Confessions of a Tax Collector (35 page)

“In other words, I’m wasting my time.”

“Your time?”

“Okay. The government’s time. Thanks for setting me straight, Gina. I would hate to labor under the false impression that what I was doing had any significance.”

“Rick, Rick, now don’t go stomping out of here with that scrunched-up little troll-face. Don’t you hate those little trolls with the primary-colored hair? Sit down. I want to tell you something… there’s something I’ve notice about you, something I’ve known since you came here, and that is you tend to view this job as some sort of drama, some kind of great conflict that you’re the center of and well, that just isn’t the case. I don’t know everything about your personal life and frankly I don’t want to know everything about your personal life, only I’m a little jealous because you happen to
have
a personal life. I’m rambling, but my point is, don’t get so full of yourself that you lose all perspective. The Service is… well, it sure as hell isn’t the universe. And me and you and everybody else here aren’t engaged in some kind of titanic struggle between good and evil.” She looked away. Her window had a nice view of the little plaza a stone’s throw from the federal building, but she usually kept her blinds drawn. In a gentler tone, she said, “I never thanked you for inviting me to help you with that show you wrote. It was fun. I had a really good time.” She turned back to me. “When is this rally?”

“Next Saturday.”

“Saturday? This is still America, Rick. Do whatever you want.”

I wore the same flannel shirt I had worn to the open house. Blue jeans. A Chicago Cubs baseball cap. My new Ray-Bans. A pair of old boots from the back of the closet. I looked the part of a good ol‘ boy, except for the Ray-Bans. It would have been smarter to leave my contacts at home, but vanity forbade.

“I still don’t see the point of this,” Pam told me that morning.

“You know, it would make for a better cover if you came along.”

“You were supposed to take me shopping this weekend.”

A local department store had recently sent me a charge card with an astounding $5,000 credit line, more money than I had grossed in 1986. Pam wanted to replace the living-room furniture.

“We’ll do it next weekend,” I said.

“I’m going to New York next weekend.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

“You never listen to me.”

“What’s that?”

“Very funny. Don’t you think you’re taking this Elliot Ness act a bit too far?”

“Elliot Ness didn’t work for the IRS.”

“I saw the movie. He worked for the Treasury.”

“So does the Secret Service and Customs.”

“Really, Rick, you’re starting to freak me a little.”

“You’re going to New York for your job and I’m not freaking.”

“I’m not going to spy on people.”

“I can’t help it if my job is interesting and yours isn’t.”

“Your job is weird and it’s made you weird.”

“Does this cap make my head look too small? I have a very pinched face; it’s not a good hat-face.”

She walked out of the room. Screw her. Since I had come home to myself—to the revenue officer inside me—we had barely spoken. She had begun staying over in Orlando two or three nights a week because, she said, she hated the forty-minute commute from her house in Clearview. Whatever.

By ten o’clock that Saturday morning, I was sitting on the steps leading to the main auditorium and convention floor of the Lakeside Civic Center, smoking a cigarette and sipping lukewarm coffee from a Styrofoam cup, bored out of my mind. I had recorded some tag numbers and some copy from several interesting bumper stickers (Hitler believed in gun control TOO; GET UNTAXED 800 555-6767; DOWN WITH THE TAX OPPRESSORS!).

