Whenever it gets really really hot like this (that is, whenever summer really feels like summer), I always think of the summer I once proclaimed to be the hottest summer of my entire life, and whether it really was or not no longer matters. It was 1991 and I was 21 years old. I was living with my friend Rachel in Astoria, Queens, back when people outside of Astoria had not been tuned in yet to its many glorious wonders.
Maybe our rent was $600 a month; I can hardly remember. What I remember most about the apartment was that it had two big bedrooms and a bathroom with a huge gorgeous claw-foot bathtub. There was a middle-aged man who lived loudly below us with his mother and who became famous for knocking on our door once in the middle of one of our parties and proclaiming that our dance floor was someone else’s ceiling. Rachel and I repeated that line back and forth to each other with much frequency.
Rachel and me, sometime around that hot hot summer.
I was temping that summer at Van Munching and Company, the importers of Heineken beer, whose office was located near Rockefeller Plaza. My job was to type up letters and, as I recall, labels, and all I can say about this job is that it added the words drayage and lading to my vocabulary.
For some reason, around March that year there was a week that got up to 90 degrees. This was a warning. I won’t say that it didn’t cool back down, but it very nearly didn’t, and by the time proper summer had arrived, the days always seemed to be blazingly hot and sunny.
I spent at least part of every weekday evening that summer in the claw-foot tub with the water at first lukewarm and then cooler and then finally cold, as I tried to figure out how long I could stay cool once I got out of the tub and sat in front of my box fan for the rest of the night. Back then no one in their 20s (at least that I knew) had air conditioning, just as no one in their 20s took cabs. Air conditioning was considered so luxurious that you simply couldn’t (or didn’t) even think about it. A guy at work about my age who was still living with his parents used to taunt me every day: “Reyna, in the middle of the night the air conditioning was so cold, I actually needed a blanket!” And I was amused by this, of course, but really all I wanted to do was to curl up on the floor under my desk and sleep the air-conditioned sleep that I was being denied all summer long.
Elvis Costello’s Mighty Like a Rose came out that summer and after the long cold bath I would sometimes lie on my bed with a wet t-shirt on my head as I listened to that album over and over again. I associate that album too with hot summers and cold baths.
Our apartment was right on the corner of Broadway, which in Astoria is the loudest place you could be. It was loud and thrilling when you were in the middle of it, loud and frustrating when you were finally trying to get some sleep in the coolest part of the morning.
I thought that summer was the hottest summer I would ever experience. I thought that my future self would never know anything like that summer again. And in some ways I was right. But I’m a little sorry for it.
reyna eisenstark 