The Cleaning Crew - Softcover

Hayes, Richard D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1524603872 ISBN 13: 9781524603878

Publisher: AuthorHouse, 2016

Synopsis

Matt and Jeremy are two successful businessmen in their sixties wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. They decide to do something grand and to recruit enough people like themselves, successful, rich, and experienced in life, to form a political group. The group would campaign against corruption and win both the legislature and the management positions in Massachusetts, from governor to district attorney, then accomplish nine specified goals, leaving the state in good shape four years later. Then each can retire having accomplished the fantastic goal of cleaning up and restoring the ship of state. Taking on an impossible task, much like Don Quixote taking on the windmills, the group comes together, calls itself the cleaning crew, and carries out an exciting, offbeat and eyebrow-raising campaign culminating in what will become known as the Century Vote. With humor and the absence of the political corruption and infighting of the self-interested political class, Matt, Jeremy and others gather ever-increasing numbers of disaffected voters even as political intrigue, government abuse of power, vote-changing, litigation, and even murder are thrown in their path.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Cleaning Crew

By Richard D. Hayes

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2016 Richard D. Hayes
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0387-8

CHAPTER 1

Matt Greenhill was sixty-four, and he'd had enough.

It was time to change his world. By God, he'd waited around long enough for someone else to take action. His daughter, Lauren, had by now graduated from high school. His wife, Evelyn, was busy with her own friends and pursuits. His business was safely in the hands of others. He was bored and angry, and he had a few million to play with. His parents had both died at seventy; he had the same genetic heart issues, and there was no particular family history of longevity beyond that. So he figured he ought to turn his anger around and, in his last years, try to make better something he saw as getting worse each year. Unfortunately, the world Matt wanted to change was what he called "the People's Republic of Massachusetts" — if not the foremost, certainly one of the most "progressive" states in the union.

Most folks think of New England as a tiny little piece of America way up there next to Nova Scotia, with lousy weather, impossibly high cost of living, great colleges and universities, terrific hospitals, and some vibrant high-tech and creative industries. There was Maine, full of woodsmen and lobster fishers; New Hampshire, full of rugged individuals working the mountain industries of winter ski and summer hiking; Vermont, full of quirky old beatniks, ski bums, and dairy farmers; Connecticut, an outpost of New York City with some defense industries and great gambling places; and Rhode Island, which, if anyone thought of it at all, was a large marina masquerading as a state. And then there was Massachusetts, which Matt often remarked was largely run and controlled by overeducated snobs who looked down on the rest of America from the state's historic heights and achievements as the Cradle of Liberty and the home of Harvard and MIT and the Kennedys. And the Marathon.

All in all, to Matt's mind, these people (a.k.a. Massholes) thought far too highly of themselves and earned the sentiment expressed by the bumper stickers in Texas that advised readers to guzzle gas and freeze a Yankee. Bostonians, he thought, were the worst — especially their cockiness for having won what seemed to be every damn sports championship of significance to Americans in recent years. And their driving skills? Matt just shook his head in disbelief.

Matt was a Masshole himself — born and raised in Wissta (spelled Worcester, to Matt's constant amusement) — and although he was registered to vote as a Democrat, he thought he was pretty darn conservative. Running a small business does that to a guy. He'd built a small chain of stores that made a good profit on his investment pretty much every year, as long as someone was paying attention to the employee theft and the customer theft and the politician theft and the questionable building and safety inspectors and the union thuggery and the contractor corner-cutting and the community-organizer shakedowns. He didn't much like the way the liberals (more recently self-styled as progressives) had run the government into the deepest pit of debt and unpayable pension obligations, while "cooperative" businesses ran away with enough tax dollars to bail out the T (the greater Boston subway and bus/rail system), assuming the leaders of the Commonwealth had any real interest in doing so.

Matt was still busy in retirement. He was on a couple of boards, he was active in the Rotary and the K of C, and he remained involved with a number of charitable organizations that valued both his money and his advice. Over the past few years, as he delegated more and more of the management of his stores to others, Matt had become active in the Better Business Bureau and had taken leadership positions in the statewide Small Business Association. As a result, his ideas about big change had remained on his desk in draft conceptual form.

Until that one day in October.

* * *

Jeremy slid into the booth and barely managed to say good morning before an irritated Matt launched into his tirade.

"Jesus Christ, Jer, did you see what that g-d governor is up to now? Free breakfasts and energy drinks in all schools — even rich places like Wellesley and Dover, so the little overweight tykes from age three to seventeen will be able to pay attention in class! On top of the free lunches they already get, of course. Free dinners and overnight accommodations next, so those poor overworked parents can have some time to themselves."

