Dear muse-haunted friends,
Today, the day of our audit, we stop at a strip mall a few blocks from the IRS office in northwest suburban Chicago to get lunch. The particular European country being degraded here is Italy. Glassy-eyed office drones, potbellied bozos with pagers on their Dockers, anhedonic single moms, and desperate pink-collar climbers are grazing on semolina tubes clotted with quasi-cream and quasi-cheese and talking about people they know either from working with them or watching them on Survivor. My wife and I will have our sandwiches to go.
Once through the glass door marked "IRS, Office Hours 8:30AM to 4:30PM Mon.-Fri." in the multiplex office park down the street, we are in a tiny vestibule with a bulletin board on the wall in front of us and a locked door and intercom on the wall to our right. "IRS Cleared of Wrongdoing," asserts the headline on a 1998 newspaper clipping in the center of the board; "Congressional Inquiry Finds No Substantiating Evidence of Inappropriate Tactics." We press the button on the intercom a few times and no one comes, so I bang heavily on the door. My wife likes this one, so I bang more and harder. Then we spot another bulletin, advising visitors to ring 6441 on a phone hanging beside the board. My wife picks up the receiver and dials 6441, but a screen above the touchtone pad simultaneously registers "6461." She hangs up and dials the number again, with the same result. We stand stupidly for 30 seconds. Then the magic door opens and out steps a thin young black man dressed in that Pier One translation of natural-fiber folk-art multicult chic. "I just had a feeling you would be here!" he exclaims.
I think: This is a fine development; for my instinctive reactions are often those of the liberal reverse racist I used to be. I nod gravely at my wife, to assure her: He's a brother. Everything will be all right. Here is no busta-ass wigger bullshit-talkin' IRS chickenhead. This man will not use the U.S. tax code to bully a pair of struggling bohemians; he will not be so rock-ribbed or steel-hearted as to pursue some hairsplitting perversion of justice, unleavened by sympathetic understanding, in the course of setting aright whatever trivial infractions he happens to uncover on our 1998 return; he will not plow us over with penalties. These reflections, the effects of an ingrained bad habit of attributing nobility to ethnic minorities, are momentary. Within an hour I will feel like smashing this gentleman's head apart on his desk.
If I had come in here less blithely the day might have gone differently. But you see, we have been audited before, and despite the horror the word is almost singular in provoking (almost, that is, until the words "prostatectomy" and "SheDaisy" disappear from use), I've not been worried this time around. "You know," I said to my wife the night before as we tallied up the last subgroup of receipts ("Promotional"), "I'm almost looking forward to this. It's like a crucible, a big test, and we're as well-prepared as we could be. In going back over the 1998 calendar so painstakingly I've gotten to relive a lot of wonderful memories. And look how many errors we've found that are in our favor – we might actually get some money from them!"
"We're not going to call any attention to any errors, no matter who they seem to favor," said my wife, who does not quite share in my all-encompassing love of life.
"All right, but just remember, nothing can really happen to us. A couple hundred, a thousand bucks, but we've done nothing seriously wrong and we're not going to jail or anything." My wife has been on thin emotional ice during the preparations and so I try to help her look on the bright side, or skate on the thick patches, or whatever.
The auditor's name is Kelvin Peterson. His cubicle abounds with humanizing artifacts, predominantly watercolors of stoic Africans, including one man with sizzling raindrops in a band around the middle of his head and ghastly white seed-pods over both his eyes. There are also ribbons from two AIDS walks; a framed inspirational message of about 150 words, mainly "I," "try," "can," and "anything"; and – a puzzling touch – a single chain of little plastic Mardi Gras beads. Between two paintings hangs an unframed eight-by-ten sheet of beige paper bearing an octagonal silver seal with an eagle. "1993/This is to recognize/KELVIN PETERSON/for Five Years of service in the U.S. government." Five Years, capitalized. Beside that, an identical award from 1998 marking Ten Years. The overall effect of this office is, like its occupant, reassuring. Here is an auditor – "tax technician" according to the business card nestled in the pelvis of a reclining black iron stick figure – unafraid to wear a human face. Here is a man apart from the mediocrities down the street sipping marinara though straws, a man who recognizes that millennia before civilization, before language, and yes, before the U.S. tax code, our forebears transmuted their inchoate longings and sense of apart-ness from the beasts around them in crude etchings on cave walls. How fortunate that this adept of the fine arts has been charged with deconstructing my 1040, for my wife and I see ourselves as artists, after a fashion.
