by Tom Papa
“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”
“Got some crap for you, Carl,” my father would say.
“Got some crap for you, too.”
“Any fans?”
“Maybe,” he’d tease with a chuckle.
My father loved hearing this. This meant that off to the side there was some stuff that was spared the compactor because it just might be worth saving. We got a lot of our appliances this way. Over the years my father accumulated six or seven toasters, a waffle iron, even an “extra” refrigerator that never worked but stayed in our garage for decades.
And hundreds of fans.
Carl knew to hide those special for my father. Rusty ones. Big ones. Some that looked like boat propellers. Some from the early days of oscillation. There were heavy ones made out of steel with the name of a true American company from Pittsburgh or Cleveland patriotically welded to the front. These weren’t the plastic fans that you find in college dorm rooms today. These were fans that were used to cool down hardworking, Depression-era patriots. These were for Fan People.
And every July when we reached peak sweat he’d drag them out of the basement, set them up around the house, and plug them all in. They took so much power that the lights in the entire house would flicker as they came to life.
I’m not saying they weren’t powerful. They were very powerful. The way a wind turbine or jet engine is powerful. Some would spin with a ferociousness that could easily cut off all your fingers. But they were no match for New Jersey humidity. All this army of fans could do was push the hot, suffocating air around the room and on top of the children.
I didn’t know much, but I knew there had to be a better way. It didn’t make sense to live like this. And soon we found out that we didn’t have to.
It was after a particularly hot night, one of those nights when it’s so hot that you sweat through your sheets. When it’s so hot that the dog tries to open the refrigerator with his tongue. When it’s so hot that you can’t sleep so you just stare out the window and pray the sun doesn’t return and make it even hotter.
My sister Kristin and I were splitting a piece of ice at the kitchen table when our sister Jen came back from a sleepover at her friend’s house. While we were sweaty and defeated, she looked refreshed and renewed, as if she had slept for a week straight. She had a look on her face that said she had seen the future.
“Where were you?” Kristin asked.
“I was at Debbie’s house,” Jen responded.
“Why are you so happy?” I asked.
“It was so nice there.”
“Nice? It was the hottest night of the year!” stammered Kristin.
“Was it? I hadn’t noticed. I was sleeping in air conditioning.”
We didn’t know it, but that was the moment we lost her. Our sister, our companion through many long, horrible summers as Fan People, had been to the other side. She escaped the Congo by station wagon and was introduced to Air-Conditioner People.
“What the hell is air conditioning?” Kristin demanded to know.
“It’s what rich people use to cool off their homes. You wouldn’t understand,” she said as she made herself an iced tea. She never made iced tea before. None of us had. Who was this person?
Anger combined with sweat and filled our eyes. We marched into the TV room where my father was aiming a fan at my poor mother, who looked like a woman from the late 1800s who had fainted on one of those fainting couches.
“We need air conditioning!” we yelled.
My father turned and slowly wiped off his brow. “What did you say to me?”
“We heard all about it. Jen was at Debbie’s and she’s been back for an hour and she’s still not sweating.”
My mother tried to lift her head off the couch pillow. “Who said what to Debbie, now?”
“Lie down, Mother.”
My father stormed out of the room and turned up the fans. It didn’t make us any cooler, but he could no longer hear our complaints.
My sister was banned from Debbie’s house, but the secret was out. We started noticing that every place we went was colder than our home. Suddenly supermarkets, movie theaters, and ice-cream shops took on an air of wealthy elegance. We didn’t just notice the cold, we smelled the money.
Later in the summer, my father, feeling the pressure, gathered us all together in the hallway and announced that he was about to turn on the greatest invention of all time. We were excited. Had the big guy sprung for air conditioning? Were we about to be cooled off without having to lie on the basement concrete? Were we rich?
“I’ve installed—an attic fan!”
While I was disappointed, I had to admire his dedication. Refusing to change teams, he’d decided to go in even harder on the fans. I’m not sure where he’d heard of it. I’m not sure what it cost. But he’d purchased what must have been to him the ultimate achievement for a Fan People family.
This is a giant fan, so big that in order for it to be installed they have to cut a hole through the peak of the house. A slatted door replaced the attic entrance, where normally the ladder comes down, and when a switch was flipped in the hallway closet, air is pulled from the hot house, into the attic, and out through the fan.
“Is everybody ready?”
We scowled.
He turned it on. The slats opened. He smiled. It was working. A giant hum roared through the house. And then all at once the air was sucked out of the bedrooms, slamming all the doors shut.
“Get to your doors,” he yelled. “Use something to wedge them open.”
He was screaming like a captain on a ship in the middle of a typhoon. We pushed against the wind to our bedrooms as he cranked it higher. Kristin was pushed across the floor in her nightgown like a leaf.
“Use a shoe or a chair. Anything,” he screamed.
We all propped open our doors and it worked. It actually worked. There was an amazing breeze racing through the house. And it was cooling us off. It really was.
“Fuck Debbie’s house,” Kristin said.
We were Fan People. And we were proud. And on this night, we had won. We defeated those high bills that the Air-Conditioner People didn’t even open. We slept well, with a cold breeze flowing over all of us. We thought the war was over. We were fools.