I had wandered the main floor, where booths had been set up with tables loaded with pamphlets, survivalist training manuals, flyers, and innumerable petitions for sale and on display. The middle portion of the room was devoted to firearms. I entered the auditorium and sat with about fifty other people while a rotund bald man lectured that the income tax system was completely voluntary and therefore you could voluntarily leave the system and there was nothing the IRS could do about it. I started taking notes, then gave up. I had heard the same tripe a dozen times before from my taxpayers. He displayed a dollar bill on an overhead projector and proceeded to explain that all currency in the United States was printed with a built-in tracking system. The government could track down any citizen it wished using this system. I wrote in my notebook,
But how does the govt know who’s carrying any particular bill?
I toyed with the idea of raising my hand and asking him, just to fuck with him, but thought better of it. He went on. There was a hidden code in our currency. Our money was worthless since the United States abandoned the gold standard and therefore the paper money could not be considered legal tender for payment of taxes. Only income is taxed and your paycheck is not income; it is barter (he spelled the word out: “b-a-r-t-e-r”), an even exchange of goods (money) for services (labor). The Internal Revenue Code, which is the IRS Bible, after all, says only people living in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia are subject to the income tax. For each claim, he cited a reference from the IRC. He sounded very sure of himself. Again, I was tempted to raise my hand and tell him it all sounded great, but if everybody did this, wouldn’t our government collapse, our armed forces disperse for lack of pay, and the United States become a province of Canada? Again, I restrained myself. Now, on the overhead was his ten-step plan guaranteed to remove anyone who wished from the tax system or, as he put it, “remove you from the IRS’s master file.” He bragged that he had not paid taxes in ten years and there was nothing the IRS could do about it. I circled his name on my program and wrote in the margin,
Pull him on S***D.
[46]
Check with Howard.
Odds were CI and the Department of Justice already had a case on this guy. I left the auditorium before he got to the important part, the cost of his “master file plan,” with a slight headache and the desire to smash somebody into a wall. I considered some of his arguments near treasonous but, after listening to the same dreck for months, I was numb.

I stopped by a display on the convention floor on my way out. I picked up a book entitled
The IRS: The Greatest Lie Ever Told.
The fellow manning the booth came over and said, “That’s a great one. Real eye-opener.”

“Pithy title.”

“Seventeen-fifty.”

“If I give you my money, the government might mistake you for me and ship you off to the gulag.”

“Huh?”

“You have
Civil Disobedience
?”

“That a book or a tape?”

“It’s an essay, actually, a very famous essay by Henry David Thoreau.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s sort of the founding father of tax protestors.”

He said nothing, but his eyes narrowed. Protestors did not call themselves protestors. They were patriots. Sovereigns. Nonpersons. But never protestors. My pulse quickened. If I had $17.50,I would have bought the book, to allay his suspicion. But I didn’t have $17.50, so I made a hasty retreat. On the steps, I sipped my coffee and smoked my cigarette and wondered why I was planning to buy $5,000 worth of furniture for a house that wasn’t mine, for a woman I wasn’t sure I loved anymore, if I ever had, to incur a debt with nothing to show for it when I moved out and left the furniture for her and her new lover to enjoy. Did she have a lover in Orlando? Did it matter?

People were wandering around the plaza. The fountain had been turned off for the winter. Children played on the concrete steps, running up and down, screaming in that hysterical way of children who are on just this side of boredom. I could follow her to work. Or show up unannounced at this coworker’s apartment she claimed to be sleeping in. Occasionally I would answer the phone and the person on the other end would hang up. What if she had taken another lover? Should I feel betrayed or relieved?

A large man sat down beside me. He asked me if I had an extra cigarette. I shook one out of the pack for him. He asked if I had a light. I handed him my lighter. He lit the cigarette, handed back the lighter, and leaned back, inhaling deeply, resting his huge forearms on the step behind him.

“So what do you think, brother?” he asked.

“Real eye-opener.”

“Your first time at one of these?”

I nodded. He said, “How’d you find out about it?”

“Saw the ad in the paper.”

“Is it on your back?”

I assumed he was either talking about the government in general or taxes in particular.

I nodded again. “It sure is.”

“Not an easy burden, brother.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“How long?”

“Almost two years.”

“Oh, man, that ain’t nothin‘. They been coming after my ass for twenty.” He offered me one of his enormous paws. “Mac Brewster.”

“Henry. Henry Thoreau.”

“Nice to meet you, Henry. So what do you do?”

“I’m a carpenter.”

“You don’t say. I’m a drywaller. Work for anyone?”

“Just myself.”

“See, that’s what the fucking IRS doesn’t understand. They beat the shit out of us, backbone of the fucking economy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t buy all the shit they’re selling in there. I just want to keep what’s mine. What I earned with my own sweat and blood and fucking tears, you know what I mean, Henry?”

I nodded emphatically. “I do know what you mean, Mac. I love my work.”

“Damn straight.”

