Confessions of a Tax Collector (40 page)

“You wanted to see me?” Toby asked her.

“Yes. There’s a taxpayer coming in today for a conference, and I need your help.”

“It’s that doctor, isn’t it?”

“Dr. Pierre, yes.”

The Pierre account belonged to Beverly Underwood, one of the original trainees under Annie. Dr. Pierre was an odd little man, of French ancestry, who alternated his strategy between feigning ignorance of taxes and claiming Bev was acting out a personal vendetta. He was unpredictable, as was his wife.

“His wife called yesterday,” Annie explained. “And right in the middle of the conversation she starts calling Beverly all sorts of horrible names and accuses her of being pregnant with her husband’s child.”

Toby laughed.

“And then she tells her she’s prejudiced against Europeans because she’s married to a racist.”

“Who is?”

“Beverly.”

He laughed again.

“It wasn’t enough to get Inspection interested,” Annie said.

“Hell no. Inspection only cares about bustin‘ ROs.”

“Bev and I would feel a lot better if you were here. Might keep things calm.”

“You want me in on the interview?”

“Oh, no. Just, I don’t know, maybe sitting outside the door. I’ll leave it open so you can hear. I would—well, I’d just feel more comfortable with a big guy like you nearby.”

He nodded. “No problem. What time tomorrow?”

I backed out of the doorway and returned to my cubicle. My skinny little cubicle. I sat down at my desk.
I’d feel more comfortable with a big guy
— Dr. Pierre was not a large man. He was shorter than I, but had about twenty pounds on me: Rick the ectomorph; Rick the worm.

The next day, Dr. Pierre had come and met with Annie and Beverly in Annie’s office. Toby sat just outside the door, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, as if he were just taking a quick nap. I pretended to work at the IDRS terminal, located ten feet from Annie’s door. I could hear Dr. Pierre saying, “Please, please, Ms. DeFlorio, I am begging you,” in a heavy French accent. “I am
begging
you.”

When he left, an extremely frustrated little Frenchman, Annie stepped out her door and touched Toby on the arm, mouthed the words
Thank you,
and disappeared into her office without acknowledging my presence. I rose from the terminal, walked to my cubicle, and kicked my desk as hard as I could.

I walked with a limp for the rest of the day. I did not realize it at the time, but my slow descent into madness had begun. A true friend might have seen the signs, been able to read the portents of the coming storm, but I had no true friends left. I had drifted away from my friends in the theater. My relationship with my family had been strained for years. I didn’t go to church and I didn’t frequent bars. Each day after work I picked up a three-piece chicken dinner from the KFC drive-thru and ate at the foot of my bed. I would watch the nightly news, then prepare for my workout. I was breaking Gina’s first rule of survival: there was no life outside the Service for me, no distinction between Rick Yancey the revenue officer and Rick Yancey the human being. My goal was nothing short .of
perfection.
The perfect human body, the perfect revenue officer. I should have foreseen the outcome; I should have known what lay on the other side of my desire.

In the twilight, after my preworkout high-carb bar (“for an EXPLOSIVE workout!”), I strip to my underwear and face myself in the mirror. I see him emerging, the one who has always dwelled inside me, straining for release, struggling for birth. One hundred and fifty-five pounds now, and gaining. The chest is broader, the ribs less pronounced. An attractive, intricate lacing of veins runs down my forearms, my biceps. I can actually see definition, a distinction of line and shadow, on my arms, my legs, my stomach. Abs are the most difficult muscles in the human body to isolate but, being an ectomorph, I am blessed with a foundation to build upon. One night, on a whim, inspired by the gleaming images found on glossy muscle magazine covers, I stop by the store and pick up some baby oil. I slip off my underwear to pose, slickly naked, before the mirror. I throw a towel over the padded seat of the exercise machine; otherwise, my naked glutes will slide right off and I might crack something precious on the leg bars beneath. With the music blaring, I reach an easy, almost mechanical rhythm. The desire, the longing and the rage, exists symbiotically with the will: nothing is possible through intellect alone. I abandon the Kafkaesque
The Fly
as my paradigm and pick up William Hurt in
Altered States,
floating in that pod,

