Day 213 - My Wife Kills a Guy

          Periodically, when my despair of ever finding another job is highest, I begin to fume about the unfairness of my current situation. I think about the people who did this to me. In fitful wakefulness, late at night and early in the morning, I concoct elaborate and fanciful schemes of revenge. Some of these are more violent than others. Most of them are beyond my ability to execute. None of them is particularly satisfying in the imagining, but this does not deter me very much.

          I have envisioned an explosion in the Albatross parking lot that sends Quentin’s Mercedes hurtling skyward, end-over-end in a ball of flames. I have watched Rod’s pick-up being loaded onto a flatbed truck and delivered to an auto recycler where it is compacted and shredded. I hope that his laptop is inside, full up with color coded spreadsheets. I have witnessed Ringcomme, stalking wild boar on a grassy hillside, split in two by a jagged flash of lightning. When the smoke clears, his favorite rifle lies atop his smoldering ashes. I have thrilled to see Fritz sent sprawling down a marble staircase, limbs akimbo, cracking his skill on every other step, to land lifeless and disjointed next to his shattered glasses.

These visions may not be satisfying, but they are entertaining to me—so much so that I felt compelled to confess them to a priest. There must be something sinful in taking perverse pleasure contemplating vengeful mayhem on the authors of my unhappiness.

            The priest seemed to agree, at least insofar as he thought that these musings would eventually poison my spiritual life and dim the inner light that I ought to be tending. He recommended that whenever I felt compelled to daydream the visitation of bad karma on my enemies I ought instead to recite the Prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith ;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

          This is a lovely prayer, encapsulating as it does the essence of the proper Christian response to life’s troubles. It is also a beautiful sentiment in its own right, possessing an elegance of humility in the heart of its contrariness. It is that contrariness that appeals to me—its call to a flinty perfection that upends our every natural inclination. It is a hard thing to do, to sow love and pardon and faith and joy, when the only place to get those seeds is from the depleted stores of your own sorry heart. I know. I can say the prayer, but like most Christians, I fall on my face when it comes time to put it into practice.

          It is doubly hard for me, I think, because I have a resource that most people do not. I can visit destruction upon my enemies without retribution. I can heap karmic retribution on Rod and Quentin and Bill and Fritz without fear of getting arrested, standing trial, or going to jail. I might roast in hell for it, but that would include the satisfaction of standing next to them and watching their torment. Well, to be honest, I can’t actually do it, but my wife can. My wife can kill a guy by wishing it so. She already did it once.

          My wife has been in the real estate business for most of her adult life. When we lived on the other coast she managed several commercial properties including a large office complex. One of her tenants was an unctuous self-employed businessman of indeterminate occupation. It turned out that he was a con-man, but of course there was no way to know that until he was no longer conning anyone because he was dead.

          On the fateful day of this fellow’s untimely demise, he tried to engage my wife in an unseemly and too familiar embrace. In her words, “he went for side boob.” My wife was wary because he had tried on numerous previous occasions to invade her space to the point of inappropriate contact, and so she was able to avoid having her goodies actually fondled. She was however incensed by the constant effort required to fend off his advances. She’d had it ‘up to here’ with the guy, which occasioned her to remark to the maintenance man that she “wanted him dead.” Her ire for the moment vented, she went on about her business.

          That very afternoon the smarmy con artist went down to the local office of the DMV to renew his driver’s license—one of a half-dozen he had in his possession as it turned out, all issued under different names. Unfortunately for him he picked a day to do this when my wife had wished him dead, for when he reached the window and announced the name on the license he wanted to renew, he was recognized by an off-duty lady police officer who was standing in line behind him. She had in fact been looking for him to execute a warrant for his arrest. She decided there was no time like the present to do just that. There he was, within her grasp. She wouldn’t have to continue looking all over town for him. She announced her intention.

          Smarmy con-man panicked. He snapped open his brief case, spilling most of its contents all over the waiting area of the DMV office, but coming up with the one item he wanted most desperately to retrieve—a .45 caliber revolver. The lady police officer had not anticipated this development. What for her had started out as a simple serendipitous opportunity to arrest a guy in a suit and tie on a misdemeanor bogus check charge had turned suddenly into a potentially lethal hostage situation. She drew her piece, and a stalemate of sorts was established.

          One of the DMV clerks called the police, and in a short period of time the place was surrounded by a lot of regular police and a tactical response team complete with helmets, flak vests, and assault rifles. Among the first to arrive, coincidentally adding further to smarmy con-man’s extreme misfortune, was the husband of the off-duty lady police officer. Presumably the two had vowed not only to love, honor and cherish one another all the days of their lives, but also to have one another’s backs in the event of any tense armed conflict. It would also seem that they had rehearsed between them a number of scenarios in which they would be called upon to take out a bad guy while insuring one another’s relative safety.