The humidity returned, and the attic fan, like all fans, was no match. It was now sucking humid air from all over the metropolitan area through the house like a tropical storm. We were hot. We were sweaty. We had lost. And if there was any doubt that we were Fan People, we found my father standing in the middle of the kitchen in nothing but his underwear, with a square metal fan, atop a stool, aimed at his sweating belly.
My mother stood in the doorway with her children behind her, all of us looking like we had just drifted up on shore like Cuban refugees. She walked over, looked him in the eye, and unplugged it. The fan slowly came to a stop.
“But we’re Fan People,” my father muttered.
“We were,” she said. “But not anymore.”
He might have cried. There was too much sweat on his face to tell. I definitely cried. They were tears of joy. I went up to my room and put on my best button-down shirt, came back and mixed us all a round of iced tea, because I knew what had happened.
We had just become Air-Conditioner People.
To this day, although my father lives in a town house that came with the central air conditioning built in, he’ll refuse to turn it on. And if you ever sleep there, and you wake up in the middle of the night, confused and sweaty, you might catch him in your room plugging in a portable fan.
And that’s all you’ll get.
HAVE YOU EVER WORKED SO MANY DAYS IN A ROW THAT YOU PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT AND REALIZED YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU WERE DRIVING? I HAVE …
YOU WORK TOO HARD
They say that Americans are dumb and lazy, and although we don’t actually hear people say it, we know damn well they’re thinking it.
While there are plenty of nimrods
in our country, for the most part we are not lazy. From what I can see, we work harder than any other people on the planet.
Who works harder? Europeans? Please. I’ve seen them, sitting seaside, drinking wine, and eating giant pastries filled with chocolate and fresh cream in the middle of a workday. They wander down their tiny cobblestone streets that have never been repaired, go inside their open-air apartments, lie down, and sleep the rest of the day.
Maybe they wake up around five, have an espresso under a shade tree with their friends, and smoke cigarettes until they slowly wake up. By the time they’re ready the workday is over and it’s time for a cocktail, dinner, and a quick ride on their Vespa to make love to their girlfriend before they come home and have dinner with their family.
Not us. We don’t have time for romance on scooters with exotic, caffeinated lovers. We can’t sit around and eat omelets and wait for the butter to melt on our baguettes. We’re lucky if we get lunch at all. Can you imagine telling your boss that you are going to spend most of the afternoon taking a nap and making love? He’d laugh, pat you on the back, and tell you to gather up your things.
Germany might be an exception, but even they don’t work as hard as we do. Sure, they’re always on time and are highly efficient. Big deal. How hard is that when you work only eight hours a day and get two months’ vacation?
We don’t even have hours. We have jobs to do. Jobs that have to get done no matter what, no matter how long it takes or how many late-night emails and phone calls we have to make. In America you get it done or get out.
We wake up in the dark and work through the night. We do early-morning hours, overnight hours, and overtime. We take 5:00 A.M. flights so we can make a meeting by 10:00, put in a full day, and fly back that night on nothing but pretzel sticks. We take the bus, the train, and commuter jets that are held together with duct tape flown by exhausted pilots and the oldest flight attendants working anywhere in the world.
No wonder we’re so damn tired. People are sleeping on the subway standing up. People are nodding off in their cars in parking garages. Americans are so tired that they’ve figured out how to sleep in the middle of meetings with their eyes wide open like horses with business degrees.
We’re pounding energy drinks and Red Bulls just to get through the afternoon.
It’s no wonder that Starbucks became the biggest company in the country. We need more fuel. And not one little espresso cup like they have in Italy. We need a bucket-size cup that we can squeeze five shots into, a bunch of sugar, and some pumps of caramel on top because we’ve got stuff to do.
We don’t have time for French cafés where everyone sits around and complains about the evils of capitalism. We pick up our coffee at the drive-through on our way to work because we’re late on our rent from all the money we spend on lattes.
If it means getting a job, Americans are ready to sacrifice, scrape, and claw their way to it. It’s amazing how far we’ll go for work. Our freeways, highways, and bus stops are filled with millions of people who for some reason don’t live anywhere near where they work. Every day there’s an endless migration of people in their cars, eating breakfast, putting on makeup, drinking smoothies, and snorting coffee beans, all while steering with their knees. It’s a stop-and-start struggle all the way to the office, and every year the traffic gets worse. Do we move? Hell, no. We just get up earlier.
Americans stay up late and get up in the dark. The alarm goes off at the last possible minute, and immediately we turn into volunteer firemen. Don’t even think about pressing the snooze button. Never press the snooze button. It’s a lie. A tease. All it does is promise you more sleep while making you later and creating more panic. And that’s what the mornings are in this country—pure panic.
Every morning it’s as if we’re thrown into a natural disaster. We have no choice but to stumble to the bathroom, crawling, banging into the walls, taking deep breaths, confused, blind, and tired. Oh so tired. This is not when the body wanted to wake up. This is when it was forced to wake up like a dog being Tasered awake at the kennel.
