Measured and Found Wanting: Snippet #51 (Battlefield Promotion Edition)

Sarah is given a promotion, which entails a move to New Jersey. That news prompts Michael's rant about his visit to the Garden State. Sarah reminds him of another rant at a School Board meeting.

Michael paces around the kitchen, phone receiver in hand. “New Jersey? Seriously? Of all the places to send you”.

“It’s not like we’re going to North Korea…”

“Comes awfully close”.

“Okay, you’re having trouble processing this. I get that. When I get home, we’ll have a cocktail and talk this one out. Honest, it’s not the end of the world”.

Michael stares out the kitchen window. The calendar says April the twenty-first, but it feels like the middle of goddamn March. Big pools of standing water in the backyard. Maybe we should forget about tomatoes and grow rice instead. And rent a couple of water buffaloes while we’re at it. Michael brings linguine, chopped clams, and canned mushrooms out of the pantry, then measures out the spices and puts them in a jar. He brings up a bottle of Mumm from downstairs and puts it in the fridge, and takes the bottle of Russell’s Reserve out of the liquor cabinet. Sarah will want to celebrate. Can’t blame her. Minerva is making her a Group Manager, with a big raise. Michael goes out for the mail. Getting colder by the minute. Back inside, he turns on CNBC. I hope they’re giving her stock options, too. Market’s been good to us. We’re ahead twelve percent for the year. Michael started following the market at age ten. First chance he got at work, he stuck the max into his retirement plan—IPA matched his contributions dollar for dollar—and let it grow, as Eric Clapton would say. Let it blossom, let if flow.

Sarah comes home early. “Hi there! Celebrate with me?”

“Why not?” Michael goes into the kitchen, opens the bottle of Russell’s, and pours out two glasses. He brings them out to the living room. “Cheers”.

“So tell me what happened”.

Sarah settles into the recliner. “This morning, I barely get my coat off when the woman in the next cube says, ‘Look sharp. Alex Hannum¹’s coming’”.

“Mr. Bullet Head himself? I’ve seen the guy on CNBC”.

“At nine sharp, Hannum's secretary calls me into the conference room. There are two people there, Hannum and another guy who fits the profile of a hatchet man to a T. Oh shit. He’s going to can me over Rocky River. I just know it. The Rocky River Data Center, where Sarah went for days at a time, was the bane of her existence. At Minerva Technologies, it is where careers went to die.

“Hannum is wearing this grim look on his face. He says to me, ‘So you’re the lady who’s honchoing the data consolidation at Rocky River’. ‘Yes, sir’, I tell him. ‘Well, not anymore’. Here it comes, I’m thinking. Hannum says, ‘I spent Wednesday at Rocky River. After talking to Mr. Holzman, the site manager, I concluded we have no alternative but to go in a different direction’. Stop pussyfooting, I’m thinking. Just get it over with. Then he breaks into a smile and says, ‘Holzman told me you’ve done a hell of a job, considering the circumstances.” The circumstances. Every time Sarah went out there, she came home with a horror story. Wildcat strikes. Knife fights in the parking lot. Drug trafficking. Theft of trade secrets. Sabotage. And last month, a murder. A foreman whose ex-wife reported him missing was found at the bottom of the Cuyahoga River. Gagged and chained to a wooden spool. The case remains unsolved. It’s only a matter of time before the true-crime jackals start feasting on the story. “Then Hannum tells me, ‘Fact is, your talents are wasted babysitting that menagerie. We’re calling in Dobler International to clean it up’”.

“Dobler? That's like throwing gasoline on a house fire. Premium unleaded. Not even Bull Connor would have sicced those guys on Dr. King and his marchers. You think Rocky River’s a combat zone now? Just wait”. Last weekend, Michael watched a documentary about the firm. Its founder, Desert Storm veteran Conrad Dobler², offers “full spectrum” security services for corporations and governments, including Africa’s most brutal dictatorships. His company has a well-earned reputation for brutality. “Those guys are the worst,” Michael explains. “Interpol put out a Red Notice for Dobler after he ordered his men to gun down strikers at the Kansanshi Copper Mine in Zambia³. His newest product line is union busting. And Minerva hired him to do just that in Rocky River”.

“It won’t be my problem any longer. After Hannum told me what he’s going to do at Rocky River, he opened up a folder. Slowly. He’s obviously milking the drama. ‘I went over your file on my way here. Very impressive. I told Special Projects that they need someone like you at Headquarters. Then he stands up, shakes my hand, and points at the man still seated. ‘This is Jack Ramsay from our headquarters in West Hillsdale. I brought him here to handle your transition’”.

