fic: PERSONAL INCOME TAX 101 (community)
PERSONAL INCOME TAX 101
community. uncle sam wants YOU; the methods of evasion are strictly limited: also known as, the one where jeff and britta get married to save themselves from the law. rated pg. 5232 words.
notes: vague spoilers through season two. ALSO: despite my status as a law student, i made up ALLLLLL the tax law stuff in this. so legal veracity is a no-go up in this joint. just warning, haha.
See. 26 U.S.C.A. § 1
§ 1. Tax imposed
(a) Married individuals filing joint returns and surviving spouses.
Death and taxes. All good stories are about one or the other; this story deals solely with the latter.
One of the perks of being basically the best lawyer ever/worst human ever (note: not Human Being, just human) is that you learn a lot about loopholes in the U.S. tax structure in your attempt to help old white dudes escape paying a third of their income for things like welfare and Medicare and that really shitty high school down the street.
Britta has no understanding of this. For the better part of her life, she’s either been a) unemployed; b) a member of the lowest income bracket on the federal tax scale; or c) simply never paid her taxes.
c) is going to prove a problem for us.
She gets a call on a Monday, and of course it’s a Monday. The voice on the other end is placid and cool and the least personal thing she has ever heard, and the second that voice says, all male and bald eagle and U.S.A.!, “Ms. Britta Perry? This is the Internal Revenue Service. We have a few questions for you regarding your recent tax statement, or should I say, lack thereof?” she wants to vomit a little.
This is why you never answer an anonymous number when it pops up on your phone. Never.
(“Unless the call is coming from inside the house . . . “ she hears Abed say in her head, and great, not only is she moments away from getting busted for tax fraud, but she’s got Abed Nadir as her Jiminy Cricket).
She broaches the subject delicately the following morning in their study group.
(“THEY’RE GONNA SEND ME TO JAIL,” she wails. “I won’t fare well on the inside, I won’t. I’ve watched HBO before, okay, dude, those bitches will eat me alive.”)
“I haven’t paid taxes since Jimmy Carter was in office,” Pierce scoffs, mutters something about "the Jews" that makes absolutely no sense in this context; Annie has the decency to look offended as she turns away from him.
“I wouldn’t exactly advertise that fact if I were you,” Jeff drawls. “If they’re going after Ani DiFranco here and her assets, namely a collection of poorly knitted cat sweaters and a spice rack, maybe a mix tape featuring the Wallflowers, I’d adopt the Fifth Amendment as my mantra.”
“‘In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups,’” Abed starts.
“Ani DiFranco?!” Britta protests.
“Ouch!” Troy calls. “Lilith Fair 1990s feminist lo-fi burn!”
“Fifth Amendment?” Pierce sputters. “Why bring prohibition into this?”
Jeff shakes his head slow, incredulous and open-mouthed, but before he can argue, Britta waves her arms around like an air traffic controller in the midst of a kamikaze airfield.
“This is about me!” she shouts; everyone freezes for a moment before they all roll their eyes, Shirley muttering, “a little respect never hurt anybody,” under her breath, Annie sighing, the words, “but of course,” unvocalized but clearly felt if judging by the wide, watery eyes; Troy’s counting on his fingers, “Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, angry lady not Alanis Morissette . . .” She turns back to Jeff, her hands clasped in front of her. “What should I do.”
“You’re asking me for advice?” he leans back in his chair, too smug by half. Her eyes narrow, all snakelike, and at one point she was aware that this alone could make him squirm, if only a little, but apparently her current situation has placed her super low on the desperation totem and Jeff is entirely too cognizant of it.
“Yes,” she spits out. “This is me asking you for advice. Take a picture. You’ll want to treasure this freakish, one-time event.”
He nods, eyes glinting. And then he says:
“Well, the first option: you lawsuit up.”
Everyone groans at the table.
“Bad news, the event horizon has passed on that joke,” Abed says; the table nods and grumbles in agreement.
Jeff continues unabated. “But if steep legal fees and possible jail time go against whatever values you and your anarchist cronies have embedded in that absurdly thick skull of yours, I’ll offer you this: Marriage always helps.”
Shirley claps her hands. “Oh! That’s nice!”
Troy’s still counting, “ . . . Toni Braxton? No, not Toni Braxton. Toni Morrison? No. Tony Blair?”
Britta’s mouth suddenly feels really, really dry.
“You cannot possibly be suggesting what I think you are suggesting.”
“‘These are their stories,”” Abed intones.
His iPhone sounds; DUN DUN.
Spoiler alert: Jeff totally wasn't suggesting what Britta thought he was suggesting, at least not yet.
This, Abed would contend, is the plot twist that occurs just before the commercial break.
As it turns out, Britta is not the solo tax evader among their degenerate gang of community college students.
While Jeff was employed by Dewey, Cheatem & Howe (note: not the real name of his firm, but rather a common joke used to poke fun at the legal profession), it seems that a large perk of the job was establishing off-shore bank accounts wherein they could hide their massive, massive earnings and not be beholden to Uncle Sam and his demanded cut of the share.
Apparently, when you’re fired and you’re disbarred and you’re relegated to community college, you sort of lose the nice legal shield the firm gave you between the IRS and these accounts.
Jeff gets a phone call a week after Britta.
“Ohh, this is so not good,” he says.
Jeff approaches her first. It’s in the cafeteria of all places, and he finds Britta staring despondently into her bowl of lime green jell-o.
“Still haven’t figured your way out of the big house yet, Thelma?”
She scowls up at him.
“I’m sorry,” he says as he sits down across from her. “Were you Louise?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” she says. “Laugh it up. Jeff Winger is going to get to see Britta Perry in a pair of handcuffs. It’s a dream come true!”
“Ah, yes, but the context I would have provided would have been dramatically different and with a lot less orange jumpsuits.”
“What do you want?”
Jeff leans in, his voice dropped low.
