No Sweat

This past summer, being both bored and relatively broke, my friend Brittany called me and asked if I would want to go see a movie with her. As I was in much the same situation, I agreed, and so I met her at her apartment. We stopped at a department store to pick up some snacks we could smuggle into the theater, and as we parked and got out of the car I commented on how hot the weather was.

“Can you believe this?” I said.

“Yeah,” Brittany said, grabbing from the backseat something black and shiny and what appeared to be about the size of an army-style duffel bag. “It’s crazy. Just last week it was, like, seventy degrees out.” She attributed the dramatic swings in temperature to global warming, and I, being neither a scientist nor very well-read on the subject, chose to agree. St. Louis, it seemed, had always been prone to extreme ends of the weather spectrum, but it was strange to go so quickly from an unseasonable cool to what now felt like standing five feet from the front gates of Hell.

Walking from the parking lot to the building left us drenched in sweat, and as we made our way over the hot asphalt, I looked over at Brittany and realized that the bag she was carrying was actually her purse. I wondered how she could manage to lug something so gigantic around in this kind of weather, and, more importantly, why she would want to do so. Getting from the car to the door seemed to be draining my energy, and as the entrance came closer my desire to be inside began to grow.

Normally, after years of walking into shopping malls, stores, and public places, one expects a feeling of relief, a rush of cool air to beat back the heat hanging outside. The experience is not unlike stepping in front of a large air conditioning vent: an immediate and overwhelming drop in temperature, followed by the sensation that one has been transported, as if by magic, to one of the Earth’s polar regions. After a quick shiver, I’m left wondering if I’m the only person questioning my decision to wear short sleeves instead of a parka in the middle of July.

But when Brittany and I crossed through the door, the wash of cold air I’d expected didn’t come. I wanted what would amount to a bucket of ice cubes poured inside my pants, and instead all we got was a window fan set to low. It did feel good to be out of the sunlight, but as we dragged ourselves along I found myself looking at the floor and wondering how long the cool feeling would last if I were to collapse to the ground and press myself against the tiles.

In the candy aisle, we made our selections, measuring them against the size of Brittany’s purse to figure out if what we wanted would fit. As if there wouldn’t be enough room in that giant bag of hers. After we made our decisions, we went to the cashiers at the front of the store and bought the candy.

Back outside in the heat, I saw a man mowing grass along the outside of the parking lot, on the little concrete median that divided the parking lot from the road that led to the highway. Immediately I felt sorry for him. He made me think of myself, growing up, when I, too, had had to step outside and, under the intense stare of the sun, cut the lawn.

When I was eleven or twelve, my parents had the brilliant idea of making me work outdoors. I don’t know if they thought this would help turn me into a more well-rounded person or if they had more practical considerations — maybe they saw me stumbling one day into construction work or felling trees as a lumberjack — but I begged them to reconsider. Maybe they just thought I was lazy and needed a kick in the pants, but being lazy was fine with me, and so I instead suggested that I try to better my work ethic indoors, preferably washing dishes or dusting, where the closest I got to direct sunlight was next to the kitchen or living room windows.

“You can’t sit inside all the time,” my mother said, standing over me as I lay sprawled out on the couch, craning my neck to see the television behind her.

From his recliner my dad spoke up. “You really need to get outside and learn how to cut the grass.”

“But my allergies,” I said. “I can’t breathe when I’m out there. How can I do it when I can’t go five minutes without sneezing?” And I wasn’t making this up. On weekdays during the spring and summer when my mother would push me outside along with the daycare kids she watched, I would play around for maybe twenty minutes before the smell of freshly cut grass or wildflowers started getting to me. My nose would run and my eyes would start to water, making it appear as if, in the midst of the worst sneezing fit of my life, I had just watched my cat get run over.

The discussion was over, though, when my mother returned home one Saturday afternoon from a trip to the drugstore and handed me a paper cup of water and a tiny white pill. “It’s for your allergies,” she said, and after I choked it down my father led me outside to the little white shed in our backyard. The day was a warm one, and I felt myself growing nervous and riddled with anxiety as my heavy jeans weighed me down and I worried about getting my shoes dirty.

