THE MAN WHO STOPPED PAYING

Or: Bureaucrats and God: A Marriage Formed in Hell

A play in one act.

By Bradley R. Smith

"In Bradley Smith's The Man Who Stopped Paying, ( ... ) bureaucrats are the enemy, for while they maintain the welfare systems, they also maintain the machines and programs that will destroy those systems. Smith's hero simply pays no taxes at all - he doesn't even send in the forms

"For the first time in a long while on stage - an anarchist libertarian has sounded out.. Jon Ackelson plays him with abandon (and)...a great deal of heart.... With his love of nature and disgust for the bomb and the Feds, Smith could become a kind of playwright laureate of an American Greens Party, but then he would probably rather go it alone."

Robert Koehler, The Los Angeles Times

"...interesting insights and humane ideas."

Susan Block, L.A. Weekly

"...one has to admire the writing in The Man Who Stopped Paying and its political message...Jon Ackelson...establishes a believable, sometimes lovable character. He is particularly good in making this man a worker rather than an intellectual."

Phillip Reed, DRAMA-LOGUE

THE MAN WHO STOPPED PAYING

(STAGE DIRECTIONS)

Scene. Interior of dilapidated one-car garage in a rustic canyon off Hollywood Boulevard. The garage walls are of bat and board, and the place is filled with the throwaway belongings of an old Anglo woman, her Mexican housekeeper, and the playthings of the housekeeper's eight-year-old daughter.

A workbench serves for a writing table, a 1930s lamp provides the only illumination. There is a typewriter, books, newspapers stacked in piles, what-have-you. Hand tools, makeshift shelves containing cardboard cartons and paper bags full of stuff, and so on.

Time. Evening.

Characters: (one only) A.K. SWIFT (fortyish).

Cast: Jon Ackelson

Curtain up.

A.K. SWIFT: Last night I dreamed I was working on the production line in a factory that made sheet glass for storefront windows, something like that. While we worked the guys were talking about when the nuclear holocaust is going to happen. Some said it's going to happen any day now, others thought we still have a year or two.

In the dream I thought it was an interesting conversation.

My work station was the last one on the line. The huge sheets of glass were being manufactured up near the roof and coming down between wide rollers toward the line where they were treated somehow by the others.

My job was to remove each sheet of plate glass from the line as it reached me and stand it upright against the wall.

If I made one mistake, if I allowed myself one moment's carelessness and one sheet of glass fell to the concrete floor and shattered, that would be the moment the thermonuclear blast would occur.

In the dream I wondered why I had so much responsibility.

I hadn't asked for it.

I didn't think I wanted it either.

I was afraid, I was certain, that sooner or later I'd fumble the ball and it would all be over.

All of it.

In the dream, I wanted to know how the fate of the entire world could depend on one man.

***

I moved my stuff out here in the garage about a month ago. This is where I read, where I do the typing, take care of business. Business hasn't been real good. I do the sleeping down in the house on the dining room floor. You go down the drive and there are the wood steps and the old wood porch and the door that opens into the side of the front room.

Mother's there now, in her wheelchair, watching a game show on television probably. The lamp on the card table will be turned on, maybe it's illuminating the pages of The Ladies Home Journal, or some tabloid about famous entertainment personalities.

Alicia is lying on her own bed in the little back bedroom. I can see the light glowing softly through her drawn blind, the shadow of her head outlined against it. She's probably talking on her Easter-egg blue telephone while she watches the Spanish language channel on her own television.

Marisol may have her eye on the television too, or maybe she's coloring pictures in the little book I bought for her at the drugstore. Marisol is a happy kid. She likes drawing happy houses with happy flowers sprouting up around them, happy smiling suns beaming down on everything.

She's eight years old.

What does she know?

***

Alicia's a Christian so she thinks she's happy too. She's not a Catholic like you have the right to expect a Mexican to be. She's an Evangelical. Among all the Christians, the Evangelicals strike the happiest poses.

These cartons are filled mostly with books. Once in a while I take down a carton and fish around in it for something to read. Today I pulled one out titled The Greeks and The Irrational. I read where the fundamental distinction Greeks made among their dreams was between those that were significant and those that weren't.

I felt the rush that happens all through the body when I think I've gotten an insight into something. Then I realized ancient Greeks distinguished among dreams exactly like we do. Some are significant and some aren't.

Some insight.

***

One night I dreamed I was standing at a window on the top floor of a huge skyscraper. A nuclear bomb had exploded and down below firestorms raged through the city streets.

The city was finished.

Life itself was finished.

It gave me kind of a sinking feeling.

I'd escaped the force of the blast somehow but I'd gotten a fatal dose of radiation. I had thirty days to live.

Don't ask me how I knew. It was a dream.

While I stood at the window watching the inferno below I felt a scab appear on my forehead, up here at the hairline. It started growing downwards then, like a blind being drawn over a window.

It came down over the eyelids, the nose, the lips. It wrapped itself around the throat and the back of the neck. It grew down over the chest, and back. It went down the arms and around the fingers. The palms of the hands scabbed over and when I made fists I could feel the scab cracking and leaking inside. The scab spread around the legs and covered the feet and the last place it went, it wrapped itself around my weenie. I can't describe how that felt.

It felt peculiar.

It looked peculiar too. In the markets, in the delicatessen freezers you can buy hot dogs wrapped in cornmeal batter? That's what it looked like.

Except it was scab.

The remains of the destroyed city were being consumed in the roaring conflagration. I was alone on earth, I was enveloped in scab, and in thirty days I'd be dead.

