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 Ale, or something. The guy at the counter said dimly, “Mmm-mm, that’s nice and cold.”
“And a good thing, too,” I said. “My wife’s in agony.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Just the heat. We don’t have air conditioning.”
I thought this would endear me to him. The fellow clearly didn’t belong to the air-conditioned classes himself. (He didn’t belong to orthodontia-, deodorant-, or mouthwash-using classes, either.)
Instead, he said, “Don’t have air conditioning? You nuts? You live in the Dark Ages or something?”
An oafish 20-year-old stockboy looked up wide-eyed from where he was stacking boxes in the corner. “Geeeeez,” he said. “You have kids?”
When I told him yes, he gave a crisp Tsk! and a slight nod, like a small-town scold in the presence of a moral menace.
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! and let no air in or out. All of these houses emitted the jiggly hum of air-conditioned contentment.
Where I grew up, in a coastal town north of Boston, to have air conditioning was an unequivocal embarrassment. It marked you as nouveau riche, or idle, or both. 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. It seemed to stunt people emotionally, too: Kids with air- conditioning were weird, anti-social types who spent beautiful beach days in the thrumming cold of a dark basement rec room, communing with their televisions.
Now that’s the way the whole country is. How could it be otherwise? Tens of millions of people live in places like Phoenix and Houston and Bakersfield and Orlando, which are virtually uninhabitable without air conditioning. 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 creates an intolerance of meteorological variation that has spread to the entire country. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you have an air conditioner, 73 degrees looks like heat stroke. The un-air-conditioned life is not worth living.
Midway through last week’s heat wave, the papers did their whatpeople-are- doing-to-beat-the-heat stories. 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. But this year’s stories were different. 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.
In the hot months, public places used to come alive with people strolling around to cool down or show off their summer dresses. Now everyone just stays inside. 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. It’s between the lonely comfort of climate control and the lonely agony of being stuck in the heat all by yourself.
Much as Robert Frost said about the Atlantic in his poem “Does No One at All Ever Feel This Way in the Least?” —
And now, 0 sea, you’re lost by aeroplane.
Our sailors ride a bullet for a boat.
Our coverage of distance is so facile
It makes us to have had a sea in vain.
— now the weather is lost by Carrier and Hotpoint. Every place in the country is the same place, winter and summer. In Los Angeles and Phoenix, outdoor restaurants are air-conditioned and misted. 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. 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. 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? It’s too darn hot.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