          The husband leapt to the fore, signaled for his wife’s attention, called an audible, and in short order the con-man was laying dead on the floor of the DMV waiting area in a pool of his own smarmy blood.

          My wife learned of all these events the next day when the FBI showed up at her office to gather information about the con-man and as much detail about his activities as anyone there might be able to recall. She was visibly shaken when she came home that night.

          “I killed a guy,” she said. “I wished him dead, and he died…the same day. I killed him.”

          I tried to comfort her. “No you didn’t. It was just a coincidence. He’d have been killed anyway. He made bad choices.”

          “No, it was me,” she said, and with finality.

          If true, this is more than a little scary, but in a totally awesome kind of way. On the one hand it has helped me to stay faithful for years no matter how many nurses I wake up to in various recovery rooms. On the other it is a power that ought to be used for good. I continue to tell my wife that she shouldn’t worry about it, that it was just one of those things. Secretly, though I hope that it’s true. After all she loves me. Maybe I can prevail upon her to use her powers on my behalf. Not that I am particularly vengeful or inclined to violence, but I have started a list. There are people who need killing, and I think you know who they are.

Day 87 - Business Ethics

          A local recruiter called today about the same juice packing company I discussed with the Colorado recruiter on Friday. When I told her I had already been submitted to the company, she said that I had not. She knew this because she had checked, and my name was not on their list of candidates.

I thought this was more than a little curious. The Colorado guy had seemed quite purposeful and competent. I couldn’t imagine him not doing what he claimed to have done. The local recruiter seemed quite purposeful and competent as well. She also claimed to have a close relationship with the company and to have placed many candidates there in the past. I told her to submit me as well, but to alert the company that I might be submitted twice, and that, should that occur they should deal with the Colorado recruiter who had contacted me first.

I hope I have covered all the bases here. Stuff like this makes me nervous. It’s tough enough trying to attract a potential employer without being undermined by the idiots in the recruiting business. Getting submitted twice for the same job seems to say that I am doing a poor job of managing my own search. Any prospective employer would have to wonder how, failing at that seemingly simple task, I could ever hope to manage their accounting department.

*****



Deep6News announces JP Morgan's pending merger with Hell.

Interestingly, Henry also came to Albatross a couple of years after Ivan. Like Ivan there was something he wanted from us. Henry wanted to be an Albatross dealer again. Enough of the old regime had transitioned out of the company that Albatross was willing to entertain this idea. I’m sure that Henry thought that my presence there would make the pitch easier for him. I guess that it did because I didn’t have a problem getting on his side in this overture. I thought it would be a good idea. I thought Henry could move some of our boats. He certainly had a lot of credibility amongst our customer base because of his past success as an Albatross dealer.

You have to appreciate that Albatross prides itself on being a moral company. It was founded more than 80 years ago now by a family patriarch and passed down through three generations before being sold off to outside investors. After two such sales, Albatross still retained much of the flavor and character of the original family company. It is the only place I have ever worked that had a chaplain on the payroll and scheduled weekly prayer services for the workforce. This had been the environment in which Henry first became a dealer.

In the beginning he had been wildly successful, and because of this the Albatross management was able to turn a blind eye to some of his less righteous predilections. When he made the newspapers for income tax evasion amid allegations of laundering drug money however, Albatross was suddenly embarrassed by their association and promptly jerked Henry’s ticket. They had refused after that to have anything to do with him, and had even questioned my moral fitness to work there because of my past association with him. Now Henry wanted to be admitted back into the fold, and everyone seemed to think that would be a good idea, especially if Henry could manage to jump start our stalled sales.

Some wag once told me that everyone in the boat business is a whore. They meant by that that there is no genuine loyalty in the business, and they meant to extend that general ethical lack all across the board: from manufacturers to dealers and from sales staff to customer base.

That assessment has certainly been born out by my experience. Customers regularly work two or three deals at the same time with different sales people at different dealers in the hopes of getting a better deal. Sales people regularly change employers, and will happily transfer the lies they used to tell about the boats they now sell to the boats they used to sell and vice versa. Dealers will do the same on a grander scale.

Everyone it seems is on the make—all the time. In this environment you have to be careful what you say because the likelihood is that before long you will want to get into bed with the person or persons or organization that you said it about. Henry’s new association with Albatross was a case in point.

We signed him up, and Albatross looked to me to manage our relationship with him. Once again it seemed I was back in the business of trying to keep Henry honest. Oh well.

Day 36 - Trading Catatonia with the IRS

          I had lots of discomfort and lots of blood in my urine today. Thank God for the spanking new bottle of hydrocodone. Kelly Ripa was looking spectacular this morning, but not so good that I didn’t get up and go take a nap in the middle of the show. It takes a little medication for me to get interested in Kelly, but just a little too much and I’m right off her again. There’s a delicate balance involved.

