This one is The King of Air Conditioners.
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It took two days in New York City before I found myself on the train to The Nuthouse in the middle of the night. It is a journey of three miles from my apartment to The Nuthouse, which, in Manhattan, translates to a trip that occupies the better part of an hour — plenty of time to reflect on the events that led to the train ride in the first place.
Earlier in the evening, I had set out to buy an air conditioner. Part of the fun of New York real estate is that, while the rent is double what it would be in any other part of the country, the amenities on offer are very spare indeed. I once heard it said that people in Germany bring their entire kitchens with them when they move — appliances, cabinets, and all. The New York equivalent of this seems to be the air conditioner.
In most cities, setting out to buy something is a fairly straightforward process. Buying an electric toothbrush in Detroit, for example, was quite simple: I discovered that Target sold the toothbrush I desired, drove a dozen miles, and retrieved the toothbrush. Easy enough.
The New York purchasing experience is quite different. After work on Tuesday evening, I simply put on my shoes and stepped out onto the street with the general goal in mind of finding a window air conditioner. Manhattan is a dense place, which makes it possible to do this sort of thing. A New Yorker can pick a direction, walk a few blocks, and find in the course of their walk any object they could desire.
I walked ten blocks before I arrived at a dazzling palace of small appliances, where I stared at an enormous display of window air conditioners in a sort of trance until a man called Tomasz snapped me out of it with a rapid-fire series of questions about the cubic footage of my apartment. Once his data collection was complete, he led me to another stack of boxes.
“You know,” he said in his unplaceable European accent, “This one is The King of Air Conditioners."
I like to think that I am immune to most sales tactics. I do not buy things from targeted advertisements. I research purchases carefully. I read reviews. I calculate operating costs and expected lifespans. I sometimes imagine that the entire field of marketing is based on the assumption that I do not exist. The endorsement of the great machine as “The King Of Air Conditioners,” however, broke something deep within me.
Within moments, Tomasz had sold me The King of Air Conditioners, a warranty, and the special window mounting bracket (“required by Local Law 11,” he explained). He gave me a look of grave concern when I declined the professional installation and sent me back uptown in a cab (“you may not carry this fine machine ten blocks by hand”).
Five flights of stairs and 150% of my air conditioner budget later, The King of Air Conditioners was sitting in its box on the living room carpet.
It was 6:30 p.m. and the next day was forecast to be quite warm, so I started in right away on my installation of the great beast, beginning with the special window mounting bracket (required by Local Law 11).
Thirty minutes later, I had stripped three screws, almost dropped a power drill five floors down an airshaft, and had essentially nothing to show for it but some holes in a windowsill.
The receipt for The King of Air Conditioners was sitting on the table with “CUSTOMER DECLINED INSTALLATION” in highlighted block lettering, and I, a proud man, set out once again to find replacement screws at a local hardware store.
By 9 p.m., I had stripped the replacement screws and discovered that the special window mounting bracket (required by Local Law 11), may well be incompatible with my windows. All of the nearby hardware stores were closed, and any reasonable person would have thrown in the towel, but I had skipped dinner and was on the warpath. For a third time, I left the house on a mission.
New York is, we are told, the city that never sleeps. To most people, I suspect this is little more than a clever saying. To me, it is a guarantee in the same tradition of “No receipt? Your meal is free!” or, “Total satisfaction or your money back.” This is a city without built-in air conditioners, without dishwashers (or even garbage disposals, for that matter), and without even in-building laundry. This is acceptable to me, provided that the city does not sleep — that is the whole bargain.
I was becoming increasingly enraged that local hardware stores dared to close at night when The Nuthouse came into my life. The Nuthouse is a Manhattan hardware store, the greatest merit of which is proclaimed on a large sign above its front door: “WE NEVER CLOSE.”
I suspect that I fall very cleanly into the target demographic of The Nuthouse: people whose home improvement projects have gone awry in the middle of the night. There were several of us there.
I handed a mangled screw to the man at the counter and explained that I was looking for “a few just like this, but less stripped.” He said nothing, vanished for about five minutes, and returned with a small box full of the exact screws I needed.
The box cost $2.12, which seemed low to me. I had imagined that The Nuthouse might have a pricing structure similar to that of a hospital emergency room, charging a tremendous premium for off-hours service in a crisis.
Stepping out of the subway on my return home, I bought a plate of chicken and rice from the cart next to the stairs, which I ate as I stared at the window bracket (required by Local Law 11), a growing collection of mutilated screws, and the still-unopened King of Air Conditioners. It was 11:30 p.m.
New York City, we are told, never sleeps, though I am not sure the same can be said for the people who share my airshaft, and I figured it best not to make enemies of them two days into my lease. I am pleased to report, however, that when I emailed the professional air conditioner installer at midnight, the response was immediate. The great city keeps up its end of the bargain.
(It is, as I write this, ninety degrees outside and very humid. I am sitting at my desk in a sweater and long pants. This one truly is The King of Air Conditioners.)
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“How New York Gets Its Water” by Emily S. Rueb in the New York Times.
I love tap water. In an increasingly homogenizing world, tap water is different everywhere. If you visit the right people when you travel, they will tell you about their tap water, where it comes from, and how excellent it is. In my hometown of Holland, it comes from Lake Michigan, is distributed by the Board of Public Works, and is delicious. Where I went to college in Kalamazoo, the water comes from underground aquifers, is foul and wretched, and leaves little white spots on anything with which it comes in contact. When I studied in Aberdeen, Scotland, the water was so clean and pure that it left no spots at all, even on the glass shower door.
Today, I am at last a proud consumer of New York City water. NYC water is fantastic. People call it — and this is true — the champagne of tap waters (and we all know how susceptible I am to that kind of marketing). The quality of New York bagels is often attributed to their being cooked in the wonderful tap water.
For years, when I have visited New York, I have stepped into my host’s apartment, dropped my bag, taken a big gulp of water directly from the sink, and carried on for several minutes about how delicious it is.
E. B. White, in Here is New York (see the May 10 edition of the Newsletter), wrote about the splendor of the water supply: “It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester.”
More than seventy years later, the water system is largely the same, and this wonderful piece from the New York Times from 2016 explains it in charming detail.
“Burnout: Modern Affliction or Human Condition?” by Jill Lepore in this week’s New Yorker.
“If burnout is universal and eternal, it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just… the hell of life. But if burnout is a problem of fairly recent vintage — if it began when it was named, in the early nineteen-seventies — then it raises a historical question. What started it?”