David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

I will spare all of us much sensuous reminiscence about Peoria’s main bus terminal — which was ghastly in the special way of bus stations in depressed downtowns everywhere — or of my over-two-hour wait there, except to say that its air was not conditioned or even circulated, and it was extremely crowded, and that there were a certain number of lone men and groups of two or three men, nearly all wearing suit coats and hats, or else holding their hats or slowly fanning themselves with them as they sat (none of them ever seemed to think to remove their coats or even loosen their ties); and I remember remarking even then that it was strange to see men in their adult prime wearing the business-type hats that normally one saw only on much older men of a certain background and station. A few of the hats were eccentric or unusual.

I know that I saw, during my survey of the pay-phone and vending-machine area near the entrance to the restrooms, what may have been an actual prostitute.

I well remember the subsequent roil of these same hatted men in the humidity and diesel fumes outside the terminal; and I well remember the two baked-bean-brown IRS transport sedans’ arriving, finally, and pulling up at the terminal curb, and there turning out to be far too many other newly arrived or transferred IRS personnel, 11all with abundant luggage, to fit everyone in the sedans, and the order of departure being determined not by the mandatory reporting times stamped on people’s respective Forms 141-PO (as would appear to have been fair and rational) but by GS grade as evidenced by Service ID — which I didn’t have, and my argument that it was precisely in order to acquire Service ID that I had been specifically ordered to be at the GS-9 Intake Station by 1340h. made no impression whatever, perhaps since several other, pushier personnel were also at that same time exclaiming to the driver while holding up their extant IRS IDs; and, slightly later, quite a few of us standing there watching the overfilled sedans recede from the curb into downtown traffic, and many of the other new personnel simply shrugging and going passively back inside the terminal, and my personal feeling that the whole thing was not only unfair and disorganized but a grim little foretaste indeed of what bureaucratic life was going to be like.

Here, by the way, as a brief interpolation, is some preliminary general background that I have opted not to massage or smuggle in through the sort of graceless dramatic contrivance 12so many stock memoirs resort to; to wit:

The IRS’s Midwest Regional Examination Center is a roughly L shaped physical structure located off Self-Storage Parkway in the Lake James district of Peoria IL. What makes the facility’s L shape only rough is that the REC’s two perpendicular buildings are closely proximate but not continuous; they are, however, connected at the second and third floors by elevated transoms that are enclosed in olive-green fiberglass carbonate as a shield against inclement weather, since important documents and data storage cards are often conveyed across them. Neither heating nor air-conditioning service was ever reliably achieved in these elevated tunnels, and in summer months the Post’s personnel refer to them as bataans, an apparent reference to the Bataan Death March of World War II’s Pacific theater.

The larger of the site’s two buildings, originally constructed in 1962, basically comprises Post 047’s administrative offices, data processing, document storage, and Support Service facilities. The other, which is where the bulk of actual examinations of US tax returns takes place, is not owned by the IRS but instead back-leased through a proprietary holding company established by the shareholder trustees of one Mid West Mirror Works (sic), a glass-and-amalgam manufacturer that vanished into the protections of UCC Ch. 7 in the mid-1970s.

Incorporated in 1845 and perhaps best known as the birthplace of barbed wire in 1873, Peoria plays a vital role in the IRS’s Midwest Regional structure. Located medially between East St. Louis, Illinois’s Regional Service Center, and Joliet, Illinois’s Regional Commissioner’s Office, and serving the region’s nine states and fourteen IRS districts, the Midwest REC’s staff of more than 3,000 employees examines the math and veracity of some 4.5 million tax returns per year. 13Though the Service’s nationwide structure comprises seven regions in toto, there are (following the Rome NY REC’s spectacular administrative meltdown in 1982) 14only six currently operating Regional Examination Centers, these being located at Philadelphia PA, Peoria IL, Rotting Flesh LA, St. George UT, La Junta CA, and Federal Way WA, to which tax returns are forwarded by either the relevant region’s Service Center or the IRS’s central computer facility in Martinsburg WV.

