What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

If you've just moved to New York City and you think that this is the hottest shit of a place you've ever seen, you just wait, more than likely this summer you will be proven right. For when August rolls in, and the winds completely stop, the temperatures reach and jump over the higher nineties and even dare to climb onto the hundreds a horrid stench starts to rise from the city. It seems everything starts to heat, then melt, and then steam releasing an evil brew of asphalt, human breath, last week's trash, sewage and that hard to describe smell of the subway tunnels. Of all of these the most unfamiliar was the subway smell.
It was a like a strange sci-fi creature, half organic, half metallic, half machine, half current it was ever present but never seen. As the months went by, August suddenly came by. Everyone told I must dread August in New York City but I just could not believe that NYC was going to get all that hot. Well it did, and this year it seemed to be worse than others according to the locals. In the office I was fine, the A/C was always in high gear there. At home I was in good hands thanks to the two windows units I had. But on the street... On the street there was simply no escape from the heat. As I walked back from the 1st Avenue Subway station back to my apartment it felt like I was in an oven with both the grill and oven turned on at the same time. The pavement that had been absorbing the heat all day long now had reached its threshold and had no intention of keeping all of this heat to itself --so it released the heat, steadily and viciously. As I reached my apartment, my backpack's straps were beginning to leave sweat marks on the front of my shirt.
At first I thought, ah this will pass, it is a day or two of real hot weather, I can do this, no problem. Then as the weeks of August progresses what I thought would be the exception became the norm. A scolding hot day after another followed.
Waiting at the subway station for the train went from being a torture because of the irregular unreasonable schedules of the trains to one that just involved cooking in there until my turkey button popped out.
The interesting thing was, here was I in shorts and a thin white t-shirt sweating like a turkey before thanksgiving while the businessmen headed downtown seemed to be doing just fine in their three piece business suits. Perhaps the Wall Street bunch were indeed cold blooded. That's an unfair thought, I thought to myself as I smirked. The train arrived after pushing another piston full of stale subterranean air through the station. The doors opened, and the cool air rushed out; the torture was over. Well at least until I reach my destination.