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it. It was a good impression.”
    “And for my next impression, a skinny putz with his foot in his mouth.”
    “It’s really okay.”
    “I really am sorry. I’m sure he’s a great guy.”
    I shrugged. “Not really.”
    Sammy studied my face intently for a moment. “Well, then,” he said with a grin. “Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”
    Sammy’s father was a music professor at Columbia University. His mother had divorced him because of his unfortunate proclivity for bedding his female students, aspiring musicians being highly susceptible to passion and therefore easy prey. I learned this and many other things about Sammy during his first few days on the job. Working side by side for eight hours a day, we got to know each other pretty well.
    Sammy was a huge Springsteen fan and would unabashedly break into song as he worked the press, bobbing his head to the beat, serenading the immigrant women when they walked by, oblivious to their averted gazes. “Rosalita, jump a little lighter,” he would sing out without warning. “Come on, Carmen - sing it with me! Señorita, come sit by my fire.” He was fiercely passionate about Springsteen and would often lecture me on the profundity of a particular song, reciting the lyrics and punctuating them with his own commentary.
    He was terribly concerned about the recent commercial success of Born in the U.S.A. “I’m not saying it isn’t a great album, but it doesn’t compare to Greetings from Asbury Park or Born to Run. And all these airheads dancing to it on MTV are totally clueless. He’s singing about the plight of our Vietnam vets, and the youth of America are shaking their asses like it’s Wham! or Culture Club.” He punched the air with his finger for emphasis. “Bruce Springsteen is not Wham!”
    The summer of 1986 was on record as the worst to hit Connecticut in over ninety years, a hot, bleeding ulcer of a season. The air was laden with a cloying humidity and the pervasive stink of melting tar as the sun beat down mercilessly on the streets and roofs of Bush Falls. The neighborhood vibrated with the combined hum of the hundreds of central air compressors, nestled in side yards, that ran at a fevered pitch day and night, serving to further raise the already blistering outside temperature. People generally stayed indoors, and when forced to venture out, they moved sluggishly, as if under a greatly increased gravity.
    In the factory, Sammy and I toiled in pools of our own sweat, the heating beds from our presses adding a good ten degrees to the already sweltering temperature. We took our breaks outside, on the concrete stairs that ran down the side of the building to the parking lot, sipping lazily at cherry Cokes as the sweat evaporated off our bodies. “Have I mentioned,” he said to me during one such break, “that we have a pool?”
    I looked at him severely. “No, you haven’t.”
    He grinned. “I meant to.”
    It was starting to look as if my summer might actually not suck after all.
    The Habers had bought an old white Dutch colonial on Leicester Road, a remote, hilly street that worked its way up to the highest point in Bush Falls, but that wasn’t the important thing. The large, marbleized pool that glinted like a kidney-shaped jewel in their sizeable yard was all that mattered. Through eight hours of cutting and pressing hot styrene in the scorching heat, it seemed as if the image of its cool blue waters was permanently tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. But Sammy’s pool represented far more than a relief from the summer heat. There were other factors. My house, which had the added distinction of not having a pool, was hardly a desirable destination for me in those days. A gloomy silence had settled over the family in the years since my mother’s death, and rather than working our way through it, we seemed to have buckled under its weight, like a house with a latent flaw in its construction. Conversation was rare, laughter an anomaly.