Pursuit of Cool

Take my advice: Don’t wait until a heat wave to go looking for an air conditioner

After a month of weather more suited to Newfoundland than Boston, I welcome the heat wave that arrives in early June. At least, I welcome it until the relentless sun reveals a heretofore undiscovered idiosyncrasy of my apartment: The skylight that lets in a bit of sunshine in the winter also turns our apartment into Dante’s Inferno’s kitchen’s electric oven’s heating element in the summer. My apartment is so hot, palm trees grow in my refrigerator. My apartment is so hot, I drilled a hole in the wall and lava came out.

I’m actually OK with being hot, but during one 95-degree day I become worried about my dog. I convince myself that if I don’t go find an enormous air conditioner, right that moment, I’ll come home to find Manny lying on a platter with an apple in his mouth and a basted glaze covering his crispy hide. I actually have one small air conditioner already running, but I fear its feeble output won’t be enough to stave off tragedy, and the next thing you know I’ll be on the news slamming my door on a Fox reporter as a graphic scrolls across the screen reading, “Man doesn’t buy second air conditioner, dog spontaneously combusts.”

Hey, we live in the most consumer-driven country in the world, right? Surely I’ll be able to buy an air conditioner at my choice of stores, and for the best possible price. I might go to three or four merchants before settling on an air conditioner that strikes my fancy. I head to Target first, thinking maybe I’ll buy one designed by Michael Graves that looks like an iMac. Also, I need toilet paper, an ottoman and the enhanced letterbox DVD edition of Sylvester Stallone’s seminal arm-wrestling film Over the Top. In Cambodia, you’d probably have to go to four different stores to get all those things. It’s sad.

I’m sad, too, because the Target air conditioner section is as empty as a crazy Michael Jackson fan’s box of doves after all the not-guilty verdicts were read. I ask an employee when there’ll be more and he says, “Maybe in a day or two, comrade,” and then offers to trade me a dozen eggs for a bar of soap.

I head next door to Home Depot. They’ll have air conditioners. They do. However, each one is roughly the size of a Honda Civic and about as expensive. With the amount of electricity this thing would require, you could either cool your apartment or power up your flux capacitor and go back to the future. I ponder where to try next.

Air conditioners are weird items. There’s no other household appliance that shows up in more random places. You wouldn’t say, “Hey, the refrigerator’s out, we need a new one. Let’s see if they’ve got any at CVS.” Yet, there in Stop & Shop, I find the Holy Grail: a stack of air conditioners sitting there in the “seasonal” aisle. However, upon closer inspection, these are 5,000 BTU models, which I gather from the illustration on the box means that they’re capable of cooling a room roughly the volume of my pants—my pants, that is, after they’ve come out of the wash and shrunk up a bit. I consider buying two of them and stacking them on top of one another until I realize that I’m losing the capacity to reason.

Eventually, I find a stack of 6,000 BTU models in Brooks Pharmacy. While I’d decided that buying the 5,000 BTU air conditioner at Stop & Shop was unthinkable, 6,000 BTUs sounds just about right. To be honest, I have no idea what a BTU is anyway, and I no longer care. As far as I’m concerned, it means Buy This Urgently.

About 15 minutes later I have the thing in the window. As it turns out, 6,000 BTUs is roughly the cooling output you get if you put an ice cube in your mouth and blow softly on your hand. The air conditioner came with a remote, which is kind of redundant given that you need to sit within 6 inches to feel it working. But I have my AC, and damned if I’m not going to sit there, 6 inches away, and make a remark every five minutes about how nice and cool it is in the living room.

The day after my epic, frustating, semi-fruitless quest for cool, the temperature in Boston drops 40 degrees. It’s June, I have a new air conditioner, and people in the grandstands at Fenway are wearing winter jackets, hats and gloves. I really can’t end this story with a better joke than that.