It was an extreme situation.

It occurred to me then, that I wanted to do something significant with the time I had left.

I think I figured it was my last chance.

That made me anxious.

I'd been all right until the issue of time had come up.

I understood there was nothing to be done about the death and ruin that was everywhere. Death and ruin were the given. I had one choice. To get myself into relationship with what was.

But everything was gone.

All that was left was the scab.

I tried to direct thought toward something that could be significant in that situation but thought couldn't come up with anything. Thought kept returning to the scab.

That's the nature of thought, I told myself.

It'll go for the scab every time.

***

At night I watch the dreams about nuclear bombardment but in the morning there is still the work, if there is any work, and the alarm still goes off and I still get in the pickup and meet the crew at the taco stand on Alvarado where we still stand on the street with the steaming coffee and Mexican rolls and set up the days' work.

And I still like it.

The best people say that's the way it should be, they say human life must go on, that it must endure.

I don't think that can be convincingly demonstrated.

I still want it to go on.

I think that's what there is about the living.

The wanting.

***

When I'm on the job laying out footings or building forms, or on the telephone to a concrete company, sometimes I find myself looking at a tree, or the sky, for no reason really, and in the stillness of that moment it occurs to me that the nuclear blast might happen in the next instant. Then I feel the anxiety that my family, my friends will be caught in it too and what I won't be able to help them, that I won't be able to get to where they are.

I want to kick myself then because I haven't done anything about the poison capsules, that I'm still procrastinating. I did introduce the subject to my doctor once but the guy laughed at me. It won't be a medical doctor finally who will help me with the poison, not someone licensed by the State to operate.

Government will create the holocaust, it's not going to take care of the victims.

The problem with stashing poison capsules around the house is that one day somebody will get a headache and swallow the wrong relief. Mother might jump at the chance to swallow a little poison. Not exactly jump maybe, she's been in the wheelchair eleven years now and her legs are useless. She says they feel like stumps.

The other day she spilled a bottle of salad oil in her lap and the oil ran down her thick legs into her socks.

I'm getting tired of this whole mess, she said.

I said, what do you mean, Ma?

The whole mess, she said.

I took off her socks and wiped the oil from her legs and feet with a bath towel. The feet were swollen grotesquely and were cold as headstones.

Look at those feet, Mother said. They look like big tamales.

I said, do you mean the living itself, Ma? Is that what you're tired of?

I've been thinking about it, she said, and all I can do anymore is eat.

A handgun would be more practical in some ways but less in others. I can buy a handgun anytime I want. I can keep it with me in the pickup, take it in the house at night, take it out again in the morning. But when the explosion happens I won't be able to get to where they are anyway.

And if I could get to them, how desperate would I have to feel to blow out my mother's brains? Or Alicia's? Or Marisol's?

I don't know if I could do it.

I probably could.

I helped a fellow out that way once, a long time ago. He was wearing the black pajama tops the Viet Cong infantry used in Nam . One afternoon we found him sitting on the roadside against an embankment. We could see the whole top of his brain, it was right out there in the open. He wasn't dead, even with his brain sticking out like that. He'd shrug his shoulders and grunt, and after awhile he'd grunt and shrug them again.

There was some joking around about what we should do with him. It was my opinion somebody should kill him. Enough was enough, that was my opinion. When I pressed the muzzle of the M-16 against his temple I pushed too hard, the head sort of leaned away and the bullet came out through the top of the brain.

It was one of those sights, when you see it, you hardly ever forget it.

I don't want to poison anyone or shoot out their brains either. But I feel obligated to make some provision for us in case we do experience a nuclear bombardment -- and live through it.

I feel the obligation, it preoccupies me relentlessly, but I don't do anything.

***

The other day there was a photograph in the papers of a guy down South who was executed by the State for one thing or another. By injection. I think it was a first.

That may be the way to go.

Each of us could keep a vial of the stuff on his own person. The stuff they injected into that prisoner. Who's going to mistake a vial of clear liquid for an aspirin tablet? Nobody.

The bomb goes off, you live through it, you begin to scab over, you get out your vial and you do it to yourself.

That's not even uncommon.

Is that a breakthrough?

Is that a breakthrough?

***

Hardly a week goes by I don't get a letter in the mail soliciting money to help cool down or freeze the nuclear arms race. The letters all express the same urgency. They swear that if I will only give a small donation to their organization the whole world will have a chance to survive.

One letter was signed by a nuclear physicist who claimed to be among the original people who designed and built the first atom bomb in Los Alamos , New Mexico in 1945. Now here he was forty years later asking me for twenty-five dollars so he could help stop what he had helped get started back then.

He wrote that at this very moment thousands of nuclear warheads are sitting, waiting, all over the world, aimed right at me, my family and my friends.

I already knew that but I went on reading anyhow. I felt like I was getting it from the horse's mouth.

The physicist described how when the holocaust happens, firestorms of a thousand degrees Fahrenheit will be set in motion, sucking the air out of our lungs. We will choke to death in clouds of toxic gases. Radioactive dust clouds will cover thousands of square miles of the earth and bring with them excruciating pain, gut-wrenching sickness and death.

Finally, the letter said that the coming holocaust might ring down the final curtain on the human experiment.

It was a wonderful letter.

I reflected on it for several minutes.

Here was a highly educated man, a nuclear physicist, concerned that the end of the human experiment might be at hand, and all he wanted from me was twenty-five bucks.