“Here’s the deal - and you will let me finish what I have to say before you start interrupting me, all indignant and faux-feminist, okay? Just nod. Don’t say anything.” Britta frowns, but she nods. Sort of. Jeff takes a deep breath. “Let’s call you Bonnie and let’s call me Clyde - you with me? But instead of robbing banks, you and I have the unique criminal similarity in that we have both kinda sorta definitely cheated the federal tax system and as a result we’ve got the law breathing heavy down our necks. Now. We can either be shot up on the side of the road and let Abed ensure we go down in cinematic history, or we can do something about our situation and remain within the confines of the law and continue our continuing education in the hallowed halls of Greendale Community College.”
“You must have made a killing as a lawyer dude, man,” she says, a look of utter cynicism warping her face. Jeff points a finger at her.
“You’re supposed to be quiet and listening and rapt with excitement. I’m asking you to marry me here.”
Her eyebrows raise and her mouth falls open and the expression on her face is a new one for Jeff. It looks a little like she wants to vomit and more so like she wants to start crying, but not in the good way, and more than that, she looks furious and a little like something else, like the victim of a sneak chivalry attack (he’s pretty sure this is rather chivalrous of him, despite the fact he would make out equally if not more advantageous here).
On Britta’s end, this sort of feels like that god awful Anthropology class all over again, some absurd challenge she can’t back down from if she intends on saving face (or saving her ass from jail or the People’s Court or however it is you get prosecuted for tax evasion, and oh my god, Jeff would have to be her attorney, because, like, how many attorneys could she possible know? The answer is one, and he’s not even technically a lawyer anymore, but she’d have to ask him to take her on pro bono, and she can see it already, the way that one eyebrow of his would quirk up and some truly terrible Penthouse montage would be playing in his head, and he’d say, more like pro boner, and is this really what her life choices have come down to? like, really? marry Jeff Winger or employ him as her attorney? or - gasp, shudder, try not to vomit - both?!).
“Wow. Dude. You need to pump the brakes and slow your roll and hit rewind and then pause, and then maybe slo-mo because I just - no - what? No, just, whaaaat are you talking about.”
Jeff is taking comfort in the thought that the Greendale cafeteria has surely been witness to worst marriage proposals than this.
Jeff has spent a long time reading the U.S. tax code, or having a recent law school grad underling read the tax code, and if you know what you’re looking for, there are a ton of loopholes that get you out of not only paying what you owe, but out of paying what you owed, past tense emphasis.
Having a spouse? Having a spouse as broke as you are? Significantly helps those odds.
He explains this to Britta, but her face remains just as horrified, if not more so.
“I? I’d have to marry you? Well, bad news bears, my friend, I don’t believe in marriage.”
Jeff scoffs. “Marriage isn’t the goddamn tooth fairy, Britta. It’s not something you can just dismiss, like Jesus or Santa Claus or socialism, or if you’re Pierce, the majority of the human race. Besides: consider this a contract. Nothing more. Just a contract.”
What she wants to tell him, is that she’s not as dumb as he thinks she is, and she knows that with contracts come a whole boat-load of fine print and things you didn’t realize you had gotten yourself into when you sign the dotted line
Instead she just says, “oh my god,” and lowers her head into her hands and a little too close to that bowl of lime green jell-o.
This one summer, she spent a week at this outdoor concert series somewhere in, like, Kentucky or Tennessee or wherever, and she was pretty stoned for most of it, and the dude she had been dating at the time had dumped her sometime during the third day, right there in a parking lot next to the row of porta-potties. It was easily one of the more humiliating moments of her life, ranking up there with the time security had thrown her out of a Radiohead show in Dublin (ugh, god, Dublin, actually that entire month she spent in Dublin is an embarrassment all its own, but that has more to do with her inability to hold down thick, dark beer and the fringe ties she established to the sort of now defunct IRA that led her detention at the Heathrow Airport for her “terrorist connections,” or at least that’s what they called them), or that time she arrived at what she thought was a photoshoot for Payless Shoe Stores (totally legit) but it turned out to be some businessman with a major foot fetish who thought she was a hooker. But he dumped her. He told her that he was seeing someone else, some hippie chick she had seen around before with a name like Dawn or Autumn or Fern, and he told her this like it was the most obvious news in the world and she was simply the last one to pick up on it.
The feeling resurfaced during the Tranny Dance, namely, while she stood there, that stupid, stupid Jennifer-Aniston-in-a-bad-rom-com phrase still gross and sticky in her mouth - and do people actually love Jeff Winger? Like, really? Is that possible?
And somewhere in that brain of hers, she is sure she is more upset with herself than she is with him, or with Annie ( . . . eh, maybe not so much on that front). But it’s hard for her just to swallow not only her pride but a whole host of emotions she’s not entirely sure she knows what they mean and act like all is forgiven and his rejection wasn’t the biggest slap in the face ever.
She marries him anyway. They drive down to the courthouse separately and she tries not to glare at him too much in front of the justice of the peace as she hitches her proverbial wagon to his.
“If I wind up in prison,” she hisses at him on the steps of the courthouse, “we are so getting a divorce.”
“Ah,” Jeff drawls, pats her on the head, “my charming wife.”
Pierce is the one who came to bear witness to their unholy union. Pierce, and Abed, but Abed was sort of a given.
“This is, without a doubt, the worst decision I have ever made,” Britta said, just before she said, “I do.”
There’s a belated reception that Monday in the study room. Shirley brought a wedding cake, a mess of white buttercream frosting and a sugar crucifix, with the words, may God have mercy on your souls swirled in pink, a matching blonde bride and groom sunk knee-deep into the cake.
“As much as I love a celebration in my honor, believe me when I say this was entirely unnecessary,” Jeff says.
Abed leans into Jeff and hisses, “Forget it, Jeff. It’s Greendale.”
A lot of complications arise after they get married. First, Jeff failed to mention the whole part of the clause that their marriage must last two years in order for it to be deemed legally recognizable. This alone earns a flurry of expletives on Britta’s part directed at him. Second, Jeff likes the idea of wedding rings, an aspect Britta hadn’t even considered when he brought up the subject (a.k.a. asked her to marry him) in the cafeteria.
“That’s really going to slow your game with your harem of hos if they see you have a wedding ring,” she says.
“Nah, chicks love a married dude. It makes it a challenge, and they get to act out their Diane Lane fantasies.”
Britta huffs and stops walking in the middle of the school parking lot.
