Confessions of a Tax Collector (39 page)

“No. Listen. We made a mistake. We told them to remove Gina. What we should have done was ask them to remove
us.
”

There was a stirring in the room. Henry was frowning. Toby lifted his head, staring hard at Beth. Allison had begun to nod.

“We file another grievance, with the same facts, but we ask for a different remedy. Don’t transfer Gina—transfer us.”

“We all ask to be transferred to a new GM?”
[49]
Toby asked.

“I don’t see how that’s different,” Cindy said.

“The end result is the same,” Beth said. “But we aren’t dictating to Byron what to do with her.”

“They take us out, she don’t have a group no more.” Henry was nodding. Even he got it.

“I’ll file the damned thing tomorrow,” Toby said.

“We still all have to speak with one voice,” Beth cautioned. “Is everyone willing to give it one more try?”

Five minutes later, Fred stepped back into the room. A few crumbs from the morning’s coffee cake clung to his mustache. He clapped his hands and cried, “So are we making any progress?”

“You bet we are,” Toby said.

I called in sick a few days later. That afternoon, a big truck pulled into the driveway and two burly men unloaded a cardboard container about twice the size of a refrigerator box. I directed them to put it inside the bare living room. “Still moving in?” one of the men asked me. I told him I was. I worked late into the night, sitting cross-legged, surrounded by huge metal poles, pulleys, and steel cables, puzzling over a fourteen-page pamphlet, Charles Atlas to the tenth power.

It was state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line, the Cadillac of home gyms. It worked by creating resistance with the pulleys and gears buried inside a plastic control panel. The workout guidebook promised a full bodybuilding program that worked all the major muscle groups. The men in the commercials had flexed mightily, their golden skin glistening… talk about demigods! It had cost over $1,400. I put it on my new American Express Gold card. In just six weeks, the ad had promised, I would begin to see results. In the guide I read,
In order to build muscle, you must destroy it. Weight training literally rips the tissue; it is the healing of the muscle that makes it grow. This is why you must determine the maximum resistance your body can bear. You must find the ‘’‘’breaking point‘’‘ of your body and reach it with each workout, but never go beyond it.

Two weeks later we were ordered to report to a nine o’clock meeting with the branch chief. Attendance was mandatory. No fieldwork. No taxpayer appointments. All requests for leave were denied. Bob Campbell was driving over from Orlando to make an announcement. Bonny informed us that Gina had called in sick; she would not be attending the meeting.

He began without preamble, refusing to look at us. He referred to a single sheet of paper.

“We have decided to honor your request to be transferred to another group within the branch,” he said. His tone was neutral, but the vein throbbing on his forehead betrayed him.

It was a stunning victory, unparalleled in the annals of the Service. An entire group had ousted its own manager, had imposed its will upon the powers of Byzantium. If this was possible, what was impossible? For Byzantium was immortal: as long as the nation existed, Byzantium was indispensable. Congress might change the name, the agency might reorganize, the means of assessment and collection might vary with the political climate, but taxes have been and always will be the lifeblood of the nation. Byzantium was immortal, and we had dictated to its high priests. For the first time, I began to understand what Culpepper meant when he referred to us as demigods.

“Effective next pay period, Allison, Caroline, Cindy, and Henry will be transferred to Doug Michaels’s group.” Doug Michaels was a group manager in Orlando. “Rick, Toby, Beth, and Dee will go to Annie’s group across the street.”

They were breaking us up. I felt foolish; I should have anticipated this. You don’t leave a cabal intact to strike again. I glanced at Beth. Her objective had not been getting rid of Gina, that was merely a means to an end. But they were not going to reward her treachery with a promotion to manager. This, too, should have been anticipated.

“What’s going to happen to Gina?” Allison asked. Bob Campbell lashed out at her. “That’s our business,” he snapped. “If she chooses to tell you, fine. But you’re not going to hear it from me.” He wanted to say more, but chose not to. You didn’t reach his level of management by speaking your mind.

Caroline, Allison, and I met later in the conference room to draw up the battle plan for my W-4/Protestor project, which had been green-lighted by Bob Campbell, after two memos and three conference calls. It was April 15, tax day. I had been with the Service for two years, three months, and two days.

We would work as a team to impose the least burden on the employers as possible. Some larger employees had hundreds of W-4S on file. I was explaining what to look for on the form that might indicate a protestor had completed it. Allison interrupted often, arguing that many alterations could simply be a mistake on the part of an ignorant taxpayer. She was surly. I had not wanted her on the team, but that wasn’t my call.

We were poring over a map of the county when Gina entered.

“I have an announcement,” she said. She spoke quickly, without looking at us. “Rick has been selected for the Grade Eleven promotion.”

She left the room. Caroline congratulated me and reminded me of the tradition of the selectee bringing in doughnuts to celebrate.

