TAXMAN
Clyde Smelnick at forty-one years of age still lived with his mother. He despised her since the day he knew she had conspired to keep him with her forever. His mom knew Clyde’s secret, she knew who he really is and what he really does, but no one else knew, and the secret was still well kept.
He didn’t love her, as most sons love even the meanest of mothers, and if there was a shred of love in that wretched woman’s soul for him or anyone, he couldn’t see it. Theirs was a family of convenience. Clyde had the job and his mom had the power, so she sat home, in the same flowered print dress, eating Oreos and watching soaps, day in and day out. Her only excursion on a daily basis was to walk her despicable little Chihuahua that hated Clyde, and Clyde hated it back.
Clyde, with his perpetually runny nose, always wore an always rumpled and out of date plaid shirt. His black horn rim glasses, ever smudged with fingerprints, persistently slid down his face. You would have to look long and hard to find a more harmless and bland looking person than Clyde.
But, looks can be deceiving.
Clyde bent his ear towards the perpetual snickers he heard across the lunch room, storing them away in his perfect memory, saving them for later. Without exception Clyde sat alone, eating his liverwurst or pimento loaf sandwiches with one hard-boiled egg and a carrot stick, add one Oreo on Fridays, just to celebrate. Fridays were the saddest day of the week for Clyde because his greatest and only joy was his job as an auditor with the IRS.
How fitting that Clyde worked at the IRS.
The Internal Revenue Service was established in 1862 with the purpose of funding death and destruction during the Civil War. Originally the tax being a flat 3% on incomes over $800 exempted most wage-earners at the time, leaving the tax burden for only the wealthy. Over time this was turned on its head as the agency began to focus their revenue gathering efforts on the average, struggling working stiff. The IRS developed all kinds of mean and nasty little tricks they called Law, and used these laws very effectively to suck money out of people with even the meagerest of incomes, leaving the richest of society every benefit those same taxes paid for.
IF you were acquainted at all with Clyde the auditor, he registered a zero on the Richter scale, he seemed to have no benefit or liability on the world around him, But, no one had any clue what was really lurking in the heart of this little nerd.
In reality, Clyde was an anti-hero, leaving a wake of destruction and misery behind him wherever he plied his special skill. He went about his business with the exactness of an executioners blade, noose or lethal injection. He feigned sympathy towards his victims while gorging on the life blood of their innocent little lives.
Even his victims had no idea that Clyde was the villain. “How could that harmless looking man do anything? “ were the thoughts of people sitting across from him while he examined their income tax forms.
“We want to make sure you haven’t paid too much.” He would dryly say.
It nearly always turned out the other way. Good, innocent and conscientious people bearing the brunt of the guilt and the luxurious burden of the upper class elite. Telling each person he “examined” that they were selected randomly by the computer that looked for certain red flags on their returns.
“I’m sure it will turn out to be nothing,” He would always say, to keep his victims still while he devoured their life’s savings.
No one, not even his superiors knew the truth. Clyde never took breaks, except for lunch, and always stayed late without pay. Because of this, he was the darling of his superiors, his rate of collection was the highest in all of California.
Clyde had no time for diversions. He spent all his time pouring over clearly conscientious taxpayers records. Clyde only read the newspaper to find victims. When he read a story about a working stiff hero that had saved an old woman from a burning house, he looked both the brave man and the old lady up in his system. He would scrape and scratch until he could find some archaic tax law or reverse loop-hole and use it as an excuse to flag them for an audit.
Clyde was a master at finding a way to make them pay. To himself alone, he called it Clyde’s Tax, taxing them for their goodness. Clyde despised good happy people, for his only happiness was in stealing theirs.
Lying in bed at night staring at the cracked ceiling, he took sickly relish in the pain of these poor folks, knowing they were at home spending countless hours scraping and scratching their records together, trying to avoid “Clyde’s Tax”. Fantasizing about their mounting anxiety and how they would worry themselves sick over the impending audit, Clyde grinned a satisfied grin and peacefully drifted off to sleep.
He took a morbid pride inflicting stress on his victims even days and weeks before they sat across the desk from him on audit day. Little blue haired old ladies, blue collar workers with six kids, even better if one was a special needs child.
“Special needs” he huffed, “I’ll show you who has special needs, Uncle Sam is needy, he’s starting to grow thin from all those tax cuts. I don’t care if you want to deduct that $800 dollar a month medicine your special needs child has. I have a special way of getting that deduction back out of you.”
He loved sapping the enjoyment right out of other people’s lives, knowing that the pain he inflicted would last for months and maybe years.
“Enjoy life, ha! I stopped dreaming about that when I was 15 and mom took my allowance and bought meth with it. Misery is my enjoyment. The most enjoyable day of my life was when that IRS recruiter showed up at his High School. I could be paid real well for inflicting emotional, financial and even physical pain on good innocent people.” Clyde thought reminiscing about that day twenty-four years ago.
Clyde was the first in his class, and if they had honors, Clyde would have been valedictorian. He stayed late, paid for all the extra books to help him pass the tests and he graduated at the very top of his class. He would make all those nice happy people pay for their nice happy lives. “Happy ain’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway,” was his mantra. He became the IRS’s little darling and poster boy for a successful auditor.
The minister and his wife sat in Clyde’s office nervously holding their box of papers. They had sweated and worried for days making sure every scrap of receipt was included and could be back-checked three different ways. All their bank statements with the receipts lined up in order and all their proof of expenses was neatly stacked in a nice wicker basket. They knew that they had done what was right. They never cheated their taxes. They were conscientious to a fault, but that still did not alleviate all the fear.