Matt and his best friend, Jeremy Boatman, were having their weekly Tuesday morning breakfast at a downtown Worcester hotel. Jeremy, a couple of years younger, was CEO of a metal stamping business on the outskirts of the small city. He had a meeting later in the morning with the government safety/EPA people, so he was already in a foul mood. At five-ten and a thin one hundred and fifty pounds, sporting a neat beard and dressed well, Jeremy tended to be seen as just another intense extrovert focused on work. He had tossed his jacket into the booth, noisily slammed his morning paper on the table, and rather ungraciously accepted his regular coffee from the busy waitress who had spotted him charging through the door.

He looked at Matt and said, "Yeah, sure, more of the same. If there's any kind of minor problem, let government handle it — it's too important to be left to the sheep-citizens. It's easy to just take over the role of parent in a way that the people can't see what's happening to them."

Matt noticed that his friend appeared to be even more upset than he was himself, so he decided to draw Jeremy out a bit. "Cynical today, are we? I was thinking of the cost and the huge increase in our debt. What's your point?"

Jeremy sipped his coffee, put down the cup, sighed, and said, "It's the removal of responsibilities from parents and families, putting the government in their place, and making both family and parents less important in the eyes of the kids and the community. Look around. It's gone a long way toward destroying family life in the cities and replacing it with school staffs and social workers not up to that job, or to gangs who offer what families used to offer — a place to belong and have some responsibility. Nobody cares to remember that this is exactly what communist Castro did in Cuba and what the socialists Hitler and Stalin tried in Europe. It's taken us to a dictatorship by government elites, just like everywhere else it's been tried."

"Christ, what's gotten into you today?"

There was a pause as the waitress took their usual orders, and then Jeremy described how his son, Daniel, had come over for dinner the night before.

Matt smiled to himself. "Oh! What was the topic that set you off down this gravelly road?"

"Marriage. I asked him if he and Gail — you met her last summer at the barbecue — had any wedding plans under discussion. His reply was to get on his high horse and talk about their not needing any priest or clerk or minister to confirm their love. So like a bull in a china shop, I butted in and said it wasn't about that but about participating in our community, our Hillary Clinton village, if you will. It tells everyone openly to respect their commitment and assures the community that if blessed with children, they will expect the community to be supportive and welcome them into a community of shared values. He actually laughed at what I was obviously not saying very well, and he said that 'no one talks like that anymore, Dad, so for God's sake, you need to get relevant.' At that I got so bullshit I had to leave the room to collect myself. When I returned, Daniel turned the conversation to something about using his Harvard connections to get on the faculty as an instructor, and we never got back to it."

"And you need to blow off steam over breakfast. I get it," said Matt, distracted a little by seeing a local judge sit down across the room with the mayor's chief aide. He turned back to Jeremy and gestured for him to continue.

"Well, dammit, it seems that the only people who talk about such things as the role of government and family values are ministers in little churches in the South and rural America, and the occasional Tea Party survivalist gun nut the media trots out for us all to laugh at, take pity on, or hate. Meanwhile our kids, millions of whom don't have real families at all, much less what we used to call the nuclear family, all too often find their needs met by the Crips and the Bloods. You just can't know how much pressure there is on the minority and poor white kids I try to hire and train for good jobs."

Matt butted in. "I'm sitting here thinking of your motto — 'if you aren't acting for something, you'll regret it when you have to react to what some other guy does.' And by the way, I've had a lot more involvement with high school dropouts working for me than you have! I've got HR people spending half their time trying to teach these kids how to tell time, what an alarm clock is, and how to discipline themselves to live by a normal daily schedule."

Matt and Jeremy both were involved with a regional program designed to help underprivileged, uneducated, and unskilled youths get a job and the self-worth that work can generate.

"Yeah, yeah. So I've been thinking — you remember that concept you developed a year or so back? The one where a bunch of successful retired people take over the government for a couple of years to fix it for the next generation?"

"Yeah." Matt held up his finger to stop the discussion as another diner stopped by the table to say hello. Meanwhile, Matt dusted off his memory of the many hours he'd spent on this concept while recovering from knee surgery.

"Well," Jeremy prompted, "let's take another look at it. It's just bold enough to maybe at least change the conversation in this country, even if it gets shot down at the polls. Did you ever do any other work on it to flesh it out on paper?"

Matt's mind went directly to his WIP (work in process) drawer and the files full of ideas and concepts he could never get to, for one reason or another, because life kept getting in the way.

"Yup, I did, and it's in a folder on my desk. Every now and again I add something or throw a note in there. Let me clean up what I have, and I'll send it over to you tomorrow. Wait! Need I remind you that one of your last comments, if I recall right, was that the idea was 'loopy'?"

"My bad, as they say. It's not half as loopy as the teacher last week who introduced the grandfather of one of the kids to her class as a veteran of World War Eleven!"

