Summer

Summer, as remembered by Tyrone C. Love and Harry Goldfarb, names a vanished period of warmth and relative plenty, made more vivid by the winter hardship that follows. Its return becomes an imagined remedy: Harry and Tyrone plan to travel to Miami for drugs, treating the southward journey as a way to recover the ease they associate with the season.

Remembered Ease

Rubbing his head as winter wind rattles the windows, Tyrone looks back on a summer that now seems impossibly distant. He recalls crossing town with Harry to the Bronx County Morgue and getting high, then wheeling and dealing and bringing money home. The contrast is stark: where they once hustled for profit, they now scramble to keep withdrawal at bay. Tyrone’s sense of time has shifted with their circumstances; summer seems both a short while ago and so remote that it might never come again.

The season also survives in the memory of private comfort with Alice. Tyrone recalls lying with her in the apartment, the window open and the curtains moving in the breeze as they talked and flirted. In the present, Alice is curled beneath the covers while the cold wind batters the building. The remembered open window and the present rattling panes make summer feel less like a date on the calendar than a lost condition of ease, intimacy, and shelter.

Winter as Its Opposite

The present winter stretches in Tyrone’s perception: days and nights run together, and each day feels like a thousand years. His recollection of summer is therefore not neutral nostalgia. It measures how thoroughly the pair’s life has changed, from bringing home money to trying to obtain enough drugs to keep the sickness away. The streets that once formed the setting for their profitable trade now seem hostile, while warmth itself has become scarce.

Harry also measures the present against the remembered season. As he and Tyrone discuss going south, he recalls the previous summer as a good time and insists that it will return once they have secured a substantial supply. His confidence turns memory into an argument for action: if they can get drugs, he suggests, they can regain the ease they have lost.

A Promised Return

Harry and Tyrone’s plan to reach Miami gives summer a future-facing meaning. They imagine that a new source of supply will let them sit back while others struggle through the shortage and the cold. On the drive, Tyrone jokes about using a sun lamp and relaxing as if already warmed by the season they seek. The joke carries the plan’s appeal: Florida seems to offer not only drugs but escape from winter’s conditions.

Yet summer remains a projection rather than an arrival in these passages. The men set out convinced that the journey will end their problems, while Harry’s injured arm is already hurting badly enough to interrupt their talk of future plenty. The season thus holds together two opposing pressures: the vivid memory of a life that felt easier and the promise of a return that the men use to keep moving through a harsh present.