I’ll lay it out real straight for y’all, okay?

Some people call it tax fraud — that’s right let’s hear those boos — but I prefer to call it helping out the little guy.

It’s not glamorous, I know, but one must do what one does best, and for me, that’s the humble charity work of defrauding the government.

Now, I hear you ask; ‘Charity work? Sounds splendid! How can I get involved?’ And to that I give you the following advice:

Pay me to do it instead.

Tax fraud — *ahem* charity work — is a vile cauldron bubbling with legal jargon, sleight of hand, Microsoft Excel — *gag* —and a whole lot of flying by the seat of your pants, much like our mythical friend Icarus.

Unlike Icarus, I did not fashion my wings with the assistance of my mad scientist uncle, I fashioned them with legal textbooks, long hours in cramped cubicles, a back-alley dealing or two — not advised, any old room is far easier to coordinate, and less awkward when someone walks by with their groceries — and a generous handful of grit.

But grit only gets you so far, and in the spring of 2009, amid my drunken celebrations as the Saints won the AFL Grand Final, I made a stupid decision.

I made a phone call.

To The Americans.

Now, I’ve seen ‘Forrest Gump’ about four and a quarter times. The ‘quarter time’ was in 10th grade, when I went to see Forrest at a drive-in cinema in my hometown of Sydney, Australia. I went with my girlfriend at the time, Pearl Blart — yes, she was commonly called Paul.

Let’s just say that before Forrest started playing ping-pong, our eyes were glued-shut, our lips were shmoovin’, and we didn’t stop our little foray until the credits rolled. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Never mind the fact that neither of us had our driver’s license, so my mother had to take us and sit in the front seat while her son tied tongues with Paul — sorry, Pearl Blart for an hour and a half.

But with great reluctance, I digress. The main lesson from Forrest Gump — at least in my eyes — is that ‘stupid is as stupid does,’ and the day I made that phone call, I was truly ‘doing stupid.’

It’s not that The Americans are intrinsically bad or illiterate or anything dastardly like that — most of them don’t even bite — it's just that I had nestled myself quite happily in the small-time work of mom-and-pop businesses and wealthy retirees, so when I burst onstage to the flashing lights and rabid applause of public companies, mafia members, gangs, and little old ladies with surprisingly large empires — don’t get me started — I was a little overwhelmed and under-resourced.

I’d gone from a big fish in a small pond to a Shih Tzu in a line of Dobermans — still a dog, just not one that can tear your face off.

It took me some time to acclimatize to my new American scenery — the Internal Revenue Service is a whole different beast to the Australian Taxation Office — but I steadily found my feet. My new ‘boss’ was Ralph Palagroo, a mean old bastard that sat atop a throne of skulls called the Pythons. He had a terrible stutter that could turn a five-minute conversation into a thirty-minute meeting with tea-and-biscuits halfway through.

A year after I started working for the Pythons, I saw a man smirk at Ralph as he battled his way through the word ‘hullabaloo’. Ralph ripped his fingernails off and forced him to play guitar — strumming chords with the exposed, bleeding skin.

By that time, I didn’t think it was too unreasonable of a punishment.

Ralph paid me well for my services, and over time, those services burgeoned. At one point in the autumn of 2014, I oversaw the entirety of his finance team, managing money laundering, bribes, identity theft, insider trading – you name it.

But throughout the years, I always kept one foot firmly in the slimy, squelching bog of my good friend, tax.

In 2017, I made a slight miscalculation by having a snafu with a long-divorced wife of Ralph’s. He didn’t take kindly to the matter, but as a sign of our longstanding friendship, he let me leave the Pythons to pursue further ‘career development’ in the underworld. As my severance package, Ralph took two fingers on my left hand, and gave me a nose reconstruction that I must say didn’t improve my appearance — not quite the pizza party sendoff I’d hoped for.

And so, out on my own once again, I set up shop in a miniscule brick office just off 13th Street, DC — only a hop, skip and a jump away from IRS headquarters on Constitution Ave. I thought it was a fun joke, a bit like Pablo Escobar posing in front of the White House.