"I remember that. As I recall, the vet immediately walked out of the class and the school without saying a single word."

* * *

Over dinner that night at their favorite restaurant, Matt told Evelyn about the conversation with Jeremy. As she often did when out in public with Matt, Ev wondered what others saw when they looked at her husband. At six-two, two hundred and ten pounds, with a full head of wavy whitening brown hair and wearing the reading glasses he needed to scan the menu, she thought he actually was growing better-looking as the years progressed. His big ears seemed less prominent, his twice-broken nose seemed less of a draw to the eye, and his military bearing gave him a presence she would not have remarked upon ten years ago. She recalled that some of her friends at school had remarked that he looked like he would be a great candidate for mayor — an idea she had immediately shot down with a comment about their trying to get back at her for not applying for the principal's job at their school.

"Matt, are you serious? Jeremy can be a kiloton of force if he gets the wind into his sails and wants to go forward. That'd be easier for him than for us. He's a widower with no teenagers to worry about."

"I know, that's why I wanted to bring you up to speed. Let's be honest, while it would be a grand adventure, this is Massachusetts after all, and by this time next year the whole thing would likely be a fond memory of the windmill winning the joust!"

Matt regarded his wife closely, impressed as usual with how lovely, how handsome a woman she remained after all these years. But he was also worried. Now that she was retired from the school system, would her interests and his become a problem as they diverged? Matt was not ready for retirement in any real sense of the word. He wanted to keep busy, to be actively engaged with problem-solving in the variety of interests he had identified. He was not at all interested in her frequently mentioned idea of travelling the world — "getting away from it all," as she would say. At least not yet.

So he was not surprised when she said, "And if by some chance it succeeded, that would be the end of our plans to spend a year of two doing Europe, Hawaii, and South America. A year to try it out, sure, but five or six? Lauren would be all right, but me?"

Her happiness was important to Matt, and he held back some facetious words that came immediately to his mind. Instead, he asked her, "Could you find anything in the concept that would keep you involved and happy for a while?"

"Ahhhh, a bribe? Can I be the sheriff of Nottingham?"

Her smile as she said this gave him a moment of pride in her. He batted away a silly question as to whether there was such a town in Massachusetts. Instead, he replied, "Very funny. But as a lifelong teacher and administrator, I'll bet you'd love to be in a position to both make real change and protect the teachers and the kids from know-nothing businessmen and pols. Wasn't it you who came up with an outline of education thoughts we agreed were revolutionary but right?"

"Okay. I'll go along ... for now." Her thoughts went immediately to the list she had created some months ago. In the format of questions and suggestions, and using her own and others' experiences over the years, Ev had come up with ideas for creating a world-class public school system, marked notably by teacher empowerment; cameras in the classroom; better pay for better teachers, even better for teachers in the critical subject areas; faculty power to remove and reassign teachers and administrators; and real power to force parents to get their kids to school ready to learn.

At first it was just going to be a letter to the editor. She thought of sending it to the Education Department, and then to the teacher's association. Ultimately, it had stayed in her own WIP file. Ev figured every good teacher and every good administrator with experience had a list just as good or better than hers, so it was easy to set her list aside on the basis of self-doubt as to its worth. Even Matt's praise was not enough — after all, his knowledge in the area basically came from her anyway.

Matt thought, during the ten-minute drive home, that Jeremy's first instinct was probably going to reassert itself after the concept was reassessed. It simply couldn't be done — too many problems. No one, he thought, knew better than he that the old saying was true. You can't fight city hall.

CHAPTER 2

Jeremy Boatman grew up in Needham (need-um) just outside Boston in a small center-door entrance colonial, white with forest green shutters. His father was a mid-level manager at Raytheon, a large defense contractor with close ties to MIT and Harvard. His mom, Marge, had largely remained at home to raise Jer and his little brother, Kevin.

Jer played varsity hockey for the town high school, paving the way for Kevin to not only star there but star in college and play on the US Olympic team. Jer was rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, so he got his degree from Worcester Polytech, majoring in business and chemistry. He did well and got a good job at a medical-device manufacturing firm. There he met and married his boss's secretary, Louise — in turn creating both a son, Daniel, and earning the unrelenting dislike of his boss.

When Daniel turned three, Jer and two other geeks got some funding for the development of a new company using cutting-edge chemical-laser manufacturing techniques. The business did well enough for Jer to buy out his partners and become sole owner seven years later. But Louise died a year after that in a car crash caused by an uninsured and unlicensed driver under the influence of a variety of drugs. Nothing was ever done to the driver, who skipped the state while out on bail and had not been heard from since.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Cleaning Crew by Richard D. Hayes. Copyright © 2016 Richard D. Hayes. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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Edition details

• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1524603872
• ISBN 13: 9781524603878
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336