“You do not get to put a ring on it. Just because we are married in the eyes of the state and the IRS - ”
“And our study group.”
“And them, it does not mean that we’re buying his and hers matching robes and bath towels and rings and a dog or sharing a bed or sharing a car, and we are definitely not sharing bodily fluids.”
“Remind me why I did this favor for you again me?”
“Remind me about that offshore account of yours that was recently discovered and raided in the Caymans?”
They get into their separate cars and drive to their separate homes.
This? This right here? This presents a whole other problem.
Britta gets a call the following Monday from the same IRS agent who called her at the start of this all. Or, at least, she thinks it’s the same agent.
“Ms. Perry?” the voice on the other end asks. “Or, should I say, Mrs. Winger?”
“Oh my god I’m going to throw up,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
Little did she know, and little did Jeff know, a lot of people get married in an attempt to evade back taxes. It’s a real problem and a real burden on the IRS, or at least that’s what the agent who calls her tells her and the agent who calls Jeff says something along the same lines.
The reason for the call, the agent tells her, is that the IRS finds it . . . suspect that despite her recent marriage to one Jeff Winger, Britta has maintained her apartment and her private residence as has Jeff. Britta offers a shaky, long-winded explanation revolving around the housing market and her puritanical values and how society places too large an emphasis on sex, and maybe sleeping with her husband is scary because he’s really tall and really huge - not like that, okay, except kinda, except wait, she doesn’t know, she’s a virgin! she’s afraid of sex! -
The agent cuts her off and tells her that they’ll be keeping an eye on the both of them in the interest of America and the almighty dollar.
So they move in together. Britta over the years has moved around, a lot, but this easily ranks as one of the worst moving experiences of her life. On the one hand, there’s that IRS agent who looks like a reject from some sci-fi movie or the Men in Black Academy who keeps ghosting their every move and popping up at odd intervals, and each time Jeff catches him around he shouts after him, “Who really shot Kennedy, man?” or, “Area 51, dude! Explain it!” and their neighbors (new for her, because, fuuuuck, she’s moving in with Jeff - he totally won the “I have more closet space” argument by a mile, and while it’s not his Lawyer Condo of Solitude it’s still a pretty awesome apartment, and he has a spare room with this awful futon thing, so, yeah) have totally already formed a bad opinion of them. There’s that. And then there’s the fact that most of the things Britta owns have some bizarre sentimental value only understood by her, like the shoddy armchair with the brown and orange stripes she bought used for her first apartment ever, things Jeff has zero patience or understanding towards. He has this awful black leather Barcalounger that dwarfs any and all of the living room furniture she brought with her, but his TV is pretty awesome.
And of course everyone in the study group knows. Of course.
“You. Moved. In. TOGETHER,” Annie sort of wails. Shirley makes a fast sign of the cross and calls, “Praise Jesus.”
“We’re roommates,” Britta offers, but it’s not even convincing in her mind.
“Yeah,” Jeff says slowly. “We’re like, we’re just like . . . Pierce and Troy.”
“Verdict,” Abed says, “not buying it.”
The first week of living together is awful. There’s only one bathroom, for one thing, and for another - it’s Jeff. They argue. They argue about everything - about what kind of milk to buy (SOY, she screams in the dairy aisle of Whole Foods, but he puts the whole milk - and who the fuck drinks whole milk past the age of five? - in the cart), to what late night show is better (Craig Ferguson? Jeff sputters, and puts Jimmy Kimmel on instead), to whether carpooling is worth the saved gas if she’s going to serve as the worst backseat driver in the history of mankind (BRAKE, she yelps, over and over again).
They get super drunk some time in their third week living together. She’s slumped low in that awful leather recliner of his while his limbs are splayed all over the smaller armchair she brought with him.
“Are you still mad at me about the Annie thing?” he slurs. “‘s that why you always yell at me?”
Britta suddenly feels a headache coming on.
“Nooooo,” she says slowly. “Or maybe. It makes me feel gross and creepy crawly when I think about it. So I don’t think about it.” She pauses and stares at the blank TV. They never bothered to turn it on. “I yell at you because you’re usually wrong, Jeffrey.”
“That is so not true,” he says and sits up a little straighter. “I am always right. And that makes you angry.”
“Oh, whatever, dude. This is clearly . . . emblematic (“good word,” he interrupts) of why I yell at you in the first place.”
Jeff sort of snorts, too lazy and drunk to actually laugh.
“So we’re good?” he asks, his eyes already fluttering close.
“I guess,” she murmurs. “As good as we ever will be.”
They find their own kind of rhythm after that.
She learns a lot about him simply by living with him. First, he’s, like, a terrifying health fanatic (which really doesn’t explain the chicken fingers and other cafeteria-deep-fried-shit he consumes on campus, but at home? hello, GNC, it’s a whole new ball game). While she chomps down on a bag of pretzels, he eats a banana-kiwi-prune smoothie, or something. His favorite movie is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and for real, who’s favorite movie is unironically Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? She told him that she had expected, like, Glengarry Glen Ross, and at that he had gotten all creepy, dancefloor rapist-like and asked her if it was because she found him attractive in a young-Alec-Baldwin-sense, and to that she said, yuck, and then called him a little pig. He gets perverse joy out of watching the E! channel, despite his weirdly emphatic protests that he would never want to bang any of the Kardashian sisters. The only books he owns are really fancy law books that don’t look as though they’ve been opened once. None of this is really all that surprising.
(Well, maybe the Kardashian part is a bit of a surprise).
(What is surprising is that he usually bounds out of bed at 5:30 in the morning, that he’s well-versed in the humanitarian conflict in Haiti and can speak some Mandarin, and that when he makes coffee in the morning he leaves just enough in the pot for her, and that even though he calls her cat “a little shithead,” they’ve sort of bonded and like to sit in front of his giant flatscreen TV and make fun of Kathie Lee and Hoda).
(Well, he does, not the cat; she doesn’t own a fucking talking cat. This isn’t a Disney movie).