Of course, I didn’t conduct a whole lot of business from there — it was mostly a glorified storage room for my printer, — bless her inkless soul — a few empty filing cabinets, and a Nutribullet that I bought during a ‘get-fit’ phase. I tried one spinach smoothie and never touched the infernal thing again.

My clients operated on a ‘you come to me’ basis, which was fine — it got me out of the house and the travel and hotel stays were tax deductible. I often turned a slight profit out of it by getting my clients to reimburse me for my expenses, but I’d still take the deduction anyway. This piece of idiocy was what led to my first run in with Detective Arnold Baker.

Arnold was my version of Patrick Denham from ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ — the dickhead / technically-just-doing-his-job FBI agent that caught Jordan Belfort. Arnold rode the subway, endured a loveless marriage to Mrs. Mary Baker, and paid off his mortgage over thirty years, as his father had done before him.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He was the kind of guy — in my humble opinion — to wear swimming goggles when he diced onions.

But he had a passion for catching fraudsters, and when he discovered my little scheme with the hotel deductions, he came by my office on one of the few days of the month that I was there. He rapped on my door just as I sat down to lunch, hot salmon bagel in hand.

“Mr. Grint,” said the bludger. “Are you there?”

I paused, jaw wide open, not daring to crunch into my tantalizing lunch. I almost cried as the scent of smoked salmon and avocado teased my nostrils. Looking at my security camera feed, I saw the man that would become the world’s biggest, pointiest thorn in my backside.

Arnold the weasel.

I recognized him from his profile picture in the torrent of emails he had sent over the past few months. They had progressed from polite inquiries to demands for an audience. Eventually being given approval, he stalked me down. I bet he felt grand as he strode the two blocks to come get me.

Now, I could tell you that I did the right thing and faced up to my crimes, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that Arnold was only investigating me for my hotel-related shenanigans — a slap on the wrist.

He hadn’t yet uncovered the monsters under the bed.

You can imagine that there was no way I was opening that door.

Unfortunately, my stomach gave me away. The torture I put it through by dangling the bagel before its greedy eyes got the better of me, and I unleashed the most gurgly, twisted stomach rumble to ever grace the United States of America.

Arnold, the mole, tacked onto this as some form of confirmation that I was alive and listening, so he read me my Miranda Rights through the closed door, advising me that he would be back with a search warrant and an armed team later that week, and that it would be wise to comply.

Now, I’m a man who likes luxury — prison just isn’t my color. So upon hearing his squeaky second-hand loafers scamper back to his hell-hole cubicle, I took one desperate, tearful bite of fishy goodness, and threw my lunch in the corner. I gathered up my papers, uncovered my emergency jerry can from under the floorboards, and doused my office in fuel.

Right when the fumes started to send me loopy, I stepped out the door, threw a lit cigarette inside, and bolted to my car.

Another important fork in the road here is that I couldn’t just up and leave the country like any regular old Joe. Flight restrictions aside, I had clients that would find me a lot quicker than the IRS could if I bailed, and some were a good deal worse than ol’ Ralph Palagroo — losing fingers would be the least of my concerns.

So I galloped north to The Big Apple, seeking refuge in the masses. I was put up in the butler’s pantry of one of my more nefarious clients, whom I knew only as ‘The Sinker’. My lodgings came at a steep price — I had to formulate a plan such that Mr. Sinker would pay zero dollars in tax that year — easy enough — and I had to babysit his six-year-old daughter on Wednesdays.

This ‘daughter’ of his made the doll from Annabelle look like Anne of Green Gables. She pulled out the few remaining hairs on my head, wailed like a CEO being told they need to increase salaries, and stank like a locker filled with rotten banana peels and festering pumpkin soup.

Needless to say, prison started to appear tenable.

Then, on a forgettable spring day, it seemed my wishes would be granted.