that modified hot tub, denied all sensory input, blind, deaf, mute, numb, then leaping out as that wicked caveman, primordial man, or whatever the hell he was, leaping, cavorting, turning over cars. Or better, Kier Dullea in 2001:
A Space Odyssey,
evolving into the Starchild with those bulbous eyes and disproportionally shaped head. Thus, men may become gods and gods men. So, thrusting, lunging, pulling, squatting, crunching, I watch the needle rise, 155, 157, 160, limbs shimmering with sweat and oil in the bright bathroom lights, after darkness has come, to the point of exhaustion but never beyond it, for God dares not give us unbearable burdens; rising at four, feeling little soreness now, but a kind of kinetic force leaking like gas from a bottle; walking in Annie’s office every morning to find her eating her regular breakfast, peanut butter cheese crackers with Mountain Dew to drink; stomping through the office, shouting for anyone who would listen to hear, “If I were in charge, no more IBIAs!
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No more IAs period! All first contacts would be seizures!” unsure if anyone heard or cared if they did; watching the needle rise to 162,164; seizing the rental house, the motorcycle, the ‘89 Ford Taurus, the Lincoln Towncar with the busted-out brake light, the mortgage, the earth-moving equipment; sitting for hours in her office over the course of several weeks, swapping stories from our childhoods (“I always wanted the next thing. The day after Christmas I couldn’t wait till Easter. After Easter, my birthday. After my birthday, Thanksgiving. Graduated from college when I was twenty. Married at twenty-two. First child at twenty-five. Always rushing ahead, wanting the next thing, wanting
everything.”);
staring into the yawning abyss of the Self, now at 167 and all of it hard muscle, people—some of them young, attractive women—noticing me, this blue-eyed buff demigod, and the abyss opens wider, sucking me down into aggrandizing cynicism, as the cute girl at the sandwich shop who ignored me for months begins to flirt with me; stuttering in Annie’s office, “I thought for Valentine’s Day… well, I was wondering if it would be all right if I got you something,” and her, nodding absently, “Yes, that would be all right,” as she turns her head to hunt for something in the file cabinet. “Yes, that would be all right. Yes, yes,” as she turns her head away; sneaking the card and Godiva chocolates into her office before she comes in, forgetting to sign the card in my nervousness; reading this in my operator’s manual:
You want short reps of the maximum weight you can bear. The key to building muscle is forcing the muscle past its normal capacity;
watching her walk to her car from my sixth-floor window, keys already in her hand, for he has been stalking her, and she is afraid; telling her, half in jest, “One day your prince will come,” and her answer, “Well, I wish he’d hurry up and get here,” to me in my white Oxford shirt with the collar that was now too tight; kneeling naked before a mirror, staring at this face that now does not seem to belong to me; slamming my fist into poles, drywall, desktops, at the slightest provocation; consuming four thousand calories a day; spinning like a Dervish without the underlying premise of faith; crouching in the shower as the water slams down on my bowed back; screaming obscenities into dead phone lines; whistling in the dark; shedding the old skin like a Gila in the sun; taking myself to the outer edge of my capacity and pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, until I can bid welcome to the god within.

* * *

The man on the telephone was not happy. I had just levied the bank account he had successfully hidden from his creditors for the past six years. I was doodling on a history sheet and barely listening. Beside the pad of paper was a stack of phone messages, six of them from Laura Marsh, all marked “urgent.”

I was a criminal. He was going to sue me. According to my own Internal Revenue Code, he didn’t exist. I watched the whitecaps on Mirror Lake; it was a blustery day in mid-March. He began to read from the Code. I interrupted him.

“Shut up.”

There was a shocked silence on the other end.

“What did you say to me?” he choked out at last.

“You people, all I hear from you is talk. You say you’re going to do this and promise you’ll do that, but you never do any of it. You have this idea that you can bluster and bully your way through every problem and somehow that will make the problem go away. Well, let me tell you something, buddy, this is one problem that is never going away. Never.”

“I’m recording this conversation, I’ll have you know.”

