A Little Heat For A Cold Day

With the cold air and snow we are getting in January, I wanted to share a little bit of heat. Just a bit to warm you up. I have a new book by John Martell coming out, a wonderfully passionate romantic drama. I thought, before that comes out, how about a bit of summer heat to take the chill off. This is a simple story, no real plot, just a slice of life. Though it very well mirror the life of a teenage boy on the early days of summer back in the 1980s at his family's old beach house.

It was so hot.

The rain had come the night before, which meant that I had to get up from my bed to close all the windows of my family’s beach house. The place was old, so old that it didn’t have air conditioning, and it counted on the ocean breeze and the shaded, open windows to keep the inside from becoming as hot as the outside in the summer.

But that only worked when the windows were open and the breeze blew.

When the storms came every summer, and they came, every summer, the windows were closed, the air became still, and the old beach house sweltered.

I got up in the middle of the night to shut my windows in the upstairs bedroom as I raced the rain to keep it out. I knew it would get hot, so hot, still, like you would choke, inside, that at some point I would open the window and let the rain in and cool me off. I would lay still on top of the bed, restless but unable or unwilling to move, because that would only make me hotter, on top of the old bed, the old sheets, no blanket, and wait either for sunrise or the storm to stop. Or to the point I couldn’t take it any more and let the rain in so that it would soak me and the wood floor, too.

It was just so, so hot.

June was a fickle month. It didn’t care if it was hot or cold. It could be both, within a week. Now, with school finally out, June came in and burned. The adults would find a place to cool themselves, or complain, the old men would wipe their brows with white handkerchiefs. But us kids, we knew better. Summer was supposed to be hot. You got used to it quickly. Summer was freedom. The heat, that brutal summer sun, that was our escape. Even if you borrowed your father’s car and it had air conditioning, you drove around with the radio loud and the windows down, blowing your hair back to help you cool.

It was wonderfully hot.

I fell back asleep and awoke to a morning sun beating through the closed window. It was early morning, and I already needed a shower to clean off the thin summer film of sweat that coated me.

Instead I ate Apple Jacks in a green bowl with enough milk to turn sweet and green. It was cold, but never cold enough.

Morning burned in. The sun comes up early in June, with long, long days and late sunsets. They were great for going to the beach and doing nothing else other than hoping for a cool wind.

I sat on the front porch, because at least there it was shaded, away from the morning east sun, already a white glaring haze in the sky. The early morning orange ball and shimmering reflection had long ago been burned away to a cruel and merciless fire in the blue sky. It was easier to sit in a rocking chair and read rather than face the heat just yet.

The beach access next door started to fill. Well, a few cars showed up, and then a few more. It was too early in the season to have the lot get filled up. The people got out, hopped around on the black tar lot, God knows why the Kill Devil Hills town government paved a beach access with the hottest, blackest substance known to man. Too many would duck under the fence to walk up my beautiful white concrete driveway, just to save their soles from the burning hellscape. I thought about hosing the drive down, but it just might only make it hotter, steaming their feet like shrimp to little pink shrivels.

Later in the morning, I saw my old mate Jason coming down Martin St. carrying his fishing pole and a bucket. Jason and I had been friends since before we started kindergarten together. We had grown apart as we went to middle and high school, with differing plans and lives ahead of us. He graduated and was going to immediately go to work for his father at a grocery store while I ran off to another state to go to college as an art student. But we were still friends, close, dependable, different, sure, but we knew where we stood and where we were going. Jason was the only person who knew where the hidden key to the beach house was. He was that kind of guy. We had said so much to each other since we were three years old that all we had to do was say “hey” and keep going. He had priorities, and fishing was one of them. I guess it was time to go to the beach.

If Jason’s job was to cast frozen shrimp on a hook as far as he could, mine was to spread a towel down on the sand to hold it down as best as possible. By now it was getting later in the morning. It was hot and would stay hot until around 5 pm, when it would get hotter. The sun would burn, turn our skin to leather, and drain the water out of us in buckets.

It would be hot, so joyously hot.

I lay on the towel, my only other additions a cheap t-shirt I used as a pillow, and a cheap paperback that I could barely read in the bright sun. As the day beat on, inexorably to noon, I focused on the ecru pages and little words until the rest of the world turned purple, sucking the color out of the sky, water, sand, and the people that walked by. It was so bright that I couldn’t even tell if I was getting a tan. Everything was just dark, and bright, blinding and blinded. I looked under the waist of my soft Ocean Pacific shorts, all soft and worn, but in the heat and sun I couldn’t tell if there was a tan line or not. Sunglasses didn’t help. My Wayfarers were stylish, teen cool, but only blotted out the world. It was better than the white sun leaving burned circles on my vision, I guess.

