Imaginary Heroism
Mar. 9th, 2023 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo!
I was parsing through the year past with Rashida Thomas (not her real name), who’d carted along her son Jermaine (not his real name.)
They were a two-fer: Jermaine was having his taxes done for the very first time, some sort of Rite of Passage, no? Baby’s First Haircut or possibly the financial equivalent of a bris.
Jermaine was slunk as far under the table as it was possible to slide, clutching his phone and muttering—by which I deduced he was Face-Timing someone who may have been naked.
Rashida and I were exchanging pleasantries about the photo on her NY State driver’s license.
“Nice photo,” I said.
“Girl, that wig hurt!” Rashida said. “These days, I go natural.”
I nodded approvingly. “The dreads are a good look.”
At the table next to us, Margaret (not her real name)—one of the tax preparers who only started this year—was interviewing a client who had a voice like a plummy radio announcer’s: “I left the Navy after it became clear to me that this nation was going in the wrong direction, a direction that was weakening its moral fiber. This was just after Obama got elected—”
Rashida and I exchanged looks.
“So-o-o. This year you can still claim Head of Household,” I told her. “But next year, Jermaine will turn 18, so your tax status will change. That means your taxable income will go up ‘cause your standard deduction will go down. You’ll need to do some tax planning—”
“You know the word ‘slave’ isn’t mentioned once in the Constitution. Not once,” Margaret’s client was telling Margaret. “And the Constitution has 4,440 words in it, so if the Founding Fathers had wanted to mention slavery, they could have mentioned slavery. Wouldn’t you say?”
Poor Margaret was punching numbers into her computer with a look on her face like a deer’s on the first day of hunting season, practically cowering in her chair. Margaret, as I say, is new; furthermore, that engineering job at IBM she had so recently retired from had never involved having to manage people so that they would shut the fuck up—
Rashida and I exchanged another set of looks. I shook my head. “I’m a professional,” I murmured to her. “So I gotta pretend I’m not hearing what I’m hearing—”
“Oh girl,” Rashida said, “If I had a dollar for every stupid old white man on this planet.”
I shook my head. “Well, this year you’ve got some income from wages, and you’ve begun drawing income from your New York State retirement fund—”
Margaret’s client had the loudest, smoothest voice imaginable. You could tell that in his mind he was auditioning for a replacement slot of Rush Limbaugh’s show even though Rush has been moldering in the grave, lo these two years past. “Now, let’s look at what was going on during the Revolutionary War, shall we?”
“Oh, now we got us a history lesson,” Rashida said.
We giggled hysterically.
“Because what nobody tells you is that Black people owned slaves! That’s right! So exactly how is this reparations bullshit—and I am sorry about using that word, but I know you understand that there’s simply no other way to describe it—how exactly is this reparations bullshit supposed to work?”
Suddenly, it stopped being funny.
I looked at Rashida.
Rashida looked at me.
Jermaine didn’t look up once from his phone.
It took me another 30 minutes to finish Rashida’s taxes and then Jermaine’s taxes, during which this guy droned on and on. Not the most offensive stuff I’d ever heard, but in a way that made it even more offensive because he was presenting it as though it was just common sense reality:
“No one would deny that the five human races differ greatly in some ways, such as average athletic ability, just for example. Musical ability is another example. But it’s not PC to say they differ in intelligence. There have been over 400 Nobel prize winners. Maybe six or eight of them were Black and those won prizes only for literature and peace. There are zero black quantum physicists. Zero Black composers of symphonic music. Zero Black artists whose work is displayed in non-ethnic museum galleries. Zero Black eminent mathematicians, chess players, philosophers, and so on—”
I wanted to apologize to Rashida.
I wanted to march up to this guy and tell him, “Shut the fuck up!” But Margaret was really the one who should have been doing that, and I didn’t want to dis Margaret because she’s already massively insecure being new, and I didn’t want to undermine her confidence further.
It was clear anyway Rashida didn’t hold this guy against me. After we finished and I was handing her and Jermaine over to the QA reviewer, she reached over and patted my hand. “Honey, I’ve been a mental health case manager for 25 years. This is nothing to some of the stuff I’ve heard—”
“But you shouldn’t have to hear it at all—”
“No. But they be thinking it just the same.”
Margaret had finally finished with the guy. It was his turn for QA review, and he grinned at me and my empty desk, rose from Margaret’s desk and began walking over to mine.
I flashed him my most dazzling smile.
“Excuse me just one moment,” I said and scurried out to the welcome area to talk to Bonnie, who is the traffic cop for our particular TaxBwana site.
“I’m sorry, Bonnie, but I can’t do this guy’s QA review. I’m afraid I just couldn’t stay polite—”
Bonnie ❤️LUV❤️s me. In Bonnie’s eyes, I can do no wrong.
So, she asked no questions, merely murmured, “Take a break,” and I watched her go out into the big room where we work with clients and tell the guy, “There’s been a change of plans. We’re going to have you sit over there for a few minutes till Doug is free—” Doug being the site coordinator and Bonnie’s husband.
When I went back into the big room 10 minutes later, the guy was still sitting there.
And he shot me the most vicious look.