“You know why I love my work, Mac? Because I take a few pieces of wood and some tools and at the end of the day I have something to show for it. A table. A chair. A nightstand. Something you can touch, something you can appreciate, use, maybe something even beautiful.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

I am a carpenter, and I build ships of paper to sail on seas of red, amid currents of black and green. My tools are pen, paper, envelopes, padlocks, chains, and a ferocious will. I navigate by instinct and the inescapable logic of brute force. Days become weeks, weeks become months, winter gives way to spring, and I sail on through heavy fog, far from friendly shores, gathering sailor’s tales from the unforgiving sea, of husbands deceiving wives, wives deceiving husbands, both deceiving themselves; of secret bank accounts in dead men’s names; of houses deeded to two-year-olds, to phony corporations, to the family dog; of millions of dollars lost in refunds when accounts are paid with worthless money-orders drawn on fictitious bank accounts; of a man clever enough to hide all his assets but not so clever that he remembers to hide the flowerpots containing marijuana in his backyard; of hands gnarled and callused from thirty years of hard labor, the skin on the knuckles cracked and dry, pounding on a table or as a fist shaking in the air; of tattered copies of court cases, highlighted, underlined, cross-referenced, annotated; of dog-eared paperback volumes of the IRC, tabbed, indexed, notes scrawled in the margins, punctuated by
???
and
!!!
; of rural fortresses, mobile homes, and shotgun shacks and “cracker” houses on concrete blocks sinking slowly into the wet Florida soil, surrounded by barbed wire and padlocked gates, guarded by Dobermans and German shepherds and pit bulls, and the hand-painted signs tacked to trees, to fence posts, to screen doors,
POSTED NO TRESPASSING: THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON, KEEP OUT! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT!
; of the fear that lurks behind the veil of rage and righteous indignation, fear of losing their Possessions, and the greatest fear of all, the fear of being wrong; of the lunacy borne of poverty and despair and greed, but most of all of greed, that no Amendments after the Tenth are valid, including those following the Civil War, that the Service is a private corporation incorporated in Delaware, that there is no moral obligation to pay taxes to fund war or welfare queens or abortion, never mind that morality and taxes have nothing to do with each other, that the IRS is part of a twelve-nation Zionist conspiracy to control the world, that “income” is a legal fiction and has no real meaning; that a true follower of Jesus does not pay taxes, since he paid no taxes, though he did say, “Render unto Caesar”; of pulling into a driveway escorted by two police cruisers and hanging back while the cops went inside to ask if there were any weapons in the house and hearing, “Put down that knife!”; of anonymous phones calls and letters that begin “Dear Criminal!”; of my home state of Florida having the honor of being the protestor capital of the world; of death threats and stalking and hang-ups and headlights appearing from nowhere on lonely country roads at dusk; of filing phony liens against yourself and doctored court papers indicating you’re exempt from income tax; of screaming toddlers on hips and the stale smell of urine and cars on cinder blocks rusting in the moist air and obscenities shouted through locked doors, over phone lines, scrawled in letters; of whole families bound together by the faith that they alone have access to the truth and they, behind their barbed-wire fences and padlocked gates, are liberated; of ill-used roads and tiny ponds and drainage ditches filled with slime-encrusted water and the sad loping gait of underfed cats; of the construction worker, the fireman, the cop, the barber, the retiree, the carpet-layer, the divorcee, the car salesman, the TV repairman, the landscaper, the architect, the evangelist, the wedding planner, the Amway salesman, the night watchman, the Wal-Mart clerk, the professional gambler, the broker, the antique dealer, the Laundromat owner, the dishwasher, the telephone repairman, the mechanic, the real estate salesman: true believers and conmen, desperadoes and fools, ludicrous, pitiful, maddening, duplicitous, sincere, predictable, surprising: humanity.

* * *

I checked my watch. 5:42. The stars were fading and the eastern horizon had begun to glow a fiery red. Beth sat beside me in the car, wincing and shifting in the tiny bucket seat, trying to get comfortable. Her makeup appeared to have been hastily applied and her hair was pulled back from her face. We both sipped coffee from twenty-ounce Styrofoam cups. I had parked on the shoulder of the two-lane road, about a hundred yards from the small house. We could see the black Camaro, which we called a “white-trash Cadillac,” parked in the driveway. The tag matched the DMV report; I had the right house.