Ghetto-Rigging an Air Conditioner

For the past week, apparent temperatures in the 110s have rendered life unbearable for millions across the American Midwest. The situation is little better in the mid-Atlantic and East Coast. Long daylight hours of merciless sun, beset by machete-worthy humidity and only the most excruciating tease of wind mean that lots of folks are sweating, bitching, moaning and praying for winter. Unfortunately, as happens every year, some of them die.

Many of those who are, to borrow an expression from the South, "taken by the heat," live in actual ghettoes. Usually these people only dream of air conditioning, which they encounter in retail establishments when they can and in designated cooling centers when they can't. Of course, not everyone can make it to or are even aware of these facilities, so in July and August, hospitals continue to receive mostly impoverished victims of heat stroke, exhaustion, dehydration, death, and so on.

This is very disturbing, but in the affluent Chicago suburb of Barrington, Illinois, problems pertaining to a low- or no-income lifestyle seem far away. They're an hour's drive southeast on Interstate 90, to be exact, an hour's drive in your plush, gleaming, luxuriantly frigid, 13-mpg Escalade, which you perhaps received for your sixteenth birthday. Barrington is a superbly moneyed small town, a bedroom community populated by modest, conservative folk with enormous and wildly successful portfolios of this and that (sometimes art, mostly stocks) who, for all their modesty, think nothing of spending a few thousand dollars on a pair of shoes, a bottle of wine, or a dog. They simply won't boast about it. Most of these people own and presumably use at least one air-conditioning unit.

There is another Barrington, though it doesn't sit across a railroad track or county line; it's made up of crappy bungalows that are always "Subject to a Public Hearing," a few derelict apartment buildings, the odd neglected clutch of townhouses. These are the ugly abodes of Barrington's vanishingly few poor, and they are sprinkled haphazardly throughout the tiny downtown, defining the blind spots of the other, finer community. My companion and I inhabit a four-room apartment in one of these. Needless to say, it was not furnished upon let with an A/C unit, or even a fan.

In late June, when the heat was best described as "kinda Mephistophelean", we bravely pretended to like it. We lounged, draping ourselves over the furniture in various states of undress, gorging ourselves on ice cream and sticking our smiling heads out the windows when driving. We giggled over our eternally slippery, pungent bodies. We could still remember the blistering cold from as recently as early April, and with our little fan chugging tirelessly away, we drank beer, mopped our brows and enjoyed the summer.

Something changed around the Fourth of July. Too often, I noticed a dazed, weary look in my lover's eyes. We slouched and slept fitfully, if ever: I couldn't lie in bed for the puddles of sweat collecting under my sacrum. No volume of Jewel Infant Drinking Water (which I have never understood) could sate us. Work was enjoyable; the restaurant I manage is blissfully cool and dry at all hours. We soaked washcloths under the tap and put them in the freezer for a few minutes, then wrapped them around our necks, spread them on our inflamed backs, used them to rub down our chapped thighs. I masturbated to visions of Antarctica.

One afternoon, while in the basement, irritably laundering the numerous garments we'd inundated with beer-and-curry sweat, he found an air conditioner.

It had apparently fallen from someone's second-story window. At first, I thought it was some kind of mangled bread machine. It sat on the counter, pathetic, destroyed and hopeless.

"I can fix it," my boyfriend declared. "Should take me about an hour."

It took him about an hour. The man works as a contractor and has spent the majority of his life repairing guitars, speakers and sound components; however, I would still term him technically unqualified for HVAC service. The fan blades were apparently catching on a piece of Styrofoam, which I had not known was a significant element of air conditioners. I thought the unit's exterior casing was disfigured beyond repair, but my valiant fellow set to with an alarmingly large hammer and his trusty Leatherman. Ultimately, he tied the casing together with 12-gauge wire.

I hope never to hear a man curse as much, nor as violently, as I heard this one curse over the ravaged Whirlpool window unit on our kitchen floor. Permutations of "bastard," "shit," "cock," "fucker," "sucker" and "mother" emanated from his normally restrained mouth as though he were undergoing some special torture reserved for traitors to the Manchu empire. Still, I have observed many male persons repairing intractable objects, and well understand that such strong and numerous oaths assist immeasurably in the progress of the task at hand.

After hammering the fan blades into some semblance of place, lashing the casing together to vaguely suggest a cube, inspecting and eventually discarding the majority of the unit's plastic armature, it was time to put the unit in the windowsill and turn it on.

I crouched, terrified, behind the kitchen counter, my cigarette trembling, my eyes squeezed shut, as he heaved the tenuously functional unit onto the sill, roared with the exertion of gently, furiously shoving it through the window, and hoisting it backward when the machine threatened to plunge anew from its precarious mooring. He plugged it in. He turned on the power.

It sounded like a prop plane warming up. The unit rattled ominously, spat, died. He turned it off, inserted his Leatherman into the thing's perilous mouth, grunted, swore viciously, tweaked something, and turned it back on.

From behind the counter, I could feel soft tendrils of cold, conditioned air issuing from the top aperture of the unit.

Nothing exploded, save the unbounded joy in the hearts of two miserable creatures who knew that they would survive the summer.

— Eve Adams (ultimaluz at gmail dot com)