Every day when I head home from work, I walk across town on a major midtown street. I like walking for its own sake, and the weather has warmed up lately, so I enjoy tooling around in the sun, but I don’t so much like walking in midtown at lunch hour on a weekday. I don’t so much like people shuffling along and eating at the same time; people pouring out of Macy’s and stopping dead in their tracks in front of me; people wearing sidewalk-width sandwich boards and handing out flyers for hole-in-the-wall men’s clothing stores; people zipping in front of me with clipboards and trying to sign me up for expensive hair-care “courses” at a sniffy new salon in the neighborhood, and then refusing to listen when I politely explain that my hair has a severe learning disability; people interpreting the word “sidewalk” rather liberally, particularly the “walk” element, and weaving in and out of foot traffic on bicycles and Rollerblades while yelling “on your left”; and so on and so forth.

In the summer, of course, this gets worse. In the summer, large numbers of tourists arrive. Simply put, tourists get in the way. Most of them come from places where life proceeds at a sane pace, and I don’t blame them for that, but I do wish that they would learn to walk faster. New Yorkers get a lot of guff because we supposedly see the rest of the country as a provincial suburb of the Big Apple, but on the flip side, vacationers to New York tend to treat the city like a giant theme park or petting zoo. Tourists wander. Tourists saunter. Tourists mill. Tourists herd each other into group photos, and tourists gawk at the skyscrapers and the mean-looking people in mean-looking shoes, and tourists hold the map sideways and observe that the East River lies only a few blocks to the north. Occasionally, however, tourists can amuse and delight. Once, a sightseer from abroad invited me to join him for a “cream egg.” I declined politely, but not before giggling, “Do you mean an ëegg cream’?” Frequently, a vacationer from the Midwest will ask me for directions, approaching me with a look of genuine trepidation, because she has heard all about Those Rude New Yorkers, and although she sincerely believes that I will rip her arm off and beat her with it, she and her family can’t find Rockefeller Center, so she sort of scuttles in front of me with her guidebook held up in front of her face to ward off the hail of blows that will inevitably result from speaking to a native, and in the meekest possible voice she murmurs “excuse me sorry to bother you can you help us find Rockefeller Center,” and when I tell her how to get there and draw her a little map on a Nike store receipt, she straightens up from her cringing posture and smiles like I have just commuted her death sentence or something and says, “Oh! Thank you. You’ve been so – so – so nice.”

With a major sightseeing attraction two blocks from my apartment, I’ve learned to live with the vacationing hordes, but I don’t understand why anyone would want to come to New York in the summertime in the first place. I hate hot weather anyway; I could tolerate it when I got a vacation at the same time, but now that I don’t, the constant sweating (and attendant shirt-changing, second shower-taking, and deodorant reapplying) just seems odious. I can’t imagine trooping around to museums and monuments in the baking heat; I organize my summer so that I can spend as much time indoors as possible, preferably lying naked on the floor in front of the air conditioner. Other acceptable activities include going to fifteen movies in a row, coming home with blue lips because Manhattan cinema owners set their thermostats at a delightful fifty-eight degrees; looking the other way when the furry, and therefore utterly miserable, member of the household settles down for a nap on the bottom shelf of the fridge; and sending Frozfruit stock into the stratosphere. I don’t know why the heat bothers me so much, but it does. It doesn’t seem to bother the Biscuit at all, which can create problems, because when I say things like “I love you, honey, but you have to QUIT TOUCHING ME,” he gets sort of offended.

I would prefer to stay inside for the summer, not moving. I can’t, of course – I have to go to work, and I have to run errands, and I have to have a social life, and besides, all of the TV shows I watch have gone into reruns. I just wish I could do all of those things at night, when the city cools off and the icky smells die down a bit. In the heat of the day, I often have to pull the neckline of my t-shirt up over my nose to ward off the stench of boiled garbage, or the sickeningly thick smell of funnel cake coming from the street fair du jour, or the noxious fumes of the subway that for some reason smell much worse in the summer months – not to mention the redolence of those who take a casual attitude towards bathing. New York reeks in the summertime, and between the heat and the foul odor and the my hair’s imitation of a water spaniel, I have to resist the urge to draw the blinds and hide until September. That strategy would work out so much better in so many ways. Nobody would see my hair. Nobody would care if I shaved my legs or not, so I would let my knees keep that layer of skin and not bother shaving at all. Nobody would hold up a hand to block the blinding glare from my forehead. I wouldn’t have to sweat, or smell bad smells.

Most importantly, though, I wouldn’t fall prey to the Italian ice cart. Every summer, the Italian ice cart figures prominently in a digestive tragedy, but I never seem to learn. It usually happens like this. On one of the first really hot days of summer, I pass the Italian ice cart on my way to return a movie, and I think to myself, “Boy, those look really good, but I got really sick last year when I ate one, so I won’t get one,” and I keep walking. Then I pass it again on the way back from the video store, and now I feel a little hungry, and also a little bit hot from walking, but I don’t get an Italian ice because I don’t want to feel wretchedly ill for two days. Later, after it gets even hotter, I walk past the cart yet again on my way to the grocery store, and I really really want a coconut one, and I have quickened my step in order to resist, but then I see a little kid eating a cherry-flavored one, and it looks insanely good, and the kid licks the ice really sensually, and I look at the kid chilling out under the balcony of his stroller and eating (as well as wearing) an Italian ice, and I look at the cart, and I look at the kid, and I look at the cart, and I walk over to the cart and order a large coconut one. I eat it on my way home, and it tastes wonderful, and I drain the last drops from the little paper cup and throw it into the trash, and just as the little paper cup makes a “ping” sound in the trash can, my intestines emit a decidedly ominous rumble, and I have just enough time to get to my apartment before all hell breaks loose, and I spend the next day in the bathroom with a big stack of magazines and a bottle of Imodium, and when I run out of magazines I sit there cursing the little kid.

The heat used to have its rewards. The heat used to mean lying in the basement with a pile of library books and a pitcher of lemonade. It used to mean going to summer arts camp, and getting poster paint all over myself, and giggling hysterically in pottery class whenever the kid next to me “accidentally” lost control of his wheel and his pot whizzed off the wheel and thunked on the floor. It used to mean afternoons at the pool, diving for pennies with Gigi and interrupting my mother’s conversation about a hundred times to show her the newest variation on my underwater handstand technique. I didn’t have air conditioning growing up, and I lay awake sweating a lot of nights, but I didn’t mind; I didn’t need sleep as much then, I guess, and like most kids I led a life of leisure, so if it got too hot to do anything during the daytime, I just didn’t do anything. The heat doesn’t have fun stuff attached to it anymore, and even though the heat hasn’t even come yet, I already want it to go away.

Share!