my new air conditioner, the absolute unit

I installed our new air conditioner this morning. The more details I include, the less impressive it sounds. It’s portable, it even has little wheels, and I made Connor carry it up the stairs for me. I “helped” by putting one hand tenderly under the bottom corner and asking the whole time “Are you sure you’ve got it?” It is not a window unit, so it wasn’t even a balancing act. I really only had to follow two and a half pages of directions--with pictures-- and click a couple of plastic pieces together so that the hot air could be pumped out of our window. The only tool I needed was a single screwdriver, which I immediately dropped out of the second-story window. Connor asked where I was going and laughed very hard when I told him that I had to go outside to get our screwdriver. He said I could have killed somebody, and oh boy, trust me, I’d already worked that all over before the stupid thing even hit the ground. 

I fell asleep sweating and woke up sweating, so I knew today was the day it had to be set up. I’d almost woken up Connor overnight to make him help me. After I finished installing it, I realized exactly how much I was sweating (the term “flop sweat” was on Law and Order: SVU this a.m., and Connor was like what the hell is that? And I was like, my mom says that all the time, it means “very much sweat.”). When I saw that it was 84 degrees outside I freaked out and yelled the news down the stairs. It’s fucking Ohio. It’s fucking May. It’s not supposed to hit 80 until like July. That’s what I was promised (i.e. convinced myself I deserve) when I moved to a place that snows 9 months of the year. 

The box it came in was another problem. It was the perfect size to use as a garbage can for all of the garbage I had to clear out to make space for the air conditioner. The bottom fell out when we were taking the unit--absolute unit-- out of the box. I saw it fall out. I knew it had no bottom. I still put all of my garbage in it and then made Connor tip it sideways and carry it to the dumpster. It was leaking used q-tips and rice krispy treat wrappers the whole time, so I will contend that my job of following him and picking all that up was actually harder.

Last summer, we didn’t have an air conditioner upstairs where our bedroom is. When we moved in, we thought we could just tough it out because it wouldn’t be that bad because of all the months of snow (see above). We were fucking wrong, me especially. I am my flop sweat mother, and neither she nor I handle it very elegantly or uncomplainingly. We also anticipated that I would walk into a teaching job with my brand new master’s degree. A summer of unemployment followed by months of essentially minimum-wage substitute teaching didn’t leave us as flush with cash (Jean Ralphio from Parks & Rec voice) as we were hoping. We also really really wanted to save up for a house. Our first cash-strapped solution was to buy an air mattress and just sleep downstairs in the living room in front of the window unit built into the wall of the apartment. 

We got a $35 air mattress that is honestly nicer than the bed we share. I’ve had that bed since I was 15, when my mom bought it from my neighbors after their grandmother died--it was her bed. I’ve had 13 years to think about her dying in that bed, even though I’m not sure where she died. Just like occasionally I think about how my grandmother died wearing the engagement ring I inherited and wear every day.

The air mattress thing was basically ok until Connor’s brother came to visit. I even considered all 3 of us sleeping on the mattress, but I snore super loud and hate sleeping with pants on. So we realized we would have to sleep-sweat upstairs.

July and August are fucking hot in Ohio, like the state had to set up heat shelters for vulnerable people, cook an egg on the sidewalk hot. My solution here  was some of my very finest work. We went to Home Depot and bought the widest dryer hose we could find. We duct taped  a garbage bag to the downstairs AC, funnelled the garbage bag to the size of the hose and taped that right up. Then we snaked the hose up the stairs, mounted it on some unpacked moving boxes, duct taped that right up, and put a fan in front of it to spread out the good air. It was incredibly inefficient but it fucking worked. I swear. And actually looking back, we probably lost a lot of money on cooling costs, maybe even more than if we had just bought a second window unit. And also it was probably not the safest. We took it apart and hid it all when the maintenance guy had to come in for something. Is a janky air conditioner grounds for eviction? Probably.

The most annoying and completely unforeseen side-effect of this setup was the amount of condensation that pools on a garbage bag and a dryer hose when you duct tape them to an air conditioner. The garbage bag itself was the worst offender, so much so that we had to put a rubbermaid container underneath it to collect the rain we were creating. To avoid ruining our carpet, we put down a plastic paint tarp sheet thing and wiped it down occasionally when the puddles got un-walk-over-able.

We lived like this for weeks, maybe months, that felt like years. We had a houseguest with this shit up in our house. Granted, it was because of the houseguest that the apparatus went up in the first place, but I would rather sweat to death in my sleep than let my mom or anyone else see how we were choosing to live. 

This year, enough has changed for us--and we are no closer to saving up for a house and moving out of our apartment--that I ordered an air conditioner as soon as I saw the weather jump into the 60s a week ahead in the forecast. I felt tremendously guilty that a delivery person had to lug the nearly 80 pound (absolute) unit to our doorstep in the middle of a global pandemic. I felt guilty spending the money. I felt like a stupid asshole dropping a screwdriver out of a second story window. But I have also felt that sweet sweet icy cold air puff out the black shirt I have been wearing every day for the last 3 weeks and ice my perennially un-bra’d chest. I have felt my room slip from unbearably hot to habitable, losing that suffocating feeling in a way that I haven’t felt since that dryer hose snaked all over my apartment. It’s much prettier this way, it doesn’t rain as much inside our apartment, and my god the difference it makes when you are in a position to just throw money at your problems. My god.