Dear Jack,

The writing has been on the wall for about six weeks now. In about two more weeks, the writing on the wall will come to an end. My company has about $2,500 in the bank now, and unless some miracle happens in the next two weeks, that last $2,500 will provide one more paycheck to our only remaining paid employee, one last check to the lawyers, and then we collapse in a heap. We will have probably $20,000 to $30,000 worth of unpaid bills staring us in the face at that point, give or take some insane amount. I wish I could say that it wasn’t my fault, that I could believe in some “it’s the market’s fault!” excuse, but it ain’t the market’s fault. It’s mine.

I have become coldly analytical about my mistakes, to the point where I don’t particularly feel as though I did much of anything right, including starting the company in the first place. Mind you, self-pity is a loathsome endeavor; what I’m experiencing now is not self-pity at all. It’s more like abject terror of what comes next. My financial life is a complete ruin, with three months worth of bills facing me and no idea when I’ll be able to concentrate on getting a new job. Most of what I owe is in the form of an outrageous credit-card debt, which I rang up while trying to start the company in the first place. I don’t yet know what the ramifications of my company’s pending bankruptcy will be, whether I’m going to get personally nailed for some of the unpaid bills – I’m afraid to ask my lawyer at this point, because every time I talk to him he charges me $200. I will find out the hard way, I’m sure.

Our president, a friend I hired earlier this year, is working the phones, and getting nowhere. Last week an old radio buddy of his told him he was considering investing, but we’d have to give him a brand new Harley Davidson if we ever went IPO or got acquired. Naturally we promised him two fucking Harleys if we ever went IPO. He hasn’t called us this week. Last week our president talked to a guy who runs a company in L.A. that seemed like they wanted to give us money. That guy hasn’t returned our calls in a while, either. This is an old story this year; every time someone wants to give us money, their stock in some other company slides 53,000 points and suddenly they’re not interested.

The irritating thing is, things looked good for a while, and I think I pretty much blew the opportunity. I got started too late; I spent money unwisely – although to my credit, we never spent $5,000 on a goddamn office chair. My spending mistakes were strategy mistakes, which is a much more painful category than just profligacy. I thought it’d be “cool” if we did X, thought it would “eventually work” if we just kept doing Y, gambled on getting another round of investment before the money ran out, neglected to budget money for promotion, etc., etc., until I wished I’d never had this idea in the first place. The only things I did right were getting us a round of angel investment at the start, and then hiring some extremely talented people; but even those victories are now bitter, because I raised the money from friends and family, and those talented people are good friends of mine. I can’t imagine what it will feel like to tell each one of them, it’s over. I know it’s going to happen, and it’s like some sad recurring nightmare in my head – rehearsing for it means it keeps happening over and over again.

Tomorrow we have a pretty important presentation of the software we’ve developed for a much bigger, more impressive local company. They have our fate in their hands, to some extent. When I met with their CEO, he casually mentioned he could finance us if he liked what we had to offer, but the minute you start believing what successful people tell you, you’re always in for a rude surprise; they hold cards you don’t, and you’re not even playing the game until you have eleventy billion in capital from Pompous Venture Fund Incorporated.

Goodness, maybe this is self-pity. I apologize.

I started my career as a temp in Chicago, for the director of marketing for a huge global company with 30,000 employees. When she got promoted, she hired me on to be her full-time “executive assistant.” After a while, a friend convinced me I had more skills than that and got me hired as an “associate consultant” for another giant company, and then eventually I got promoted to “consultant,” and then I eventually became a “content manager” and then an “associate producer” for multimedia-based training products, and then I wound up working as a “project manager” for web application development and web projects. Time elapsed: about five years, give or take, and somewhere along the way, I got the idea to start my own company, and so I became “CEO & Artistic Director.” For a while, I used to walk down the street giggling at the idea that I was a CEO. The idea for the company came to me in the middle of a heavy experience involving homemade ayahuasca, but that’s probably another story altogether.

I convinced my uncle to chip in, and later convinced my old boss to chip in a big hunk, and then convinced our future president to chip in, and invited him to hitch his wagon to our rising star. Just in time, as it turns out, for all kinds of things to go wrong: I made some bad decisions early on concerning the viability of video on the net; I burned up development time on a project that we would eventually replace with something smarter, but not before wasting months of effort; leads kept drying up for future financing; the sneaking suspicion began to overwhelm me that if I was an actual CEO, I’d know what to do, but instead I grew paralyzed as we slowly ran out of money. I had known all along this was the likelihood; most companies fail in their first year, and when dot-coms started collapsing all around us, my fight-or-flight instincts started selling me out.

