When the thing happened, the Founder and Legal were drinking in a bar in northern New York called Media Res. The Founder was telling Legal about Mickey Mouse’s divorce. ‘So the judge says, ‘You say that your wife is crazy?’’
As he spoke, the Founder smirked.
‘’That is not what I said’, Mickey says’, the Founder said.
Legal smiled and nodded.
‘’I said, ‘She’s fucking Goofy’, he says.’
In the here-and-now, an MC climbed on top of a platform made of milk cartons. He was young and fleshy, with a man-bun and a Yasir Arafat-style beard. A large middle-aged, butch-looking woman, who the Founder had always assumed was the owner, sat near the head of the bar and raised her hands to clap. People sitting nearby joined in. ‘What’s this’, Legal said.
‘Trivia Night’, the Founder said.
‘Rule number one,‘ the MC said –
‘Don’t look at your phone’, Legal said.
‘Don’t look at your phone’, the MC said.
‘Rule number two’, the MC said –
‘See rule number one’, Legal said.
The owner looked out over the sea of faces, like a pastor looking at her flock. The Founder saw some young guys with short haircuts and civilian clothes sitting in packs. From the army base, he thought. A pudgy middle-aged NCO sat in fatigues with his wife. The insignia of the Tenth Mountain Division hung over the bar and on the far wall. It’s good that military personnel support local LGBTQ-owned businesses, the Founder thought. Maybe the idiots from the new administration won’t ruin that. The rest of the crowd was white and older. The bar was in a rehabbed flour mill next to the Black River. Through picture windows, people could watch whitewater kayakers shooting the rapids that passed by the mill wheel. One of the kayakers, a young guy with long hair and a yellow PFD, was stuck in an eddy behind a large rock. Each time he tried to move out, the back-current would suck him back in. He waved his paddle and shouted at someone who looked like a guide or an instructor, standing on the shore. Neither seemed able to hear the other.
‘Siobhan is at it again’, the Founder said. ‘She has filed a complaint with the New York AG’s office.’
‘You mean, the lady whose installer sticker was mutilated by space aliens’, Legal asked.
‘Yup.’
A couple of women sat at the bar next to the men. One wore a brown lambskin jacket and kept her hair piled on top of her head. The other was younger and skinny, with tattoos on her neck and the backs of her hands. A sign in front of the larger woman read The Wikipedians.
‘Are you guys playing’, the woman in the leather jacket asked Legal.
‘No, ma’am’, Legal said. ‘This is a business meeting.’ The woman gave him a half-smile and turned to her companion. Legal turned to the Founder. ‘What’s Siobhan up to now’, he asked.
‘She moved out in April, you know’, the Founder said.
‘And then she sued us in June.’
‘And now she has filed this with the AG’, the Founder said. He took a document out of his pocket, unfolded it and handed it to Legal. Legal read.
‘She says we over-charged her sales tax’, Legal said.
‘She’s right on that point, but read on’, the Founder said. Legal furrowed his brow as he looked at the document. It’s a good thing he doesn’t move his lips when he reads, the Founder thought. If he did that, I would have to fire him.
‘She said sales tax is computed with respect to dealer cost, not retail price’, Legal said.
‘There’s more.’
‘Excuse me’, the woman with the hair piled on top of her head said to the Founder, ‘What do you know about towns in New Jersey?’
‘More than I would like’, the Founder said.
‘What is the town where the Monopoly addresses get their names’, the woman asked.
‘Atlantic City’, the Founder said.
The woman gestured to a group of men and women at the other end of the bar bent over their answer sheet. ‘You’re going down, bitches’, she said.
Legal looked up from the document. ‘Siobhan says that we are running a criminal enterprise’, he said. ‘She says that we have a practice of consistently and deliberately over-charging sales tax on the sale of new mobile homes and retaining what we charge as a way to unjustly enrich ourselves. She says, further, that you have put the proceeds of this fraudulent activity in a Cayman Islands bank and used it to purchase a diamond necklace for your wife, real estate in Monaco, and a stable of racehorses. What the fuck?’
‘Read on’, the Founder said.
‘What body of water in London was Blackfriar’s Bridge built over in 1775’, the woman in the leather jacket asked the Founder. When he looked at her, he saw that she had a thick makeup base and the beginning of crow’s feet.
‘The Thames’, he said. ‘Spelled T-H-A-M-E-S’.
‘You guys are amazing’, she said. ‘Why aren’t you playing?’
The MC cleared his throat. ‘What Canadian rodeo did Prince William and Kate Middleton visit in 2011?’
‘Calgary Stampede’, Legal said. ‘Only fucking rodeo in Canada.’
The woman with neck tattoos looked over at Legal, giggled and smiled. Legal saw that she had a silver tooth whose reflection she could direct, like a child directs light reflected from the face of a watch. ‘Who are you guys’, she asked. ‘What do you do?’
‘We are with Dirtlease’, the Founder said. ‘We run mobile home parks and we know a lot of useless shit.’
‘Join us’, the thin woman said. ‘We make a good team.’
‘With pleasure’, the Founder said. ‘Sure.’
‘Bitches!’ the woman in the leather jacket shouted at the group at the end of the bar.
‘So, what happened with Siobhan’, Legal asked the Founder.
‘We really did screw up’, the Founder said. ‘You know Brandon, in operations?’
‘Oh, yeah’, Legal said.
‘Well, the buck stops with me, but it was his fault. We have been charging 8 percent sales tax on the sale of all new homes, since we started selling new homes.’
‘As we should’, Legal said. ‘Sales of used homes are exempt from sales tax under New York State law. New home sales are subject to sales tax. The tax rate in most counties is 8 percent’.