I gave in and rolled over, my arms tucked under my head, as I let the heat  burn down on my shoulders. It was better to not move and just let me bake.

I fell asleep in the sun, the overhead sun. It was a battle to see who or what could stand it longer. The sun tried to cook me, and I lay still, showing I could take it. After 45 minutes, it was time to rotate, a chicken on a spit, to keep the tan even. My back, all smooth, taught, I was fit from baseball and track, all 150 pounds of me, caught my sweat in pools along my spine. It all ran down to my lower back and poured off in a wave. It was both a comforting and disgusting feeling. The sweat gathered, hot, like a puddle in the heat, somehow withstanding the sun’s evaporative effects, but also strangely cooling, a quick chill that ran down the side of my waist and down my shorts in a horribly uncomfortable way. I quickly rolled onto my back to let the sweat soak into the purple and yellow patterned beach towel.

Yes, it was hot, but so was I. In my Wayfarers and OP shorts and sexy tanned legs and long blond hair. It was hot, a rad hot.

Morning moved into afternoon, but it was too hot to eat. Jason continued his work, getting paid well, I hoped, as he pulled in a fish, the first of the day. But all this was killing time, until around 1 o’clock. I went up to the beach house, drying off as best as I could. I was wet, soaked to my scalp with sweat, glistening with the summer sheen that would stay with all of us until September. It wouldn’t be an endless summer, but it wold be long enough.

At one pm, a car, vaguely gold, possibly a four door, likely an import, but all so unmemorable that I would never bet on what it was, pulled up to the house. I didn’t care about the car one bit. The car’s owner lived over in Manteo, and probably still was there. But her daughter, well… speaking of hot…

Meg and I met two years ago and had to somehow wait six months until we were willing to recognize we liked each other. I knew the first moment I saw her, this thin, striking, shining girl with short black hair, black like a night on a new moon, all raven wing black, holding sad secrets that couldn’t stand the way she smiled, all white perfect teeth in a too small mouth. She stepped out of the car in a bikini top and shorts that surely were not allowed by her father, looked at me, and I melted like an ice cream cone. This girl haunted me from the first day I saw her.

A teen boy could try to act tough, to prove to whoever he thought was watching, impressing no one, really, by going out on the sand on an unflapping wing and a prayer, but when Meg came over, we gathered a little more of our world with us. A cooler, a long chair for her body, already beginning to shine on her cute little nose, pink cheeks, smooth stomach, that didn’t deserve to have to touch the sand when she laid out. I carried the little red and white cooler with water and Coke and a root beer for Jason. Meg carried the big towel and an attitude.

Summer was wonderful. We were free, even if it was only for this week. Summer jobs were necessary. We still were under the yoke of the adults. We had to get jobs, we had to make money, we couldn’t just sit around all summer on the beach.

“Oh, yeah?” I said to the hot wind, looking at Meg as she kicked off her shorts. “Wanna bet?”

It was hot, so hot. The afternoon burned with a clear blue sky and not a bit of shade from a cloud. It was not time for the breezes to shift, for the waves to come or the wind to take the tops off of them. I lay on the towel, next to Meg, elevated above me, as she occasionally glanced down at me and leaned her cute face in for a kiss, decidedly passionate for a public place. But we were teens, accustomed to each other, committed as much as we were allowed. It’s what we did.

I had applied a bit of suntan oil across her lounging figure. It was another way we could reach out to each other, caresses that were only allowed because we were on the beach and the sun was burning down. She did my shoulders next, ending with a coconut scented embrace of my neck and a nibble on my ear.

“It’s so hot!” Meg stretched off the big plastic lounge chair. I knew the feeling of how your body would stick and slurp away from those horrid plastic straps. The fluffy white towel I had given her was already soaking with her sweat as it ran down her brown skin in tiny beads. I could see them, racing, slowly, catching on the rare downy hair or curve of her otherwise unblemished skin. Her head must have been on fire with that dark hair, even in the short wavy bob. Meg would tell me on occasion of her wild Roman heritage, but I knew she was the daughter of a fisherman, just as much as I was the son of a doctor.

Meg got up and pulled me to the water. Finally, we gave in. The sun and heat had won. The ocean beckoned. Cool water, but not too cool, was needed, desired. The Outer Banks has as much a fickle ocean as June was a fickle month. We hoped for a cool water, low 70s, a chill that quickly went away with the first wave that forced you to dive under it. Then, you were fine, and never, ever wanted to get out. But sometimes it ran hot, and we could just jump in, like the kids we were not so many years ago. We plow into the waves, trip, fall, flop, get up, dive and splash like mermaids in the moonlight. Other times the Labrador Current runs in too close, an uninvited guest that sends the Gulf Stream too far out to sea, lowering the temperature to a biting 60 something degrees. Even on a hot day, it would be too cold to stand. We were fortunate that the water was a perfect 72 degrees, enough to cool us down and bring back our blinded eyesight. Meg clung to my back as I swam, racing to the deep end of the ocean, where the kids couldn’t be, where we could be alone. She was so light I had no problem letting her lean on me as I tread water and she splashed me and kissed me to say she was sorry, then splashed me again.