They sat holding each other’s hand. Little beads of sweat popping out on their foreheads. They glanced at each other with a look of reassurance while Clyde poured through their records.
Sitting across the desk from them rifling through their records, Clyde nodded occasionally and said “Hmmm” a lot. This was all part of his act. Over the years Clyde carefully crafted his art of inducing stress. He knew the exact motions and body language that would induce the highest amount of anxiety into his victims. Like a cat playing with a mouse that he would eventually devour, Clyde played his sadistic game like a master.
He knew exactly what he was looking for. He had planned this ‘hit’ for weeks.
Smuggling their records out of the building late one night, he went over them at home with a fine tooth comb. He knew if he looked hard enough he could always find something wrong with any tax return. He could make the smallest error seem like a felony by applying any one of a number of obscure tax laws to it. The tax code was so immense, no one knew everything that was in it, except, “Tax Man”, Clyde’s secret anti-hero name for himself that no one knew but him.
A modified version of the Batman theme song would run through his head whenever Clyde scored a hit for the IRS, “Taxman nananana! Taxman!” He really was somebody now.
If “they” only knew.
Clyde sat at his desk, salivating over this potential kill. He would rake them over the coals. In the end they would feel like dirt. It wasn’t just the money, it was the righteousness, joy and peace he wanted to steal, kill and destroy. Men feared failure and women wanted security. He attacked and devoured these like a lion on the hunt.
“This could not be happening” Clyde exclaimed silently to himself. As he put all the figures together through his computer, they were getting money back, a lot of money. Clyde took it personal. It may be the governments money but Clyde treated it like his. Clyde wanted pain and suffering from the Minister and his wife. He poured through the numbers again. “No! This cannot be.” He thought. Now the little beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. “Stay calm, don’t give yourself away Taxman.” He went through it the third time and it was almost time for the office to close.
He finally relinquished victory to the minister and his wife. He tried to feign happiness as he told them the ‘good news’. He cringed when they smiled and thanked him profusely for his thoroughness and ‘kindness’. “Can we send a note to your boss, saying how pleasant and thorough you were?” the minister said. Taxman cringed, his cape in tatters. “Yes that would be real nice.” He said.
Unbeknownst to Taxman, someone in the office was listening in. Ashley Meyers the cheerful auditor in the next cubicle had been monitoring his activities since she began working there five years ago. She had even hacked into his secret files. Someone did know his secret.
Ashley, a pretty twenty-something was very conscientious, but her return rate, the money she collected from taxpayers, was lower than anyone’s in the office. Scrupulous in her work and life, she genuinely cared about people, little animals and the environment. This meant that Ashley cared about her clients, as she called them. She worked for them, to see that they got a fair shake, only using the fine-toothed comb on the obvious cheaters. She despised cheaters.
Ashley always greeted Clyde with a smile when she saw him in the hallway or the lunchroom. This made Clyde nervous. She was too good, too happy, and too pretty. She unnerved Clyde, his palms would sweat and his speech stammer when she spoke to him, always in her sweet little voice with just a hint of country south.
The question’s always asked or at least we’ve all wondered, do IRS agents ever get audited?
Yes they do, as Clyde found out when he checked his mail on Saturday. This infuriated Clyde.
“What do they think they’re doing? don’t they know I’m their best agent.”
Clyde’s records were definitely in order. There was none of that scraping, scratching and sweating for him. “Piece of cake” he thought. He called the number and set up an appointment, for two weeks from Monday. He had to take the day off of work to go to a different office than he worked in. While he was waiting for that day to come, Ashley was transferred out of his branch, he was almost as happy as when he assessed huge penalties and back taxes on some innocent little old lady.
“The happy little good girl was gone.” He rejoiced as much as Clyde could.
On the day of his audit, Clyde dialed the same number on the intercom that thousands of other taxpayers had dialed, just to see someone like him, a little sweet hint of country south voice answered and asked him nicely to please wait. He took a seat and waited for a very inconvenient fifteen minutes.
When the buzzer sounded and the door opened, out walked Ashley Meyers and she greeted him warmly, feigning surprise. Now it was Clyde’s turn to sit in the hot seat. Ashley was very thorough examining Clyde’s perfect records. But unknown to Clyde or anyone else, Ashley had caught onto his sadistic little game when she first started working for the IRS. She hated cheaters.
When she caught onto his game, she went into the big computer and adjusted his tax withholding so a little less than what was right got deducted from his paycheck. Only twenty-five bucks a week and Clyde never noticed, never checked and never suspected. But twenty-five bucks a week over five years adds up to six thousand five hundred smackaroos. This was the only slightly dishonest thing she had ever done, but the end justifies the means, right?
With relish in her voice and a sly grin that Clyde didn’t see, she printed the report and turned it for him to see. “What! This couldn’t be.” But, Clyde had never checked his own deductions. Not only did he owe, it looked like he had defrauded the IRS that he so loved working for. There were lots of records of his unauthorized access to the computers and Clyde was charged as a criminal.
Clyde was tried and convicted for his crimes and was sentenced to five years without parole. He served out his term as a dishwasher and janitor at the prison on Bird Island. Clyde, released on the last day of the five years, took a job as a dishwasher in a seedy restaurant on skid row. Mom still held his secret and so did the pretty and cheerful auditor at the IRS.
“Taxman nananana! Taxman!” He really was somebody now.