The technical people who work for us have been slaving away. Our director of software development said to me a week and a half ago, “I don’t want to look back on this and realize there was something more I could have done.” I don’t have any such way to focus; the things I think I know how to do at this point require money I don’t have to accomplish. I’m twenty-eight years old. I don’t belong at the helm of a company, and it’s clear to me now that that’s one of the major reasons our business plan met with such little success. I am at a complete loss, and I spend my days waiting for something to happen.

My own personal network has been tapped out; the developers can keep developing, our president can keep making phone calls. This meeting tomorrow could go well; chances are, it will go just fine but they won’t commit to anything and we will shut down before the end of the month, go our separate ways, and look back on this however we choose. I’m the only one who has to answer to those investors, of course, and god knows my old boss is going to kick my ass for losing his money. I’m going to go back to consulting, make enough money to pay off my debt, try to get on with my life without such enormous ambitions.

I think it’s easiest if I just blame computers. I fucking hate computers.

Signing off,

Scott

19 March, 1993

Personal Case # 690-3020-372

John Hodgman
16 Edgewood Ave
New Haven, CT 06511-4706

Dear John,

My name is Lady Stardust. An associate in the United States has provided me with your name. He’s deeply concerned with your future and would like to see you happy and successful.

You’re not alone, John, everyone is having money problems. Sure you’re proud, but don’t be too proud to share your problems with your friends. John, there are all types of people in this world, and I happen to know that you are a worthwhile and deserving person. You deserve much more than you are receiving right now. John, don’t give up, you may be on the verge of winning a major lottery or sweepstakes or receiving an inheritance.

John, you may be tempted to take this letter and throw it away. You may feel that smart people don’t need the help of anyone especially unsolicited advice, right? Wrong! Some of the advice that you have been receiving from your friends may not be the best advice for you right now, in fact some of the people you think are your friends may actually be your Judas. All I can say is beware.

My associate in the United States asked me to help make your life easier. John, after making this request of me, I envisioned a series of numbers, I do not know what those numbers represent, for all I know they may be the numbers that appear on a loved one’s Social Security Card or they may be the numbers that will win you a lottery or sweepstakes.

Many of the numbers I have selected have won extraordinary sums of money for my friends. John, it may be that your lucky moment in life is approaching and your less fortunate days may be in the past.

If you would like to receive your lucky numbers call the number shown below. Please do not delay. The numbers selected have a special importance for the period of March 19 to March 31. If you would like to receive your special lucky numbers you can call 1-900-680-8667 (cost of call $3.99 per minute, you must be over 18. Service by Infotrax, Mt. Laurel, NJ, average call 3-4 minutes). I will give you the lucky numbers that I have personally selected for you at that time. The telephone number is 1-900-680-8667, ($3.99 per minute, you must be over 18, average call 3 to 4 minutes), please call if you would like to receive your special lucky numbers. I have assigned you a personal case number 690-3020-372, please have your number handy when you call.

These numbers are of no use to anyone else and will be destroyed if we do not hear from you by March 31. I have already informed my friend that I have provided you with the opportunity to change your life.

Blessed be.

Lady Stardust

PS: If I do not hear from you I can only hope things are going well for you.

To my old Master,
Colonel P. H. Anderson,
Big Spring, Tennessee.

Sir. I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, – the folks call her Mrs. Anderson, – and the children – Milly, Jane, and Grundy – go to school and are learning well…. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense…. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve – and die, if it come to that – than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson

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 Johnson’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.)

But this year’s auditor is interested in succinct data to fill each field on the computerized form. “In this business you operate as a self-employed musician, where do you go to play music?”

“Um” – how to put it? – “bars.”

“No, what I mean is, your engagements, do they take place primarily in and around Chicago?”

“No, they take place all over. Mainly in the United States.”

“And who comes to hear you play?”

Again I am unsure what to say.

“For instance, do you play primarily for children?” The kinder, gentler, post-1998 tax examiner always keeps helpful mind-jogging instances at hand.