Twenty-five beanies.

Two tens and a five.

Why didn't he ask me for an arm?

Why didn't he ask for a leg?

Here was a man who hadn't been serious at the beginning of his career, who after forty years toiling in the nuclear vineyards still could not get serious

I don't claim to know what value that human experiment actually has in the great scheme of things. Who am I? I'm not formally educated. I'm not university trained as I suppose our nuclear physicist is. But even somebody like me, even on a sour stomach, I think the human experiment is worth more than twenty-five dollars.

Where do our twenty-five-dollar protestors think this government gets the money to finance its nuclear arms race?

The government gets it from us.

Well meaning people from every walk of life make their twenty-five dollar contributions to organizations dedicated to stopping the arms race and the next thing you know it's April 15th and all these so-well-intentioned folk contribute twenty-five hundred dollars, twenty-five thousand maybe to the government so it can go forward with its nuclear arms race.

It's a hell of a game we're playing.

***

My own point of view is simple. It's appropriate I think for those of us who are not experts, who do not devote our lives to the problem of how to get some to stop building what the rest will not stop buying.

My point of view is that you do not fund government programs, or any others, that you hold are morally, grievously wrong.

No protests.

No cooperation.

Who is there to protest against?

Ourselves?

What is there to protest?

What we ourselves maintain with our own tax payments?

The difference between progressive-minded protestors and the right wing people is that right wingers fund nuclear arms programs because they believe in them while nuclear-arms-protestors fund them because they're afraid they'll see the inside of a jail if they don't.

Maybe there's some other reason.

If all the world is a stage, and from a certain perspective it is, and if the plays we judge most beautiful surpass all others in terror- Oedipus Tyrannous, Antigone, Prometheus and the Oresteia, Lear - then the great drama of our time must surely be the struggle of a few unarmed men and women standing alone against the immense might of State bureaucracy and Corporate business, united in their production of thermonuclear weaponry.

If that isn't our great drama, if that is not our role of horror and human beauty in this age, then what is?

What can it be?

***

Yesterday morning when I was waking up I thought I heard Mother call my name. I rolled over on my belly and got up on my hands and knees and held my breath.

I could hear her snoring softly in her bedroom.

I realized then that it wasn't Mother's voice I had heard. It was something in my own brain that had called out my name.

Out the front window it was beautiful Sunday morning. The sun was just coming down into the little canyon while the thick shadows on the ground receded smoothly before the edge of its light. The surface of the roadway glistened with lavenders and greens like an oily stream. The tips of the needles on the Japanese pine sparkled with tiny points of light as the sunshine poured through them. For a moment the mind was still, and empty, like the sunlight itself.

Then thought started up again, making its sounds, fidgeting with one thing then something else.

I made a cup of instant coffee and stepped out into the cool morning air. A squirrel barked at me from the big oak tree next door. I determined to think purposefully about the most important issue of our time.

Thought replied by recalling how one afternoon I was digging in the little garden in the front yard when Marisol had come out to watch.

AK, she said, what are you doing?

I'm pulling up weeds, Marisol. See?

Yes, I do.

See these big weeds? I'm going to pull them all out.

I see.

She watched me with her beautiful black eight-year-old eyes.

AK, she said. What do you need them for?

I thought that was pretty funny. It was Veteran's Day so I asked her if she knew what a veteran is.

I think so, she said uncertainly.

Well, what is a veteran, Marisol?

Are those the people who kill the dogs and cats?

I couldn't let it go at that. The kid was on a roll. So I asked her if she knew what an atom bomb is.

A what?

An atom bomb. Do you know what an atom bomb is?

I'm not sure, she said. There's a Tony Bond in my class, but he's a real pest.

***

In the oak tree the squirrel had grown quiet. I tried to put a hold on thought, to direct it onto the great drama of our age. Nothing was of less interest to thought.

Thought considered the birds chirruping on the hillside. Thought considered the lizards scurrying through the dry leaves underneath the sumac. A car rolled down the hill past the front of the house and thought considered the whirring of the tires on the asphalt.

Still, it was slowing down, the mind was quieting. I listened to the breathing, in and out. It wasn't interesting.

It was boring.

Then, in the mind's eye, I saw Mother appear on the porch before me and before she had time to even know where she was I had her back in the kitchen, shoving her into the freezer compartment in the fridge. She slid right in on her back, her nose sticking out above her bedcovers just like it does at night when I turn out her light.

I heard her grit her teeth. I heard her say, I'm going to get out of here if it's the last thing I ever do. She started pushing with the old legs that don't work anymore and I was curious to see how it came out, but the picture ended.

What do you do with something like that?

***

The other night I cornered my friend Beatrice at the bar at Joe Allens and started proselytizing her with the idea that you do not initiate force to gain social or political goals.

When I'm boozing it's not unusual for me to talk like that.

Beatrice is a psychotherapist but she has an interesting way of looking at things anyhow.

It sounds good, she said. It is not right to initiate force to gain social or political goals. It's a high ideal.

Isn't it though?

The reason it sounds so good, Beatrice said, is because it's an irreducible idea.

Irreducible?, I said. I like that. It sounds like I've gotten to the bottom of something. It is an irreducible idea, isn't it?

Sometimes, Beatrice said, when you go deeply enough into an irreducible idea, you find out it is reducible after all.

What?

Beatrice laughed, then some people came over and one thing led to another and the conversation was lost.

That night I lay on my pad on the dining room floor thinking about what it could mean that an irreducible idea could prove to be reducible.