“No more commutes to Rocky River. What are you going to do for aggravation?”

“Listen to you rant, of course.” Laughing, Sarah holds up her glass.

“Refill?” Michael brings the Russell’s out of the kitchen and pours out two more glassfuls.

Sarah takes a sip, and thinks. So typical of Mike, not wanting to move, even though he’s unhappy here. Mr. I Hate Change himself, thinking of everything that can go wrong and none of the good things. Afraid of a move of any kind. Once more it’s up to me to push this ahead.

Sarah asks, “Why are you so upset about moving? You’ve hated this subdivision from the day we moved here, so you hardly have standing to complain.”

Michael laughs to himself. Standing. Amazing how many legal catchphrases she’s picked up by osmosis. Like “complete and utter” and “slippery slope”. He takes a sip. “Can you blame me for hating it here? Beautiful Cherry Hill Subdivision. Where good fences make good neighbors. Where homeowners are judged not by the color of their skin but by the character of their lawns”.

“What’s so bad about wanting a nice lawn?”

“Grass is the most useless crop ever raised by human beings. For starters, you can’t eat it. Tending it’s a gigantic waste of time. And around here, lawn care is a competitive sport. A dick-measuring contest. This subdivision’s coat of arms should be crossed edgers rampant on a field of green fescue”. Michael looks out the picture window, flips the bird in the general direction of the Semenko house across the street. “Dipshit. Reported us to the Homeowners Association for too-tall grass while your dad was dying and we had to leave town for two weeks. Cost us a hundred-dollar fine. And his three kids were holy terrors. How many cars did they wreck, all told? A whole fucking fleet. Not that it mattered to him. His party stores were bringing in enough money to pay for the repairs, and the sky-high insurance premiums on top of them.”

“At least his widow has been nice to us”.

“Maybe she was glad to get rid of him. You always hear about ‘untimely’ deaths. His was timely.”

“Michael, that’s awful”. We’ve been married fourteen years, Michael thinks, and she still can’t recognize hyperbole. It’s my way of blowing off steam.

“Bad as the Semenkos are, they're not as infuriating as the Dale Hunter and his wife next door”.

“At least they stopped dropping Bible tracts in our mailbox. Have you ever read that drivel?”

“I try not to. It’s bad enough that Mrs. Hunter kept dropping hints about us not having kids, though lately she’s cut it out. Maybe she’s given up”.

“Next time she does bring up the subject, tell her our tax dollars pay to educate all those kids of theirs at that pissant charter school. Everyone from The Purification Church sends their spawn there to get indoctrinated. Fuck those kids. Fuck the Purification Church. Fuck Pastor William Hulbert. And fuck that cheap-ass imitation Billy Graham accent of his”. Michael paces around the room. Sarah stares at the ceiling. He’s like a lion in a cage. Can’t stay still for a moment.

“Let the record show that I did get in one final shot at the lowlifes in this town”.

“The neighbors are still sore at you over that performance”.

“I have zero regrets”.

“Thought so”.

So far as Michael is concerned, his confrontation with the School Board was the highlight of his years in Napier Township⁴. It all began when Mike Milbury, the Superintendent, announced that he was taking Toni Morrison’s Beloved off the reading list of the AP English class⁵. Milbury told the Napier Observer he did so after Mr. and Mrs. Ulf Samuelsson, whose son was enrolled in that class, complained to him that the novel “depicted bestiality, racism, and sex”, which was “not appropriate for children that age”. Ulf Jr. was seventeen. Mr. Samuelsson also happened to be one of the “Four Churchmen”, members of the Purification Church who held a majority on the seven-member School Board. The Superintendent’s decision prompted a storm of emails and phone calls, as well as a threat by the faculty to walk out in violation of state law, fines be damned. In an effort to “lower the temperature”, the Board scheduled a public hearing on Beloved “and other objectionable material”. The public came out in force--including Michael, who finally saw an opportunity to get even with the mental midgets who lived in his neighborhood. He knew that Milbury was thoroughly off-base, and that he’d get trounced in court if the ACLU ever got involved. But for now, this was a golden opportunity to publicly denounce the Bible-bangers. As Catherine Thorpe might have put it, “it’s like sitting ducks in a barrel”.

Michael had to wait until half-past eleven to speak. By then, the auditorium was half-empty. But all of the Purification Church people were still in their seats. Daniel in the lions’ den, he thought to himself. He walked to the microphone and began, “My name is Michael Hermann. I am a homeowner in this school district and a writer as well. I take particular offense, Mr. Milbury, to your taking Beloved off the AP English curriculum”.

Samuelsson interrupts. “Why are you speaking to this board? You don’t have children in this district. As a parent…”.

“As a parent, you get just one vote. One. Same as me, my wife, and everyone else in this room”. Gasps and some boos from the church people.

Another board member, Marty McSorley, shoots back, “Being childless, Mr. Hermann, you don’t get a say”.

“Really? In that case, since there’s no taxation without representation—I assume you teach that in Civics, or have you done away with that as well?—the School District owes us all the property taxes we’ve paid over the years. Plus interest. That will be thirty thousand dollars, please”. Hooting and scattered cheers.

Michael points at the superintendent. “Now, Mr. Milbury, you went on Joe Cronin’s radio program last week, and don’t say you don’t know Cronin’s political leanings because everyone in Detroit knows where he stands. You got on that show and fed the audience the red meat. You analogized Beloved to an R-rated movie. Bad analogy, sir”. A chorus of boos. “You know full well that books don’t carry ratings, and besides, the age limit for R is seventeen and everyone in the AP English class is a senior and is therefore at least that old”.

“Just a minute, Mr. Hermann”, Milbury interrupts.

“Don’t ‘just a minute’ me, sir. I have the floor. You also called Beloved ‘harmful to minors’, a legal term you don’t know the meaning of, because the book contained quote ‘offending passages’, unquote. I’ll bet the thirty thousand you owe me…”

“Take a seat, Mr. Hermann”, Milbury yells.

“That you never read the book. Admit it, sir. You never read the book...” More hoots and boos.

“Mister Hermann!”

“Does the phrase ‘taken as a whole’ ring a bell? You don’t get to ban books or anything else based on a few offending passages—especially when you’re as easily offended as Mr. Samuelsson, who started this circus”. A blast of boos from the church people. While the audience settles down, Milbury bends over, as though tying a shoelace. ”Mr. Milbury, you also said that Beloved was ‘not of sufficient quality’ to be included in that class. Care to explain that to the Swedish Academy, which awarded Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize?”

“That will be quite enough!”

“No, it isn’t quite enough”. He looks at his watch, then stares down a pocket of church people in the front corner. “My time isn’t up. In closing, let me congratulate you, Mr. Milbury. Your handling of this matter, going back to when the Samuelssons complained to you, ex parte, another legal term you don’t know the meaning of, violated every known rule of sound decision-making. Every one of them”.

“CUT OFF HIS MIKE!”

Michael shouts over the din, “Mr. Milbury, you are a five-tool incompetent, You, sir, should…”.

Red-faced, Milbury shouts, “ORDER! ORDER!”. Shoe in hand, he does his best Nikita Khrushchev imitation, banging it on the table⁶.

Michael continues shouting, “You should step down immediately and find a more suitable line of work. Working the midnight shift at Sam’s Club. Driving a forklift. Stacking pallets of dog food.”

The auditorium erupts in chaos.

As Sarah leads him out by the hand, Michael laughs uncontrollably. In the car, Sarah asks, “What was so damn funny? You could have gotten us hurt! Someone threw a water bottle which missed my head by this much!”

“Probably someone on the Tigers. Their pitching staff is putrid”.

“Be serious for once!”

“Be serious? After that farce? When Milbury was banging his shoe, it reminded me of Dean Wormer in Animal House. I expected him to start yelling, ‘I’m going to revoke your charter! No more Delta House! No more fun of any kind!’”

“I'm warning you, Michael. One of these days, your sense of humor is going to land us in big trouble”.

“That board deserved what I gave them. Especially Milbury. What frosts my ass is that he’s going to retire to Florida, where he’ll eat twenty-two-ounce Wagyu steaks for dinner after sucking down mai-tais at poolside all afternoon. On our dime”.

Sarah takes a sip of her drink. “You realize, don’t you, that you burned your bridges in this town, plus all the roads leading up to them, and then lit the river on fire. Par for the course for you. Face it, Mike, you’re miserable here. You always were miserable here”.

