He made arrangements to move. Informed of this, Sappho broke down at the prospect of being torn from her love-object. She wept. She screamed. She frothed at the mouth. She tore her garments. All to no avail. Papa Kuntzentookis was firm. They were moving to new quarters on the first of the month, and that was that!
Moving day brought an unexpected catastrophe which affected the entire city. While Papa Kuntzentookis was busy with the movers, Sappho locked herself in the bathroom with the family tool-box. By the time they had managed to break down the bathroom door, Sappho had already worked the drainpipe loose of its moorings.
The real trouble arose because those moorings were of a delicately balanced complexity which would have given a master plumber screaming nightmares. In some way, they tied in with the other fixtures in the bathroom, which in turn were intimately connected to all the plumbing fixtures in the house, which likewise affected all the plumbing on the block—and for blocks around. It was like the pulling of the bottom matchstick from a precariously balanced matchstick castle; things began to happen.
The first sign was when the Kuntzentookis toilet erupted into a geyser. While Papa was attempting to cap this geyser, the bathroom sink had an attack of hiccups and began regurgitating scalding water. Papa leaped to the faucet and it came off in his hand. Immediately a torrent of cold water splashed into the bathtub. But Sappho’s fiddling had incapacitated the drain and now the tub quickly filled and began to overflow. A moment later there was a pounding protest from the ceiling of the apartment below.
Papa ran into the kitchen and attacked the main valve controlling the flow of all the water in the apartment with a wrench. He must have turned it the wrong way, for immediately little miniature geysers of water began spurting upwards from all four burners of the gas stove. Papa tried to disconnect the stove, but it was too late. The oven was already gushing with ice-cold water.
Three floors below a tenant turned on her kitchen sink faucet and set herself on fire with the flames which belched forth. Next door, another tenant who had been defrosting her refrigerator was overcome by gas fumes—- lightly scented with the aroma of a fine old Greek cheese -—when she opened the door to remove the ice trays. In the apartment above, a gentleman just about to perch on the toilet emitted a scream of anguish as a baby alligator propelled upwards by the churning water nipped his naked nether cheeks.
The alligator was not alone. Many lizards, snakes, crocodiles and other alligators, once souvenirs of visits to Florida, had outgrown their pet status and been flushed down various toilets. Such wildlife flourishes in the sewers of New York. Now, caught in the snowballing effects of Sappho’s attempt to play plumber, these creatures stampeded for the surface of New York.
First to appreciate their menace were the Con Ed workers who arrived to repair the power lines which had been shorted out by the backing up of the churning waters. They fled screaming from the sewers, screaming, “Dig we must, but this ain’t just!”
When the ’phone lines were affected, the New York Telephone workers formed ranks and attacked the animals with live wires. They succeeded in electrocuting many of them, but in the end the animals captured the high-power lines and reversed the attack. The telephone repairmen also fled, screaming like children for their supervisors.
But it was no use. By this time the automated ’phone system had been thrown completely out of whack. Computerized dialing became a nightmare. It was truly Black Friday for phone company executives. Quite a few of them threw themselves out of windows. And the major computer in the New York area deliberately shorted out its circuits and immolated itself.
One of the groups which managed to keep its head in the emergency was the Explorers’ Club. Rising creakily from their armchairs, these mighty white hunters armed themselves and organized a safari. Borrowing elephants from the Central Park Zoo and guides from the Indian Embassy, they raided several bars for gin and a Schweppes warehouse for tonic, and valiantly set out on their underground expedition.
They were never heard from again. It was some months before their bodies were found and their fate determined. It seems that another group from the Safari Association had recruited guides from the Pakistan Embassy and also descended into the sewers. When the two groups met, the white hunters were caught in a crossfire between the Indian guides and the Pakistani guides and completely wiped out. Those who survived the battle fell easy prey to the monsters swarming underground.
In the end, it took the 101st Airborne Division and a special contingent of Navy frogmen to restore order to New York. It was weeks before the various floods were brought under control, the several raging fires extinguished, the pockets of gas cleared away, the animals subdued. The plumbers raised their rates, of course, and there was talk of socialized plumbing on the floor of the Senate. The AMA joined forces with the plumbers to exert pressure to defeat the bill, and the effort was successful. It was successful despite the fact that a certain left-wing student group staged a bathe-in at the White House.
(Indeed, there were those who felt that the bathe-in did more to harm the cause of socialized plumbing than to help it. When the President went on TV with a special broadcast to the nation and complained that his unshaven appearance was a direct result of the bathe-in, feelings ran so high that there was a general disavowal of the bathtub-sitters. The opposition party criticized the Administration for not taking stronger measures—holding them under the water for five minutes or more was one recommendation. But the President, a humanist with an image to protect, turned thumbs down on immersion and simply had the water shut off. Finally the bathe-in demonstrators dried themselves off and emerged. Immediately they were brought up on charges of stealing the White House towels. When they were convicted, the A.C.L.U. stepped into the case and appealed. When the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, the John Birch Society demanded that Justice Warren be impeached. When he wasn’t, they went on a bathing strike by way of protest. Months went by, and still they refused to bathe. But it fizzled out when the general public proved so apathetic as to be incapable of distinguishing the difference between the unwashed Birchers and the brain-washed ones.)
By the time New York—and the nation—had returned to normal, Sappho and Papa Kuntzentookis were installed in their new apartment. But the forced separation from the object of her love only made Sappho’s heart ache the more. She wept constantly. She refused to eat. She went into a state of acute and deep melancholia. And nothing Papa Kuntzentookis did seemed able to relieve her despair.
Finally one night she ran away. Papa Kuntzentookis didn’t even know the girl was gone until the police called him. Sappho had been apprehended breaking into the apartment in which they had once lived. She had climbed up the fire escape and then, head-first, through the bathroom window. She had plunged straight into the bathtub, which was filled, half with water, and half with the bulk of the man who now occupied the apartment. The man had been startled, to say the least. But he had managed to subdue Sappho and hold her until the police arrived.
“Where is it?” she kept screaming while they waited for the police. “What have you done with it?”
Finally her captor realized that she was referring to the drainpipe which had once stood beside the bathtub. He explained to her that it had been removed, and that the entire plumbing system had been revamped and was concealed inside the wall now. When he showed her the little switch under the faucet which controlled the drain now, she burst into tears.