I have never had a 60-year-old man cry on me. It is both the sadness and the beauty of this job that people feel they can.
In better times, Terry Conway and I likely would never have chatted. In these times, though, I am more than a little worried about the man.
He is like so many of us now, a proud man who figured tough times were for suckers, that he had the smarts, drive and hustle to dodge whatever financial or professional mud life might throw at him.
“I am embarrassed and humiliated to be in this spot” — those were the last words he sent to me in an e-mail, titled “Never Take Hope Away From Anyone. It May Be All They Have.”
I called him, and we chatted.
He arrived in Colorado Springs from his native Minnesota about a dozen years ago to work as a representative for three flooring manufacturers. Two years ago, two of the companies went belly up. The third told him he wasn’t needed.
Conway said he has been searching for full-time employment ever since. The best job he could find is the one he holds now, driving a courtesy van from 7 a.m. to noon five days a week for $8 an hour at a car dealership where his son works.
The hundreds of applications he has sent out over the past two years resulted in two interviews. He got close awhile ago with an auto insurer.
“At the end of the second interview, the woman told me I didn’t fit in,” he said.
Then he tells me of the Internal Revenue Service: how he never filed a return for 2003; how last December the government got access to the $2,200 remaining in his checking and savings account, the last of his safety net, and presented him with a $5,000 order to pay; and how the bill has since more than doubled.
“Periodically,” Conway said, “I have thought that it’s just not worth going on.”
That is crazy talk, I tell him, almost shouting. It is about here when he starts to cry.
“There are days I come home and just fall asleep,” he explained, “because I don’t want to obsess with this thing with the IRS. In unconsciousness I can’t think about it.
“Some weekends, I don’t get out of bed. I don’t want to deal with things. Things that used to interest me don’t anymore.”
He is in full cry mode at this point.
He has a deal with the IRS now, he says, to pay $100 each of the next 12 months, a deal that would mandate he then make $250 monthly payments until the debt is satisfied.
He brings home $975 a month, an amount he figures he spends on his rent, car, credit card, gasoline and food payments.
“I’m right on the edge now, and it’s more than a little stressful,” he said. “If I could find full-time employment, I could pay the $250. Given the circumstances of my age and the economic picture, I could tell them I could pay it, but it would be a lie.”
If I were to write about you, I tell him, what would he want people to know?
“It is not a sign of weakness to ask for help,” he said. “I don’t know how to get out of this, so, yes, I am asking for help.”
He thanks me for reading his e-mail and for taking the time that I have with him.
“And you know,” he said, regaining his composure, “as crappy as all of this is, I do have a better life than 95 percent of people on Earth. I’m not doing as well as I could or should be, but a lot of people have it worse than me.”
He took a long pause.
“I know I can solve this. Let’s just say I bet I can. And I think I will.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
