Last night so many of us stood at the platform at 96th st, dying for the 1 train. People were fanning themselves, wiping their foreheads with handkerchiefs. I saw one guy lift his shirt to cool off and beads of sweat covered his lower back. A man standing next to me happened to sigh, and I was relieved by the coolness of his breath on my hand. A few minutes later a family, fed up with the heat, decided to head up to the street and walk home. As they hurried past me I relished in the momentary breeze caused by their haste. I'm not kidding; it felt great.
The trains run less frequently at night, which is aggravating when you've been standing on your feet all day, but it's murderous when the heat is on. Jenny and I were talking about this last night. "The heat makes people crazy," I told her. Nothing good comes of many people together suffering the same unbearable heat. I vacillated between being pissed off and anxious. I was angry at how stifling it was down there. Why aren't the stations air-conditioned? Why haven't they figured that out yet? The trains are. Sometimes I got scared at how uncomfortable it was trying to breathe. There was no air. Nothing clear and fresh. It felt suffocating down there.
At work the AC's busted in the back where many tables are located and in the front it isn't much better. I'm sweating like I never have before. We're all suffering, but the cooks must be dying.
And at night, here at home, I continue to sweat as I had been at work earlier. I take a cold shower and scrub the sweat and dirt and city off, then I go to bed and resume sweating until I fall asleep. We don't have an AC in the apartment. I plan on buying a fan. However, as difficult as it is to sleep at night from constant sweating, as uncomfortable it is trying to type because my arms and fingers are slick from sweat, as irritating as it is trying to apply makeup while beads of sweat gather at my forehead, I already know I'm more grateful for the heat than I will be for the brutality Nature has in store for New York come winter.
3 comments:
This sums up my summer in NYC experience too. The heat is one thing....but it's the humidity that makes you irrationally violent.
There is a whole other atmosphere down in the subways. "So thick you could cut it with a knife."
I loved that you got a sliver of relief from someone's sigh.
great description, but sorry you had to go through it. you know, the window a/c units work pretty well, it would help you get some better sleep - and maybe you could apply some makeup in your room before you hit the humidity
Like I was telling Jenny, Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet starts a scene by commenting, concerned, that the heat starts trouble and they need to lay low. This scene ends with Romeo killing Juliet's cousin Tybalt, thereby sealing his damned fate.
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