If you live in Texas, you are supposed to demonstrate perpetual grit. You are not supposed to whine, for example, about a little heat wave. As a matter of fact, it's almost always hot here. When it isn't, we're most likely experiencing hail, floods or a tornado. This summer, however, even fifth-generation Texans betrayed mild chagrin when the mercury spitefully rose to 109 back in June.

I became aware that it was abominably hot - not merely hot in the usual sense, but oppressively, extraordinarily damn hot - when I opened my local paper (once the wrapper had cooled) and saw a feature titled "The Great Meltdown." In a whimsical enterprise that bizarrely but accurately captured the flavor of what was going on all around us - extreme heat dementia - intrepid reporters at the Austin American-Statesman had put a Hershey chocolate bar on the sidewalk and timed how long it took to melt. "A Hershey bar melted within an hour," the parboiled caption writer noted, "but we could still read the letters." That beat the Velveeta and the ice cream cone, which melted into gooey pools of enigma.

Until then, I had been vaguely aware that it was truly hot, but you have to understand, we go through something like this every year. We're used to it. We have heat-induced rituals that help us cope just fine. Video stores have signs warning against the hazards of leaving your favorite movie on the car seat. Good housekeepers throw away their candles in May, before they start to melt. So this summer, it had to get quite hot to make the news. Then just the other day, our torpor was the top story on National Public Radio, leading to a nationwide panic among my friends and relatives.

"How's the heat?" my dad wanted to know. "I've been watching the Weather Channel, and it sounds like it's hot!" My highly excitable friend Isabel, who comes from Madrid, left a characteristically volatile message, something along the lines of: How are you doing! Are you alive in the middle of the inferno! I hear that you are in hell!"

To be honest, I felt like a impostor. People around me were literally dying from the furnace-like temperatures, but thanks to my bourgeois, air-conditioned lifestyle I was blissfully cool. Sometimes I even got goose pimples. Outside, the heat was wreaking a slow burn of havoc across the state, frying up cotton crops and corn, putting hatless tourists into intensive care. (Hey, cowboys wear those things for a reason.)

At the same time I was not personally suffering in any way. You see, most of us down here have a simple strategy: we just don't go outside from May to October. It's like winter in Chicago - you read a lot, you watch more TV, eventually you get cabin fever.

Back when I first moved to Texas, I tried to make do at home with just an AC unit in a window, and drove a convertible whose large V-8 engine was, unfortunately, prone to overheating. So I spent the summer months cruising around in a stupor, simultaneously broiling in the sun and baking in the hot air blowing through the air vents.

Then I did suffer, slightly. But now, despite the record-breaking highs, no. My new pickup chills to icy within seconds. On muggy days my glasses even fog up when I step outside, though they clear up instantaneously again in the glacial atmosphere of our office building.

Sometimes I think it's sad not to be able to spend time outside. I look at the facsimile of summer I can see through the windows; my porch swing sits unused, and when it's windy the red oaks move without that swishing sound. But why go out there? We can't even swim anymore; the local lakes are so warm that bacteria are reproducing wildly, causing extreme nausea and diarrhea in anyone who dares take the plunge.

A good number of people share my alienation from the heat. In Houston, the downtown crowd never sets foot outside for even for a millisecond, thanks to air-conditioned underground tunnels that lead from glass office towers to the city's banks, restaurants and parking garages.

In Dallas, people seek shelter almost as assiduously. "I have not experienced the heat at all," confessed Skip Hollandsworth, a colleague who lives there. But thanks to his amazing powers of imagination, Skip nonetheless managed to write a convincing remembrance of just how hot it gets in his hometown of Wichita Falls for the July issue of Texas Monthly. In it, he reminisced about people sweating until they smelled like road kill.

Everybody in Wichita Falls got mad. As if higher powers were determined to chastise Skip personally, temperatures in Dallas subsequently soared to become the most brutal in the state. There was a momentary sprinkle on the Fourth of July, right after the parade, but instead of running for cover, everybody raced outside and threw their hands up in the air. Perhaps they thought they were hallucinating.