In my wooly youth there was an underground comic I used to enjoy about a bunch of inveterate stoners called “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” At some point they developed a kind of life maxim that was repeated frequently in the comic and eventually became a cult mantra for the times: “Dope gets you through times of no money better than money gets you through times of no dope.” Leaving aside the relative truth or fallacy of that particular statement, there is often a relationship between dissimilar objects like dope and money or hydrocodone and Kelly Ripa or drudgery and leisure that needs to be maintained within a narrow range of ratios in order to work at an acceptable level of satisfaction. Now that I’m out of work and having to take medication to moderate my various pains, I’m finding a lot of my ratios are getting out of whack. Hopefully something will happen soon to reestablish some semblance of order and balance.

*****

I owe the IRS a million three?? I guess it could be worse.

I lost ten times that much in my trading account in the last 20 minutes.

          My reveries today went back to Henry and all the abuse and injustice associated with working for him. In spite of his affronts to good manners and decency he was always interesting, especially when considered next to the anal bozos I have worked for since. Henry was a megalomaniacal sociopath, but he was always direct and unapologetic about it. For this reason he was almost entirely predictable. For instance when he stiffed my wife on the $30,000 real estate commission I knew he was going to do it and warned my wife to get a written contract before she set out to sell his house.

“He promised,” she said, and so he did. In the end though, when he betrayed her trust, broke his promise, and cheated her out of her livelihood, it was just ‘bidness.’ It was entirely within the norm of Henry behavior not only to stiff her on the commission, but to be surprised and a little hurt when she got angry about it.

          When Henry said he loved me the day I almost killed him, I have no doubt that he believed it. Henry had no idea what love is, but, to the extent that he was capable of experiencing emotions and affixing labels to them, however bizarre to the rest of us mortals, what he felt for me and my wife was genuine affection. Now that we are not associated with him on a daily basis, he will not ever think of us again unless there is some immediate benefit available to him in the reaching out. When such a situation presents itself to him however, we will be the first people he thinks of. That’s about as much as one can hope for from Henry.

           Henry used to delight in telling people I was the only person on the planet that he trusted enough to grant power of attorney over all his affairs. That he had not actually done so did not trouble him very much, or me either for that matter. He had given me power of attorney over his income tax issues, and probably that was close enough to ‘all his affairs’ for Henry as tax matters occupied a large percentage of his psychic energy. Henry was one of those people who would rather lose a thousand dollars of real money to real crooks than give up a hundred dollars to the IRS. Fortunately for him I was able to pull his fat out of the fire several times when it came to his taxes.

Henry never really appreciated what I actually did for him, but he did appreciate what he thought I did for him, which was keep him from having to pay any taxes. I didn’t really have much to do with that happy state of affairs. The real reason Henry didn’t have to pay any taxes was that he never made any money. He was an appallingly bad businessman—completely clueless in the intricacies of managing his assets to generate profits and positive cash flow. He was however a master of leverage, and what he managed to do was build a huge and precariously balanced house of cards on credit. He was always one deal away from disaster, and he took us all to live with him on the bloody edge of the precipice.

          What I actually did for Henry was not nearly so exciting, but was, at times at least, immensely satisfying. One such occasion had to do with an IRS audit. No one likes to get audited—especially Henry. He was so completely and naturally larcenous at heart that he couldn’t imagine getting through an audit unscathed. In addition to that, he did not trust the IRS or any of the agents in its employ to deal fairly with him—not since he had admitted to a female agent (long before I met him) that he was knocking down cash, and she had the brass to bring him up on charges.

          The real irony in that particular incident was that Henry had admitted to the impropriety, not out of contrition or even because he thought that he was about to be found out, but rather because he believed that the female agent would be so impressed with his resourcefulness and temerity that she would consent to sleep with him. He did it to get laid, but instead he got screwed. That at least was Henry’s take on it. I would love to talk to the agent and hear what she has to say about it. I imagine that it is, for her, a tale that grows larger and sweeter with each telling.

          So when Henry got the notice that he was going to be audited again he rushed down to my office, threw the envelope on my desk, and told me to handle it. Henry did not want to confront or be confronted by anyone from IRS. He just wanted me to make the whole thing go away.

          The auditor turned out to be another woman. I’d dealt with a number of auditors in various capacities at that point in my career. I thought that I was batting a thousand with them. That is most of the audits I’d been involved in had resulted in a ‘no change’ finding, meaning no additional tax due, and those that had not, amounted to not more that a few dollars each—essentially the same result. My opinion of the process and of the agents involved was this: an audit is meant to be fair, and the auditors who conduct them are just regular people trying to do a difficult and tedious job in which they are usually regarded with fear and loathing. Always I had treated the agents and auditors with whom I dealt with consideration and respect. They had done the same with me.