But first we have to explain exactly what we do and how we earn money, and this is a tricky matter requiring masterful exegetical technique. My wife does voiceovers for commercials, and she begins by explaining how it is that her robust ream of W2's comes from companies she has never been to or worked for. The companies are paymasters who compute her income based on how often commercials featuring her voice are played, at what time and in which markets. The payments are made to my wife's agent, who deposits the checks and pays my wife, who then pays back a commission. As a wrinkle, for reasons unknown to us, one of her payments in 1998 was reported on a 1099 rather than a W2. Kelvin Peterson is fixing his intelligence on this anomaly.
"So your business income for 1998 was actually $850; that is the amount that should be entered on your Schedule C."
"No, that's just a payment for one job which for some reason was reported on a 1099," says my wife. "If that were the only income entered on my Schedule C, I would be reporting a business loss of over $10,000, whereas I actually earned a net income of $44,000."
"You should tell these companies who send out your checks they should be issuing you 1099's instead of W2's. Then you can properly report them as self-employed business income."
"Hmm." We are both thinking of the tens of thousands of voiceover actors and actresses who file W2's from paymasters each year and wishing we had a snappy answer. It would be a shame to have to begin reporting giant losses that we didn't really incur. "There must be some other way…"
"Are any of these companies who issue you W2's your employer? Do they, for instance, tell you to be at work at 8 and leave at 5?"
This would seem to be a rhetorical question, since my wife has already detailed the irregular pattern of auditions and short jobs that constitute her workaday life. But she dutifully says, "No."
"Then," says Kelvin Peterson with a triumphant flourish, "they are not actually your employers and these W2's should never have been issued."
This certainly is a setback for us, but the audit is only beginning and there is plenty of time for improvement. The accounting methods of the ad industry have been exposed as fraudulent, and though this is surely thrilling in itself, we are preoccupied with the hazards ahead, such as my wife's mileage log, which she has lost.
"We moved last year and I just. Don't. Know. Where it went." Being an actress, she sometimes does that for effect. Kelvin Peterson's eyes are wide and full of fellowship, and I detect a malign aftereffect of that congressional inquiry: human inter-relations training.
"That's really not good," he says.
"I know. And look, here's the thing. The 4,300 miles that are on there, that I drove from my house to Chicago in doing all my work that year – well, obviously I did it. I made the money from the commercials – in fact, I brought the contracts to show you – basically, I can demonstrate, I mean it's undeniable, that I did all this work. Which, logically, you agree I did it, since you're taxing the money I made from it. So if I did it, I had to have gotten there. Obviously, right?"
Kelvin Peterson is shaking his head with great sadness.
"Could I get some fraction of that 4,300?"
"No."
"I can't have any mileage at all?"
Kelvin Peterson pauses magisterially. "Let's see how generous I'm feeling by the end of this," he says.
Well, I for one didn't really expect to win that one. But this audit is not getting off to a good start. Our last audit was an hour and a half long and was conducted by a nice lady who tried to understand our occupations and proceed from there. At one point she singled out on my performance calendar a date where I had opened for Dave Alvin. "You went to Cleveland," she said. "Between personnel, motel, gas, and sundries you spent $900, and you made only $100. What were you trying to do?" I remember staring at her without quite knowing what to say. "Pass out business cards?" she suggested, trying to help me. "Make contacts?"
Good Lord, come to think of it, what on earth was I trying to do? My long, dogged pursuit of music business goals both childishly delusory (a major-label deal) and pathetically modest (a sustainable wage) suddenly seemed, in the light of What-are-you-trying-to-do, like a transparently absurd endeavor that I had kept afloat year after year only by suspending my entire capacity for sober self-examination. I might have dissolved in a pool of tears if my wife hadn't whisked a copy of my recent major-label release out of her pocketbook with a triumphant air, placed it before the audit lady, and announced: "This! This is what we have been spending all this money and time waiting for! This is it – the eventuality every struggling musician dreams of and prays for, this! The end of the rainbow! Our countless sacrifices vindicated by the endorsement of a giant corporation!" It was as though she had been polishing this Brechtian outburst for days. But her point was taken by the auditrix, and for the remainder of our session there were no inquiries into the hundreds of dollars daily disappearing into the voracious maw of my career during fiscal year 1996, the eventual sinking of hundreds of thousands of dollars into that very maw by a real record company having lent some legitimacy if not respectability to the boondoggle. (In an ironic footnote to this story, that company has now disappeared. I am still here.)
Robbie
