Where have you gone, sweetest summer?
It is August and that is the worst news I’ve ever heard. August, already? You’ve gotta be kidding me! I’ve barely done the things I’ve been meaning to do, and the things I have done, I’ve not done how I meant to!
The thing about time is that it moves fast.
Before you’re done thinking that you’d like to enjoy June for more than thirty days, it’s July and then August and soon it is Autumn. And summer won’t come until next year.
July is over and it’s a melancholy occasion. July is as melancholy as any woman can be. She’s hot, but a damp hot. Muggy and dense. Wet and dank. She blows you a kiss and it’s thick. I’m told it’s worse in Atlanta, but I’ve never been besides the airport. August is no different.
Summer is something of melancholia (for melancholy people such as myself, at least. Maybe not for others), but I do love the season. I feel it is when I am at the height of my melodrama. I think being melodramatic is when I am most myself (and a crucial part of melancholy is melodrama).
It’s melancholy and miserable and yet somehow I am always fooled by its empty promises. It teases you, winking on a warm night in late May. It's 7pm and the sun has yet to set, and there is an aching reverberating off of everyone on the street. They are desperate for the promise of summer. They crave what could be. Summer begins.
It was summer when I decided to decorate myself in copious amounts of jewelry. It was summer when I chose Marlboro Golds.
At times I recall a moment I’ve never lived through. I feel it like a memory. I can’t be certain about anything, except for that it is summer.
It’s a flash of a feeling, really, and it lasts a second or less. I blink, and I’m there, and it’s this:
I’m on a roof, probably downtown somewhere on the East side. It feels like Second Avenue. I’m hot, and I’m having fun but I’m relaxed and I’m lying with my legs stretched out in front of me. I’m probably wearing a backwards baseball hat. I’m probably tan. I blink again and I’m gone.
I get those feelings less and less, the older I age. It used to happen all the time when I was a teenager. In the memory I can’t remember, I’m a teenager too.
I miss seventeen. I miss virginal summers. I miss lying to my parents (I’m sleeping over at Kaylee’s; actually I’m at a party somewhere in Brooklyn).
Melancholia in summers past was broken up by babysitting gigs then staying outside for hours, because sitting in the park was free, and cash was reserved for things like tallboys of fetid fruit flavored malt liquor (White Claw didn’t exist then).
(How did we even get alcohol in those days? We all had fakes, that wasn’t the issue, but who the hell was actually buying it? Maybe this, ultimately, is what led to stonerhood. Weed is far more accessible).
Do the kids these days even know what smoking shitty weed feels like? Do kids these days still smoke fronto? They have to, right?
If you’re a teenager, and you’re from New York City, and you smoke weed, you have to roll up with fronto. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not -- some kid at the cyph will pull out a Ziploc bag with a big brown tobacco leaf, and that is it, end of story. Except sometimes you’ll use grabba. Or, on occasion and depending who you’re with, you’ll just smoke a Backwood.
And then you’ll cough, and cough until you think you might choke, and cough again, and suck down the water bottle you bought for a dollar, and then you’ll be okay.
(Never, ever, buy water for more than a dollar. You can usually find someone selling dollar water out of coolers in the park or the sidewalk. If you can’t, get a Poland Spring at the nearest deli and slap a dollar bill on the counter as you’re walking out.)
It’s pronounced “fonto,” by the way.
Once the water is almost gone, you should save a few sips just in case. It’ll still be hot but you’ll feel a shiver down your spine and you’ll realize you’re high. You’ll know because everything your funniest friend says will be even funnier. Your back will sink into the grass and you’ll feel yourself spinning in time with the Earth. You’ll wish this moment would never end.
Once it gets dark out you’ll realize you’re hungry and you’ll wind up with a dollar slice. No one will have verbalized wanting pizza, but you’ll be there doing it anyways. No one would have thought to do anything different. All of you will eat it folded in half, lengthwise.
The way home is what it is. You’ll probably hop the turnstile.
(Did you hear the kids these days get MetroCards the whole year round? Four trips a day? On weekends and holidays too?)
(Except they are not MetroCards, they are called OMNY cards, and that makes me want to scream at a pigeon. But then again, I’ve never used a token.)
Summer will end and it’s a relief, in a way. You’ll have something to do. You’ll have somewhere to go. The ennui that comes with a lack of routine will hole you up in your air conditioned bedroom on a night with no plans, or no fives to throw, only roused in ninety minute increments by watching KIDS (1995) and being excited by rebellion. You can see yourself in Rosario Dawson’s bedroom, and you give into a romantic fantasy that only a New York City kid can fully understand (much like sitting on a roof on Second Avenue in the summer).
(My most fun fact is that there is a photo of me at a Christmas Eve party in 2002 and I am crawling, my most fun party trick at the time, and the photo is taken by Larry Clark.)
Summer ends. The East Coast is unbearably humid in the summer and drearily gray in the winter, but that means it has seasons, and this gives us gorgeous September.
The thing about September is that it still feels like summer, and if you’re not careful, you’ll carry over the habits you developed in July.
Before you know it you’ll have that same weed smoke on your breath, only this time it’ll be winter and six months will have passed and you won’t have gone a single day without smoking.
Your mom will tell you your clothes smell like “pot” and then you’ll laugh with your friends about how adults are always using corny words like “pot.”
You’ll graduate high school. You’ll work at an ice cream store. Your eyes will be red and hang low.
You’ll remember a time when summer meant running through the sprinkler and eating fragaria fruit flavored popsicles that dribbled down your chin. You won’t know how to reconcile the difference.
Years later you’ll have stopped smoking weed. You’ll have gotten your heart broken and then done the breaking. You won’t be a teenager anymore, though you cannot conceive of yourself as an adult. You’ll have student loans. Drinking in bars will have lost its novelty. You’ll do it anyway.
These days you read Babitz. Her work feels like how summertime should. She writes with such passion about Los Angeles lotus-eating that even a forever New York Girl is enthralled by the LA Woman. You’ll look up the definition of hedonism.
But before all that happens, you’ll be seventeen and trying to look older. You will look like a seventeen year old who is trying to look older. You’ll go, go, go until it’s gone. Summer will have gone too.
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