          This new auditor however seemed to be cut from different cloth. She was as unattractive and disagreeable a person as I had ever had to deal with. She was not just unfriendly. She was imperious. She was beyond the reach of such charm as I had managed to develop to that point in my life. She would not be led. She would not be cajoled. She would not be persuaded by reason, logic, or even by beautiful reports. She was a plodder, so I let her plod.

          It took forever. She examined every aspect of our business for the previous three years. She looked at payroll records, bank records, financial statements, invoices, receipts, notices and minutes of the board of directors. If it was on a piece of paper she looked at it. She said not one word about any of it—not to me at any rate. I assumed that she had found nothing to discuss. I knew that our returns were true and complete and supported by the underlying books and records. I knew we were clean as a whistle because it was my job to make sure that we were. That was the only way I was going to keep Henry out of jail, and keeping him out of jail, if you will remember, had been his sole mandate to me.

          Still the agent plodded on, and I began to suspect that she was hiding out with us. She either didn’t want to go back to the office or she didn’t want to start the audit they had scheduled next for her, so she was going to drag our audit out until they reassigned her next job. I couldn’t imagine why else she was taking so long to conduct what should have been a routine examination.

          It took six weeks to get my answer. After an absence of several days the auditor called to tell me she had finished a draft of the final audit report, and wanted to review it with me. We made an appointment for the following day. She showed up in her usual grumpy mood and started off our meeting by telling me that her final additional assessment of tax was going to be $1.3 million. I pretended not to be alarmed, which was actually pretty easy because all of my synapses and all of my vital organs had shut down the second she mentioned $1.3 million. It is an easy matter not to register surprise when you are catatonic.

          She gave me a copy of her report. My immediate plan was to hide in a closet until after closing time, and then to get into my car and drive to Argentina. I didn’t know if the U.S. had an extradition treaty with Argentina or not. It was not a fully developed plan. I looked at the paper she had handed me. It was an IRS form, a fill in the blanks form with spaces for the essential findings, the applicable code sections, the amount of the related assessment, and so forth. I needed to get Henry to sign it to finalize the outcome. The entries on the form were made by hand in a tightly crabbed block print so tiny I needed a magnifying glass to read most of it. I looked at the assessment. $1.3 million is a huge number—maybe not to the investment bankers and Wall Street traders who are largely responsible for our current financial crisis, but then, to Henry and me at any rate, it was an astronomical sum. Henry was going to have a stroke.

I looked at the reason for the assessment. The auditor had asserted that Henry had taken deductions for losses in excess of his basis. I stopped and read that part again. I knew that was wrong. I sat down and waited for my vital organs to reboot. It took several minutes.

          I had set Henry’s company up as what is known as an S Corporation. An S Corporation is a special kind of corporation that is taxed as if it were a partnership. That means that instead of the corporation paying any income tax, the corporation’s income and losses are passed through to the stockholders and reported on their individual tax returns. Henry’s corporation had only spun losses, so Henry, the sole stockholder, had deducted the company’s loss each year from his other income to arrive at the adjusted gross income on his Form 1040. When I say that Henry deducted the losses, I mean of course that I did it for him when I prepared his annual returns.

Now there is a limit to the amount of losses that a stockholder in an S Corporation may take, and that limit is the amount of money the stockholder has actually invested in the company. This is called his basis. The basis is adjusted upwards for any profits passed through to the stockholder and downwards for any distributions of cash or property taken out of the company by the stockholder. The loss deductions taken by the stockholder in total may not exceed the stockholder’s adjusted basis. This sounds complicated but it is actually very simple. It is also something that I took a great deal of care to calculate correctly each year. I knew that the auditor was wrong.

          I went down to the office she was using, and asked to see her calculation of the adjusted basis. As soon as she showed it to me I knew what she had done. She had started with the adjusted basis at the end of the period under audit—a number from which the distributions Henry had taken had already been deducted. Then she deducted the total of all the distributions that Henry had taken. She had in effect reduced his basis twice by his distributions. Her math was wrong. I tried to put on a considered and avuncular air. This is hard to do when your ego is turning cartwheels as if you had just checkmated Bobby Fischer or stripped a basketball from LeBron James. Still, as gently as possible under the circumstances, I pointed out the error in calculation to the auditor.

She didn’t register any surprise or alarm. I suspect that this was because all her vital organs had just shut down. I knew just how she felt. She’d walked in there with a $1.3 million assessment under her belt. She thought she was going to be a big hero back at the office. She thought that she was taking down a big player who’d already copped to a felony evasion charge. Her career was made one minute, and then, thanks to me, in the next minute—not so much.

She sat looking at the offending calculation for about 30 seconds, after which she uttered a single word: “Oh.” Then she packed all her work papers and schedules into her valise and left. I got a ‘no change’ notice the following week. Henry thought that was just as it should be, and he was right.