I couldn't figure it out.

It was beyond me.

Then it occurred to me that I have only two ideas, two ways of looking at things. One is that no matter what anyone does to me, I am responsible for how I feel about it. The other is that I ought never to initiate force against another person to get something I want.

I understand those two things made up the entire extent of the content of my moral being, my thinking. Two propositions that are so simple, so plain I can say the same thing to everyone, the powerful and the weak, men and women both, the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, to the right, the left, to the religious and the rest.

It doesn't make any difference who you are.

I'm going to say the same thing to you.

The body felt moved by a kind of joy. I could see so clearly the fundamental superficiality of my character.

How there are no depths to it.

No profundities.

That there is nothing here but the obvious.

I got so excited at seeing how superficial I am that the body felt like it was going to levitate. I jumped up in the dark and walked in circles on the carpet. I laughed and talked to myself.

I've only got two ideas in the entire brain I kept saying.

That's all there are.

And even those aren't mine.

What an experience it is to have the sense, even if it's only for the moment, that you know who you really are.

And that you can live with it anyhow.

***

Here's a guru, he's gone all the way from Columbia University to India and come back again, and now he's got a spiritually enlightened way for writers to deal with the nuclear arms race.

The guru is asked, what do you think is the role of the writer in all this?

And the guru replies, the role of the writer is really no role. Except to register his sensibilities and to tell the truth.

The role of the writer is really no role. I know a lot of writers who have been waiting to hear that one.

I take it to mean that the writer can be distinguished from the citizen. I don't think I'm twisting the text. Who would want to bear the burden of citizenship in this age when he can settle for being a writer and have no role?

That way the writer can go on expressing his sensibilities and telling the truth while he goes on paying his part of the two hundred, two hundred-fifty billion dollars the military bureaucrats need to get on with their manufacture and deployment of hydrogen bombs and the rest of it.

No role there for the writer. I can see that.

The writer today is divorced from all that by sensibility and truth.

It's a thought sweet enough to make a writer swoon.

***

One day when there was no work I drove downtown to the main library to see if they had any good books. In the stacks I came across an anthology ob Benjamin Tucker, the editor of the old Liberty magazine. Tucker held that human rights do not exist in nature, that in the beginning there was the right of might, and more recently men invented rights that are guaranteed by mutual contract.

So if a contract is forced upon one party by another it is an example of primitive regression to the right of might.

It isn't complicated.

You either force yourself on somebody against his will or you enter into voluntary contract with him.

Voluntary relationship, that's for me.

When relationship isn't voluntary, relationship sucks.

The American Government holds me in involuntary contract. It's tax collectors demand from me what in good conscience I can no longer give them. This Government runs programs that disgust me yet it believes it has the right to my cooperation against my conscience and good sense.

My friends believe they have the right, using democratic institutions, to extract from me by force monies to fund programs that go against every decent feeling I have ever had.

That's what my friends think democracy is.

***

Out on the street a wind was blowing and the air was cold. I crossed Fifth Street to the parking lot and sat in the cab of the truck. I ate some bran muffins and finished off a bottle of club soda. It was awful. I had no place to go so I folded myself up on the seat and went to sleep.

When I woke it was dusk. Ahead, to the West beyond the Union Bank skyscraper, a few clouds were faintly tinted with red. Above the clouds the sky was already dark. The twin black Arco Towers loomed up to the left, the Bonaventure Hotel to the right. The great buildings with their lighted windows were beautiful against the black sky and against the red and gray light on the horizon. The lights of the Bonaventure were small and warm compared to those of the Arco and Union buildings. The exterior elevators of the hotel, a light at the top and bottom of each, glided up and down between the round black-mirrored towers like silent carousels.

When the horizon grew dark I drove out onto Fifth Street . I turned on the radio. A Tchakovsky waltz was playing. It was lovely sitting in the warm truck cab filled up with that music. I drove onto the Harbor Freeway and headed toward the interchange. Ahead, the traffic was backed up solidly. The lines of red taillights stretched out before me beautifully in the clear black air. Columns of white lights swirled down off the interchange and swept past in the opposite direction.

The warmth inside the cab, the music, the red and white lights in the clean blackness, the great expanse of view toward the Northeast, the tremendous buildings - all of it together created in me a sense of elevation. I felt moved by the wonderful accomplishments of people everywhere.

***

Listen to this. The French military alone have enough nuclear capability to take out the top thirty Russian cities in a first strike.

The French.

Then there's the English, the Hindus, Israel , Pakistan . South Africa . Who knows who else?

The bloody Tanganikans will get it next.

You don't think it's going to be exciting?

***

One night I dreamed John Kennedy had come back from the dead. I was standing in a windowless passageway when he walked past toward the closed doors ahead. There was a clear plastic tube inserted in his back just below the shoulder blades and some kind of metal apparatus to hold it there. The tube was about three inches in diameter and trailed behind him along the floor of the passageway and through the other closed doors behind us.

I understood somehow that Kennedy had no blood, that he was empty. The tube inserted in his back was there so blood transfusions could pass through it and fill his body but the tube was empty too. I felt alarm for him. If he didn't get some blood quick his brain would starve and he'd be finished. I wanted to warn him about the precariousness of his position but some reporters and government officials appeared in the passageway just then and he stopped to greet the in the charming and businesslike way he had.

I watched him with fascination and dread.

The man had no blood, didn't he know that?

He was an empty cadaver yet he wanted to go on living life as he had lived it once before, a long time ago.

