To smell of something other than sweat and body odor is an important social obligation. This doesn’t suit me very well, living as I do in a rusted-out VW in the middle of the Arizona desert.
The VW is great for summer camping. The pop-top lets air circulate through the van and lets the hot air leave. The windows open and have screens to let the air out and curtains to block the sun. I leave the hatchback open, and that too has a screen. Inside, I have a little fan hooked up to a solar panel. The temperature inside the van is rarely more than a degree or two hotter than the temperature outside. It’s comfortable enough, or if it isn’t, at least I’m used to it.
But without air conditioning, sweat pours from my body all day long. When the temperatures soar past the 100-degree mark in the summer afternoons, there’s nothing that can be done. I take a bath each day after sunset, wash myself off with soap and water, use the cleanest sponge. For a brief moment, I am pure: naked, cool, and clean. But no more than five minutes later, I’m covered in sweat again.
Today is no different from any other. When I go to town, I am sweaty, hot, and smelly. I put on a clean shirt this morning, but already it is wet. The accumulation of sweat in the endless heat of summer is not just something that occurs on your body, on your clothes. When you’re homeless, the sweat piles up inside your mind. You are a filthy, worthless person. Others keep their distance from you.
It helps to shop at discount stores. The people there are crusty, less polished, and air-conditioned perfect. Still, you worry about the stink.
At the Dollar General, the cashier stands behind a generous counter, too far away to smell me. She talks about the recent heat wave. The daily highs have been 118 degrees for nine days in a row.
“Do you think it will cool off a little soon?” I ask. “I’m not from around here.” This is only my second summer in the desert.
The woman in line behind me, a blessed six feet away, laughs at this. “Oh, it won’t cool off until October, and sometimes not even then.”
I don’t reply to this. The locals here are irritating. They take pleasure in talking about the heat as if they know all about it, as though they’re used to it.
The store we’re in is deliciously cool, at least to me. After I pay, I take my ice out to the VW and begin to drain the cooler. The woman in line comes out behind me. She gets into a sedan with tinted, rolled-up windows. She doesn’t roll the windows down, and I know what that means. Even here, at a place like this, the poor have air conditioning. In their homes and in their cars. It’s one of the main things that separates the poor from the outright homeless.
I sigh as I put the ice inside the cooler. I didn’t learn what I wanted to know. I wasn’t asking when the desert would turn pleasantly cool, as it does in the depth of winter. All I wanted was to know when the 118 might end.
The difference between 108 and 118 is enormous. Somewhere between 110 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit, things start to take on their truest nature. That’s when ordinary objects become your enemies. That’s when the metal on the VW, the side that’s in the sun, can burn your skin from just the slightest touch. That’s when water, if left outside in the sun, becomes hot enough to scald your hands. So the laundry, soaking in a plastic bucket, cannot be left outside. Sure, you could try to put it in the shade. But what shade is there in the desert? The bushes are too short, and even the base of the wispy trees isn’t shady all day long.
Other things happen too. Metal silverware, even in the shade, can become almost too hot to handle. Plastic becomes brittle and liable to break. I once set a three-gallon plastic jug down outside, and it shattered from the ordinary force of impact, shattered like it was made of glass.
And then there’s the matter of your skin. It’s not lotion that you need. Your skin doesn’t peel and crack if you drink sufficient water. That means two or more gallons a day throughout the summer. It’s difficult to drink that much. You start to hate the taste of water. But at least your skin stays supple; besides, it’s covered in a sticky layer of protective sweat. No, it’s not that your skin dries up, but something starts to happen. It’s hard to say exactly what. Maybe it’s the frequent low-level burns that add up from touching too many things, each one of them just a little bit too hot. Maybe it’s the fact that everything you touch is unimaginably dry. Whatever the reason, you get marks upon your skin. You open a gallon of water with a plastic screw-top, and the motion leaves a deep groove inside the palm of your hand that doesn’t go away for several hours. Those places on your hand where you hold a kitchen knife, they become rough and raw. Calloused even. The softest paper products feel like sandpaper against your skin.
This is the meaning of 118 degrees. One hundred and eight is hot, but it is not a form of torture.
I didn’t always live like this, hot and homeless, wrapping myself in wet towels at night to cool off enough to sleep. Once I had a job, a condo, an ordinary Nissan sedan, a compact, not too old and not too new. But I got sick of suburbia, or maybe just my stupid suburban self. It all started, I suppose, with the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink.
I came home from work one day and started making supper. But when I went to run the garbage disposal, there was a horrific noise, and the water was all backed up. I turned it off, then turned it on again. This time, nasty dirty water shot out, throwing little chunks of broccoli and pork and pineapple all across the kitchen, on my face, and in my hair.
I emptied out the P-trap, something I had heard of, but had never done before. Now there was no backed up water, yet the garbage disposal still made the horrific noise. I went online to look up how to install a new one. It seemed like a task within my reach, so the next day, I went out to Lowe’s to pick one out. The section was large, but there were only a few boxes actually on the shelf. I decided against the cheapest unit; I wanted this one to work. After all, I was an owner now and not a renter. So I found what seemed to be the premium brand, but chose their cheapest model. I didn’t need a lot of features. Plus, it was on sale.
When I got to the register to pay, it rang up as $300.
“That can’t be right,” I told the cashier. “It’s supposed to be on sale for $99.”