There’s nothing more important than the shower. A self-shocking system that if skipped will ruin your entire day. Humans should come with a label that reads, “Just Add Water.” But this isn’t one of those long enjoyable showers when you hug yourself under cascading water while sniffing the soap. This is a speed shower where you do your best to hit the important parts and keep going. This is an ass-and-armpits nuclear reactor shower. They get longer showers in prison.
This is painful. This is misery. You’d love to call in sick, but you can’t because you did that last week and they thought you were lying. If you do it now, they’ll know for sure.
You want breakfast? Sure, you can have breakfast. But there’s no time to sit and read the paper, casually skimming through every section of the newspaper. This is a workday and every second counts. You can’t be late. Not in this country. Maybe in Tuscany when you’re showing up to your noodle-making job, but not here at Best Buy. Throw on your polo, shine up your name tag, grab a banana, and get out the damn door.
And it’s hard work. Important work that keeps everything going, and I’m in awe of you all. Day after day, doing jobs that are so crucial to all our lives. Everything we do throughout our day was touched in some way by another human being doing their job.
Thank God for you all.
Thank God for the guy who drives the Oreos to the store on the corner. Thank God for the cookie maker, the filling person, the packaging lady, and the dude who puts them all in rows.
Someone made my desk. Someone made this computer. Shaped this coffee cup and wrote, “World’s Greatest Dad” on it. Someone picked and roasted these coffee beans. Someone designed this chair and figured out how to make the air conditioner work and put the vent in just the right spot so it cools me off but doesn’t blow directly on my bald spot.
All hail the people out there making the pens and pencils and my Cambridge pads. You see a mass of people causing traffic? I see heroes going out there every day, doing their part, and making our lives a little better. Like bees in a hive, we all have our job to do. It takes teamwork to make the beehive work.
I’m not saying everyone does their job well. Some do a bad job. We’ll never meet them, but we’ll feel their effect. Why did that hair dryer break so quickly? Why did the garage door get stuck? Why are all the chips crushed in that bag? Because someone screwed up. Someone didn’t take pride in their work, and by not caring about themselves, they don’t care about us, and now there is a kink in the system. Now we’re just a little more messed up than we should be.
But there’s nothing more impressive than when someone does his or her job well.
It’s a beautiful thing. I have the most amazing plumber. He loves what he does, he knows what he’s doing, and he’s a pleasure to watch.
He crawls under the house like a cat. Like a chubby, middle-aged feline. He follows the pipes, inspects as he goes, and finds the problem. My favorite part is when he tells me about it.
“Okay, buddy, I find out the trouble,” he says with pride. “Let me explain to you.”
He goes into great detail, like a surgeon explaining what he found when he cut open my chest, and I love every minute because he loves what he does.
Americans are doing a great job all over. We’re picking almonds and avocados in California. Shooting movies in Atlanta. Selling insurance in Hartford. We fill up office buildings and suites and work from home. We teach children and bake bread and wait on tables and toss drunken people out of bars. These are jobs. Really hard jobs.
Your hard work is the reason our lights stay on, our hospitals are open, and our showers have water pressure. You pave our roads. You police our streets.
When stuff catches on fire because some dingbat doesn’t know how to turn on a gas grill, someone does their job and puts it out.
When we are hungry, there are places open at all times of the day and night ready to feed us. When things go wron
g, workers are standing by ready to help. Tow trucks, mechanics, and twenty-four-hour help lines.
You may not love your job. Not everyone does. But that doesn’t mean you’re not doing great work. You are. Right now there is someone cleaning a toilet. Mopping up after some drunk’s bad behavior. Carrying garbage, digging holes, pulling out asbestos. Someone is standing in a hot tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike. Someone else is pulling weeds in a hot field. Picking strawberries. Demolishing a basement. Riding on the back of a garbage truck. Painting, brushing, cleaning, hosing down, ripping apart, carrying, hauling, raking, and sorting. Every day. All day. All night.
So don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t doing enough. That our generation is lazy. That Americans are lazy. Sure, we may not know all the artists in the museums and all the poets from the last century. But that’s not because we’re slacking off, it’s because we’re at work, working harder than everybody else. Except maybe all those people in Asia.
HAVE YOU EVER EATEN SO MANY BUFFALO WINGS IN ONE SITTING THAT YOU ALMOST SNEEZED FEATHERS? I HAVE …
SHUT UP AND EAT
I can’t stop eating. I won’t stop eating. You can’t make me stop eating.
When I’m eating with other people and reach the end of the meal, it’s totally an act. I don’t get full. I stop eating only when I can tell that it would be socially unacceptable to keep going. I see people who stop eating when there’s still food on their plate and I can only imagine they have something really wrong with them.
I may have a tapeworm. If I find out that I do, I won’t have him removed, I’ll give him a nickname and call him my friend.
If I’m at a party and there’s food out, I lose my mind. If there’s a bowl of chips, it’s mine. If I see cheese and crackers, you better keep your hands clear or you will get bit. Don’t expect me to carry on a conversation when there’s a platter of anything around, I simply can’t concentrate. Not until my wife drags me into the other room, throws a pitcher of water in my face, and slaps me around.