“No, primarily for adults. I put out records and theoretically people develop an interest in attending one of my shows after having heard a record.”

“I see.” He types the word “general” in the field and moves on to the next. “Who handles sales and production, would that be you?”

“You mean of the records? The records are produced, I guess you would say, by the record label. I sell some myself from the stage but most of the sales take place in stores where people go to buy records” – I am still trying to find a suitable diction for this weird discourse – “and are accounted for by the record label.”
He types “lable” after the prompt “Sales” and “label” after the prompt “Production,” and after comparing the effects, corrects the first. I am wondering how to get this on track. That no one outside of one’s profession has a clear understanding of what one does, or how (or sometimes why) one does it; that one is condemned by one’s occupational culture to exile from ordinary society; that one is, with one’s casual attire, slouched posture, and stammering difficulty in answering a few generic questions, naturally ridiculous in the eyes of decent citizens; one must accept these symptoms of an ordered society with forbearance. But unfortunately, one also becomes inured to a special status that is usually easy to invoke when necessary. Look: I make records! I travel around entertaining people – not a lot of people, to be sure, but they are spread all over 48 states! I am written about in magazines! I’m even on the electric TV!

“Now, let’s look at some of your Schedule C deductions. First, you reported $9,091 in travel expenses. What were those?”

I produce four thick manila folders full of tour receipts and income/expense breakdowns by month. “That’s for hotels. Here are the receipts.”

“These are hotels for…”

“For when we go to play our shows, which are attended by adults, and which occur mainly outside of Chicago. Afterward we sleep in hotels.”

“‘We’ is who? You and your band?”

“Yes.”

Another sorrowful shake of the head. “The only allowable travel-related deductions are for yourself.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t deduct others’ expenses, unless they’re your employees. The law is very clear on that point. Are these people your employees?”

The sickening sound is my all-encompassing love of life collapsing into a slough of despond. My wife steps in.

“These people are not our employees. Let me present a clear picture of our operation for you. We are not the Rolling Stones here. We are a small family business. We cannot afford to pay the people Robbie takes on the road Medicare or Social Security, nor do they expect us to. They are indispensable to my husband’s career. He releases records featuring group performances, and so he needs to tour with a group.”

“Then the group needs to pay their own way and claim their own expenses on their own returns.”

“Musicians are not going to cover their own travel expenses! That’s just not how! It! Is!”

“Well, I suggest you try looking for some different musicians. I’m sorry, but it’s very clear.” He reads a passage from a book which says what he just said, that travel deductions must be one’s own or one’s employees.

“Look,” says my wife, trying a different and more fruitless tack, “this is what everyone does. And we ourselves have done this for years. Our travel expenses for Robbie’s band passed our last audit, and passed two different, experienced tax preparers.”

“I can’t speak for what happened at your last audit, or what you have done in the past. Sometimes,” he confides, “low-budget tax preparers are unreliable.”

“This is absolutely insane,” I suggest. “First of all, Geffen reimbursed me for all these expenses, and their reimbursements are reported here as income, so under your scenario I’m taxed on the reimbursement but can’t claim the original expenses I paid out of pocket. Second, this tax law is plainly meant to cover pager-wearing schmucks who go to Cleveland for a seminar, not rock bands. It’s not business-related travel, my whole business IS the travel. I have tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for my band, going back for years – not just hotels but air fares, cabs, drum heads, and a dozen other things.” Maybe I shouldn’t be saying all this.

“And none of that is allowed,” smiles Kelvin Peterson. “You can’t deduct other people’s expenses. It’s just absolutely clear. After all, how do I know that your band isn’t claiming these same expenses on their returns?”

“What do you mean?” I pull from a folder a few pages of meticulously Scotch-taped hotel receipts. “I have the receipts! Here they are! Anyone else that claims these 2 rooms at the Red Roof on August 9, 1998 in Trenton is clearly incorrect!” I am kicking at his desk impatiently and gesturing heatedly.

“Do not get angry at me, Mr. Fulks. I did not write the law. Talk to your congressman.”

Neither of us can think of any other line of reasoning, and we can see little profit in continuing to object to something so clear.

“I’ll ask my supervisor to confirm the law if you like.” We nod mutely, and are left alone all of a sudden, Donna and I. There was, as Dorothy Parker put it, a long silence with things going on in it. After a minute I mumbled timidly, “Are these car dealer-type stunts or what? First the how-generous-I’m-feeling bit and now this. If he comes back saying ‘Well, this is really your lucky day,’ I’ll asphyxiate him with my long form.” (Tax jokes are usually a bit labored.)

