American Summer

I have a friend... for the sake of anonymity let's call him N. Luff... No, that's too obvious... let's call him Nathan L... So Nathan grew up in the remote confines of Yass, an inland country town known for agriculture and being closely situated to Canberra (although not as close as Queanbeyan. I'm not really sure who the winner is in this urban ménage à trois). When I say Nathan grew up in Yass, as far as I can tell he really grew up in Yass. You see, Nathan didn't see the ocean until he was nineteen. I mean, he'd seen pictures of the ocean, and no doubt had seen movies and television shows with nautical themes, and was vaguely aware on a conceptual level of the pelagic nature of the edge of the continent, but the first time he stood on a beach with the sand between his toes, the sun above his head, seagulls squarking in his ears and the eye-sucking vastness of the Pacific Ocean before him was at an age when the average person's "firsts" consist of consuming and experiencing as many illicit, immoral and illegal pleasures that hitherto had been off-limits as quickly and as often as possible. Prior to this, Nathan's concept of standing on a beach was on the same level as standing on the moon: some people had done it, but not him, and it was unlikely in the near future he would be able to join their ranks. Not being Nathan, I can't be 100% about this, but I can speculate that after finally, for the first time, experiencing the splendor of the ocean (and experiencing the less splendorous finding-sand-in-every-nook-and-cranny-of-the-goddam-car-for-months-afterwards) Nathan was like "huh.... it all makes sense now..." 

Nathan's story feels to be a great illustration of what living in New York is like for a thirty-two year old who has grown up with America on the television screen. On some idiotic, conservative, pocket-protector level I feel that I am too old for "first experiences", or at least, too old to smile stupidly at the sheer enjoyment of first experiences. (I have to admit, most of my "American Firsts" have not been unadulterated orgies of pleasure: My first dealings with the American visa system; my first phone call from my unpredictably bizarre landlord; my first time doing a commando roll in an effort to avoid being mown down by a grade-A douchebag in an SUV the size of an aircraft carrier who felt that observing pedestrian crossings and traffic lights was an inconvenience not to be suffered on his way to his lobotomy or wherever the fuck it was that shitlicker was going). But Nathan's story popped into my head as I walked home from the pub tonight, and I feel compelled to write about an American First that is everything TV promised it would be, and much, much more: The American Summer.

I'll admit that until recently I firmly believed that whatever these uppity Northern Hemisphere countries thought of as "Summer" would pale in comparison to an authentic Aussie summer. In some respects, I'm right. New Yorkers bitch and moan about heat that the average Australian would consider to be a mild December afternoon. But now that we're officially two or so weeks into the US Summer (they do their seasons by the solstices... pagans...) I think they may be on to something pretty sweet here. It's difficult to articulate, but the cut-throat, desperate rat-race feeling that usually pervades the city seems to have evaporated into a cloud of sunglasses, coronas and thongs (the Australian kind. And maybe the American kind too, but I don't often get to see those). It's like the whole of New York has gone on vacation to New York.

Parks are full of people. And I mean FULL. There's a lot of people here and virtually none of them have backyards, or even a balcony. For most of the time, their "outside" time is spent on sidewalks, trudging from the subway to work to the gym to the pub and back home again. So when the sun comes out, hordes of New Yorkers descend upon their local public park, quickly filling every available square inch with people reading, lazing, talking, watching squirrels, or playing instruments (including one ambitious guy who drags an upright piano to the park near my school every lunchtime and plays rags for an hour or so).

My neighborhood has a distinctively party feeling. It's made up primarily of Dominicans or Puerto Ricans, and these guys take relaxing pretty seriously. All day long they guys will set up charcoal barbeques in the streets and play dominoes. In the evenings people hang out on their stoops drinking beer and talking long after the sun has gone down. Kids knock the covers off fire hydrants and play in the spray. Latin music blares from every window (and, to be perfectly honest, this drives me bats.) Walking home from the pub it feels like you've been to a party that's spread out across the entire neighborhood. Everything might look decrepit, but it feels awesome. Its what I imagine Cuba would be like, if Cuba was a filthy bastion of capitalism instead of a bolshy haven for pinko commies.

The weird thing is that this seems incredibly familiar even though these scenes are NOT at all what my summers are like in Australia (for, unlike our anonymous friend in the first paragraph, I've been to the beach every summer since I was a born). Think about it: Sesame Street, Seinfeld, Friends, Sex in the City, even NYPD Blue (remember that show? I HATED THAT SHOW. KEEP THE GODDAM CAMERA STILL, YOU DICKWADS), all of these shows have action that takes place in the summer, and every one of them will have scenes like I described above. Any Australian that grew up in front of the idiot box and then comes to New York in the summer will straight away know what I mean. It won't be like, "What the hell? Where are the backyard barbeques, or the sunday sessions in the pubs, or the days lounging around on the beach? How do these people enjoy summer?"... it'll be more like, "huh.... it all makes sense now..."