“Can you blame me? The neighbors treat us like space aliens, and not just the Grimsons. What do I have in common with these galoots? Their number-one topic of conversation is cars, just ahead of the new leaf blower and pruning shears they bought. At least I can fake a conversation by babbling about the Tigers or the Wings”. Michael looks outside the picture window. A man walks by. “Hey, look! A pedestrian. The lowest form of life in Cherry Hill Subdivision. Do you know how many times someone’s cursed at me while I’m walking around the neighborhood. For walking, for Christ’s sake!”

Sarah takes another sip. “Don’t be such a martyr. I haven’t been thrilled with life around here either. Or with work. You’d be surprised by how many people told me I wasted four years of my life going to college because all that did was put off collecting a pension. And the commute! I have to drive east into blinding sunshine in the morning, and west into it in the evening. I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the Sun hardly ever comes out in the winter”.

“Which never seems to end”.

Sarah goes into the kitchen, then comes out with crackers and cheese. “You talk about Jersey as though it’s one big toxic waste dump”.

“Based on my experience, it is. Dan took me to his hometown. It was dirty and crowded and smelled of truck exhaust. Downtown was dead. Dingy luncheonettes that sold nothing but cigarettes and pulp paperbacks with the covers taken off. Thirdhand clothing shops, selling hand-me-downs from Goodwill. Alpine National Bank, the biggest building downtown, was empty, probably inhabited by plague rats. Grim liquor stores, even by liquor store standards. The movie theater showed Triple-X porno. Kids in black leather jackets on every corner, smoking Marlboros. Slutty looking girls in tights, already sporting rolls of cellulite at age eighteen. Mean-ass cops. They saw my Michigan tags and tailed Danny and me all the way through town until I got on the Parkway. Toll road. Great. I’m from Michigan, we don’t pay toll. Then, at the plaza, the guy behind me, probably an extra from the cast of Grease, leans on his horn and flips me off because I had to fumble around for the coins. Dan tells me, too late, ‘You’re in an exact change lane’, as though I should somehow know that. I’ll bet the guy who gave me the bird was in a hurry to pick up his Viagra before the drugstore closed.”

“Generalize much?”

“There’s a reason for those Jersey jokes. ‘Where the garbage meets the sea’. ’The only gas station with two senators’. The Shore is nice, I’ll grant you that, but you have to have to drive through endless miles of shitscape to get there. And the pollution. Holy shit! Dan said that in the summer, for days on end, the air quality is ‘unacceptable’⁷. ‘Unacceptable?’ What are you going to do, send it back? Did you know there’s a huge dead zone in the ocean where New York City dumps its trash. Killed all the fish. And pollution doesn’t stop with just dirty air and water. The summer I went there, medical waste washed up on one of the beaches. Syringes. Bloody bandages. Colostomy bags. It made national news”.

Sarah stands up. “Whoa! You need a trip to the hardware store. That’s an awfully broad brush you’re using”.

Michael laughs. “Does Home Depot take Discover?”

Hands on hips, Sarah declares, “You’re damning the whole state based on one visit?”

“My sample size was pretty significant. I got to see Jersey at its worst. Dan grew up in a shitty town, in a tiny house. I’ve been inside it. He took me up to his bedroom where all the heat collects, and pointed out the window. The Manhattan skyline. Of course I couldn’t see it because of all the smog. Between Dan’s house and Manhattan, there’s an industrial zone. Bubbling cauldrons of brimstone and smokestacks belching out unstable isotopes and free radicals and swamps where mutant reptiles live”.

“Mike, don’t spoil things. You know how much I’m looking forward to New York. The museums, the shows, the shopping, the pace of life. I’ve seen a thousand movies set in that city, and every one of them makes me want to be there.”

“You need to balance that with a few from the Seventies. Taxi Driver. Dog Day Afternoon. The Warriors. Sarah, that city is a zoo that took down the cages and put the animals on the honor system”.

“Maybe twenty years ago. It’s changed. Everyone at Headquarters told me that. They even cleaned up Times Square⁸. Besides, we won’t be living in the kind of town Dan grew up in. There are lots of communities with nice homes and shops and restaurants. They even have train service. You can sit back and let Choo-Choo Coleman be your driver. Half an hour later, you’re in Manhattan”.

“You mean Choo-Choo Charlie, from the Good & Plenty ad⁹. Coleman played catcher for the Mets¹⁰. His manager said he’d never seen someone move so fast chasing his passed balls”.

“I stand corrected, Mr. Font of Knowledge. Now, how about dinner?”

