It seemed like a winning proposition: Head down with my brother to my mother’s house in Tampa and lay more than 700-square-feet of hardwood floors in her upstairs. She was paying us a substantial fee and promised to order us carry-out food until our intestines resembled manatees.
Yet, somehow it sounded too good to be true. Too simple. Too easy. Too lacking in major complications the kind that are either life-threatening or get you sent to a special hospital where you try to work out why you’ve suddenly taken up eating wallpaper.
Two little details had seemed to escape us (or maybe we had blocked them out): 1) the only way upstairs was a narrow spiral staircase; 2) the upstairs, like the downstairs, was un-air conditioned. And because heat rises, the second floor sucks up heat like a vacuum, collecting it in scalding corners that every so once in a while erupt in jets of scorching flames.
As my brother and I stood there surveying the scene that first morning — the temperature already hovering around the boiling point of iron — one of his shoes caught fire. We watched as the sweat emerged on our skin and then instantly evaporated, forming thunderstorms in the appropriately named “sun room.”
Recap: My mother decided in the 1970s that she would never put AC in her house, which sits in the historic and relatively upscale Hyde Park section of Tampa. A passing fad, she thought it wouldn’t survive that long-ago oil crisis. So she’s been waiting four decades to be proven right, and now that we’re in the middle of a new oil crisis, she’s utterly convinced that it won’t be much longer. I tell her people will give up food and sell kidneys before they give up their AC, but she’s not listening. Her house is cooled only by fans and oak trees.
If you’ve never been to Tampa in June, then you don’t realize it is like a vacation on the sun. It is as close to being a bag of microwave popcorn as you should ever come. And it is a city where they expressly warn you not to lay floors on the second floor of an un-air conditioned house in the middle of June. If you do, you have to sign a waiver that says you understand paramedics won’t come to retrieve your body until cooler weather arrives, usually in November.
We went on with it anyway.
Laying floors is back-breaking work as it is, but it’s the heat that really did us in. It started to build in the morning, growing more intense throughout the day until its afternoon peak when we could hear our skin start to sizzle, taking on the look of a bag of pork rinds.
By that point we were toast. I don’t know how to describe our look, accept that it reminded me of miners in Third World countries where the heat gets so bad that they strip down to the bare essentials. We worked barefoot and shirtless, leaving our shorts on only to keep the neighbors from calling the cops on us as we rushed repeatedly to the windows to make loud panting noises and fan ourselves wildly. We prayed for rain to help cool the world down, and thought seriously about taping bags of ice to key part of our bodies.
Delusional, dehydrated and char-broiled, we toiled for two days knowing our lives — forget the floors! — depended upon it.
“How did we ever live in this house?” I asked my brother over and over again. “And why didn’t HRS have the decency to take us away?”
He just shook his head. He was the color of a cherry tomato.
The floors are down — we made sure of that. We worked fast knowing that life — our lives — hung in the balance. Delay or take too long and we would have been beef jerky. And they do look great. Wonderful, I would even say. It’s just too bad no one will ever be able to survive the heat long enough to go up there and take a look.