And I thought, This is exactly the type of guy who returns to a place with an AK47 and begins taking people out.
So, then I started concocting a very complicated fantasy about exactly how I was gonna respond to him with his AK47—
I would march up to him—Go ahead, fuckhead. Shoot me—while gesturing madly to Doug behind my back, Get everyone out while I’m distracting him!
Too bad my entire LJ/DW diaries are mostly locked because I knew if I went down in a blaze of heroism, everyone would want to read me!!!!!
I am very, very good at imagining heroism.
###
This was not the only intense client interaction I had yesterday.
It was a day for intense client interactions.
Or maybe it really is true: There are stories everywhere you look.
My first client of the day had been a kind of Blanche Dubois prototype, Miss Borderline Personality of 1983. The moment she sat down, she began babbling about the teaching job she’d been forced to retire from over the school principal’s unfairness, and her blessed Mama’s death three years ago, and her sainted Papa’s death five years before that, and how they had been forced to sell the house—
Do I need these kinds of details to do a person’s taxes?
I do not.
All I need are those pieces of paper that get mailed to them in envelopes marked Important Tax Documents Enclosed.
I mean, it is true that I often feel quite sympathetic toward my clients, and when I feel sympathetic, I enjoy listening to their life stories. I’ve often observed that reading someone’s Tarot cards and doing their taxes have a lot in common.
But I did not feel sympathetic toward this woman.
My mother was a borderline personality.
It’s one of those personas that instantly drains me of any dram of empathy.
###
My final client for the day was a woman whose tribulations seemed almost too much to bear “Traumatic brain injury,” Bonnie whispered to me as she beckoned the woman toward my table.
She was very intelligent, but at intervals throughout our session just… locked.
It was painful to see.
The injury had happened some years before, and I didn’t ask for details.
She collected SSI. Barely enough to keep body and soul together even with food stamps and Section 8 housing.
And she’d been smart enough to work a little this year. As a wage earner, she was eligible for Earned Income Credit, which netted her a $100 or so back at tax time.
“Great!” she said. “I’ll buy myself something pink and frilly!”
We laughed.
“So, would you like me to print you out some information on food banks?” I asked. “I work with the Hyde Park foodbank during the summer! The garden collective I work with donates about a third of what we grow to the food bank. Lettuce and fresh tomatoes!”
“You are very sweet,” said the woman. “But no.”
###
I had been planning to tromp but by the end of the day, I was so exhausted that all I could do was eat Chipotle and go to bed, there to watch endless episodes of The Real Housewives of Miami.
But tomorrow is another day! And today is that tomorrow!
I was parsing through the year past with Rashida Thomas (not her real name), who’d carted along her son Jermaine (not his real name.)
They were a two-fer: Jermaine was having his taxes done for the very first time, some sort of Rite of Passage, no? Baby’s First Haircut or possibly the financial equivalent of a bris.
Jermaine was slunk as far under the table as it was possible to slide, clutching his phone and muttering—by which I deduced he was Face-Timing someone who may have been naked.
Rashida and I were exchanging pleasantries about the photo on her NY State driver’s license.
“Nice photo,” I said.
“Girl, that wig hurt!” Rashida said. “These days, I go natural.”
I nodded approvingly. “The dreads are a good look.”
At the table next to us, Margaret (not her real name)—one of the tax preparers who only started this year—was interviewing a client who had a voice like a plummy radio announcer’s: “I left the Navy after it became clear to me that this nation was going in the wrong direction, a direction that was weakening its moral fiber. This was just after Obama got elected—”
Rashida and I exchanged looks.
“So-o-o. This year you can still claim Head of Household,” I told her. “But next year, Jermaine will turn 18, so your tax status will change. That means your taxable income will go up ‘cause your standard deduction will go down. You’ll need to do some tax planning—”
“You know the word ‘slave’ isn’t mentioned once in the Constitution. Not once,” Margaret’s client was telling Margaret. “And the Constitution has 4,440 words in it, so if the Founding Fathers had wanted to mention slavery, they could have mentioned slavery. Wouldn’t you say?”
Poor Margaret was punching numbers into her computer with a look on her face like a deer’s on the first day of hunting season, practically cowering in her chair. Margaret, as I say, is new; furthermore, that engineering job at IBM she had so recently retired from had never involved having to manage people so that they would shut the fuck up—
Rashida and I exchanged another set of looks. I shook my head. “I’m a professional,” I murmured to her. “So I gotta pretend I’m not hearing what I’m hearing—”
“Oh girl,” Rashida said, “If I had a dollar for every stupid old white man on this planet.”
I shook my head. “Well, this year you’ve got some income from wages, and you’ve begun drawing income from your New York State retirement fund—”
Margaret’s client had the loudest, smoothest voice imaginable. You could tell that in his mind he was auditioning for a replacement slot of Rush Limbaugh’s show even though Rush has been moldering in the grave, lo these two years past. “Now, let’s look at what was going on during the Revolutionary War, shall we?”
“Oh, now we got us a history lesson,” Rashida said.
We giggled hysterically.
