The mercury was pegged at 96 degrees at 10 in the morning
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 2, 2019
- 934
In times of trouble like these, with rancor in our politics and record heat plaguing most of the country, I often turn to classic cinema for words of wisdom and comic relief.
In Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, “Dr. Strangelove,” released in 1964, America is drawn into a nuclear showdown with the Russians because an insane Air Force general named Jack D. Ripper is having problems, well, in the bedroom department.
Oh, this guy’s a real piece of work.
He’s convinced the Communists have polluted what he calls his “precious bodily fluids” by means of fluoridation, the means by which water was purified in post-war America.
So he does what any crazy military man with access to the nuclear code would do.
He launches a pre-emptive strike, and then once he’s sure the bombers can’t be recalled, he blows his brains out.
It’s terribly amusing in a black-comedy way.
Kubrick’s point is fairly obvious: doomsday is closer than you think, and the sooner sanity is restored, the safer we’ll all be.
Unfortunately, in the movie, the world is pretty much destroyed.
See, that’s the funny part.
Guess you had to be there.
I remember walking down a summer city sidewalk with my father past a theater where “Dr. Strangelove” was being shown, but what stays with me are the words printed on a sign affixed to a window.
“IT’S COOL INSIDE,” it read, each letter dripping with icicles.
This was early ‘60s shorthand for the fact that the place was air-conditioned, which, in my 9-year-old mind, was a novel idea, something I’d only heard about but never really experienced.
Sort of like liking girls.
It would be another eight years before AC became a reality, and by 1972 I was nearly finished with high school and about to leave home for college.
I know you’re probably thinking, “C’mon Mike, you had to have at least walked into one air-conditioned building before Watergate happened.”
And that may be true.
It’s just that these are the facts as I remember them: no schoolroom, no church, no store, no friend’s house, no car and certainly not our own home was thusly equipped.
Air-conditioning was a rumor, an urban legend, something akin to life on Mars or a Beatles reunion. It was beyond belief.
And so when I joined my family on what would prove to be my final summer vacation, I was ready for something, anything good to happen.
So when I walked into the spacious confines of our room at the Holiday Inn, located just off the interstate in a Michigan town called Kalamazoo, I was startled to find it so cool inside.
I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Midwestern heat isn’t like Southern heat, and I can say this with some authority, having lived below the Mason-Dixon line since the turn of the century.
Down here in Coastal Carolina, a temperate spring lasts for approximately a week, maybe 10 days, usually peaking around the Sunday that the Masters ends.
After that it’s full-blown summer.
My wife and I, however, have agreed that no matter how blazing hot it gets in this house, we will not — as a matter of principle and economics — ever engage the central air until the first of June.
This is non-negotiable.
We are, after all, native Ohioans and proud of that heritage.
I remember, however, entertaining a former colleague and his wife who had decided to visit us in the middle of their Outer Banks vacation. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the thermostat in the kitchen read 91 degrees.
This house is built of bricks, which means that when it heats up, it just stays hot.
Some kind of scientific theorem.
I was sorely tempted to ease our guests’ suffering — sweat was positively poring from their faces — but decided to move our little confab to the patio, where it was even hotter.
The fact that they never came back should come as no surprise. After all, I could have put them in the lap of comfort quite easily.
But I don’t do that.
If I suffer, so does everyone else.
Call me selfish, call me sadistic, call me doomed to hell.
It’s all cool.
And that brings us to last Wednesday. The mercury was pegged at 96 degrees, and this was at 10 in the morning. Clearly something had to be done. The beach offered only temporary relief, and besides, it was so crowded, towels overlapping on the sand and umbrellas fighting for airspace. We’d been there and done that.
“Let’s go to a movie,” I said. Soon we’d decided on “Yesterday,” the Beatles-inspired film we’d waited to see all summer. The place was nearly empty — in fact only one other lady was there — and we were just getting comfortable when the air-conditioning kicked in.
Cold? You talk about cold? In a closed-in space that could accommodate possibly 250, maybe 300 people, they had the AC turned down so low we needed sweatshirts and stocking caps.
My wife and I tried moving to the very rear of the theater, figuring that it might be warmer there, but vents were everywhere, which, had the place been full, would have been a very good thing.
Instead, we bolted for the doors before the credits ran and basked in the glow of the glorious Southern summer sunshine.
Think of Jack Nicholson at the end of “The Shining” or Julie Christie struggling across the Russian tundra in “Dr. Zhivago.”
Sometimes you just need some heat, crazy as that sounds.