It's my agreement with myself that my dreams are about me, not the characters that appear in them.

I didn't dream then about John Kennedy.

Secretly, I think I am the one who has no red blood.

I am the one who wants to go on living my life as I used to live it, a long time ago.

I am the one attempting to take myself out of the land of the dead.

***

I married Alicia so she could get a green card. I made her over with one stroke from a illegal wetback into a legal worker. Her income increased substantially with the green card. It made her happy.

It's not easy having a good-looking wife who is devoted to serving you and not seduce her. So now I have a wife, and a stepdaughter, and we're making plans for the future.

I don't know what kind of plans we can make. I've tried to explain to Alicia about income taxes and community property, how we ought to consider divorcing now so she can protect whatever property or savings we might accumulate, but Alicia is deaf to everything but marriage and love. She wants to have a good husband and serve him all his life.

Everything I need done she does for me. Everything I want she gets for me. She watches over Mother and Marisol, she cooks and cleans, and gets erotic. There's no end to it.

It's frightening.

One night I asked Alicia if there are not times when she does not want to serve me? She hasn't learned English so we talk in Spanish.

I never feel like I do not want to serve you, she said.

I explained how, if there are times when she serves me when in her heart she really doesn't want to, that could make her feel resentful.

What do you know about serving?, she said. Old fart faces like you?

Fart face is one of the ways she addresses me.

Tell me then, she said, old boneheads like you, what do you know about serving?

All right, I said, I do not know much about it.

Speak the truth to me, she said,

All right. Nothing.

She put her hand on my arm then and looked into my eyes with her big black gaze.

Permit me to serve you, she said. Will you permit me to do that?

Yes, I said.

That is what I want to do, she said.

I could feel the heat flowing out of her fingers onto my arm.

I do not ask you for anything else, she said.

The implications of the words, the wide-open black gaze, the electric touch of her fingers.

The heart pounding.

That's not exactly the way it worked out of course. She's thought of one or two other things to ask of me.

That's all right.

I don't mind.

***

I've gone to meetings of the War Tax Resistance Group a couple times over at the Unitarian Church . The idea the Group is implementing is to withhold in a special bank account that percentage of their income tax they figure goes to the military.

They are above board about everything, keep accurate records, file their income tax forms and publicize what they do. They are not hiding. And they are preparing themselves inwardly to go to jail for their acts of conscience.

I do things differently that the people in the Group, less intelligently. I don't give the Internal Revenue people anything. I don't fill out their forms, I don't write letters explaining my actions, and I don't try to cover my ass.

When push comes to shove I might try to cover it a little.

I've thought about joining the Group myself but there's a problem between them and me that that is almost insurmountable. It's the problem that everywhere separates those who need security and bureaucracy more than liberty and risk.

Those who have placed their most precious hopes in the welfare bureaucrats, the integration bureaucrats, the military bureaucrats, education bureaucrats and so on, these people do not want to contemplate the fact that it was Nazi bureaucrats who protected German forests and managed the State medical and welfare programs and built the great autobahns while they destroyed Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.

That it is Soviet bureaucrats who teach their people to read then imprison and murder and exile their writers and run the Gulag and are poised to incinerate a couple hundred million people in Europe , China and The United States.

Those South African bureaucrats helped create the most successful and civilized society in Black Africa and took the liberty, as it were, to institutionalize racism and black serfdom.

That here in America it is the bureaucrats who manage the great welfare programs that protect the old and the poor and it's the bureaucrats who run the programs that produce thermonuclear weapons that hold hostage the poor and old in other lands.

Who hold hostage the children.

All over the earth great gangs of bureaucrats stand in symbiotic relationship with each other. No matter which nation, no matter which program or policy the state intends to promote, its bureaucrats have sworn their allegiance to it, sworn to carry out its every desire.

What do you say to these bureaucrats when they are your friends and neighbors, when you know how decent they are?

When you know what they have given themselves over to?

***

One night at a meeting of the War Tax Resistance Group a tax attorney spoke about the consequences of tax resistance for those of us who indulge ourselves with it. If the IRS discovers you are holding out on it, it will prosecute you. And it will win. That's the entire story.

It's bad enough to file and not pay, but the worst is to willfully not file at all. Willful not-filing is worth one year in the Federal penitentiary for each year you do not do it.

The way I had it figured, I had six years coming in the Federal pen.

There in the meeting room of the church with its high ceiling, the chairs and tables with folding legs, the left wing progressive pamphlets, the knowledgeable serious discussion, the quiet good humor, the determination, the smiling tax lawyer who was unwilling to risk anything herself but was willing that others risk everything, thought kept repeating, Six years in the Federal pen?

Six years in the Federal pen?

Until that moment, I can't explain why, I hadn't reflected seriously on how it would be inside a government penitentiary. Now I began to feel a certain curiosity about it. I'd be closing in on fifty when I got out. And from what I'd heard, the way the bureaucrats run their prisons was a crime in itself. Bludgeonings, knifings, beatings, shootings, you name it and the bureaucrats have got it ready for you. They're waiting. I've been in jail a few times, it wasn't that bad, but I haven't been in jail six or seven years at a stretch. A few days here, a couple weeks there, there wasn't much to it. I'm good at laying around, organizing myself in small places. I enjoy reducing my needs to fit my circumstances. I make a game of it. My inclination, I don't know where it came from, has never been to get more. I've always felt the urge to slip through desire, like an eel passing through nets cast out for bigger fish.

