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,11 all 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 contrivance12 so 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.13 Though the Service’s nationwide structure comprises seven regions in toto, there are (following the Rome NY REC’s spectacular administrative meltdown in 1982)14 only 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.