The Tax Man

It’s that time of year! Time for math dummies like House Crazy Sarah to pay way too much money to have someone to tell her how much money she owes the government.

For a couple years, she went to the same tax professional to get her taxes done. He was a full-time tax preparer so House Crazy Sarah figured he would know his stuff. And he did.

He was a very large fellow who weighed in excess of three to four adult human beings. In the time House Crazy Sarah knew him, he lost 240 pounds which he was happy to report each year when she visited him.

Nonetheless, he still had trouble fitting his rotund girth behind his desk. He resided like Jabba The Hutt in a dimly-lit room in the upstairs level of a commercial building in a sketchy part of town.

The very large tax man was a brilliant – though absent-minded – taxologist. But his self-proclaimed “expertise” was a gift for gab, one-sided gab at that. He easily stretched a half hour accounting appointment into a two hour verbal tour of the cultural and political landscape of America.

The tax man’s diatribes were punctuated with questions – perhaps to give the illusion that he was having a two-way conversation – but he invariably insisted on answering his own questions.

“And why do you think that is? What is the explanation for that?” He would ask House Crazy Sarah. But just as her murky turtle brain was formulating a response, the tax man rushed in with: “Don’t answer that! I’ll tell you why…”  As he was speaking, he often drank from a large plastic vat filled with a combination of Gatorade, orange juice, and Coke.

House Crazy humored him and went back to him for years because he was a good tax guy. And he was forever seeking ways to “screw the IRS – they take enough of your money!” Plus, he was affordable and House Crazy Sarah likes when things are affordable.

On one occasion, the tax man slapped House Crazy Sarah’s W-2’s on his desk and used them to wipe up some of his spilled Gatorade/orange juice/Coke concoction! His ginormous coffee cup from that morning (or maybe a morning six months ago), was pushed close to House Crazy Sarah on the desk to where she could see the god-awful stains inside. It was reminiscent of a public toilet in a Greyhound Bus terminal. She averted her eyes to the floor – old speckled blue carpet that may have been vacuumed when the first Bush was president – and she saw: a smushed macaroni. With little bugs crawling all over it.

Then, as he was talking, the tax man made a sudden flourish with his sausage arms and up-ended an entire stack of papers. The documents fluttered painfully in slow motion to the bug-laden floor.

House Crazy Sarah was aghast.

“Oh now look what I’ve done!” The tax man said as he pushed a large intercom button on his desk and called for Jake.

Jake trotted quickly into the room but it was hard not to notice that he had some type of simpleton condition. Jake earnestly gathered up all the papers while the tax man wheeled backwards in his chair and lifted up his belly with his two hands so that he could see down to direct Jake on how best to pick up the papers. The whole spectacle was so unsettling that House Crazy Sarah had to look away in politeness and decency.

Afterwards, when the documents were hastily arranged, signed and stapled into place, the tax man asked if she want to know how he had rapidly lost so much weight. Not sure how to answer, House Crazy Sarah waited just a beat because she knew he’d tell her anyway.

“Medicinal marijuana – edibles to be precise – because smoking it for your health would be kind of counterproductive, don’t you think?”

 

~~~

2 thoughts on “The Tax Man

Add yours

What ya thinking? Leave a comment!

Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: