The Freon Jones
from What've I Done?
A chilling tale of chemical addiction, inspired by a battle against the implacable forces of nature. A condensed version appeared as a column in the local paper in the early 1990s, and I was gratified to see a copy pinned to a bulletin board in the FL Governor's Energy Office. Most recently performed in May 2026 during Colten Hood's gig at Blue Tavern in Tallahassee.
1687 words; 7m40s read
They’re almost here.
Those muggy nights, when your shirt sticks to you like a plastic trash bag, and slipping between the sheets is like sliding between two slices of unrefrigerated bologna. When even a cool shower and handfuls of talcum powder won't ease the sticky that's got on the back of your knees and into your elbow-pits.
Florida summer. When the mildew sprouts a two-dimensional rainforest across bookshelves, walls, and toilet-seats. Advance party for the plant kingdom waving all green and expectant just outside the window-screens where june bugs bounce like love against a hardened heart. When all that's outside wants inside. When powder-winged nightmares buzz in horrid yearning for the bulb of your floor-lamp, and geckoes prowl the walls, barking like tiny dogs.
You try to hold out long as you can, windows open, as the nights get warmer. Stickier. Closer. The bugs get to singing so loud you can't hear half the dialogue on Andor. Then late one night when a barred owl sits you bolt-upright in bed with a scream and a monkey laugh, the echo of a bad dream, you won't be able to stand it no more.
When the sweat soaks your brow like naked guilt and drenches your bedsheets like an embarrassment of passion, that's when you'll get the freon jones real bad.
That's when you'll know you goin' do it again. You goin' turn on. “Just for a little while,” you'll say. “Just long enough to dry things out a bit. Then I'll turn it back off.”
Who you foolin'?
You goin' tell me you ain't addicted? That you ain't no BTU junkie? First thing you goin' do after you flick that little switch on your wall is go stand by a vent and let the cool, dry air whisper over you like a satin sheet. You'll lift the damp hair off your neck, close your eyes, and roll your head left and right, real slow and sensuous-like, for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, while the moisture steams off your body like mist off a sinkhole.
You tell yourself you'll turn it back off in the morning before you go to work. And maybe you do, but that's just ‘cause you know you'll spend all day inside some concrete cave where AC units the size of lunch trucks soak up the heat and moisture and wring it outside. You know you'll be buzzing all day long in an atmosphere like a virtual Colorado. Ain't no withdrawal symptoms allowed in those cool opium dens, where people wear jackets and keep sweaters draped over the backs of their chairs. Where the hypodermo-thermostats are locked up like the cabinets in a hospital pharmacy, to prevent costly overdoses self-administered by coolant freaks. You'll be in that cool dry all day long.
But come the afternoon, when the sun is so bright and hot it shines right through you, leaving no shadow on the asphalt fudge under your feet, you'll come home and your closed-up house with no AC will feel like the inside of a pizza oven. Garbage-can special.
“I'll just turn on until the sun goes down and things cool off a bit,” you say, peeling off your underwear like a soaked bandage.
Uh-huh. I heard that.
Sun don't set until near 9:00 anyway during the summer. And by then you figure it won't cost that much just to run it through the night. Just to get you through the night. Just this one night.
Next thing you know, you’re cool inside on a Saturday afternoon, with the blinds shut tight, sprawled on the sofa with slack jaw and sleepy eyes, binge-watching Stranger Things on Netflix and eating Doritos right out of the bag.
You tell me what that sounds like.
I know you can't face up to your addiction. You don't want to hear about it. You say you don't really need it. Just makes you feel good. Helps you relax. And besides, you mumble from the sofa, pulling a coverlet over your feet, it ain't hurting nobody.
But I can see in your eyes you know better. You know what kind of people deal your drug of choice. You know who the players are. Utility-company executives. Coal merchants. Shady characters of all sorts.
But you pretend not to see these things. You turn down the thermostat a notch, and the mercury switch sparks like a Bic lighter over Martha and Snoop’s bong. You get a head-rush just watching the houselights dim when that compressor kicks in. The freon blood moves through copper veins and boils in coils, vampire-sucking the heat from your air, and where does it go? Where does it go? Outside is all, where a swamp forms from the drip, drip of wrung-out water.