Among the notable businesses and industries based in metropolitan Peoria as of 1985 are included Rayburn-Thrapp Agronomics; American Twine, the nation’s second-largest manufacturer of string, wire, and low-diameter rope; Consolidated Self Storage, one of the first corporations in middle America to utilize the franchise financing model; the Farm & Home Insurance Group; the Japanese-owned remains of Nortex Heavy Equipment; and the national HQ of Fornix Industries, a privately held maker of keypunch and card-reading equipment, one of whose largest remaining customers of that time was the US Treasury. Of Peoria’s employers, however, the Internal Revenue Service has ranked first ever since American Twine lost exclusive patent rights to Type 3 barbed wire in 1971.

End of interpolation; return to mnemonic real time.

After who knows how many attempts, back in the fetid terminal, to find a working pay phone and to prevail on someone at the Form 141-PO’s ‘employee assistance number’ (which turned out to be incorrect or out of order), it was eventually in either the fourth or fifth Service vehicle to appear at the terminal that I finally secured transport to the REC, now direly late for my appointed check-in time, which tardiness I could imagine being blamed for by some expressionless person whose finger also controlled the Intake system’s moral bell/siren.

The next salient fact of that day is that traffic along the city’s circumambient Self-Storage Parkway was totally horrible. The section of SSP around Peoria’s east side was lined with franchise restaurants and things like Kmarts, and auto dealerships with gaudy tethered parade balloons and blinking neon signs. There was an entire separate four-lane access road leading to something called Carousel Mall, which one shuddered even to think about. 15Behind all this commerce (i.e., behind as seen from the east side, heading south around the city’s perimeter, with the slow and silty Illinois River coming in and out of view on the Gremlin’s left side) was the ruined-looking skyline of downtown Peoria, a bar graph of sooty brick and missing windows and a sense of hard pollution even though no smoke issued from any of the smokestacks. (This was several years before attempted gentrification of the old downtown.)

The Service vehicle in question was a two-door orange or yellow AMC Gremlin, albeit fitted with a high-powered whip antenna and a Service-seal decal on the driver’s-side door. Interior signs prohibited smoking and/or food. The vehicle’s rigid plastic interior was clean, but it was also extremely hot and stuffy. I could feel myself beginning to perspire, which is obviously not a pleasant sensation at all inside a three-piece corduroy suit. No one spoke to me or even acknowledged my existence — although I had, as I may or may not have mentioned, a severe dermatological condition during this period, and was more or less used to not being looked at or acknowledged after an initial involuntary gasp and expression of sympathy or distaste (depending), which is to say that I no longer took it all that personally. There were no general offers to adjust the air-conditioning, or even standardly polite questions about whether any of the AC’s trickle was reaching us in the cramped backseat, where between myself and an older GS-11 whose homburg was mashed down almost around his eyes by the roof’s pressure on its crown sat a long-jawed younger man in a gray polyester sport coat and tie, maybe roughly my age, his feet on the medial hump and knees thus up almost to his chest, who was already sweating prodigiously, and who kept surreptitiously wiping rivulets of sweat off his forehead and then wiping his fingers off on his shirt with a motion that looked strangely as if he were pretending to scratch himself under his sport coat rather than wipe off his wet fingers. He did this over and over in my peripheral vision. The whole thing was very strange. His smile was an anxious and totally false rictus, his profile a branching mass of running droplets, some of which were actually falling onto his sport coat and dappling the lapels. He gave off a palpable aura of tension or fear, or perhaps claustrophobia — there was the unexplainable feeling that I’d hurt him terribly if I spoke to him or asked if he was feeling OK. Another older IRS employee sat up front beside the driver, both men also hatless (the driver with a monastic-looking coupe de zéro haircut) and staring straight ahead, neither of them speaking or moving, even when the vehicle was completely stopped in traffic. From the side, the skin of the older employee’s chin’s underside and upper throat had the scrotal or lizardy cast of some men’s advanced middle age (not unlike the then-current US president’s, whose face, on television, often looked as though it was melting down into his throat, which I remember making his jet-black pompadour and harlequin ovals of rouge look all the more incongruous). We alternated between sitting stopped in traffic and moving at roughly cortege speed. The sun beat palpably on the Gremlin’s metal roof; a franchise bank’s digital Time & Temp sign, which we sat idling in view of for several minutes, kept flashing first the time and then YOU DONT WANT TO KNOW, presumably for temperature, which seemed to me an ominous preview of Peorian wit and culture. You can imagine for yourself the air quality and overall smells involved.