But he returns without any developments to report, and informs us that it is time to move on to my mileage claim, which is 41,394.

“Were all these miles on one vehicle?”

“Yes.”

“Did you use that vehicle for any non-work-related driving?”

“No.”

“Did you keep a mileage log?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s take a look.”

I recorded my mileage in my calendar book. At the end of every trip, on the page with the date on which I got home, I wrote down the miles driven with a box shape around the figure. Two-hour trip, number in a box; month-long trip, number in a box. There are perhaps 60 numbers in boxes. I read each one to Kelvin Peterson, slowly and deliberately, while turning 365 datebook pages slowly and deliberately. He runs an adding machine tape. The miles come up about 1,000 short.

“Well, that’s odd,” I say. “Maybe I missed one. Shall we double-check our work?”

He sighs, runs another tape, and I read through the book a second time, not much faster, and the number doesn’t change. The return is adjusted accordingly. Kelvin Peterson’s patience is being strained, and you can see some cracks, just barely. As for me, I’m not even here anymore. I am mildly interested in what magic sum will be declared at the end, but, despair having set like cement in my head, I would like to amuse myself for whatever time remains by playing daft and throwing spanners. When he turns to the meals deduction, which is based on the number of days out of town, I ask Donna whether she brought that sheet where I tallied my travel days. No, she didn’t, and we go back to the datebook and count out 196 days, page by page, at the speed of mammal evolution. A couple times I lose the count – “47, no, wait, did I already say 47?” – but Kelvin Peterson sticks doggedly with me as he runs the tape. After this exercise he asks for the 1099′s I filed for my band. “Um, did you bring those?” I ask Donna. Kelvin Peterson doesn’t wait for the answer. He goes away again. I turn to Donna.

“What were we thinking? We should never have come here without bringing someone to speak for us, someone to speak to this man in his own tongue and find whatever fucking hidden clause it is that lets us earn a living the way we earn it and keeps the fucking IRS off our backs. We’re over our heads and out of our element. And that sandwich is making me sick. Something was wrong with it.”

“If he’s right about your deductions, what are we going to do?” Donna says. “You can’t go out on the road anymore if you can’t claim most of the expenses.”

“He’s not right, and I can claim them, and what we’re going to do is research case law, consult a half-dozen different tax lawyers and accountants, talk to other bandleaders who’ve been audited, and then appeal. We’re going to spend half our productive time for the next month on this horseshit. We can’t come back to this on our third audit.” Almost everyone we know who has been audited once has been audited twice more.

“I think,” Donna lowers her voice to the faintest whisper, “he’s not going to ask you for documentation on your per diems.” We haven’t been able to locate any corroborating proof of the cash I paid my players in 1998 for meals on the road, and I’ve claimed (accurately) around $5,000. It was our top worry coming in, unable as we were to foresee the disallowed hotels or the agency paymaster brouhaha.

“I doubt it. I think he just hasn’t gotten there.” He walks back in, and it turns out he is indeed skimming past the per diems. He’s just too eager to get this over with. “I” and “try” and “can” and “anything” have turned to “very” and “tired” and “go” and “home.” This is not the sympathetic, soul-of-Job, post-congressional-hearings Kelvin Peterson of three-and-a-half hours back. This Kelvin Peterson stretches his arms languidly and sighs continually. Presently his phone rings. He tells the caller suggestively, “I’ll call you back in three minutes.”

“Are we through in three minutes?” my wife pipes up.

“I was using a turn of phrase,” Kelvin glowers. But we are done in 15. The bill is $966. We ride home through rush hour traffic. As we pull in our driveway a girl from the neighborhood, a pretty 14-year-old with a somewhat confrontational style, is hanging around our lawn on her bike. People are hanging around our house a little more in the last week, since I did the Conan O’Brien show.

“I just wrote two songs,” she tells me.

“I didn’t know you were a songwriter. What are they called?”

“One’s called ‘Country Hillbilly’ and one’s called ‘Down Town South.’”

“That’s funny.”

“I’ve got a lot of songs,” she says. “Not all of them are finished.”

“Stay out of the business,” I advise her.

Robbie