(Although she has made him start buying fair trade coffee, and he had grumbled at that and told her he liked his caffeine with a side of capitalism thanks, and she called him Gordon Gekko and started talking about impoverished Columbians (“invest in more AK-47s!” he suggested), and Guatemalans (“rename your country something that doesn’t sound like a euphemism for lady parts”) and Brazilians (no comment, but a pointed look below her belt), so she was beyond surprised a week later when she saw the bag of coffee beans on his counter, the words FAIR TRADE printed large and in red).
While she sleeps in an old Che Guevara t-shirt and these skintight faded black yoga pants, he sleeps in these absurdly patterned boxer briefs, and boxer briefs alone. In the morning, crowded in that one bathroom full of Jeff’s over-priced, salon-purchased beauty (“man care!”) products and Britta’s organic goat’s milk moisturizer and surprisingly extensive assortment of make-up, they play this terrible game of trying not to look at the other (or trying not to get caught looking at the other).
Jeff finds there’s something sleep-softened and gentle in Britta in the morning, despite the scowl that deepens on her face and the way her eyes don’t quite open all the way. As for Britta, all she sees is a lot of skin - a whole lot of skin.
And some nights they hang out together. They’ll watch bad television and snark on it simultaneously, eventually creating their own commentary banter more entertaining than whatever it is they have on TV.
Late night reruns of Law and Order bleed into reruns of Saturday Night Live.
Her toes bump against his leg and he gives her this quick look out of the corner of his eye. It’s the first time in a long time, no, the first time ever, not in forever, the meaning differs, that she wants to kiss him. She wants to kiss him warm on the mouth free of any consideration of their shared past.
But she doesn’t do that. They’re not those sort of people. Instead they watch a little more of Saturday Night Live, and it isn’t funny; Jeff says it hasn’t been funny in the last two decades, and he says it all pompous and condescending, so Britta kicks him a little with her foot and calls him grandpa in this really doofy voice, and she’s asking after his prune juice when he grabs her by the ankle, his fingers encircling the bare skin and she goes silent.
Ryan Seacrest is on the television screen pretending to be Brad Pitt.
Jeff still has her ankle loose in his hand, but his eyes are on the TV, and he shakes his head. “God, I fucking hate that guy.”
Three months after they said “I do,” they’re crowded around the fridge together - Jeff reaching for another beer, and Britta going for the cheap white wine.
She closes the fridge door, and Jeff doesn’t move, and neither does she. He crowds her against the oversized kitchen appliance, the metal cool against her back, even through her thin t-shirt, and she doesn’t move.
“Should I be concerned?” he asks, voice too husky and low, and there’s the sound of thick glass meeting his marble countertop as he sets his beer down.
“About what?” she asks, and to her own embarrassment, her voice is just as thick.
“That you look like you’re seconds away from unhinging your jaw and swallowing me down like a snake.”
“I like that I’m the snake in this particular metaphor, and you’re the frightened mouse.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“And you don’t get used to me letting a comment about - what was it? swallowing you down? - go without further protest.”
He waggles his eyebrows. “Does that mean you’re coming around to the idea?”
“Dream on, Mighty Mouse.”
But he kisses her anyway, and she doesn’t bat him away, and then they’re making out against that huge industrial refrigerator he has in his kitchen, and it’s the first time she has kissed him in a long time, the bottle of chilled wine still grasped in her fist. It’s the first time she has kissed him and meant it, because she thinks she means it.
He’s still the most amoral and competitive person she has ever met beside herself (not that you can ever, like, meet yourself, but you get the sentiment), but she thinks she means whatever message her open mouth is communicating against his.
Because that’s the thing: she likes having him around. She likes arguing with someone who used to get paid to argue and sees things from her end of the spectrum, and she likes that everything is a contest, including and not just limited to, who can get ready for class the fastest and who makes the better grilled cheese sandwiches and who gets the most Jeopardy questions right on any given night (it’s usually him, and that bothers her way more than she’d compare to admit, but really, having a sports category is sort of cheating and gendering the whole game towards sports club dudes).
So kissing him feels natural. And maybe that’s a terrifying thought, but she kisses him back when he kisses her, fights back, because that’s what they do, though she’s not entirely sure when they started fighting for the same team.
She thinks she likes it. Or, you know, she thinks she’s going to stop thinking and just sort of roll with this.
This, being of course, Jeff’s hands under her shirt and his tongue in her mouth.
THREE YEARS LATER TITLE CARD
Abed is alone in an interrogation room with two IRS agents. Abed rises from his chair and begins to pace. “You want to talk about Jeff Winger and Britta Perry, hmm.” He freezes with his hands behind his back. “Then talk about them we shall, and I will provide you the most compelling argument I have, and -
“Evidence!” Abed says, and holds up a finger. “I’d like to direct the jury’s attention to Exhibit A,” he starts, and the two agents look at each other, both slightly unsure, undecided whether to be amused or annoyed.
“Son, this isn’t a court of law,” the one agent (the shorter one) says.
“No,” Abed concedes, “but this is America. Justice prevails!”
“Law and Order, fucking Law and Order,” the taller agent mutters under his breath.
“If I may continue, Exhibit A: a photograph taken one year ago, two years after Britta Perry and Jeff Winger’s sparse nuptials occurred.”
In the photograph, Britta is wearing a short white dress and her hair hangs messy around her face. She has two flutes of champagne in either hand, and her mouth is open grotesquely, as though she is screaming, “WASSSUP,” at the photographer. Jeff is behind her, and if the agents choose to look closely enough, they will see his hand resting on the swell of her hip, his arm around her, his face equally twisted by the champagne and some sort of excitement, an open bowtie around his neck and white shirtsleeves rolled.
Abed creeps up behind the agents and points at a person in the far background of the picture; it’s Abed, a pink tuxedo t-shirt on and a video camera in hand. “July 18 of this year: Britta and Jeff renewed their vows at the party room at the Olive Garden downtown.”
Neither agent comments. Abed begins to pace.
“Exhibit B!” Abed throws down a post-it-note. On it, it reads: WATER THE PLANTS & LEAVE OUT TUNA FOR BRITTA’S MONGREL. THANKS, JEFF (& BRITTA. I GUESS).