‘Yeah, but there is a quirk in the law that Brandon missed.’
The MC tapped the mic. ‘Aspirin is made from the bark of what tree’, he asked the room.
‘Willow’, Legal said. The woman with the tattoos scribbled on her pad.
‘What’s that’, Legal asked.
‘Under NYCRR 544.3(a)(2), sales tax on a manufactured home (not including personal property severable from the home) is taxed at the applicable tax rate on a tax base equal to seventy percent of the ‘receipts or consideration given by the purchaser or the user’. The applicable rate is eight percent. We have been charging that on the full retail price of homes we sell, rather than on seventy percent thereof.’
‘So – Brandon fucked up.’
‘We fucked up.’
‘Duff Beer is the favorite drink of what character in what sitcom’, the MC said.
‘Homer Simpson, The Simpsons’, Legal said.
‘We knew that’, the woman in the leather jacket said.
‘Sorry’, Legal said.
‘You guys really work for Dirtlease’, the woman with the tattoos asked.
‘We run the place’, the Founder said.
‘That’s so cool’, the woman said.
‘So – Siobhan is right’, Legal said. ‘What do we do about it?’
‘She is right on that point. We miscalculated the sales tax. She is due a refund equal to thirty percent of what she paid. But she is wrong on two other points.’
The Founder saw one of the women at the end of the bar make a rude gesture toward the woman with the tattoos. The woman with the tattoos stood up, walked over and stood nose-to-nose with her. A bouncer came up and separated the two women. Tattoos returned to her seat.
‘She says that the tax base – the number that is multiplied by seventy percent – is dealer cost, not retail cost. Because of that, she has demanded that we show her our invoice from the factory for the home that she bought from us.’
‘The fuck?’
‘She mis-read the law. Receipts or consideration given by the purchaser or the user pretty clearly means ‘retail price’, but she thinks it means ‘wholesale cost’. She can’t read a statute, but man – the woman is a pitbull. You gotta hand that to her.’
‘What Roman emperor’, the MC read into the mic, ‘Divided the empire into two halves and accepted Christianity as the state religion?’
‘Constantine’, the two men said, simultaneously.
‘Jinx’, Legal said.
‘Fuck off,’, the Founder said. The woman in the leather jacket scribbled on the answer pad. ‘You want another pencil’, the Founder asked her. ‘That one looks pretty beat up.’ The woman adjusted her top-knot and smiled. ‘This is my lucky one’, she said.
‘No sales tax is calculated with respect to wholesale price’, Legal said. That’s why it’s called a ‘sales tax’. A value added tax references seller margins. A sales tax references sales proceeds. We don’t have a VAT in this country. We are not euro-trash.’
‘That’s not the worst’, the Founder said. ‘She says we’re holding on to the overage as part of a plan to defraud customers and enrich ourselves.’
‘Is that true?’
‘No! Every dollar that we collect as sales tax is sent to the New York State taxing authority. We do not hold on to any of it. We have tax returns and bank records to prove that.’
‘How many new homes have we sold?’
‘Three.’
‘Sounds like a shitty criminal enterprise to me.’
‘Yep.’
‘Hey’, the woman with the tattoos said. She nudged Legal. ‘Focus.’
‘What line of defenses did the French believe that they could hide behind in the First World War, only to be rudely surprised by a German flanking maneuver?’
‘Maginot line’, Legal said. ‘Spelled M-A-G-I-N-O-T.’
‘What else does Sibohan say we have done with the money that we have over-withheld?’
‘She says we have invested it in a child prostitution ring run out of a pizza parlor in DC. We put in a low-ball offer in the bankruptcy auction for InfoWars that disrupted the process. We have a manufacturing facility in California that makes Jewish space lasers. We have been making Marjorie Taylor Greene butch by putting hormones in the water in her district in Georgia.’
‘Really’, the woman in the leather jacket asked. ‘Is all that true?’ The Founder noticed that her eyes were a strange mix of gray and brown, and that she sat straight on the bar-stool, with her ankles crossed.
‘No’, he said.
‘So, what do we do’, Legal asked.
‘We admit our mistake and defend against the charges of unjust enrichment’, the Founder said. ‘Siobhan has been over-charged. She should be made whole. New York State now has custody of her money. In a perfect world, the AG’s office, which is a branch of the New York State government, would refund it to her, but I don’t think it works this way. We probably have to refund it, file an amended return, and wait for the state to cough it up. She will take our money, dream up something else to accuse us of, and come at us again. She’s a cross between a pit-bull and a mobius strip.’
‘Aren’t there statutes of limitation?’
‘Not for mobius strips.’
‘What happens to Brandon?’
‘He will be shot. An invoice for the cost of the execution will be sent to his family.’
‘Quiet’, the woman in the leather jacket said to the Founder. When she put her hand on his elbow, he noticed, she left it there a beat longer than he would have expected. ‘They are announcing the results.’ Legal opened his mouth to ask the Founder a question, but he was drowned out by the sound of the women shouting ‘Whooo-whooo’ to the room and, ‘Suck it, bitches’, to the group at the end of the bar. The woman in the leather jacket grabbed the Founder’s hand. The woman with the hand tattoos wrapped herself around Legal like boa constrictor.
‘Come on’, the woman in the leather jacket said to the Founder. She had to look over her shoulder to talk to him, because she was dragging him through the melee that had erupted. A bunch of navy guys, it appeared, had entered the bar during the contest. When the results were announced, the squids had gotten into it with the guys from Fort Drum.
‘Where are we going’, the Founder asked.
‘Our place’, the woman in the leather jacket said. ‘We are going to slip into something comfortable, and you are going to teach us about sales tax.’