It's hot.
It’s very hot today. New York has always had a reputation for miserable, muggy summers, but this is early for a string of 90° days.
On days like this I always remember that when we were young we didn’t have air conditioning in the city. No one I knew had it. It was miserable, but we tolerated it like so many other fucked up things in the city because it was the price of living here. We sat out on stoops in the evening and drank tall boys in paper bags. We ate cheap Mexican food on the sidewalk, went out dancing all night, to the movies in the afternoon when we were desperate to cool off for a couple hours. We slept naked on bare mattresses in front of windows with box fans rattling and blasting hot air across us all night long. We didn’t get much sleep. Now there are a thousand festivals of all kinds in the city all summer long and it’s crowded with tourists, but in the 1980s, the city emptied out in July and August when everybody who could afford it left for Fire Island, or the Hamptons, or Cape Cod or wherever they went, I don’t know I stayed. We had the place to ourselves, free of rich people.
I don’t know if this is true, but I always thought the reason we didn’t have air conditioners was because the electrical outlets in the tenement buildings we all lived in weren’t wired for it. But we couldn’t have afforded the higher utility bills all summer anyway, we lived so close to and usually over the edge of our means. I guess some time in the late 90s, they must have started making air conditioners that used regular voltage, who knows?, but I remember when my partner Jay and I went to the P.C. Richards on 14th St. and bought a cheap little window unit on an installment plan for our tiny street level studio apartment that we shared with four cats who were every bit as relieved as we were to feel that cool air. But we were just as broke as ever so we only turned it on when the temperature got into the 90s, which used to be pretty much limited to August.
Maybe I’m spoiled, maybe I’m fussier now that I’m older, maybe I’m having less fun to distract me (because summers in New York were if nothing else fun), but I can’t imagine living without a.c. now in the city. Or I can imagine which is why I know I would not tolerate it. Many of our older neighbors in the co-op, who bought their apartments in the 1950s and live on fixed incomes, have not installed air conditioners. They tough it out. On really hot days, they go to “cooling centers,” public spaces like schools and community rooms, where they hang out during the heat of the day. And, I imagine, go home at night to sleep naked in front of box fans rattling in their windows.
