Slapstick Summer

Despite my having grown up in Tucson, I find the heat in New York City to be entirely intolerable - sticky, foul, oppressive, entirely a different sort of beast from the desert heat, which while savage, has a certain bleaching, blowtorch purity.

That being said, a good air conditioner in the window is a godsend, and I’m privileged enough to need to move mine from one window to another so that I don’t give myself freezer burn by having it blow directly on me when I’m sitting in my favorite spot in the living room.

It’s been running for a couple weeks in its current spot, so we make sure it’s off and unplugged as I haul it from the right front window to the left, but there’s always a moment of terror when we actually take it OUT of the window, the intrusive thought being that it will somehow tumble from its perch down onto the street below, where it will crush, say, a baby in a stroller or an old man with a walker or an immigrant family who just got here from Nicaragua or a puppy out for its first walk, etc. etc. etc.

So I have my arms wrapped tightly around it, pulling it out of the window and tipping it towards me to keep the demons of gravity at bay, and the waste water that has accumulated inside it over the past few weeks dumps out all over me and pours a small flood onto the floor.