A woman who organized an anti-rat petition as a girl in grade school has been crowned New York City’s rat czar, beating out a man who has been inducted into the Pest Management Professional Hall of Fame.
The Wall Street Journal
Then . . .
Oh, how long I suffered from the sneers and catcalls of the . . . is “stupid doody-head” too strong a term? . . . boys in my 6th grade class at the William “Billy” Bretherton School for Exterminators, of which I was the only girl.
“Hey Miriam,” Ricky Heyhimer would shout at me as I ran down the steps at recess, “want me to squash a bug for you?”
The other boys would laugh heartily. “Ha, ha, ha, so funny I forgot to laugh!” I’d shout back at him. “Why don’t you check your underpants for crab lice?”
That usually shut him up. He was ashamed to look in his “tighty-whiteys” because, unlike every other twelve-year old boy in the class, there was no hair down there.
“Why don’t you go to nursing school?” Todd Fremke would shout. “At least you’d have a chance of getting a job.”
“Good idea,” I’d say, feinting with a jab before I hit him with some roundhouse sarcasm. “Maybe I could give you an intravenous infusion of brains.”
Now!
But now, as I surveyed my domain as New York City Rat Czar . . . actually, czarina . . . I could laugh a bitter, mirthless laugh at all those I’d bested in my quest to reach the highest summit in pest control: New York, New York, it’s a helluva town–I’d made it there, proving I could make it anywhere.
But unlike all of my male predecessors, who only had to worry about rodent and insect pests, I had to worry about the human kind; the nay-sayers, the back-stabbers, the men who greedily eyed my $155,000 a year salary, trying to think of some way they could embarrass me . . . and take my place.
Not bloody likely, I muttered under my breath, just as my intern, Miriam Tapack, tapped ever-so-lightly on my frosted glass door.
“Come in,” I said.
“Good morning, Czarina Kravetz.”
“Good morning to you, Miriam.” She’s a “project,” as they say on NBA Draft Day for someone who has a ton of potential but is still in need of some molding and sculpting. She has a nose for a nest of carpenter ants, a sharp eye for silverfish. She earned a “Rising Star!” accolade from Pest Exterminator’s Digest last year for her anti-rat petition when she was just a sixth-grader, but I have to maintain my professional skepticism. After all–there aren’t exactly a lot of pro-rat forces out there to oppose her.
“What kind of a milquetoast knock was that?” I snapped sharply, but with a smile on my face. I thought Miriam had talent, but she was hiding it under the bushel of her tartan plaid skirt.
“What’s milquetoast?” she asked meekly.
“It comes from milk toast, a dish consisting of buttered toast in milk.”
“Does it . . . knock on doors?”
“No, the term has been carried over by analogy to mean a timid person. If you’re going to make it in the man-eat-bug world of professional extermination–whether it’s in the public or the private sector–you’ll have to be more forceful than that.”
“Okay–got it.”
“What’s on tap for today?” I asked as I poured myself a cup of municipal government coffee, than which there is none stronger, nor worse tasting, unless you patronize Starbucks.
“More Airbnb customers complaining about bedbugs in Flushing.”
I snorted, almost spraying coffee on the impressionable young girl; it would have made quite an impression on her snow-white ruffled blouse. “Won’t those people ever learn,” I said shaking my head. “We’re the goddamn bedbug capital of the world–it’s part of the vibrant personality of the world’s greatest city!”
“So . . . what do I do?”
“Private dispute, none of our business. Did I tell those people to stay there?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a rhetorical question, the answer is no. Next.”
“Complaint about a large, scorpion-like cockroach coming out of the kitchen of a restaurant.”
“Was it in Chinatown?”
“How’d you guess?”
“They grow ’em big over there, kinda like the bats that started the whole COVID thing,” I said, leaning back in my chair to take in my breath-taking view of the dumpsters in the alley behind the building.
“But I thought . . .”
“Forget what you thought, you were lied to.” I scowled at her, but not too hard–our interns are unpaid, just work-study. I couldn’t have Miriam crumple up and quit on me.
“So . . . what do we do about the cockroach?”
“Call them owner, tell him to step on it. Anything else?” It was almost 11:00–time to start thinking about lunch, and I wanted to have my mind clear to focus on the meatloaf and mashed potatoes special in the Municipal Building cafeteria . . . without images of bugs and bats dancing through my head.
“That’s it for now.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
I turned to page A14 of The Wall Street Journal–The Daily Diary of the American Dream–folded the paper into a neat little rectangle, and tossed it across the desk at her.
“We’ve lost our Number One ranking in rats.”
“What? Who’s in first.”
I started to say “Correct,” but I remembered–she was young. She doesn’t even get “Seinfeld” references–no way could she understand Abbott and Costello.
“Chicago is in first place, we’re a rat-and-a-half out.”
Miriam looked . . . confused. “So, isn’t that a good thing?” she asked hesitantly, going all Martha Stewart on me.
“This post is yucky!”
It was time for me to level with the kid. I couldn’t have her leaving at the end of the summer, heading back to some leafy-green liberal arts college for her senior year under the spell of a noble dream of a career in municipal government.
“Listen kid, and listen good.”
“I’m listening.”
“Are you listening good?”
“I actually think it should be listening ‘well,’ because you’re talking about how you’re listening, so you’re modifying a verb and need an adverb.”
Kids. She’d probably aced her SATs, but what did she know about the real world. I came around to her side of the desk, sat down next to her, and put my arm around her.
“The thing is,” I began, “if we killed all the rats, I’d be out of a job.”
“So . . . we don’t want to kill rats?”
“Pre-cise-ly,” I said, drawling it out for emphasis.
“But . . . what about our constituents?”
I closed my eyes and looked out the window, exasperated. Then I remembered I closed my eyes and couldn’t see anything out the window, so I opened them and turned around.
“Twenty years in, I get a full pension, see?” I snapped.
“So . . . that’s what motivates you?”
“I sure as hell didn’t go into public service because I wanted to serve the public.”