One agent starts to grumble, but Abed stops him. “March 21 of this year as well - Britta and Jeff went on vacation, to Las Vegas. I don’t know how familiar you are with the cinematic canon that covers this region of the United States, and depending on which director and which route and which genre you pursue, you pretty much know what kind of trip a trip to Las Vegas is, and the eye in the sky is watchin’ us all - ” the DeNiro impression earns an eyeroll, and cut to -
“Exhibit C! Halloween 2011. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Couple’s costumes. Need I say more?”
“Exhibit H! Britta Perry’s signature on Jeff Winger’s dry-cleaning bill - ”
“ - and I’m not sure if this qualifies as hearsay, The Practice and Ally McBeal and Boston Legal all offered differing opinions on the subject and no prevailing precedent, soooo, but! Since I am the witness I can tell you, that on more than one occasion Jeff Winger has intimated to me that Britta Perry is “not so bad,” end quote. Here are the transcripts.”
“And last, but not least, gentlemen of the jury, I direct your attention to Exhibit CC.” He throws down a greeting card with a snowman wielding a machete on the front.
Inside it reads: Happy Bloody Holidays -
Jeff and Britta Perry-Winger.
“I rest my case.”
COURT ADJOURNED.
community. uncle sam wants YOU; the methods of evasion are strictly limited: also known as, the one where jeff and britta get married to save themselves from the law. rated pg. 5232 words.
notes: vague spoilers through season two. ALSO: despite my status as a law student, i made up ALLLLLL the tax law stuff in this. so legal veracity is a no-go up in this joint. just warning, haha.
See. 26 U.S.C.A. § 1
§ 1. Tax imposed
(a) Married individuals filing joint returns and surviving spouses.
Death and taxes. All good stories are about one or the other; this story deals solely with the latter.
One of the perks of being basically the best lawyer ever/worst human ever (note: not Human Being, just human) is that you learn a lot about loopholes in the U.S. tax structure in your attempt to help old white dudes escape paying a third of their income for things like welfare and Medicare and that really shitty high school down the street.
Britta has no understanding of this. For the better part of her life, she’s either been a) unemployed; b) a member of the lowest income bracket on the federal tax scale; or c) simply never paid her taxes.
c) is going to prove a problem for us.
She gets a call on a Monday, and of course it’s a Monday. The voice on the other end is placid and cool and the least personal thing she has ever heard, and the second that voice says, all male and bald eagle and U.S.A.!, “Ms. Britta Perry? This is the Internal Revenue Service. We have a few questions for you regarding your recent tax statement, or should I say, lack thereof?” she wants to vomit a little.
This is why you never answer an anonymous number when it pops up on your phone. Never.
(“Unless the call is coming from inside the house . . . “ she hears Abed say in her head, and great, not only is she moments away from getting busted for tax fraud, but she’s got Abed Nadir as her Jiminy Cricket).
She broaches the subject delicately the following morning in their study group.
(“THEY’RE GONNA SEND ME TO JAIL,” she wails. “I won’t fare well on the inside, I won’t. I’ve watched HBO before, okay, dude, those bitches will eat me alive.”)
“I haven’t paid taxes since Jimmy Carter was in office,” Pierce scoffs, mutters something about "the Jews" that makes absolutely no sense in this context; Annie has the decency to look offended as she turns away from him.
“I wouldn’t exactly advertise that fact if I were you,” Jeff drawls. “If they’re going after Ani DiFranco here and her assets, namely a collection of poorly knitted cat sweaters and a spice rack, maybe a mix tape featuring the Wallflowers, I’d adopt the Fifth Amendment as my mantra.”
“‘In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups,’” Abed starts.
“Ani DiFranco?!” Britta protests.
“Ouch!” Troy calls. “Lilith Fair 1990s feminist lo-fi burn!”
“Fifth Amendment?” Pierce sputters. “Why bring prohibition into this?”
Jeff shakes his head slow, incredulous and open-mouthed, but before he can argue, Britta waves her arms around like an air traffic controller in the midst of a kamikaze airfield.
“This is about me!” she shouts; everyone freezes for a moment before they all roll their eyes, Shirley muttering, “a little respect never hurt anybody,” under her breath, Annie sighing, the words, “but of course,” unvocalized but clearly felt if judging by the wide, watery eyes; Troy’s counting on his fingers, “Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, angry lady not Alanis Morissette . . .” She turns back to Jeff, her hands clasped in front of her. “What should I do.”
“You’re asking me for advice?” he leans back in his chair, too smug by half. Her eyes narrow, all snakelike, and at one point she was aware that this alone could make him squirm, if only a little, but apparently her current situation has placed her super low on the desperation totem and Jeff is entirely too cognizant of it.
“Yes,” she spits out. “This is me asking you for advice. Take a picture. You’ll want to treasure this freakish, one-time event.”
He nods, eyes glinting. And then he says:
“Well, the first option: you lawsuit up.”
Everyone groans at the table.
“Bad news, the event horizon has passed on that joke,” Abed says; the table nods and grumbles in agreement.
Jeff continues unabated. “But if steep legal fees and possible jail time go against whatever values you and your anarchist cronies have embedded in that absurdly thick skull of yours, I’ll offer you this: Marriage always helps.”
Shirley claps her hands. “Oh! That’s nice!”
Troy’s still counting, “ . . . Toni Braxton? No, not Toni Braxton. Toni Morrison? No. Tony Blair?”
Britta’s mouth suddenly feels really, really dry.
“You cannot possibly be suggesting what I think you are suggesting.”
“‘These are their stories,”” Abed intones.
His iPhone sounds; DUN DUN.
Spoiler alert: Jeff totally wasn't suggesting what Britta thought he was suggesting, at least not yet.
This, Abed would contend, is the plot twist that occurs just before the commercial break.
As it turns out, Britta is not the solo tax evader among their degenerate gang of community college students.
While Jeff was employed by Dewey, Cheatem & Howe (note: not the real name of his firm, but rather a common joke used to poke fun at the legal profession), it seems that a large perk of the job was establishing off-shore bank accounts wherein they could hide their massive, massive earnings and not be beholden to Uncle Sam and his demanded cut of the share.
Apparently, when you’re fired and you’re disbarred and you’re relegated to community college, you sort of lose the nice legal shield the firm gave you between the IRS and these accounts.
Jeff gets a phone call a week after Britta.