Michael looks out the window again. The rain has turned to sleet and snow, and the wind has begun to howl. “Look at this shit. Why do we subject ourselves to this?” He goes into the kitchen.

After dinner, Michael opens a bottle of Mumm and pours out two glasses. Sarah hides her disappointment. He didn’t bring out the Dom? We saved it for just this kind of occasion. They move to the living room. A white coating covers the grass. “I guess we’ve spent our last Christmas in this room”.

“Remember the year we had that ice storm?”

“We were sitting here, listening to Christmas music, when the tree limbs started breaking. That was scary”.

“Next morning, I saw Mrs. Grimson fixing the Nativity scene in the front yard. I wished her a Merry Christmas, you know how she hates it when someone says ‘Happy Holidays’. She launched into a tirade about the how the storm was God’s wrath, and He’s going to send down more disasters unless we mend our ways and get right with Him. You came out to listen to her”.

“Of course I did. I never pass up a good rant. In fact, I awarded her bonus points for bringing up the Lake of Fire¹¹”.

“Bonus points. Only you. One thing is for sure. I’m not going to miss the Grimsons”.

“Me neither”. Michael gets up and stares out the window in the general direction of the Grimsons’. “Wonder what they had for dinner. My money’s on Hamburger Helper for eight. Bon appetit!” He raises his glass.

Sarah stands up. “All right, Don Rickles. We’ve got to get rolling on the move. Minerva’s giving me two weeks to house-hunt. You’re welcome to come along, and I hope you do, even though you’re absolutely clueless. You wouldn’t even notice a hole in the roof. Just stay out of my way while I’m looking. Go into the city, watch the Yankees, even though you call them the Evil Empire. Or start your quest of all the art museums in Manhattan. Find a bar you’ve read about, drink some beer, write another article. Didn’t you say there’s a famous beer hall in Queens?”

Dread falls over Sarah. He’s going to be unhappy in Jersey, too. I just know it. We could move to a castle in the Loire Valley, and he’d wind up calling it a shithole¹².

© 2025 by Paul Ruschmann. All rights reserved.

Snippet #52 will be published on Sunday, June 1, 2025.

1. The names of high-ranking Minerva executives come from NBA coaches from yesteryear.

2. A 1977 cover story in Sports Illustrated declared Dobler "Pro Football's Dirtiest Player”—a distinction he wore with pride. Conrad’s memoir, published in 1988 was titled They Call Me Dirty.

3. Fun fact: Copper accounts for about two-thirds of Zambia’s exports.

4. There is no Napier Township in Michigan. However, there is a Napier Road, a north-south road, which is the western boundary of Canton Township. The road is not named after Scottish mathematician John Napier of Merchiston (1550-1617), who is best known as the discoverer of logarithms.

5. In December 2011, the interim superintendent of Plymouth-Canton Community Schools removed Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel Waterland from the AP English curriculum. He also submitted Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved for review by an independent committee. The interim superintendent allegedly took these actions after only two parents complained, and did so without consulting the School Board or the faculty. His decision prompted an outcry from the community and the threat of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

6. On December 23, 1979, Mike Milbury of the Boston Bruins climbed into the Madison Square Garden stands and spanked an unruly fan with the fan's own shoe.

7. Nowadays, New York State measures air pollution on a 0-to-500 Air Quality Index scale, which no longer has an “unacceptable” category, perhaps because the jokes about it. An AQI of 300 or above is “unhealthy”, prompting a warning of emergency conditions.

8. During the 1970s and 1980s, Times Square epitomized the decline of New York City. The neighborhood was home to sex shops, peep shows, X-rated theaters, prostitutes, and people who arguably didn’t belong to the species Homo sapiens. It inspired the HBO drama series The Deuce (slang for 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue), which depicted the Times Square’s “Golden Age of Porn”.

9. “Once upon a time there was an engineer/Choo-Choo Charlie was his name we hear./He had an engine and it sure was fun/He used Good & Plenty candy, to make his train run”. It was one of the most famous jingles in advertising history.

10. Clarence “Choo Choo” Coleman played for the Mets in 1962-63 and 1966. With the Mets, he hit .205 in 415 at bats, but made up for his anemic hitting with his inability to handle pitchers.

11. Mentioned in five verses in Chapters 19-21 of the Book of Revelation, the author of which must have been under the influence of powerful hallucinogens.

12. One word, not two, no matter what your auto-correct tries to tell you.