***

One night in a Mexico City jail I was in the holding tank when I decided to stop worrying and get some sleep. There was a bench in the center of the room. I lay down on it on my back. I slept pretty good but when I woke up some guy had crapped on my foot. This big pile was all over the foot, clear up over the ankle. It felt all right, sort of warm and comfy, but it looked like what it was.

The other men in the tank were little Indians and shirt-sleeved mestizos. None of them looked like he could have done what somebody had personally done to my foot. I was looking for a pretty big guy. I thought maybe when I was asleep the cops had put a giant in the tank with me and had taken him out again before I woke up.

Squatting over some guy's foot when he's asleep, that's what men think is funny. It's one of those male characteristics that all over the planet testifies to our universal brotherhood.

***

Sometimes I worry that when the Feds get their hands on me I'll end up inside a cube and never get out. The image isn't entirely rational, but I know how I talk. I'm going to offend the guards and the prisoners alike. The guards will put me in solitary, who knows what some of the prisoners will do?

In my imagination though I don't often see myself in the pen. I see pictures of myself living as a fugitive, signing the writings anonymously, always on the move, always looking over my shoulder.

By nature I'm not secretive, and when I travel alone I like to drink. Some small-town sheriff would probably find me out in about three days. And there's the problem with Mother. I can't just go off and leave her.

Who's going to lift her in and out of bed?

I could go to the IRS people now and confess my sins, apologize, throw myself on the mercy of the court and agree to pay everything they say I owe, but how do I know they wouldn't jail me anyway?

And if I do recant, how much humiliation will I feel? If there is one thing I detest, it's feeling humiliated.

***

I've seen magazine ads describing books that tell you how to get new identification and disappear from the face of the earth. I could cut off my hair, shave the beard, go on a fast, change my name, and move to a new city , a new state. How could they ever find me?

I would have to leave behind everyone I know. And what about the writing? I could write under a different name but I would still have to write about the arms race and the forced taxation used to finance it.

So after awhile I would be found out and I would have to get another new identity, move to another new place, become another new person. And then I would have to do it again, always alone, and again until they caught me or I gave myself up. Or I croaked.

Another alternative is to not pay the taxes and not write about it either, as if it were the money that matters.

But I'm too old now to start avoiding in the writing what I can no longer avoid in the life. I can't divide up the life any longer into sections and arrange the parts so I feel no discomfort.

When push comes to shove, maybe I will.

I'm not one of those die-hards with a will of iron.

I give.

When the pressure's on, I can give a lot.

***

Sometimes the work takes me into Topanga Canyon or up in the mountains behind Malibu . It's more beautiful up there than people know. Everything is still there, the deer with their fawns, the creeks and waterfalls, the rattlers, the foxes and bobcats, the abundance of wild flowers.

One morning I took the freeway into Santa Monica then headed up the Coast Highway . Curtains of rain blew off the ocean into the faces of the cliffs above me. There were mudslides along the edge of the pavement and at Big Rock I saw a boulder some ten-feet wide at its belly bounce across the highway like a big beach ball.

A fawn lay on its side on the white centerline, blood trickling from its nostrils and the one eye.

At Rambla Pacifico I turned up the mountain. At six hundred feet I could see down where Malibu Creek was pushing its brown muddy water out into the gray-green sea in a perfect half circle.

At fifteen hundred feet there were two new waterfalls sliding down over great flat slabs of glistening rock.

By the time I was up on the crest of the mountain the rain had fallen off. Under the canopy of black cloud, inland across the San Fernando Valley , I could see the San Gabriel mountains and beyond them to the San Bernadinos covered with snow and thick white mists.

Inwardly I could feel it starting up. It was in the intestines first, then around the heart. Then it was inside the head and there was the sense of great spaciousness, a sense that the mind was not bounded by the brain or the interior of the skull but was everywhere, like the rain-washed light was everywhere. There was no thought, but somehow an understanding of the great abundance of the earth, the tremendous volumes of sea and sky. Then there was the spasmodic shuddering in the upper body, the tears, the terrible sense of being one with everything I could see, with everything I could imagine.

***

The job site was on Saddlepeak Road . I worked there a couple hours sealing window casements. It was wet, and cold. While I worked I watched the storm breaking up. Patches of blue appeared among the thinning clouds. I felt disappointed. I wanted the storm to continue. I wanted the day to be like it had been before. I wanted to feel again what I had felt then.

I got in the pickup and drove along the ridgeline searching for signs that the storm might come back. Then I realized how I was trying to manipulate, to actually direct the heavens, that my happiness depended on changing what was, that I had allowed the moment to go beyond me.

Just then I rounded a turn in the road and there below was the great city spread out from the sea to the mountains all creamy and white and perfect and in that moment, which was like a cool, slow, slap across the face, disappointment and longing, the past and future together, evaporated and I was left with the truck and the earth it was rolling over and the immense envelopment of space and with the body and how it felt.

***

Down in Topanga Canyon I stopped at a roadside cafe for a sandwich and coffee. In the papers there was a story about a priest in El Salvador who has gone over to the guerillas there. There was the usual talk about liberation theology and how the priest had joined the revolutionaries out of his Christian commitment to the Salvadorian people.

So the priest is going to bless the people who are killing the people for the good of the people. The usual.

The priest could have chosen to kill the despot directly, the despot is the guilty one, but that isn't how priests think.

The priesthood today operates on the same rough principles as the Aztec priesthood did four hundred years ago. High ideals in the service of God and the perfectly imagined society, with bloody terror and chaos for the people.

