A hot time in the old town

by David Benjamin

“Hot town, summer in the city? Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty…”

—John Sebastian

MADISON, Wis. — You don’t have to guess what city John Sebastian was thinking about when he — along with Steve Boone and his brother Mark — wrote “ … All around, people looking half-dead, Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head … ” Only New York City in August—Manhattan, really—conveys that oven-temp oppression and high-rise claustrophobia. Standing on an 8th Avenue curb in the dog days of summer, I hesitate to obey the “Walk” light and step onto the simmering asphalt, imagining that it will liquify around my feet, deep-frying my toes, sinking me ankle-deep while the light changes and a thousand Yellow Cabs rev their engines, jostling for dibs on my obliteration.

As I’ve aged, I’ve noticed the heat more. I came to dread it after two weeks of hellish weather—they called it a “countercyclone from the Sahara”—in Paris in 2003. The thermometer hovered relentlessly at 90° and I slept—well, laid there—in a nightly puddle of sweat. Fifteen thousand Frenchpeople died and they had to storebodies in the meat and vegetable lockers at the vast marché in Rungis. 

Partly because of that cruel August, I came to fear the heat. Certainly, when I was a kid, and summer was freedom, weather was irrelevant. I roamed smalltown Wisconsin oblivious to the waves of humidity that withered grownups all around and built thunderheads ten miles high, breeding tornados and painting horizon-wide Stendhal sunsets. I carried on my skin a perpetual sunburn, dust caked between my toes, wearing only a t-shirt and a pair of jeans torn off raggedly above the knee. Dressed and dirty in his unvarying ensemble, I dashed every morning into the seething sunlight, where I was too busy with tadpoles, baseball, bumblebees, green apples, woods, swamps and a swimming hole on the Lemonweir River to take note of the climate. It’s hot. So what? I’m busy.

It was when I moved to cities that I began to appreciate heat. One summer I spent painting steel and loading trucks in Orlando, where the vapored air was so thick that every afternoon, it congealed into hot raindrops that poured straight down from a windless sky and left behind on the ground wispy pools of steam, like dry-ice fog in a scene of witches by Shakespeare. Orlando had heat that clawed at your back, gripped your limbs and filled your restless sleep with visions of immense mandibled insects lying on your chest and coveting your blood. Florida gives off heat that makes you want to turn and run, only to crash into a wall of bigger, wetter, stickier heat. Why do people move there?

I spent one summer night in Hong Kong, but that was long enough. Heat there, close to the equator, in a city teeming with polyglot masses, everyone selling something, was a huge, damp hand inside a dirty wool glove. It holds you—breathing, suffocating—in an ambience of scorched spices and body fluids. You recoil from touching anyone but they press, impinge, importune on every side, at every turn. Hotlips and I stayed the night in a red-walled “hotel” room that looked and felt like the dressing-room of a Tenderloin massage parlor. There was “air-conditioning,” we were told—a feckless tease in a breathless closet. 

Noel Coward had also been there. He wrote: “ … In Hong Kong/ They strike a gong/ And fire off a noonday gun/ To reprimand each inmate/ Who’s in late… But mad dogs and Englishmen/ Go out in the midday sun … ”

Heat on tropic islands is blessedly different, ever-present and perpetual, but always carried on a gentle, drying breeze that assembles rainless cloudbanks that render a daily twilight so glorious that hotels hire hula girls to sway in the foreground while sunset-gazers drink mai-tais and titter with awe. In this sort of warmth, one can only raise a sweat by working at it, jogging a penitent mile along the beach or subbing into the endless volleyball game, played on the court beside the lanai, by teams of (mostly Australian) masochists. 

In Tokyo, I survived seven summers. The season begins with something called tsuyu, which consists of one-hundred-percent humidity manifested in week upon week of drizzle and downpour. After a few days, you feel as though you’re walking—even when you’re sitting down, indoors—through a foot of warm saliva in wet socks and waterlogged workboots, while itchy rivulets gather on your neck and trickle down your spine. The rain disperses in July, ushering in two more months of spirit-crushing humidity. I worked inside during those summers, careful to prevent the sweat that dripped off my face from puddling on my keyboard and electrocuting my prose. August (and beyond) in Tokyo is a warm, damp shirt, too sizes too small, that you can’t take off. It’s a haze of invisible grime drawn by a malign magnetism to your skin, into your hair, stinging your eyes, lining your creases, chafing your crotch and straining your relationships.

I’ve done L.A., too, in the summer, where the afternoon brightness (it’s mostly hazy in the hot, hot morning) makes your eyes ache and your hope fade. Michael Connelly, whose novels take place there, put it simply. Morning, he wrote, “once more … came up ugly in his eyes, all sharp edges and harsh glare.” L.A. heat simmers off geometric planes, its corners honed on stone and concrete, cracked by a merciless sun in a naked sky, until it scatters in burning shards that rake your flesh. A California tan is leather against the heat.

But this year, it was back to Manhattan, where the heat’s cruel accomplice is people, hurrying, swarming, rubbing against you as they pass, leaving streaks and itches. “Looking half-dead,” but sent forth in a tunnel-vision stampede, sidewalk-wide, elbows flying. “Outa my way!”, scurrying quick—like roaches—over molten asphalt. 

However, this is New York, full of beautiful people. And she is. Oh my God. Spaghetti straps on tawny shoulders, bare arms somehow cool and dry, gauzy fabric that flatters every curve and … uh oh. Look. Cold, cold eyes that if you dare meet them, say, “Look again, you sexist shitheel and I’ll rip your heart out with my manicured nails and feed it to my shi-tsu.”

And instantly, she passes among the horde, a mink in the rat race, oblivious—immune?—to Sebastian’s match-head misery.

Incongruously, so was he. I stopped to stare. He was three hundred pounds, if an ounce, commanding the center of the sidewalk, framed in the city’s eternal scaffolding (New York’s only shade), draped in a sort of wool caftan—pilled, stained, specked with moth-holes, unwashed forever—from shoulder to mid-calf, more a cassock than a shirt. Below this gray shroud, a glimpse of bare leg and a pair of slippers but hard to see. Flattened Keds? Flip-flops? His hair was long, greasy, tangled and perhaps inhabited, his beard unkempt and flecked with remnants of recent meals, his cigarette unlit—or, at least, unpuffed.

Could he feel the heat? Could he see the rat race—arms and legs churning, briefcases slapping, deliveries late—as the light said “Walk,” as they all impended toward him. Hardly. He was, as they passed, a garbage scow laboring upstream, a rock in the river, whom every vessel, every fish, every urgency had to navigate or crash—coffee spilled, ass on the burning cement. 

He wouldn’t have noticed. New Yorkers are nimble and, after their fashion, polite. No one touched him. We all kept moving, swimming through the steam, slogging through the fug, hurrying toward a change of season that, when it comes to the city in a month or so, we’ll be too busy to mention. 

“… Come on, come on and dance all night

Despite the heat, it’ll be all right…”