Well, it finally happened. A few weeks ago the wife and I caved and bought an
air conditioner for the bedroom. Our holdout was noble — for years I had regarded this step as yet another fabric softener-esque concession to what Caesar would call
"the effeminating powers of civilization" — but a second consecutive brutal Fourth of July weekend ensured that we would relent.
Lodged somewhere in my subconscious was, apparently, a need to
earn my reprieve from the oppressive heat and humidity that so many of my ancestors weathered without the aid of a Kenmore 5,700 BTU window unit (though Caesar, the hypocrite, probably had a captured Gallic concubine to fan him). So I hacked myself to bits while installing ours. The streetward exhaust grill of this particular model is comprised of hundreds, possibly thousand of metal slats, vertically arranged and razor-sharp. At one point during installation, before we managed to screw it down into the window frame, the air conditioner teetered on the sill, threatening to heave itself out into the driveway. I threw my arm around the back of the unit to cradle it, slashed my fingers open on the grill, leaving twenty or more deep parallel lacerations down the index, third, and fourth fingertips of my left hand.
Justice! my subconscious might have declared —
a karmic down payment. As I tested the absorbency of Bounty paper towels on my blood-spigot fingers, my Yosemite Sam swears drowned these observations out.
Earlier that day I had been pontificating at work about new laws requiring convicted felons to surrender DNA samples to law enforcement. I thought it gave the authorities too much of an advantage in identifying criminals, with the result that true-crime book and film genres, with all their reliance on whodunit intrigue, would ultimately forfeit much of their appeal for lack of plausible suspense. A co-worker suggested that police have been taking fingerprints for years, and that practice had only enriched crime narratives.
Ah! I declared,
but determined criminals can burn off their fingerprints to escape future detection. I noted parenthetically that I was sure I had seen that at least once in a movie (was it
Face Off?). For my part, I argued, I would burn off my own fingerprints that very day (and I don’t even have any extralegal aspirations) if I could be assured that it wouldn’t hurt.
Needless to say, eyebrows were raised in the workplace the next morning when I arrived with Band-Aids lashed around the ends of three fingers. Phutatorius had some 'splainin' to do that day — yes, indeedy. As I type these words tonight, the cuts have healed and the striations on my fingertips have all but disappeared, but I'm still searching the Internet for a class action settlement notice covering “all persons injured by an unreasonably dangerous Kenmore air conditioner exhaust grating.” Keep your eyes open, readers, and send me links if you find them.
Status report, August 13, 2003: Just as I feared, my wife and I now spend all our at-home hours locked in the bedroom, our 15- x 20-foot refuge from the chicken-soup atmosphere parked outside the door. Entering our enclave of conditioned air is like ingesting a York Peppermint Patty without taking on the calories. It’s glorious, a great leap forward for the apartment, but the technology is insidious and seductive: the
TV, our second-newest appliance, sits alone and unattended in our sweltering living room. We haven’t watched it in weeks.