“Because what nobody tells you is that Black people owned slaves! That’s right! So exactly how is this reparations bullshit—and I am sorry about using that word, but I know you understand that there’s simply no other way to describe it—how exactly is this reparations bullshit supposed to work?”
Suddenly, it stopped being funny.
I looked at Rashida.
Rashida looked at me.
Jermaine didn’t look up once from his phone.
It took me another 30 minutes to finish Rashida’s taxes and then Jermaine’s taxes, during which this guy droned on and on. Not the most offensive stuff I’d ever heard, but in a way that made it even more offensive because he was presenting it as though it was just common sense reality:
“No one would deny that the five human races differ greatly in some ways, such as average athletic ability, just for example. Musical ability is another example. But it’s not PC to say they differ in intelligence. There have been over 400 Nobel prize winners. Maybe six or eight of them were Black and those won prizes only for literature and peace. There are zero black quantum physicists. Zero Black composers of symphonic music. Zero Black artists whose work is displayed in non-ethnic museum galleries. Zero Black eminent mathematicians, chess players, philosophers, and so on—”
I wanted to apologize to Rashida.
I wanted to march up to this guy and tell him, “Shut the fuck up!” But Margaret was really the one who should have been doing that, and I didn’t want to dis Margaret because she’s already massively insecure being new, and I didn’t want to undermine her confidence further.
It was clear anyway Rashida didn’t hold this guy against me. After we finished and I was handing her and Jermaine over to the QA reviewer, she reached over and patted my hand. “Honey, I’ve been a mental health case manager for 25 years. This is nothing to some of the stuff I’ve heard—”
“But you shouldn’t have to hear it at all—”
“No. But they be thinking it just the same.”
Margaret had finally finished with the guy. It was his turn for QA review, and he grinned at me and my empty desk, rose from Margaret’s desk and began walking over to mine.
I flashed him my most dazzling smile.
“Excuse me just one moment,” I said and scurried out to the welcome area to talk to Bonnie, who is the traffic cop for our particular TaxBwana site.
“I’m sorry, Bonnie, but I can’t do this guy’s QA review. I’m afraid I just couldn’t stay polite—”
Bonnie ❤️LUV❤️s me. In Bonnie’s eyes, I can do no wrong.
So, she asked no questions, merely murmured, “Take a break,” and I watched her go out into the big room where we work with clients and tell the guy, “There’s been a change of plans. We’re going to have you sit over there for a few minutes till Doug is free—” Doug being the site coordinator and Bonnie’s husband.
When I went back into the big room 10 minutes later, the guy was still sitting there.
And he shot me the most vicious look.
And I thought, This is exactly the type of guy who returns to a place with an AK47 and begins taking people out.
So, then I started concocting a very complicated fantasy about exactly how I was gonna respond to him with his AK47—
I would march up to him—Go ahead, fuckhead. Shoot me—while gesturing madly to Doug behind my back, Get everyone out while I’m distracting him!
Too bad my entire LJ/DW diaries are mostly locked because I knew if I went down in a blaze of heroism, everyone would want to read me!!!!!
I am very, very good at imagining heroism.
###
This was not the only intense client interaction I had yesterday.
It was a day for intense client interactions.
Or maybe it really is true: There are stories everywhere you look.
My first client of the day had been a kind of Blanche Dubois prototype, Miss Borderline Personality of 1983. The moment she sat down, she began babbling about the teaching job she’d been forced to retire from over the school principal’s unfairness, and her blessed Mama’s death three years ago, and her sainted Papa’s death five years before that, and how they had been forced to sell the house—
Do I need these kinds of details to do a person’s taxes?
I do not.
All I need are those pieces of paper that get mailed to them in envelopes marked Important Tax Documents Enclosed.
I mean, it is true that I often feel quite sympathetic toward my clients, and when I feel sympathetic, I enjoy listening to their life stories. I’ve often observed that reading someone’s Tarot cards and doing their taxes have a lot in common.
But I did not feel sympathetic toward this woman.
My mother was a borderline personality.
It’s one of those personas that instantly drains me of any dram of empathy.
###
My final client for the day was a woman whose tribulations seemed almost too much to bear “Traumatic brain injury,” Bonnie whispered to me as she beckoned the woman toward my table.
She was very intelligent, but at intervals throughout our session just… locked.
It was painful to see.
The injury had happened some years before, and I didn’t ask for details.
She collected SSI. Barely enough to keep body and soul together even with food stamps and Section 8 housing.
And she’d been smart enough to work a little this year. As a wage earner, she was eligible for Earned Income Credit, which netted her a $100 or so back at tax time.
“Great!” she said. “I’ll buy myself something pink and frilly!”
We laughed.
“So, would you like me to print you out some information on food banks?” I asked. “I work with the Hyde Park foodbank during the summer! The garden collective I work with donates about a third of what we grow to the food bank. Lettuce and fresh tomatoes!”
“You are very sweet,” said the woman. “But no.”
###
I had been planning to tromp but by the end of the day, I was so exhausted that all I could do was eat Chipotle and go to bed, there to watch endless episodes of The Real Housewives of Miami.
But tomorrow is another day! And today is that tomorrow!
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Date: 2023-03-10 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-10 02:11 pm (UTC)