Not all abuse is physical. Some is the result of psychological warfare. For 42 years, I seemed to be receiving coded messages that something was wrong. They came from seemingly likable billboard ads, pop songs and TV comedy skits. The queasiness, t...
This writing heretofore has included "1967" 11 times, including once spelled out and another time in Roman numerals. During all the time of my life I have described so far, I did not believe that anything detrimental to me had occurred in that year. I just didn't like it.
Despite the triggers the year caused in me, I had only a mild problem with obsession over numbers. That's ironic, because in so many other ways, "mild" does not at all describe the depth of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder I suffered in my young adult years.
Though I had frequent success in my 20s quelling the problem, occasionally believing I had whipped it, OCD always came back, as my hard-won stability would be incrementally eroded over a year or two until I was back into enslavement by needless mind rituals.
At the root of my OCD problem was a feeling that what I saw as precious, ethical or beloved was somehow under siege. My thoughts could seem involuntary, though they were not; I was lucid and not psychotic.
And I coped. I was professionally stable as an independent contractor journalist working for some excellent newspapers of various sizes, as well as magazines, alternative weeklies and monthlies, Associated Press and during its last days, United Press International.
I had some glorious scoops, from neighborhood developments to stories catching eyes worldwide resulting from my wire-service coverage of a handful of national conventions of interest groups meeting in Louisville. The Organization of American Historians during its 1991 convention released its assessment of the Reagan presidency, and their negative findings stunned Europe after my story on the OAH report and responses to it by Republican leaders was broadcast on French, German and British airwaves.
A few years earlier, I broke the story of the first ever entry of U.S. fast food into China. For that one, I used a little less gum shoe determination – I was handed a press release by a KFC public relations person who stopped in at our UPI newsroom on a Saturday afternoon on his way to drop the same release off at the Courier-Journal and AP. Unknown to him, I had been struggling for several minutes to find the required 5th story for my hourly news briefs, and KFC going to China would now be the top story, which I sent out literally two minutes later.
I still do not know if my lead sentence, "Soon, when residents of Beijing, China are hungry, they'll be able to send out for American" survived editing in the Atlanta regional office before the world learned minutes later of this 11-herb-and-spice rapprochement between once mortal enemies (or was this a Cholesterol Offensive by our side?)
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During those 17 years of self-employed journalism I developed a permanent instinct for making my own opportunities to inform millions from Beijing to Berlin, and to keep paying my rent. A good deal for all.
The downside was that my pay seldom included tax withholding. In several years, I fell behind in the quarterly advance tax payments I set up with the IRS and two states. Groceries are needed now, and the next April 15 is not really gonna arrive, is it?
I did child care for one of my editor/friend's three wonderful kids – in their 20s today, they are still the greatest. One evening, my editor, his wife and another friend of mine showed some tough love by persuading me to get help for my OCD.
The resulting therapy and medication gradually lessened the symptoms, and a couple of years later, after I realized I needed a real job -- with tax withholding -- their household was just as crucial a resource in my landing a full-time position with a telephone survey call center.
When I triumphantly called Carl, the children's father, to inform him I had been hired, adding that I could not have done it without him, he responded with congratulations, but then said, "I don't think Ihad anything to do with it."
"Oh yes you did," I told Carl, who was my height and weight almost exactly. "I wore your shoes to the job interview."
Yes, I still had the grooming deficiency, but the right friends. And soon a discovery that I had great telephone skills that allowed me to rack up the most completes in the center night after night.
In a few months, I accepted another job also doing telephone work, but with more tasks as well, at a large distribution and call center, where early on, my totals for successful resolution on phone calls were just as spectacular.
We worked for several clients, answering the phone as a different service provider depending on which line lit up. On some calls, we did customer satisfaction surveys. On others, we gave help to callers with trouble using their software, took orders for shipping or looked up technical or financial information for businesses.
The busy place was like a family in every way – it had camaraderie, and dysfunctions. And since part of our work was federal contracting, those government shutdowns suddenly were personal, not just political; they caused reductions in my hours more than once.
Still, I liked the work. Quite a bit. And the fact that the job included the tax withholding normal jobs do stopped the IRS-debt hemorrhaging.
Penalties kept growing, though. So, about four years into my employment at the center, to address the by then $8,000 I owed in federal back taxes (about $6,000 of which was penalty), I arranged an IRS paycheck debit agreement with the help of a former co-worker who had left the company to become a tax preparer. Jim was his name and he was about the nicest person I had ever worked with. Goodness knows his career change to being a preparer and taxpayer representative, known as an "Enrolled Agent," was golden timing for my needs.
And Jim charged me nothing year after year, for preparing my taxes and negotiating the debit amount, then in a few years persuading the IRS to reduce it to a level that allowed me to keep getting by. Getting them to agree to that required an Enrolled Agent. I paid Jim $25 a year anyway, a speck of what he deserved.
"You were my first customer," Jim said in his characteristic easygoing tone explaining his fee-gratis service.
The debit, which was in biweekly increments, got me out of IRS debt in about four years.
Though I had never owned a home, I had that "mortgage burning" feeling as my final paycheck debit meant I was completely out of tax liability after about 15 years of living day and night under the weight of growing back taxes owed the IRS, and smaller liabilities to state and local authorities.
(To circularize this story, this was about as I was passing the Interstate 64 billboard for my nightly exercise in enticement and suspicion.)
Well, with the IRS no longer debiting my pay, my employer was effectively giving me more in each check.
Another change soon came. Greater Louisville has two sprawling river ports, at opposite ends of the city's long, looping Ohio River front. One on the Hoosier side of the river; the other in Kentucky, both are linked by expressways to the Louisville International Airport and, more importantly to United Parcel Service's North American hub next to the airport.
The telephone center for which I worked had a close relationship with a shipping facility in one of those river ports and I was among several workers offered a chance to be leased out to help run packing lines there.
This was the first managerial level position I had ever held. I did all right at it, which is to say not great. I was delighted when the lease ended and I could return to telephone/online work that was more me. Yet, my nine-month stint in that gigantic shipping center was an education. Although I was management, I absorbed some of the realities faced by industrial laborers, the folks we leftists always champion. Scurrying workers, humming fork lifts, clanking machinery, supplies stacked a hundred feet high -- it was a little like living in a scene from Metropolis.