“Congratulations, Rick,” Allison said. She was making a valiant effort to hold it together. Convinced she was the better revenue officer, Allison knew the promotion had been hers for the taking, but the timing was wrong. The coup had come too late.

That night, I stripped down to my underwear and studied myself in the full-length mirror, a model of self-absorption, front view, side view and, looking over my shoulder, rear view.
Look at you, you have no ass. The amazing butt-less man and his lifelong quest to find his missing ass.
I turned to face the mirror again and spread my arms straight out from my sides.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!
The bathroom scale had read 135 pounds. I was six feet tall and weighed 135 pounds. I could hide behind a light pole. The chart that came with my home gym indicated my optimum weight was 175-190 pounds. I squinted my eyes and tried to imagine 40 pounds of lean muscle added to my slight frame, and failed. I began to flex my muscles, such as they were, trying out different poses, feeling a little ridiculous, berating myself, the cheapest personal trainer I could find, because I was never going to see this through unless I was angry; only anger could motivate me in the long haul.

“Look at you! You’re no thicker than a fucking blade of grass. There are corpses that look better than you, you desiccated, knobby-kneed, emaciated motherfucking son of a bitch. There ain’t much on the outside, so you better pray there’s something substantial on the inside. What’s inside you? Huh? Huh?” I gripped my wrist with my left hand as I pushed my right arm upward, grimacing at the bicep balancing on the bone like an small apple. “Your body is only a manifestation of your inner being. Inside you’re just as starved, because you won’t let yourself believe that anything you believe is believable. You don’t have faith in your own dreams. You’re like a theologian who doesn’t believe in God. It is the ultimate hypocrisy, to act like a demigod while refusing to become one. Become one! Be! Do you believe you are a god? Do you believe in perfection? Do you believe in the hundred-seventy-five-pound man inside you?” And so on.

I popped a Simple Minds CD into the player and jacked up the volume. I reread the section of the guidebook that talked about working individual muscle groups:
Remember, you want to work the muscle to the point of exhaustion, but never past it.
Sounded like my day job. I punched in the code for the particular muscle group I wanted to work (biceps/triceps), input the number of reps and total weight, and set to work.

An hour later I was done, dripping sweat, my arms feeling light and rubbery. I walked past the mirror without looking and took a long, hot shower. Tomorrow I would pay for my efforts, but for now I felt pretty damn good. I had embraced something, and it had felt holy. I wrapped a towel around me and went into the kitchen and mixed my weight-gain powder in eight ounces of whole milk. I finished it in four swallows, feeling bloated and slightly nauseated. I lit a cigarette. The guidebook didn’t mention it, but smoking probably wasn’t recommended when starting a body-building regimen. I noticed a slight quivering in my fingers.

“There,” I said to the empty room. “It’s begun.”

My new office was just across the alley from the federal building, but a world away from the milieu in which I had come-of-age as a revenue officer. Located on the sixth floor of the Wesley Building, my cubicle overlooked Main Street, with a view of Mirror Lake, where Blinky the alligator had resided when I was a child. Blinky had only one eye and was the unofficial city mascot. I grew up, moved away to attend college, and when I returned, Blinky was gone, destroyed: he had become too tame and had lost his fear of humans. Big mistake.

The floor had been renovated recently and still smelled of drywall and fresh paint. The carpeting was new, the furniture was less than five years old, the computer systems were state-of-the-art. We moved across an alley and six stories into the air, but it was as if we had stepped over the chasm separating the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Allison, Caroline, Cindy, and Henry were jealous: only those of us transferred to Annie DeFlorio’s group moved into the Wesley. They would remain in the federal building, to be managed “off site,” as it was called, by Doug Michaels in Orlando. We, however, would be integrated into Annie’s existing group, the trainees, now full-fledged revenue officers, who had come on board six months after we did.

Gina had been offered a transfer to Jacksonville. It was a face-saving gesture on the Service’s part. The only alternative was to be “busted down” to RO and work side-by-side with those who had forced her out. She took the job, an advisory position that required no case work and no supervision of employees. The Service was, in effect, putting Gina Tate on ice, where she could do no one, including herself, any harm.

Beth and I met with Annie DeFlorio during that first week to get better acquainted. Her office was twice the size of Gina’s, the same office in which Culpepper had hunkered down, refusing to leave until the branch chief arrived with his marching orders.

“I don’t know everything that happened next door and, frankly, I don’t want to know,” she began. “I’ve heard there are some concerns about Gina poisoning the well, trying to influence my opinion of you, and I want to assure you that I don’t judge employees by what’s said about them. I look at their work and how they conduct themselves while they’re doing it.” Meaning Gina had indeed been poisoning the well. I wondered what, if anything, she had told Annie DeFlorio about me.

“I don’t like gossip,” she continued. “I won’t listen to it and I don’t expect my people to listen to it—or spread it. Our jobs are tough enough as it is.”

I glanced at Beth. She was staring expressionlessly at Annie DeFlorio.

“I will not tolerate hypocrisy. In this group, we do not say one thing and do another. We do not pay lip service to the manual while we bypass procedure or the law. We do not act like someone’s friend to their face and gossip about them the second they leave the room. The only time I want to hear you complain about someone else is when you suspect some kind of integrity issue, and then you better have the evidence to back it up.”

There’s a reason we’ve never had our own TV show or movies made about us,
Culpepper had said one day while we were driving around in the field.
And it’s not because we don’t have interesting jobs. In a lot of ways, our jobs are more interesting than cops’ or doctors‘. The reason there will never be a movie or TV show about revenue officers is, as a group, you will not find a homelier bunch of people working in a particular profession. Present company excluded, of course. I mean, we’re ugly as the attendees at a plumber’s convention. And Hollywood knows this. Or they understand nobody in America is going to believe anybody in the Service could look like Rob Lowe or Michelle Pfeiffer. It just strains credulity. Now, that’s not to say I haven’t seen some pretty hot ROs. They’re just damn few and far between. I have noticed, since they began this Outstanding Scholars Program, the quality has improved. For example, wait till you get a look at Annie DeFlorio. Anybody passing her on the street would be flabbergasted to learn she worked for the IRS. They would laugh in your face. No one will ever believe we could be beautiful, because the perception is that all that we do is ugly.

“Beth, you had asked about my expectations. Let me tell you what I don’t expect. I don’t expect perfection. I don’t review cases looking for mistakes. I don’t review time sheets looking for irregularities. I don’t live by quotas or keep count of the number of seizures you’ve done. I don’t check the clock every time you go to lunch or take a break. If your work is flowing, if you’re closing cases and turning over your inventory and doing the right thing on each case, I don’t slam you for taking twenty minutes on a break or an hour for lunch or calling in sick when you need a ‘mental health’ day. I intend to treat you as human beings first and employees second, and whatever happened in the past, whatever was said about me or my group, is forgotten. All of us are going to start with a clean slate.”

“She called you Snow White,” Beth said.

“I know what she called me,” Annie DeFlorio said. “And it’s mild compared to some of the things she called you, Beth. This is an example of the hypocrisy I talked about. Would you tattle on her if she was sitting here now?”

Beth smiled humorlessly. Already, Annie had an enemy, owing to several factors. Her looks. Her position as manager. Her intolerance of an entire way of life for Beth and the “old hands” who had come on board long before the Outstanding Scholars Program. I had a feeling, however, that Annie would not be as easy to depose as Gina, if Beth should ever conspire to take up the dagger again.

Every morning, before checking her messages, before jumping on the phone to fellow managers or the branch chief, before going through her mail or the contents of her in-box, Annie DeFlorio poured herself a cup of coffee and toured the room, stopping at each cubicle and chatting a few minutes with any RO who happened to be in that day. She never directed the conversation. Sometimes we talked about cases; sometimes, if the RO was comfortable with it, about our personal lives. She seemed genuinely interested in us, but never intruded upon our privacy. Her training was in political science, not tax or business administration; her professional background included a stint as a U.S. senator’s aide. She always made eye contact and possessed an astounding memory of the most esoteric fact about us. She confessed it had once been her ambition to be a prosecutor.

She never pried into our personal lives, but would offer glimpses into hers. When we first moved in, she told us she had recently reconciled with her husband of eleven years, a successful restaurateur based in Orlando. They had two children, both boys, the younger just starting preschool. Their pictures were displayed prominently on the filing cabinet in her office and on her desk.

She was serious about her job, and she was serious about
our
jobs. She considered it an honorable profession and a sacred trust, vital to the functioning of our government. Politically, she was conservative—the senator she had served had been a Republican—but lacked the intolerance found in so many conservatives. She regularly lectured on the subjects of diversity and sexual harassment in IRS conferences.

And she scared the hell out of me.

About a month after my transfer, Annie summoned me to her office. It was the first time I had set foot in there since her meeting with Beth and me. What had I done? Was it the Marsh case, which I had allowed to fester during my protestor crusade and the internecine war between Gina and the group? Was it the hockey team that owed two years’ worth of employment taxes, the first professional team to play in Lakeside, and its evasive Canadian owner?
Only a damn Canadian would think he could make a hockey team successful in Central Florida,
Toby had said.

I had learned early in my career that the best defense is self-abasement.

“My overage is creeping up,” I said, before I even sat down. “But I’m gonna get a handle on it. I don’t have an excuse, except all that stuff that went on next door.”

She laughed. “Rick, I didn’t ask to see you to talk about your overage.”

Her hair was loose and flowed over each shoulder, a cascade of tight curls that shimmered under the fluorescent lights. She had a habit of twirling the ends of her hair around her index finger as she talked. I found the practice extremely distracting.

“Somebody told me you thought I didn’t like you,” she said. “They weren’t trying to cause a problem,” she added quickly. “I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re wonderful. You have an excellent reputation, and the work I’ve seen reflects this.”

“Thanks, Annie.”

“Do I frighten you?”

“Excuse me?”

“They said I scared you.”

“I don’t think I used the word
scare
. Maybe intimidate.”

She laughed. Annie laughed more often than anyone I knew in the Service. She pulled her finger from her hair and now ran this same finger along the flesh just below her bottom lip.

“Why?” she asked.

I looked away. I had always been hopelessly tongue-tied in the presence of attractive women.

“That’s okay,” she said. She wasn’t trying to embarrass me. “You’ve got to understand, I’m not like Gina. If I have a problem with anything you do, I’m not going to make snide comments in group meetings or ambush you in a review. You’re going to know in plenty of time to get your act together.”

“I had an idea for this hockey team case.” I was determine to find some way to impress her.

“Go.”

“The owner is Canadian.”

“Right.”

“He doesn’t have a Social Security number.”

She nodded.

“So we can’t assert the penalty
[50]
At least, that’s what I thought. But I checked the IRC and with SPf
[51]
and we can create a Social Security number for him, for the express purpose of asserting the penalty.”

“Great. Let’s do it. Can we collect it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re not putting money on the books we can’t collect. We must be rational, Rick. I know that must seem strange to you, using the word
rational
in the same context as collection. I can’t control what the entire IRS does, but I can have a small say-so in my own little corner of the world.”

“I’ll see what he’s got.”

“Why don’t you just seize the team?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Seize the hockey team.”

“There’s no assets—well, there’s some hockey sticks and equipment and the uniforms and the, um, pucks, but—”

She shook her mane of curly hair. I caught a whiff of White Diamonds.

“No, Rick. Seize the
team.
The franchise. Seize it as an ongoing concern. With something like this, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

“I—I hadn’t thought of that, Annie.”

“And once we’ve seized it, we’ll fax the notice of sale to
The Journal”
our local newspaper. “They’d love to run a story. We’ll get more bidders at the sale and some great press on the compliance side.” The paper had been running stories for over six months, playing up my Canadian taxpayer as an intrepid, if Quixotic, dreamer, in an effort to rally civic support for the team. To notify the paper was not disclosure. Once we seized and advertised the sale of the assets, our actions were public record.

I left her office, my head spinning. She had solved in the space of two minutes a thorny problem I had been wrestling with for months. Her solution demonstrated a quantum leap in thinking—in essence we would be seizing an
idea
—that was humbling; my brilliant plan had been to give the guy a Social Security number and assess tax against him that we might not collect. But how do you place a value on a team that was losing money? How do you factor in the money owed to the investors? I had no clue and was afraid to ask her, not because I feared she might ridicule me, but because I didn’t want her to discover I wasn’t quite as wonderful as she thought I was.

I was standing in the doorway of Annie’s office, chatting about the latest news from England, of the mysterious bacterium that was causing an outbreak of what the press had dubbed “the flesh-eating disease.” For some reason, we both found this morbidly fascinating.

“Have you ever heard about the Ebola virus?” she asked. “It turns your insides into soup. It melts you and when you die, all the blood pours out of every orifice in your body. Nobody really knows where it came from or what causes it or how to cure it.”

Toby’s voice rumbled behind me, “CIA.”

I jumped a little. Toby slid past me and sat down inside her office. The chair groaned in protest.

“Oh, you see a conspiracy behind everything,” Annie teased him.

“Child, you’ve led sheltered life, so I don’t hold it against you. CIA’s behind Ebola and this flesh-eating thing, just like it was behind AIDS.”

“I thought AIDS came from monkeys,” I said, a little annoyed that he had interrupted.

“They were gonna use it against the Russians.”

“Africa is a long way from Russia,” I said.

He waved his huge hand in my direction. “Africa was just their staging area. Why Africa? Because nobody in the world cares if a black man dies. Then the experiment got outta hand. Genie popped outta the bottle.”

“I thought it was a plot to kill all the homosexuals.”

“Well, you would.” From early in our relationship, Toby had suspected I was gay. I was from the theater, after all, and dressed well. And what real man would change his eye color?

“They cookin‘ up somethin’ all the time,” Toby said, meaning the CIA, not homosexuals. “Labs all over the world. Who you think come up with Agent Orange? You wait. This is nothin‘ compared to what they’re workin’ on now.”

“What are they working on now?” Annie asked, her eyes growing wide.

“State secret,” I said. “If he told you, he’d have to kill you.”

“As long as it’s not Ebola,” Annie said, and shivered. Today she was wearing a sleeveless yellow dress that terminated three inches above her knees, a summery frock.