Over the years, the very existence of air-conditioning has spawned its own branch of Texas lore (as well as kept our oil companies in business). It's fueled by a nostalgia for the spirit-breaking days of Life Before AC, when folks cooked inside during days of triple-digit heat or washed clothes by hand in vats of scalding water. Then summer tested the mettle of true pioneers.

Perhaps it was in homage to those frontier days that local musician Chad Nichols invented a summer parlor game called the Hot Movie Fest. The rules: Gather guests before the TV. Pull down all blinds, close all windows, turn off the AC, kill the fans. Serve no water, but supply ample hot coffee. Then slip a movie like "The Towering Inferno" or "Dog Day Afternoon" into the VCR, and wait to see who can stand it the longest.

Recently, feeling like a turkey, I decided not to hide from the heat anymore, either. I took to going running at 5 p.m., about the hottest time of day. My favorite route followed a bone-dry creek ++ bed filled with polished round stones that lie there prone, the very memory of water. "I love running in the heat," said a local marathoner, Mike Hall, when we compared experiences. "It's so grueling. And it feels really good when you stop." I gave up the masochistic habit after a while, though, taking pity on my dog, who would trail along behind me, tongue lolling, sides heaving, eyes gone blazing wild.

Now I venture out just once a week, to sit in the garden of a local club and listen to a tango band called Tosca. Fans stir up a fevered simulation of a breeze while the music creates fragmentary images of bullfights and other passions. Stupefied listeners sip martinis and dream of Spain, where people sensibly sleep all afternoon.

Of course, whether one has any choice in the matter of heat is dictated by one's bank balance. Heat waves are especially unkind to senior citizens, musicians and artists of all stripes. Bill Daniel, a local filmmaker whose stubborn devotion to uncommercial art means he must support himself with nightmarish day jobs, has spent the summer breaking rocks.

The whole thing started out as an ordinary construction job, but just as the most surreal temperature spikes began, he was directed to take apart a stone house. Bill described feeling like "another kind of being." He had trouble re-entering severely climate-controlled buildings, where it can be up to 40 degrees cooler. One day he was temporarily blinded. "The inside of my safety goggles had filled up with sweat, so that it looked like a diver's mask," he said.

After a while, he started a contest that involved coming up with a Texas-style saying for exactly how bad this summer was. I tried to work out a pithy line about a wealthy rancher who once got lost on his own spread without an adequate supply of water, but ultimately, Bill won with: "It's hotter than the inside of a cow's mouth."

In trying to adopt an authentic hard-boiled Texas attitude toward the heat, I don't mean to sound irreverent. It really is hot here. The deaths and the crop failures are not happening thousands of miles away, they are happening just down the street, or right outside of town. Cattle ranching will never be the same. A lot of the state's small ranchers barely made it through the extreme drought that hit two years ago, and their loans are coming due just as the sun has fried up the last of the prickly pear. The grass went a long time ago. In one of those quiet catastrophes that transform a place, scores of families who have hung onto the same land for five or six generations will go out of business for good.

Just recently, however, Austin enjoyed some rain, a brief, blessed interlude of relief, and perhaps that's why I dare to be so mouthy. One morning, the Dallas Morning News stopped printing its tally of how many days in a row the temperature had climbed to over 100 degrees - 29 to be exact - because it got only into the 90s.

Here in my arctic office, there is an odd sense of disappointment. We thought we were going for broke. Next thing you know, rattlesnakes will be extinct too, and then what menace will be left by which to prove that we are indeed Texans?

I console myself with the idea that the rain will not last. Temperatures are supposed to climb back up any time, and already the rain feels like nothing more than a premonition, a foreshadowing of November, when the heat will finally break for good. Then we will spend six months in paradise, while the rest of you freeze your backsides off.

! Pub date: 8/16/98