“Ohh, this is so not good,” he says.
Jeff approaches her first. It’s in the cafeteria of all places, and he finds Britta staring despondently into her bowl of lime green jell-o.
“Still haven’t figured your way out of the big house yet, Thelma?”
She scowls up at him.
“I’m sorry,” he says as he sits down across from her. “Were you Louise?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” she says. “Laugh it up. Jeff Winger is going to get to see Britta Perry in a pair of handcuffs. It’s a dream come true!”
“Ah, yes, but the context I would have provided would have been dramatically different and with a lot less orange jumpsuits.”
“What do you want?”
Jeff leans in, his voice dropped low.
“Here’s the deal - and you will let me finish what I have to say before you start interrupting me, all indignant and faux-feminist, okay? Just nod. Don’t say anything.” Britta frowns, but she nods. Sort of. Jeff takes a deep breath. “Let’s call you Bonnie and let’s call me Clyde - you with me? But instead of robbing banks, you and I have the unique criminal similarity in that we have both kinda sorta definitely cheated the federal tax system and as a result we’ve got the law breathing heavy down our necks. Now. We can either be shot up on the side of the road and let Abed ensure we go down in cinematic history, or we can do something about our situation and remain within the confines of the law and continue our continuing education in the hallowed halls of Greendale Community College.”
“You must have made a killing as a lawyer dude, man,” she says, a look of utter cynicism warping her face. Jeff points a finger at her.
“You’re supposed to be quiet and listening and rapt with excitement. I’m asking you to marry me here.”
Her eyebrows raise and her mouth falls open and the expression on her face is a new one for Jeff. It looks a little like she wants to vomit and more so like she wants to start crying, but not in the good way, and more than that, she looks furious and a little like something else, like the victim of a sneak chivalry attack (he’s pretty sure this is rather chivalrous of him, despite the fact he would make out equally if not more advantageous here).
On Britta’s end, this sort of feels like that god awful Anthropology class all over again, some absurd challenge she can’t back down from if she intends on saving face (or saving her ass from jail or the People’s Court or however it is you get prosecuted for tax evasion, and oh my god, Jeff would have to be her attorney, because, like, how many attorneys could she possible know? The answer is one, and he’s not even technically a lawyer anymore, but she’d have to ask him to take her on pro bono, and she can see it already, the way that one eyebrow of his would quirk up and some truly terrible Penthouse montage would be playing in his head, and he’d say, more like pro boner, and is this really what her life choices have come down to? like, really? marry Jeff Winger or employ him as her attorney? or - gasp, shudder, try not to vomit - both?!).
“Wow. Dude. You need to pump the brakes and slow your roll and hit rewind and then pause, and then maybe slo-mo because I just - no - what? No, just, whaaaat are you talking about.”
Jeff is taking comfort in the thought that the Greendale cafeteria has surely been witness to worst marriage proposals than this.
Jeff has spent a long time reading the U.S. tax code, or having a recent law school grad underling read the tax code, and if you know what you’re looking for, there are a ton of loopholes that get you out of not only paying what you owe, but out of paying what you owed, past tense emphasis.
Having a spouse? Having a spouse as broke as you are? Significantly helps those odds.
He explains this to Britta, but her face remains just as horrified, if not more so.
“I? I’d have to marry you? Well, bad news bears, my friend, I don’t believe in marriage.”
Jeff scoffs. “Marriage isn’t the goddamn tooth fairy, Britta. It’s not something you can just dismiss, like Jesus or Santa Claus or socialism, or if you’re Pierce, the majority of the human race. Besides: consider this a contract. Nothing more. Just a contract.”
What she wants to tell him, is that she’s not as dumb as he thinks she is, and she knows that with contracts come a whole boat-load of fine print and things you didn’t realize you had gotten yourself into when you sign the dotted line
Instead she just says, “oh my god,” and lowers her head into her hands and a little too close to that bowl of lime green jell-o.
This one summer, she spent a week at this outdoor concert series somewhere in, like, Kentucky or Tennessee or wherever, and she was pretty stoned for most of it, and the dude she had been dating at the time had dumped her sometime during the third day, right there in a parking lot next to the row of porta-potties. It was easily one of the more humiliating moments of her life, ranking up there with the time security had thrown her out of a Radiohead show in Dublin (ugh, god, Dublin, actually that entire month she spent in Dublin is an embarrassment all its own, but that has more to do with her inability to hold down thick, dark beer and the fringe ties she established to the sort of now defunct IRA that led her detention at the Heathrow Airport for her “terrorist connections,” or at least that’s what they called them), or that time she arrived at what she thought was a photoshoot for Payless Shoe Stores (totally legit) but it turned out to be some businessman with a major foot fetish who thought she was a hooker. But he dumped her. He told her that he was seeing someone else, some hippie chick she had seen around before with a name like Dawn or Autumn or Fern, and he told her this like it was the most obvious news in the world and she was simply the last one to pick up on it.
The feeling resurfaced during the Tranny Dance, namely, while she stood there, that stupid, stupid Jennifer-Aniston-in-a-bad-rom-com phrase still gross and sticky in her mouth - and do people actually love Jeff Winger? Like, really? Is that possible?
And somewhere in that brain of hers, she is sure she is more upset with herself than she is with him, or with Annie ( . . . eh, maybe not so much on that front). But it’s hard for her just to swallow not only her pride but a whole host of emotions she’s not entirely sure she knows what they mean and act like all is forgiven and his rejection wasn’t the biggest slap in the face ever.
She marries him anyway. They drive down to the courthouse separately and she tries not to glare at him too much in front of the justice of the peace as she hitches her proverbial wagon to his.
“If I wind up in prison,” she hisses at him on the steps of the courthouse, “we are so getting a divorce.”
“Ah,” Jeff drawls, pats her on the head, “my charming wife.”
Pierce is the one who came to bear witness to their unholy union. Pierce, and Abed, but Abed was sort of a given.
“This is, without a doubt, the worst decision I have ever made,” Britta said, just before she said, “I do.”
There’s a belated reception that Monday in the study room. Shirley brought a wedding cake, a mess of white buttercream frosting and a sugar crucifix, with the words, may God have mercy on your souls swirled in pink, a matching blonde bride and groom sunk knee-deep into the cake.
