A Night at the Operation by JEFFREY COHEN Read Free Book Online

Williams movie in your men’s room.”
    This was turning out to be a swell day. “What can we do?” I asked. “Can you fix it?”
    “Fix it? Merlin the Magician couldn’t fix it. It needs to be replaced, and it’s possible there are more rusted-out pipes in there. This is an old building.”
    “I noticed,” I grumbled. “So . . .”
    “I turned off the water, so you won’t get any more flooding, but I couldn’t trace the pipe back—those things go into the floor, set in cement. So I had to turn off the main supply to the whole building.”
    I winced. “Which means I have no water in either bathroom,” I said.
    “Worse than that,” Dad piled on. “There’s no water to the snack bar and no hot water going into the heating system.”
    That one took a moment to sink in. “Am I going to have to shut down?” I asked Dad.
    “I think you already have,” he said.
    I held out for as long as I could, but the lack of heat, more than anything else, made it obvious that Comedy Tonight would be on hiatus until I could guarantee working toilets and dry floors. After Joel McCrae’s John Sullivan was finished learning that comedy is necessary during bad times (and getting Veronica Lake—whose character is called “the Girl”—to fall in love with him), I made an announcement to the audience and sent everyone home. Seventeen people asked for their money back, and got it.
    This really wasn’t what I needed just at the moment. I reassured Mom seven or eight more times, each time crossing my fingers just a little tighter behind my back, and sent my parents to thaw out in the car on their way home. I called the emergency line for a plumbing contractor I found in the Yellow Pages, and outlined the problem to the answering service, which promised to get back to me in the morning. Then I sent the staff home, rewound the film, and closed up shop.
    The ride home was, as I’d feared, cold and unforgiving, with a wind that would have caused a normal man to ponder why he’d taken up this whole bicycle idea to begin with. But then, a normal man probably would have been in a car, thus rendering the entire exercise moot. It did, however, lead one to question whether the whole “saving the planet” thing was really pressing. Tonight, global warming was a more difficult concept to believe in than it was on most evenings.
    I was looking at an indefinite period with a closed theatre and I still hadn’t heard from my ex-wife. That didn’t help me feel any warmer, either.
    At the door to my town house (which the real estate people, I was told, were now calling a town home ), I got off the bike and exhaled. They say physical exercise helps clear the brain, but I was not finding that to be the case. Endorphins be damned, I was in just as much of a funk now as I had been when I mounted up, and my lips were chapped on top of it.
    The bike seemed heavier in the cold weather. I can’t explain why, but it did. I picked it up and carried it up the four steps to the brightly painted green door to the town home , and unlocked the door.
    Walking into my front hall, warmth enveloped me, and that did everything those miserable endorphins couldn’t accomplish. My mood immediately lightened, and my natural optimism (stop laughing!) returned. Sharon was just off licking her wounds, and I would certainly hear from her in the morning.
    My buoyant mood lasted the entire length of the walk from the front door to the living room entrance, which was roughly five steps. Once I got a look at the living room, even a blazing fire in my nonexistent fireplace wouldn’t have been able to warm my heart.
    The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which I’d had installed to accommodate my admittedly enormous collection of comedy films on DVD and videotape, were empty. But that was only because every single one of the 2,394 films I had so carefully catalogued, categorized, and cross-referenced was on the floor of the living room, scattered to the four corners. The