The Sunday Memory Drawer - My Late Night Summer Hideaway

We're deep now in the belly of Summer 2012.  On my last trip to New York, I got the tail end of some really sweltering weather on my first two days there.  Last week in Los Angeles, there was the unusual wisps of...gasp...some humidity.  And, now back here in New York, the humidity in the air can be sliced with a butter knife.  You can almost see it as it envelops every pore of your body. 

Global warming?  Phooey.  Yeah, it's summer and it gets freakin' hot.  We deal with it.

When I was a kid, it was a lot easier to cope.  I had nothing else to do.  In that youthful purgatory of being too old to sit in a wading pool down on the backyard lawn and too young to get a summer job, I was a bit lost during the summer months.  We had one air conditioner in our house, situated in the living room.  Spend all day inside and watch TV?  That got a little old by the second week of July.  Spend all night inside the ultra-coolness that surrounded the Zenith picture tube?  Well, that wasn't an option.  When it was really, really hot, my mother, already commuting to a NY job every day, slept on the living room couch so she could be crisp for the morning run to the train station. 

So what to do at night when the temperature still hadn't dropped below 85?

Well, eventually, a routine developed for summer nights on 15th Avenue in Mount Vernon.

The post 6PM hours were easy to cover.  I've written before of our neighborhood vacant lot that was nightly transformed into our own personal ballpark.  Surrounded by weeds that were virtual condominiums for mosquitos, this was hardly the ideal way for me and my buddies to stay cool.  Running around till we were sweaty and playing our own special brand of baseball with ground rules that had to be perfectly tailored for our dimensions.  Hit the ball in the big thoroughfare of First Street, you're out.  Hit the sliver of a sidewalk and you've got a homer.  Throw the ball over the head of the kid playing first base and expect a ten minute delay while we rifled through the aforementioned weeds looking for the ball.

But, there we were every night from about 6PM to around 830PM or whenever the ball was declared officially lost.  We needed to head back to our block anyway.

Coot and his Good Humor truck were due at 845PM.  Dessert!!  And we would savor our treats on somebody's front steps.  Landing en masse as a group.  Or sometimes it was just me and my best neighborhood pal Leo munching our Chocolate Chip Candys on the cement stairs in front of my house and yakking up the day's events. 

By about 930PM or 10PM, Leo would retire to his home which included two parents and three lively brothers.  As for me, the house was deadly quiet and sibling-less.  Upstairs, my mother was asleep in the living room, chilling away for her next day of work.  Downstairs, Grandma had decided once again that television was for the birds and headed off to bed herself.  Meanwhile, my father wouldn't be home from his night job until after 1AM. 

Now an official summer night owl, I had at least three or four hours to kill before I would hit the hay myself.  Back then, nighttime Met home games started at 8PM, so sometimes there was still a contest to watch finish up on the rickety black-and-white portable television in my room.  But it was still way too hot for that and the bedspread worked up the sweat that had finally evaporated after my baseball exploits on the lot earlier that evening.  I could have watched Johnny Carson, but his jokes were not as funny while you were losing quarts of water in your own personal sauna.

I had hours to spend and a body to cool.  What's a kid to do?

There was only one place for me.  Our kitchen.  With the enormous fan in the window.  It made the sound of the D train rushing through a local subway station. But, like ocean water crashing up against a shore, there was something oddly soothing with that loud whirring of our kitchen fan. I could listen to it for hours. And frequently did. Way up close.

I was a weird kid.

And electric fans had been the way our family kept cool during the summer. 

My grandmother had one mounted in her kitchen downstairs as well and that must have been how people stayed cool during World War II. Apparently, there are all sorts of scientific solutions on how to use the fan to get gusts of wind going throughout the house. It must have been handed down like family lore, because both my dad and Grandma were cooling experts.

If you're in the bedroom, you turn on the kitchen fan and then close all the doors of the house except for the room you're in. Voila. The whole opening in the home gets all the intake and you have a breeze. Naturally, I would invariably go into one of the other rooms and then I would hear the wail.

"Close the door!!"

But, after 10PM every steamy summer night, I had to be near that monster of a fan.  For the breeze, but also for the noise.  It shut me into my own special world.  This was my "alone" time and I valued it.

So did my dog Tuffy, who would sequester herself in her sleeping box and keep me quiet company.  This would be my hideaway for the next three hours.

First order of business?  I'd make myself a sandwich with one of the German cold cuts my father had bought the previous Saturday morning.  Usually my beloved Taylor Ham or some Cervelat.  Wait, didn't I just have a Good Humor ice cream?  No worries.  That had to be...wow...over an hour ago.

For two summers, I would spend the 10PM hour and playing out past New York Met seasons with my Strat-O-Matic baseball game.  These were the versions of the popular strategy game that were not computerized.  I'd follow the games of an earlier season schedule and simply replay the games.  Then, I'd record the stats in a spiral bound notebook.  The goal was to see if I could duplicate the same statistics that each player had actually recorded in that season.  And was it possible for me to manage the New York Mets and improve their overall record?

I told you I was a weird kid.   And obviously an only child.

I was only good for about two or three games a night.  I had to set aside quality time for my next nightly activity.

Reading.  And summer was the best time to do it.

There was always something different about diving into a book when you didn't have to as opposed to when it was assigned to you by some nutty seventh grade English teacher. All those designated "must-reads" ever did was promote the opportunities to make sport of the titles.

Silly Ass Marner.

Great Expectorations.

And the boys locker room classic: A Sale of Two Titties.

Reading on hot and humid nights was a completely different thing, though. I couldn't wait to hit a book around 11PM and go till about 1AM or whenever Dad popped home from work and sent me to bed. Even then, my reading preference tended to be more film and sports biographies. I would attack a novel from time to time. Usually, if some best seller was being made into a movie for summer release, I would race to finish the book before seeing the film. I remember vividly the breakneck speed at which I finished "The Godfather." 

And, for this innocent youngster, Page 27 was more education than I ever needed.

But, the simple act of nightly reading was not the complete nirvana. I had another bizarre ritual that went along with it hand-in-hand.

I needed to have a glass of iced tea at my side.  Usually the Nestea powder brand.  Nobody in my house had the time or the inclination to brew it from scratch.

I'd then take the kitchen chair and put it as close to the monstrosity of a kitchen fan, which was always spinning on the highest speed.   It was situated right next to a china closet, which created a pretty dark corner and a very small space.  No worries.  I was snug.  And there is where my summer nightly reading took place. With a tensor lamp and me wedged in between the fan and the china closet with a good book. It was almost like my own private little cave.

To this day, the sound of an electric fan does a little more than just comfort me. It blows me right back to Don Corleone, Rhett and Scarlett, and a biography of Charlie Chaplin.

Before I knew it, I would be stirred back to reality by a male voice.

"Go to bed already."

Dad was home.  I'd stumble down the hall to my Gobi Desert of a bedroom.  Thinking fondly of the next night.   When I would repeat the routine all over again.

Dinner last night:  Wine and cheese at the Hollywood Bowl.