There was no need to get out. We stayed in the ocean, just at the edge of the rollers, as they lifted us off the soft sand, then back down on our tiptoes. We talked about summer, where we were working, making sure we had the same times off. Dating for teens was both a challenge, and a dull routine. We wanted to see movies, go play mini golf, go out to eat, occasionally at a nice restaurant, playing dress up adults like we thought they did. Not our parents of course. They weren’t that cool. But at the same time, we wanted to get to the point, and that might be in the back seat of a car, or in the dunes in the dark, or under a glowing moon down at Coquina Beach. It was about the intimacy, certainly, that tangled knot of hands and arms that always came with each night as couples grew closer and closer.

Jason waved from the beach and left. He knew his place in our world was at an end. He was happy with his prize, as much as we were. The beach still sizzled as we walked out of the waves. I had a way to get out of the shore break. I watched the waves, waited, and let the next wave lift me up to plant me on the shore. “Like James Bond,” Meg would say. It drove her a little mad to see me walk out of the water, and I knew it. So I did it for her, real cool.

Real hot.

Meg would twirl in her string bikini, flattering, sexy, but just the uniform of a beach girl with its green color and millefiori flowers scattered like snowflakes all over. I wondered if she noticed the old men, the dads, staring at her over their stupid sunglasses, looking at her and probably at me in jealousy. Tough luck.

Meg knew the moms did the same thing to me.

Were in love, teenage, useless love, that drunk simple love, but not beer drunk. Whiskey drunk love, the burning kind that heated you on the inside and kept you still, otherwise your head would spin you out of control.

Summer would burn and we were going to throw fuel on the fire. Yes, we had to work, but we were going to work at us, too. We were young and we needed to be a little free. I was working at a camera store during the summer, and Meg was at a sno-cone place. When August rolled around, I would go away to college in Savannah at an arts school, and she would finish her senior year. Hopefully she would come down, and I would photograph her, that beautiful dark haired wonder of a young woman, walking the streets of old Savannah, and that town wouldn’t know just why it got even hotter than before. It would be all her fault, walking around in a fur coat, staring off into the distance.

Or she goes off to college the next year, and we walk the campus at Chapel Hill, holding hands under the old trees while the other students stare like the old men and women do, jealous, heated.

But it was summer. Too early to worry about that now. Too hot.

Day went to evening. I hadn’t eaten since those Apple Jacks and had burned calories as much as skin. By 5 o’clock, the tourists, the beginning summer ones at least, had left the beach, rushing back to their hotels and rental homes. We walked back to the beach house. Tanned, cooked, we never burned, because nothing bad ever happens to a teenager, we showered off in the outdoor shower. The cold well water was rich with iron, so metallic you could chew it. I could feel the sweat and sand roll out of my hair. Meg, even though I didn’t know how it was possible, stood under the shower and let her black hair get slicked down, looked even better. Well, as good as ever, in a different way.

If it were up to me, I probably would have just stayed there, under the waterfall of cool, ice blue water pumped up from under the coastal sands. The cool water mixed with the evening land breeze of hot air coming under the walls of the shower. It was a reminder of how hot it still was out there. The sun wouldn’t set for hours still, and it only meant that it would be dark, but still hot, thick, humid, still.

The solution, we knew this, we teens knew, was to embrace it. Go out, feel the warmth, where we all are hot, all even, all fair. Meg and I got out of the shower and got something to eat. I’d take her out for dinner later. We just needed a chunk, a crunch, until then. Now, the sun had moved. In the morning, it shone into my eastern windows over the back porch, and I hid on the front. Now it burned down over the roads and dunes to the west. The back porch was finally cool, or at least better than before. I clicked on my old tape player. Van Morrison’s Into The Mistic worked its way into the ether of the back porch, as Meg lounged on my hammock. I gnawed on a frozen pineapple stick. The music was as close as possible to the sound of a cooling shade as we could find. There was no chill or thaw, just a dip. That was good enough. I climbed into the hammock, Meg moved over, snuggled, and even in the heat, we cooled, nestled like ice cubes as they slowly clink down a glass dripping with dew. Her forehead pressed against mine, and we warmed each other, silently, the music playing a lullaby in the eclipse of the warm day that finally set its prenumbra on us.

Under us, through the cotton weave of the hammock, the first cool breeze blew.