale Ale, or something...
...How could it be otherwise...
...This does not stop people from fraudulent bragging about their regional identities, as if any place in the United States still had weather: Minnesotans about their resistance to cold, New Englanders about their seafaring ruggedness, Arizonans about their "desert souls"—whatever those are...
...It's between the lonely comfort of climate control and the lonely agony of being stuck in the heat all by yourself...
...When you have an air conditioner, 73 degrees looks like heat stroke...
...Geeeeez," he said...
...I thought this would endear me to him...
...This creates an intolerance of meteorological variation that has spread to the entire country...
...Our coverage of distance is so facile It makes us to have had a sea in vain...
...Much as Robert Frost said about the Atlantic in his poem "Does No One at All Ever Feel This Way in the Least...
...Some of the country's colder cities—like Minneapolis and Des Moines— have even glassed in huge parts of their downtowns, so you can drive to work in your pajamas in January if you want...
...All of these houses emitted the jiggly hum of air-conditioned contentment...
...And now, O sea, you're lost by aeroplane...
...Just the heat...
...You have kids...
...But for now, it's 68 degrees on Main Street (which is in a mall), it's 68 degrees at the ballpark (which is domed), and at the beach, it's— But why go to the beach...
...Instead, he said, "Don't have air conditioning...
...The guy at the counter said dimly, "Mmm-mm, that's nice and cold...
...It's too darn hot...
...It marked you as nouveau riche, or idle, or both...
...More often than not, "Dolores Fuertes de la Variga, 19, a mother of two ...," or whoever, turned out to be taking the air not out of indigence, but because her "unit" was broken and the repairman wouldn't get there until later in the afternoon...
...Tens of millions of people live in places like Phoenix and Houston and Bakersfield and Orlando, which are virtually uninhabitable without air conditioning...
...In the hot months, public places used to come alive with people strolling around to cool down or show off their summer dresses...
...now the weather is lost by Carrier and Hotpoint...
...The un-air-conditioned life is not worth living...
...When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
...Our sailors ride a bullet for a boat...
...Every place in the country is the same place, winter and summer...
...Christopher Caldwell...
...But this year's stories were different...
...It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor: Once you're traveling to an air-conditioned office or factory in your air-conditioned car, an un-air-conditioned family life is unbearable...
...This is an annual staple that always obeys certain genre rules: twelve horrifying vignettes— the immigrant family of eight that lives in the boiler room, the senior citizen who lives above the dump next to the fish market—accompanied by a half-page photo of a group of black children guffawing in front of an open hydrant in Brooklyn...
...Sometime in the past decade, we passed a tipping point: Since there's no one on the street, one's choice is no longer between the lonely comfort of climate control and the pre-air-conditioning jollity of the public square...
...If you had it, it meant that you lived in one of the breezeless neighborhoods far from the oceanfront, or that you were so bereft of inner resources that you preferred to sit at home contemplating your appliances...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 45