I woke up early in the morning when Sinker’s personal chef, Polo, leaned over my mattress on the floor of the pantry and promptly dropped the toaster on my head. He said it was an accident, but I had a feeling that working for a mob boss had put murder on his mind. He was far too handy with those knives.

My sleep ruined; I got out of bed to put some ice on my brow. The doorbell rang out through the maze of hallways, and I wandered over to take the delivery of what I thought would be UberEats, or a FedEx package.

But as the door swung open before me, it was not one of my growing contacts of delivery drivers, it was Arnold Baker and his team of agents.

Scum.

“Mr. Grint, I am placing you under arrest for wire fraud, tax fraud, conspiracy to defraud the government...”

The little shit kept going, giving me the spiel of everything bad I’d done since I was out of nappies. He even had the gall to give me side-eye when he read out ‘arson’ as though it was some kind of personal affront.

He finished his lecture and waved his men forward. One of the agents held handcuffs.

“I’ve told you before, Mr. Grint, just comply and this won’t be more difficult than it has to be.”

But my trusty friend Polo rose to the challenge and made it a lot more difficult. The moment the first agent stepped through the door, a knife whizzed through the air and buried itself in his neck. I jumped back in shock and disgust as blood sprayed from his jugular.

Then I ran.

I bounced through the maze of hallways, following Polo through the house as he booked it as well. He had a pistol in his trousers and a shotgun in his hands.

I knew he wasn’t just a chef.

Shots rang out and bullets slammed into the walls around us, plaster flying into the air. Mr. Sinker’s new Banksy dropped from the wall, riddled with bullet holes. I winced for a moment before realizing it would probably be worth even more now.

Polo yanked the pistol from his waistband and handed it to me. The barrel was slick with butt-sweat.

Gross.

I barely knew what to do with the thing.

Polo seemed like he knew where he was going, so I followed him up the stairs and around the jaundiced halls until he stopped me at the entrance to one of the master bedrooms. He grabbed a maplewood pole and poked it into a circular gap in the ceiling. There was a light ‘pop’, and a ladder cascaded to the floor.

Mr. Sinker’s panic room.

We climbed up, the agents hot on our heels.

Once inside, I found it was not a panic room. Unfortunately, it was a pleasure room, and Mr. Sinker had some strange pleasures.

The walls held guns and...toys...at an almost one to one ratio, slightly biased towards the weaponry.

Some of the toys looked like they could do some serious damage too.

Polo pushed me through the room until we broke through a door at the end, leading into the early-morning sunlight.

The view from the top wasn’t great. Arnold had come prepared, surrounding the house with a ring of twelve agents in addition to the ones chasing us through the house. Polo slammed the door behind us and lodged a deck chair under the door handle.

“Get to cover and start hittin’ ‘em! I’ll handle the city-side!”

Polo rushed to the balcony, spraying his automatic rifle down at the agents. A red dot appeared on his head, and he promptly blew up.

Oh.

So much for the bravado. Polo fucked me over; the agents were now shooting to kill.

I ran to my side of the roof and hid behind a thick chimney. Summoning up a shred of courage, I poked my pistol around the corner and spattered bullets at my foes. One must’ve made contact — I heard a cry like a man being kicked in the balls by a horse.

Back behind my chimney, I watched the door to the roof rattle and snap as the agents battered through. I launched from my cover, attempting a miraculous escape.

After two steps, I felt my body shake side to side as I was riddled with bullets. My vision turned black before even the pain settled in, and I knew I was dead.

An explosive end to a sedentary life.

I floated in the inky darkness, searching around the space for God, or the Devil, or whichever deity I was destined to endure. I picked up speed, rushing toward a tunnel of light in the distance.

Oh God, the Buddhists were right. I’m going to be reincarnated as a goddamn mosquito or something even more pitiful.

But as I approached the light, I watched myself get thrown into something far worse than hell or the body of a mosquito. It was a place so barren of enjoyment that even the most masochistic fucker would give up hope.

I was reborn into an office cubicle.