Summer In The City

Unseasonably warm here. I'm reminded of a day long ago in my misspent youth, when I was rather newly living on my own.

It was Summer in D.C., and I'd moved into a tiny, wretched apartment. There was no air conditioning, and only one window, so it offered no cross ventilation at all. Sweltering, oppressively still, cloyingly, densely moist-- that greasy humidity you only find in the midst of that D.C./NoVa, reclaimed swampland environment. A brutal little space where I could barely bring myself to spend any time at all. I'd take a cool shower and sit around in a towel, trying to let evaporation cool me, but only managed to work up a sweat from the exertion of wrapping the towel around myself.

I ran into the mother of an old friend one afternoon-- a sweet lady who'd always been very kind to me. We commiserated about the rotten weather, and when I bemoaned my lack of AC, she told me her son was away for the Summer, and his room was empty. She invited me to come by and take the brand new air conditioner she'd recently had installed in his room and use it for the remainder of the Summer. I immediately and gratefully leapt at the wonderful offer, and got a ride over there the following day with a pal.

We went upstairs to his bedroom, and I saw the fine, hefty, shiny, General Electric window unit sitting there. I unplugged it, and as I opened the window to remove it-- completely failing to take into account that only about a quarter of its depth was INSIDE the room, held in place mostly by that closed window (the bulk of the thing was perched on the sill and extended nearly two feet outside)-- my friend blurted out "NNOOO! Wait a..."

The rest of his warning was drowned out by the sound of the bulky, unbalanced, damn thing tumbling immediately to the ground and shattering into several chunks, 25 feet below. Its downward plunge was only *slightly* impaired by the presence of the brand new gas barbecue grill the lady had also just had installed on the patio. This proved not just wholly ineffective at breaking the air conditioner's fall-- it was also totally destroyed in the process.

I nearly lost all sphincter control. It was a long, hot, expensive Summer...

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