Avec chaleur

I live on the fifth floor of an apartment building right alongside campus. It's an ugly place; though a red-brick structure, and lined with gorgeous oaks that really come alive in the spring, the roof is placed on atop of the building a la the lid of a gift box, or maybe like a bad architectural toupee; the shingles come vertically down the side of the building about 10 feet, completely cosmetic and thus ironically hideous, because the real roof is as flat as the top of a grand piano. (Thanks, 1960s.) Not that the inside's any better. The long hallway to my room is painted hospital mauve, and you can always smell curry or something equally disgusting since this is where all the foreign exchange students live.

Last winter the heater stopped working, not that we ran it much. Most of the time in an apartment building you can get away with not using the heat because of all the rooms around you, but we're on the top corner, and whenever it slipped below about 20 degrees outside-- that was the magic number-- the temperature in our apartment would plummet. We never saw our own breath, but we knew we were almost there. We had idiotic scientific debates on whether the air coming out of the still-functioning air-conditioning unit might be warmer than the temperature outside. Joey and Jordan, my two roommates at the time, bought space heaters for themselves and promptly and repeatedly blew the fuses for our apartment whenever they tried to plug them in at the same time. A third space heater was out of the question. I was on my own.

We called the building maintenance man, Terry, who always seemed to come when it was above 20 degrees outside. Terry has a huge beer belly and calls everyone "Guy" when he sees them. I'll never forget the image of him standing in front of the vent with a thermometer and manipulating the thermostat to hot, cold, hot, cold again. "There's your problem, Guy," he said. "The dang thermostat's backwards." He took a pencil and wrote a reversing arrow on the wall paint above the thermostat. As soon as he waddled out, we put the thermostat on 50 degrees and stood in front of the vent and then put the thermostat on 90 degrees and stood in front of the vent and it became obvious that the fucking thing was going to blow 65 degrees of heat no matter what.

Night came, the temperature dropped, and the heater stopped blowing 65 degree heat. It was frigid. We left the door to the hallway open while we were awake, since at least the hall was warm. Then when I went to bed, I put on 3 layers of socks, sweaters, sweats, stocking caps, and then buried myself under a mound of blankets. I put up the hood on my sweatshirt and cinched it closed. I looked like Kenny from South Park. The only thing exposed was my nose, and when I woke up, I couldn't feel my nose. I'd then go to the bathroom and shut the door and turn the water up to a scalding temperature and instead of taking a shower just sit on the bathmats until the numbness left my extremities. Our monthly utility bills were at a gloriously fixed rate. We had Christmas lights up in our living room, and we let them run 24 hours because we swore they generated heat.

We sent in maintenance requests but we never raised hell, which we were perfectly in our rights to do. It doesn't really make any sense in hindsight, other than all three of us were much too busy with school and girls to make much of a stink, but I think it's also that we weren't really the kind of guys whose happiness necessarily depended on having only part-time warmth, or else we wouldn't have been living in a building like this in the first place.