“Good! Check the tape after we’re done and if you’ve missed anything, let me know. I’ll be happy to repeat it. We are never going away. We will be here until there is no
here
anymore. The IRS
is forever,
and you can duck and jive, you can threaten and argue, you can register your sovereignty and declare your nonpersonhood and hunker in your bunker, and we will still come after you. We are relentless, implacable, indefatigable. We will show you no mercy. We will rip that American flag you have wrapped around yourself, wad it up, and stuff it up your treasonous, hypocritical ass. I happen to know for a fact you spend two or three days out of your week at the VA hospital—who do you think pays for that, you ungrateful sonofabitch? I pay for that. Me and about a hundred million others, so you can drag your worthless deadbeat ass down to the VA for your cortisone shots and your angiograms and your bypass operations, when you haven’t paid your fair share in twenty goddamned years. Are you getting all this? Should I slow down? God knows I wish you were right; I
wish
you didn’t exist. I wish it every time I pick up your case file, so in my own small way, I help you out, chisel away at the edges, cut off as much of your miserable life as I can, so bit by bit I narrow your existence to the smallest possible space a human being can occupy. You think about that the next time you drive to the bank to cash your Social Security check.”

“You ain’t touchin‘ my Social Security check!”

“It’s my Social Security check!” I shouted. “I’m paying for it!
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You’re living on my dime! You owe me a total of fifty-seven thousand dollars and I want it back.”

I slammed the phone down. My collar was soaked with sweat and my hands were shaking. One of the messages from Laura Marsh fluttered to the carpeting. I knew why she was calling. She had defaulted her latest installment agreement and wanted yet another audience with the prince, another opportunity to abase herself.

· · ·

“You shouldn’t have come down here, Ms. Marsh,” I told her. It was 4:45; my tour-of-duty was over. “You don’t have an appointment.”

“Well, I didn’t know what else to do, Rick. You won’t return my phone calls.”

“I didn’t return your phone calls because there’s nothing left to be said. You’re not making your payments, you’re not making your deposits. There’s nothing left to negotiate, Ms. Marsh.”

Tears welled in her eyes. I slid the Kleenex box toward her. She was not wearing makeup. I had never seen her without makeup. I decided she was not the kind of woman who should venture into public without any makeup.

“At any rate,” I snapped, “you’re here. Here you are. Again.”

“I lost six clients. That’s why I couldn’t make my deposit, Rick. If you could give me just a few more weeks.”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“I can’t give you a few more weeks.”

“I’ve done everything, Rick. I’ve done everything you asked me to do. I can’t help it if the banks won’t loan me the money. I can’t help it if my kid needs braces. I can’t help it that my competition undercuts me.”

“For three years I’ve heard this. I’ve heard the same thing, over and over, and now there’s nothing left to say. What could you possibly have to say to me, Ms. Marsh, that can change anything?”

Tears flowed copiously down her fleshy cheeks; it was amazing, the amount of liquid that was draining from her eyes. She didn’t bother with the Kleenex.

“Have mercy on me,” she whispered.

“This isn’t about mercy. And it isn’t about your ex-husband or your sick children or your unreliable employees or even about you. It’s not about you and it’s not about me, so don’t beg for mercy. Do you know what this is about, Ms. Marsh?”

“No.”

I leaned in. “Taxes.”

“Oh.”

“It’s about taxes, Ms. Marsh. You owe them, I collect them.”

“Please, Mr. Yancey. Rick, you know you can’t do that to me.”

“Three years ago—no, more than that, five years ago, you had a decision to make. You were losing money. You barely had enough to feed your family and keep a roof over your head. But instead of making a rational decision, cutting your losses, closing the business, finding a real job, and moving on with your life, you chose to chase… well, I’m not exactly sure what you were chasing, but you must realize by now what you’re chasing is a ghost, a phantom, Ms. Marsh. You’ve dug yourself into a hole halfway to China and, as the sides crumble in on you, you just dig faster. You don’t try to claw and scramble up the sides to daylight. You just dig the pit deeper.”

She stared at me for a moment before saving, “Is everything okay, Rick? Are you feeling all right?”

“What I feel is irrelevant.”

“You’re still a human being.”

“That’s irrelevant, too.”

“Oh, that’s horrible. If that doesn’t matter…can you tell me what does?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that for the past fifteen minutes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes.”