She narrowed her eyes and looked at me, as though I were trying to pull something, as though I were a thief. “No, this is a really expensive one.”
“I saw it on the sign.”
“Do you want it?”
“No, I want someone to go and check the price.”
She wouldn’t go herself, but at last she called someone. He went with me all the way across the store. I showed him the sign with the sale price, and I pointed to the model number on the box. Model #1152. He looked at these, and at last he saw the problem. The box I had picked up, the only box anywhere near that sign, was Model #1152-S. Apparently, that S was worth $200.
“Do you have any of the $99 one?”
It took him fifteen minutes to get a ladder and find one, buried somewhere up on the topmost shelf two stories up. I took it back to the cashier, the same woman as before. The box, which looked identical, only without that little S, rang up as $99. I didn’t say I told you so, but I thought it. I left the store with my purchase in a quiet fury.
I don’t like to fight with people. I don’t like to fight with things. But the disposal turned out to be a lengthy war. There were the pieces that were screwed on too tight, the piece that broke when I removed it, and the tool that was necessary to installation but not mentioned on the box. When at last, I got the new disposal in, I turned it on and found it didn’t work at all.
Back at Lowe’s, the customer service person acted like I might be some kind of scammer. What kind of scam did she really think I might be pulling? The kind where you buy a brand new garbage disposal and switch it out for an equally new-looking disposal of the exact same make and model that happens not to work?
Eventually, I did get a replacement and I did manage to install it. By then, I hardly cared about the disposal. I cared about my aching back. For you see, the kitchen cabinetry had been made so that there is a three-inch lip around the bottom. That means to wedge yourself underneath the sink, you have to almost break your back. No one on the Internet had warned me of this danger. The sink cabinet did not have to be this way. It could have been made with no bottom, to be flush against the floor. I guess someone decided it wouldn’t look good that way. Or maybe no one decided anything. The cabinet was simply made. That’s when I began to realize that every single thing around me is made and sold by people and corporations that simply do not care.
From that day on, I felt it, felt it very deeply, this sense that everything was somehow off. Everything was made too cheaply. Everything was made to break. Even the most expensive faucet might well include a washer with a fifty-percent failure rate.
The refrigerator broke less than two months later. And then the air conditioner stopped putting out cold air. Always, it was something. Back when I first bought the condo, I had told myself that I would keep everything in good working order, that if something broke, I would try to see if I could repair it. If I couldn’t, I would pay to have it done, or I would buy a new one. It sounded so sensible at the time. I even bought a book about electrical wiring and switched out the dining chandelier myself, something I was very proud of. But as the number of things breaking piled up, I saw that very few of them were ones that I could fix. Most of them could not even be repaired, at least not economically. And so the old one was thrown out and a new one purchased. That’s what happened to the refrigerator.
The air conditioner was different. The repair guy came out and charged me $100 to take a look. He said there was probably a small coolant leak somewhere in the system. He could try a leak repair kit. It might not work, but if it did, it would be far cheaper. It was only $200, he told me, for the kit. The alternative might run into the thousands. I told him we could try it. He said he didn’t have one with him, but he saw the Lowe’s as he drove in, so he could run down the street and get one.
“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” he told me and rushed right out the door. He hadn’t moved so quickly the entire time he had been there. Maybe he didn’t want me to think too much about this, that I might go out and buy the kit myself. But of course, I didn’t know what kit it was or how to use it. The air conditioner was a baffling object I had never looked at before. It wasn’t easy for me to do it now, since the HOA kept them in little fenced off areas that were locked. Only maintenance had the key since there were air conditioners for several units behind each gate. Did they think someone might tamper with someone else’s?
After this, there was the dryer. It didn’t break exactly. It just stopped drying properly. It took three hours or more to dry even the smallest batch of clothes. When I read online about this problem, I found that the ductwork probably needed to be cleaned. You could do this easily yourself, it said. Of course, in the end that wasn’t true. The washer and dryer were stacked on one another and then wedged inside a little cut-out space in the second bathroom. There was an access panel to get behind them, and I could see the duct from there, but I couldn’t reach it. I needed to pull out the dryer from the front, but how to do this wasn’t clear. For you see, the top of the dryer, when the two were stacked, was taller than the doorway. How did anyone ever get them in there? I really couldn’t say.
Sometime after this, I decided I had to leave the suburbs. I wanted a simpler life. I wanted fewer things.
The temperatures at last are falling. No more 118. There is relief in this, knowing that fall is on its way. But for me, there is no real difference. I’ve always felt the weight of things, the weight of owning and maintaining them.
The VW is broken. The engine won’t turn over. I’m miles from the nearest road. I have AAA roadside assistance for all the good that does me. The battery on my phone is dead, and now it cannot be recharged. You see, the day before the engine problem, the solar panel broke. Not the panel itself, which appears to be fine, but the cord that attaches it to anything has pulled away from the panel. It’s not the kind that you simply plug back in. There’s no obvious way to reattach it. So the sun is here, still plenty hot even in mid-October, but the energy is gone. It’s not gone, of course, for others; it’s only gone for me. An acceptable rate of failure.
I have a gallon of water left. I plan to drink it all today. Then I too will be stiff and heavy. Broken. Just like I’ve always been.
Currently, she’s taking time off to write and travel throughout the western United States.
- The Weight of Things - December 20, 2023