You'd rather not know. You'd rather not think about what matter was converted to energy to power that 2-ton unit that squats in the backyard like a brooding robot, shifting your electric meter from 33-1/3 to 78 rpm at regular intervals. The windows are shut. The plants and june bugs can't get inside, where you're zoning out in an artificial mountain evening.
It's gotten so bad you even use it while you're driving. Turning on before the engine even warms up, man. Mad Max AC. Fan on high. Then your tolerance builds up and you have to tint the windows—sunglasses you can't even take off at night.
If you think I'm criticizing, think again. I know how it is to have the freon jones. I'm there. Man, I'm thinking 'bout turning on right now. About getting out of that heat that makes me feel like I've got webbed fingers. About sitting on upholstery that don’t feel and smell like some cat with a bizarre UTI peed on it. About sheets as dry and smooth as a cotton-lined envelope.
I know it feels so good to turn on. I been turning on since I was about five, man. I was exposed to freon in my own home, by my own parents. I know. It's hard. I know. We used to be clean, man, and then one day they put window units in the dining room and in their bedroom. Uh huh. That's right. The dining room and bedroom. Bodily pleasures.
We went to central air before I was ten years old, man.
By then I was so hooked I thought it was my right to be refrigerated. I'd sneak into the hallway late at night and tap-tap downward on the temperature control; tap-tap; tap-tap; until the mercury flashed and I could hear that dry exhalation begin to stir the drapes. And then one more tap for good measure.
A power outage in July would set my teeth on edge, my skin crawling. I'd begin to see sweaty pink elephants. I'd like to die before the juice kicked back in and that cool rush sprang from the vents like gaseous ambrosia.
One summer I spent time in an old beach house with a wraparound screen porch and one inner bedroom that had AC. A holy of holies. At night those of us exiled to the muggy porch with the mosquitos whining in our ears would nurse revenge fantasies about those inside, while the AC unit droned through our fitful dreams, making the night seem a few degrees hotter. A few gallons muggier.
Oh, man, it's so much worse when somebody's holding and you ain't. You know what I mean. Just makes that freon jones grip you tighter and tighter. You get to where you'd sell your body for a night in an air-conditioned bed.
Ain't no other high like AC. Ain't no other drug gets supplied to your home by IV hoses strung from one pole to the next. Ain't no other drug's got a statue and museum dedicated to its inventor. I seen it, man. Apalachicola.
I wish I could kick it. I tried goin' cold turkey, but that only works in the wintertime. I tried ignoring it, but I can't. Even the outdoor queues at Disney World got AC vents blowing cool air on the sweaty crowds to keep 'em docile. That's the ultimate, man. Blowing AC right out into the world, while somewhere else a giant compressor unit is evening things up by radiating heat like a barbecue grill. Downers and uppers at the same time, man. AC don't get rid of the heat. It just moves it someplace else, with a portage fee in kilowatt-hours.
If it weren't for AC no one would make pizza in the summertime. If it weren't for AC no babies would be born in the spring—that's a math problem, y'all. If it weren't for AC nobody would use hot water in the shower before October. If it weren't for AC half the heat-seeking reptiles that slither into Florida would be gone by April, and there wouldn't be no endless ticky-tacky stucco tracts where buggy cypress bayheads and stifling piney woods used to stand.
Every time I turn on I know I'm participating in the assault on the environment. Maybe not throwing the punches, man, but helpin' to hold it down, you know? Pinning its arms back. Maybe kicking it in the ribs once before I walk away.
Just 'cause it makes me feel good.
Yes, I got the freon jones, man. I'm a BTU baby. I need that refrigerant bad. Keeps them palmetto bugs from buzzing round in my head. Soothes my body like a dry salve.
I'm hooked. Stoned cold. Tonight I'm goin' go home and set the thermostat on fifty-nine, man. Get out the electric blanket. When the bill comes I'll just skimp on groceries. Be late with the child support. Pawn some jewelry. Sell some plasma.
Anything to make my feet quit sweating. Anything to keep from sticking to the kitchen counter. Anything to get that squirrelly feeling out of my butt-skin.
Long as I can't hear them katydids I'll be fine.