“As much as I love a celebration in my honor, believe me when I say this was entirely unnecessary,” Jeff says.
Abed leans into Jeff and hisses, “Forget it, Jeff. It’s Greendale.”
A lot of complications arise after they get married. First, Jeff failed to mention the whole part of the clause that their marriage must last two years in order for it to be deemed legally recognizable. This alone earns a flurry of expletives on Britta’s part directed at him. Second, Jeff likes the idea of wedding rings, an aspect Britta hadn’t even considered when he brought up the subject (a.k.a. asked her to marry him) in the cafeteria.
“That’s really going to slow your game with your harem of hos if they see you have a wedding ring,” she says.
“Nah, chicks love a married dude. It makes it a challenge, and they get to act out their Diane Lane fantasies.”
Britta huffs and stops walking in the middle of the school parking lot.
“You do not get to put a ring on it. Just because we are married in the eyes of the state and the IRS - ”
“And our study group.”
“And them, it does not mean that we’re buying his and hers matching robes and bath towels and rings and a dog or sharing a bed or sharing a car, and we are definitely not sharing bodily fluids.”
“Remind me why I did this favor for you again me?”
“Remind me about that offshore account of yours that was recently discovered and raided in the Caymans?”
They get into their separate cars and drive to their separate homes.
This? This right here? This presents a whole other problem.
Britta gets a call the following Monday from the same IRS agent who called her at the start of this all. Or, at least, she thinks it’s the same agent.
“Ms. Perry?” the voice on the other end asks. “Or, should I say, Mrs. Winger?”
“Oh my god I’m going to throw up,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
Little did she know, and little did Jeff know, a lot of people get married in an attempt to evade back taxes. It’s a real problem and a real burden on the IRS, or at least that’s what the agent who calls her tells her and the agent who calls Jeff says something along the same lines.
The reason for the call, the agent tells her, is that the IRS finds it . . . suspect that despite her recent marriage to one Jeff Winger, Britta has maintained her apartment and her private residence as has Jeff. Britta offers a shaky, long-winded explanation revolving around the housing market and her puritanical values and how society places too large an emphasis on sex, and maybe sleeping with her husband is scary because he’s really tall and really huge - not like that, okay, except kinda, except wait, she doesn’t know, she’s a virgin! she’s afraid of sex! -
The agent cuts her off and tells her that they’ll be keeping an eye on the both of them in the interest of America and the almighty dollar.
So they move in together. Britta over the years has moved around, a lot, but this easily ranks as one of the worst moving experiences of her life. On the one hand, there’s that IRS agent who looks like a reject from some sci-fi movie or the Men in Black Academy who keeps ghosting their every move and popping up at odd intervals, and each time Jeff catches him around he shouts after him, “Who really shot Kennedy, man?” or, “Area 51, dude! Explain it!” and their neighbors (new for her, because, fuuuuck, she’s moving in with Jeff - he totally won the “I have more closet space” argument by a mile, and while it’s not his Lawyer Condo of Solitude it’s still a pretty awesome apartment, and he has a spare room with this awful futon thing, so, yeah) have totally already formed a bad opinion of them. There’s that. And then there’s the fact that most of the things Britta owns have some bizarre sentimental value only understood by her, like the shoddy armchair with the brown and orange stripes she bought used for her first apartment ever, things Jeff has zero patience or understanding towards. He has this awful black leather Barcalounger that dwarfs any and all of the living room furniture she brought with her, but his TV is pretty awesome.
And of course everyone in the study group knows. Of course.
“You. Moved. In. TOGETHER,” Annie sort of wails. Shirley makes a fast sign of the cross and calls, “Praise Jesus.”
“We’re roommates,” Britta offers, but it’s not even convincing in her mind.
“Yeah,” Jeff says slowly. “We’re like, we’re just like . . . Pierce and Troy.”
“Verdict,” Abed says, “not buying it.”
The first week of living together is awful. There’s only one bathroom, for one thing, and for another - it’s Jeff. They argue. They argue about everything - about what kind of milk to buy (SOY, she screams in the dairy aisle of Whole Foods, but he puts the whole milk - and who the fuck drinks whole milk past the age of five? - in the cart), to what late night show is better (Craig Ferguson? Jeff sputters, and puts Jimmy Kimmel on instead), to whether carpooling is worth the saved gas if she’s going to serve as the worst backseat driver in the history of mankind (BRAKE, she yelps, over and over again).
They get super drunk some time in their third week living together. She’s slumped low in that awful leather recliner of his while his limbs are splayed all over the smaller armchair she brought with him.
“Are you still mad at me about the Annie thing?” he slurs. “‘s that why you always yell at me?”
Britta suddenly feels a headache coming on.
“Nooooo,” she says slowly. “Or maybe. It makes me feel gross and creepy crawly when I think about it. So I don’t think about it.” She pauses and stares at the blank TV. They never bothered to turn it on. “I yell at you because you’re usually wrong, Jeffrey.”
“That is so not true,” he says and sits up a little straighter. “I am always right. And that makes you angry.”
“Oh, whatever, dude. This is clearly . . . emblematic (“good word,” he interrupts) of why I yell at you in the first place.”
Jeff sort of snorts, too lazy and drunk to actually laugh.
“So we’re good?” he asks, his eyes already fluttering close.
“I guess,” she murmurs. “As good as we ever will be.”
They find their own kind of rhythm after that.
She learns a lot about him simply by living with him. First, he’s, like, a terrifying health fanatic (which really doesn’t explain the chicken fingers and other cafeteria-deep-fried-shit he consumes on campus, but at home? hello, GNC, it’s a whole new ball game). While she chomps down on a bag of pretzels, he eats a banana-kiwi-prune smoothie, or something. His favorite movie is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and for real, who’s favorite movie is unironically Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? She told him that she had expected, like, Glengarry Glen Ross, and at that he had gotten all creepy, dancefloor rapist-like and asked her if it was because she found him attractive in a young-Alec-Baldwin-sense, and to that she said, yuck, and then called him a little pig. He gets perverse joy out of watching the E! channel, despite his weirdly emphatic protests that he would never want to bang any of the Kardashian sisters. The only books he owns are really fancy law books that don’t look as though they’ve been opened once. None of this is really all that surprising.