Bureaucrats, revolutionaries and priests. The age-old destroyers of right relationship.

They never will understand that there is no way to social justice, that social justice is the way.

They never will understand how means exist concretely in a way that ends do not.

They never will confess that this is the moment.

***

Now Harry Truman, he was a Christian, and when he was the great chief of all the bureaucrats in America he was willing to nuke a city full of living people to achieve a political goal.

At the same time, he lacked comprehensiveness. He could have gotten rid of the Supreme Soviet and a lot of commies too but he didn't do that. In his Christian imagination a defeated Japan was more dangerous to human society than a triumphant Soviet.

Who can understand how Christians think?

In the early Forties the largest Christian community in Japan was in Nagasaki . When Truman incinerated the Japs at Hiroshima there were thousands of burned and dazed survivors who thought if they could only get to Nagasaki they could find some relief from their pain and terror. They were streaming into that old city three days later when Harry, he nuked 'em again, along with the largest Christian Community in the Japanese homeland.

Is there some kind of desperate humor in that story?

Probably not.

Still, maybe it depends on how you tell it.

If you're a Christian, it may be that a nuclear holocaust is not of absolutely first importance to you when you reflect on what God has got in store for some of you anyhow at the final reckoning.

It's difficult to tell with Christians though. Some of them say one thing, others something else.

***

Jews were in there too from the beginning with Christians and Nazis and the others working on the bomb. They were good at it too. Einstein, Oppenheimer. Teller. What distinguishes Jews primarily from the others is that there aren't so many of them.

Oppenheimer told a story once about how they got to a certain place in the design of the bomb where it was so sweet they had to go on with it.

So sweet.

Afterwards he got together with the generals and helped pick out targets.

Talk about sweet, eh?

***

So now there are Christians and Jews working together to try to put a stop to what they helped get started forty years ago. They're finding out it's easier to dirty human life than it is to clean up the mess afterward.

I have no faith in Christians or Jews, not when they're big-government people, big bureaucrats. They're accustomed to being ruled by hierarchical organization and institutionalized force.

God and State.

That's what they like.

They like how they feel when they're part of that.

***

One night when I turned on the television I found myself watching a movie documenting some of the worst horrors of the European Holocaust. It was so ironic, so touching, to be reminded how alike German Christians and German Jews acted in their relationship to the German State . The State told Christians to victimize Jews and Christians willingly did it. The State then ordered Jews to make victims of themselves before the Christians and Jews obediently did that.

And it wasn't only German Christians and Jews who prostrated themselves like primitives before their bureaucrats and leaders. The English did it, the Americans did it, the Russians. All of them.

All of us.

I was just a kid then, but when I got old enough to go to a war I discovered I was willing to do anything my government asked me to do.

Anything.

I was the Christian, and I was the Jew.

I was obedient in my mind, and I was obedient in my heart.

I know how obedient I was.

I know how obedient I was willing to be.

***

I've been reading the Bible again. Alicia is responsible for this. One day she brought me a Gideon Bible in English and told me to read it, that it would help me live my life less foolishly.

That is what I want, I told her. To live the life less foolishly.

The old stories are an unforgettable part of my childhood. Abel and Cain, Noah's Ark , the snake in the Garden of Eden. Rereading them I feel a nostalgia, a tenderness for the Sunday morning Bible classes where we horsed around and laughed so much and learned about Jesus too, and the bald-pated preacher with the rich voice, the whole congregation singing out in full voice The Old Rugged Cross , or

(singing) He walked with me and He talked with me and He told me I am His own.

***

I started at the Creation and now I'm to the story where God brought the Jews out of Egypt . It wasn't easy, God had to make a lot of innocent people suffer, but to God it was worth it.

It's a very ugly story.

Moses and Aaron would go to Pharaoh and demand he let their people go and Pharaoh would say okay. But later his heart would harden and he would refuse to let the Jews go.

Whereupon God would jump up in a rage.

God turned the Nile into blood. He made the fish stink. He buried the land of the Egyptians in frogs, covered Egyptian men and beasts alike with lice, sent swarms of flies to infest the homes of Egyptian woman and locusts to Egyptian crops so the people would starve.

There is nothing to show that Pharaoh himself went hungry, or Pharaoh's court.

There is nothing to show either that the Chosen were distressed by the fate of those who God had not chosen.

But Pharaoh's heart remained hard. Until God fell on the Egyptians like some great, mad, Nazi doctor, infecting every Egyptian alive with boils and running sores, killing every man and beast in the fields with bombardments of fire and hail mingled together, while those who remained alive He terrorized with darkness as if he had taken the light from the sun and life itself were ending.

Still, Pharaoh refused to let the Jews go.

I ended up kind of admiring the guy.

There Pharaoh was, just muscle and bone, just blood and vapor, banging heads with God Himself, the Lord of all Creation.

Horse-drawn chariots, spears and swords, magicians who couldn't make fish stink, courage, a bad temper, that's what Pharaoh had.

God had everything else.

And still, Pharaoh would not let the Jews go.

In the end, God suffered a spiritual break.

There is no other way to describe it.

God went insane and that night he entered every Gentile house in Egypt and tore up every first-born Gentile child from his cradle, ripped away every first-born Gentile child sucking at his mother's breast, and killed it.

In all the land of Egypt that night there was not a single Gentile home where the mother and father were not weeping grievously for their slaughtered babies, or a single man or woman who felt himself chosen who did not feel encouraged.