Inside the shed, I was sweating already, and as I gazed at the various tools shoved on my dad’s crude workbench and heaped on naked wooden shelves built up in the roof’s exposed crossbeams, I realized how seldom I had actually been in here. The smell of sawdust tickled my nose as a bead of sweat stung my eye, and the various devices hanging from the walls were reminiscent of the late-night horror movies of which I was so fond. Here was a dusty shovel like a hockey-masked serial killer might use to decapitate his victim. Next to it, leaning against a vice, lay a chainsaw nearly identical to one that killed a teenager in a wheelchair under a blackened Texas sky. Above me hung the sinister J of a hook, while beneath my feet dried blood from a now-absent deer carcass made a crude circle in the dirt floor. I jumped away from the stain, more scared than ever, as my dad pulled a plastic tarp off of the lawnmower. He dragged it outside to show me how it worked, and then left it running so that I could begin. But while I was glad to be out of the shed, I wasn’t sure which situation was worse.

Getting started, the first few minutes weren’t so bad. Sure, it was warm, but it didn’t seem like anything I hadn’t experienced before. And, in a way I suppose it wasn’t. But this time, there was no option to run inside to splash cold water on my face or sit in front of my oscillating fan for the better part of an hour. I tried to make the best of it, though. I would cut little designs like concentric rectangles into the backyard or make zigzag paths in between the swing set seats. The fun lasted until I realized my hair was a slick dark sheet against my forehead, and after that I started to notice just how hot it was.

When I’m tired or uncomfortable I tend to let people know it, and so once I got past the twenty minute mark and saw that I’d only gotten half of the backyard done, I started pouting and pushing the mower like it were a mythical boulder I had to roll up a hill only to watch it tumble back down again and again. Shoving it forward and then dragging it back, I felt my legs begin to burn. My eyes ached from their exposure to the bright sunlight, but still I kept glaring at the kitchen window looking out over my progress, hoping that maybe my mother would see the pain I was in and come rescue me.

Maybe I’ll just die out here, I thought. That’ll teach them a lesson.

Finally, when I was done, I pushed the mower back into the shed and shut its heavy white door. It was a full hour and a half later, and I went to my room and collapsed on my bed.

I felt the same way before falling into the passenger seat of Brittany’s car. The heat had taken away my strength and, it seemed, my desire to go on living. The scene felt reminiscent, like from a movie where the supporting character, exhausted and unable to continue, says, “Leave me behind. I can’t make it.” I could imagine myself, lying on the hot asphalt, crawling a few final inches before nobly giving up the ghost and baking in the sun.

Even with the windows down, the car had heated up since we had gone inside, and as we pulled out I was grateful for the breeze that come with driving. With no air conditioning, sitting still could be deadly, and so I prayed that we would either miss the red lights or Brittany would have the good sense to gun the engine to make it through before they turned.

The department store must have been a fluke, I thought as we drove along. “Why wouldn’t they have had their air on higher?” I asked.

“Probably the economy,” Brittany said. “It’s too expensive to keep the air running on high.”

Again, I agreed. I hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe I had and just couldn’t remember it now. My head felt light. And had the temperature dropped, or was I starting to get sunstroke?

The theater appeared in the distance, and I went through the list of deities in my head, thanking them all. Surely it would be air conditioned, cooler than the department store had been. I was eager to park, and so I kept pointing out spots. It was a matinee show, and so the parking lot was pretty close to deserted, but I wanted to make sure that we got as close to the front doors as possible. The thought of another trek away from the car was almost too much to bear in this heat, and as my strength felt like it was slowly draining away I pushed out of the car as soon as we were stopped.

“Hey,” Brittany called out. “Wait for me.”

She was barely out of the car, but I was already lumbering towards the building like a character in his final moments, reaching as a boy finished with his day’s work might for the knob of the back door and the promise it holds for just a little time out of the summer sun.