There is a mindlessness, a ferocity to that old story that is unimaginable to anyone with decent sensibilities.

It is an event, a disaster, that is still celebrated in cities and towns all over the Western world.

That's crazy.

The way God treated the Egyptian people has become in our own time the historic role model for the United States Government.

We Americans are the Chosen today, Gentile and Jew alike. Our way of life must be preserved at every cost.

Our children are worth more than those children who have not been chosen.

If we Chosen Ones are threatened, our Government has taken upon itself the right, the holy responsibility, to destroy all those who have not been chosen.

Adults, children, babies, animals, the innocent and the guilty without distinction.

Once you discover you have been chosen, that's what you can do.

You can do anything.

You do not have to limit yourself, because God did, to the first-born. You have the right to incinerate the second-born, the third.

The fourth.

There is no limit.

The precedent is set.

God and man set it together, in ancient Egypt and modern Japan .

A God-like State with God-like responsibilities. That's what they tell us we need, our Judeo-Christian leaders.

Who can believe it?

Who is there who will refuse to accept it?

***

I used to belong to the Chosen myself but I have defaulted on my membership. I no longer pay the dues they require for me to remain a member.

It wasn't an act of courage for me to leave them behind.

I did it out of shame.

What would happen in this city if five thousand, if one thousand of us stood together openly and told the United States Government to shove it along?

That we are not going to buy into its programs for the production and deployment of nuclear weapons anymore?

That we are not going to buy into its germ bombs anymore?

That we will not buy into its chemical warfare weapons?

Its neutron bombs?

Its bi-nary nerve gases?

Its secret intelligence agencies?

Its foreign expeditionary armies?

Its military advisors?

Its allies!

It could electrify this city.

But if we don't pay our taxes what will happen to Social Security? What will happen to the disabled, the sick, the helpless minorities?

What will become of the poor?

What do you think is going to happen to the poor and the rest of them if we go on buying into the nuclear arms race?

Eh?

What do you think will happen to the poor everywhere if we go on obeying this Government as if it were God?

I know what my guess is.

Brace yourselves.

Help the poor to brace themselves.

It's going to be -- something.

It's going to be spectacular.

***

Yesterday morning I got in the pickup and headed North on the Ventura Freeway.

You still have to work.

No matter what, the living still goes on. There is still the excitement, the beauty, the destruction by death, the unknown.

Every morning that is still all there and every morning I am still amazed by it.

It was a nice day. The cool fresh air, the pale blue sky, the sunshine. While I drove, memory recalled how I had dreamed about Alicia the night before, how her brown body had gleamed in the light from the lamp here.

Memory turned her image over and over in its hands, fondling her body like a warm egg.

At the Las Virgines turnoff I headed west toward Malibu Canyon . It was a road I've driven regularly all year but somehow it was as if I hadn't seen it for a long time.

There were the shinning gas stations and coffee shops, the little stucco school, then the Italian restaurant and then the empty hillsides again and the white-fenced pastureland, and at the same time her glowing body turning round and round in the lamplight.

At Piuma Road I turned south and started up the mountain. Rabbits and squirrels scattered off the narrow roadway before me. Birds rose off the pines and the sumac, leaving their calls behind. At a switchback I saw a coyote with two pups sitting in the shade beneath a great red rock.

I noticed then that the mind, something, had lifted up into the sky. From that perspective, high above the twisting road, I saw the truck far below, traveling the narrow road around the brown, tree-dotted mountainside.

At the same time, inside the cab, I was aware of the condition of the pavement, the places where I could go over the side if I wasn't careful, the fact that I was approaching the job site.

As I pulled off the road I gazed out the cab window at the great expanse of pale blue sky.

Inside the cab I watched while Alicia opened a flap above her gleaming, golden breast and revealed her red heart to me. I could see the intricate way it was pulsing.

I could see the intricacies that lay behind it.

Then she opened a flap on my breast and my own heart was revealed too, and with her bare arms she drew us together until the two raw hearts were beating, each against the other, in blood and all their complication.

I saw if from inside the cab of the pickup, and I saw it from on high too.

I walked out along the hillside. Flies and bees were making their sounds all around. Inside my breast the heart was swollen and thick. High over the valley a red-tailed hawk sailed through the sunlit air in great slow circles.

The vision of Alicia, the sensation of her heart pulsing against mine, the beautiful valley below, the blue and rose and yellow mountains going off into the distance range beyond range, the golden liquid sunlight, the understanding that this was the moment.

That this is always the moment.

And then it was there inside again like a hot light and it was immense and for a moment I did not understand clearly what was inside and what outside. I saw the mind merge with the sunlight somehow and I watched them, the mind and the light together, pour down over the valley and the mountains all around.

They poured out of the sky and saturated the clothes that covered me. I felt flesh, I felt bones being penetrated with light and heat. Inside the body I saw the heart doing its slippery work.

I saw the lungs, the kidneys, the stomach cavity.

I saw the liver.

I saw it all.

It was the liver that surprised me so.

I had no idea it would be that large.

Curtain

Author's Note-

The author welcomes suggestions that may lead to further production of this play, along with any help he may receive to that end. The author does not intend to rewrite the play however, nor will he consider amusing suggestions that he do so.

Any size or shape of playing space will serve to stage this play so long as it is not too large. The role is a difficult one and laborious but it is a tour de force and there are numbers of actors willing to break a leg to have a run at it.

Any communication about this matter will be welcome, and if you are one of those persons who like to organize things, a nationwide college tour might prove a profitable challenge for you.