(Well, maybe the Kardashian part is a bit of a surprise).
(What is surprising is that he usually bounds out of bed at 5:30 in the morning, that he’s well-versed in the humanitarian conflict in Haiti and can speak some Mandarin, and that when he makes coffee in the morning he leaves just enough in the pot for her, and that even though he calls her cat “a little shithead,” they’ve sort of bonded and like to sit in front of his giant flatscreen TV and make fun of Kathie Lee and Hoda).
(Well, he does, not the cat; she doesn’t own a fucking talking cat. This isn’t a Disney movie).
(Although she has made him start buying fair trade coffee, and he had grumbled at that and told her he liked his caffeine with a side of capitalism thanks, and she called him Gordon Gekko and started talking about impoverished Columbians (“invest in more AK-47s!” he suggested), and Guatemalans (“rename your country something that doesn’t sound like a euphemism for lady parts”) and Brazilians (no comment, but a pointed look below her belt), so she was beyond surprised a week later when she saw the bag of coffee beans on his counter, the words FAIR TRADE printed large and in red).
While she sleeps in an old Che Guevara t-shirt and these skintight faded black yoga pants, he sleeps in these absurdly patterned boxer briefs, and boxer briefs alone. In the morning, crowded in that one bathroom full of Jeff’s over-priced, salon-purchased beauty (“man care!”) products and Britta’s organic goat’s milk moisturizer and surprisingly extensive assortment of make-up, they play this terrible game of trying not to look at the other (or trying not to get caught looking at the other).
Jeff finds there’s something sleep-softened and gentle in Britta in the morning, despite the scowl that deepens on her face and the way her eyes don’t quite open all the way. As for Britta, all she sees is a lot of skin - a whole lot of skin.
And some nights they hang out together. They’ll watch bad television and snark on it simultaneously, eventually creating their own commentary banter more entertaining than whatever it is they have on TV.
Late night reruns of Law and Order bleed into reruns of Saturday Night Live.
Her toes bump against his leg and he gives her this quick look out of the corner of his eye. It’s the first time in a long time, no, the first time ever, not in forever, the meaning differs, that she wants to kiss him. She wants to kiss him warm on the mouth free of any consideration of their shared past.
But she doesn’t do that. They’re not those sort of people. Instead they watch a little more of Saturday Night Live, and it isn’t funny; Jeff says it hasn’t been funny in the last two decades, and he says it all pompous and condescending, so Britta kicks him a little with her foot and calls him grandpa in this really doofy voice, and she’s asking after his prune juice when he grabs her by the ankle, his fingers encircling the bare skin and she goes silent.
Ryan Seacrest is on the television screen pretending to be Brad Pitt.
Jeff still has her ankle loose in his hand, but his eyes are on the TV, and he shakes his head. “God, I fucking hate that guy.”
Three months after they said “I do,” they’re crowded around the fridge together - Jeff reaching for another beer, and Britta going for the cheap white wine.
She closes the fridge door, and Jeff doesn’t move, and neither does she. He crowds her against the oversized kitchen appliance, the metal cool against her back, even through her thin t-shirt, and she doesn’t move.
“Should I be concerned?” he asks, voice too husky and low, and there’s the sound of thick glass meeting his marble countertop as he sets his beer down.
“About what?” she asks, and to her own embarrassment, her voice is just as thick.
“That you look like you’re seconds away from unhinging your jaw and swallowing me down like a snake.”
“I like that I’m the snake in this particular metaphor, and you’re the frightened mouse.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“And you don’t get used to me letting a comment about - what was it? swallowing you down? - go without further protest.”
He waggles his eyebrows. “Does that mean you’re coming around to the idea?”
“Dream on, Mighty Mouse.”
But he kisses her anyway, and she doesn’t bat him away, and then they’re making out against that huge industrial refrigerator he has in his kitchen, and it’s the first time she has kissed him in a long time, the bottle of chilled wine still grasped in her fist. It’s the first time she has kissed him and meant it, because she thinks she means it.
He’s still the most amoral and competitive person she has ever met beside herself (not that you can ever, like, meet yourself, but you get the sentiment), but she thinks she means whatever message her open mouth is communicating against his.
Because that’s the thing: she likes having him around. She likes arguing with someone who used to get paid to argue and sees things from her end of the spectrum, and she likes that everything is a contest, including and not just limited to, who can get ready for class the fastest and who makes the better grilled cheese sandwiches and who gets the most Jeopardy questions right on any given night (it’s usually him, and that bothers her way more than she’d compare to admit, but really, having a sports category is sort of cheating and gendering the whole game towards sports club dudes).
So kissing him feels natural. And maybe that’s a terrifying thought, but she kisses him back when he kisses her, fights back, because that’s what they do, though she’s not entirely sure when they started fighting for the same team.
She thinks she likes it. Or, you know, she thinks she’s going to stop thinking and just sort of roll with this.
This, being of course, Jeff’s hands under her shirt and his tongue in her mouth.
THREE YEARS LATER TITLE CARD
Abed is alone in an interrogation room with two IRS agents. Abed rises from his chair and begins to pace. “You want to talk about Jeff Winger and Britta Perry, hmm.” He freezes with his hands behind his back. “Then talk about them we shall, and I will provide you the most compelling argument I have, and -
“Evidence!” Abed says, and holds up a finger. “I’d like to direct the jury’s attention to Exhibit A,” he starts, and the two agents look at each other, both slightly unsure, undecided whether to be amused or annoyed.
“Son, this isn’t a court of law,” the one agent (the shorter one) says.
“No,” Abed concedes, “but this is America. Justice prevails!”
“Law and Order, fucking Law and Order,” the taller agent mutters under his breath.
“If I may continue, Exhibit A: a photograph taken one year ago, two years after Britta Perry and Jeff Winger’s sparse nuptials occurred.”
In the photograph, Britta is wearing a short white dress and her hair hangs messy around her face. She has two flutes of champagne in either hand, and her mouth is open grotesquely, as though she is screaming, “WASSSUP,” at the photographer. Jeff is behind her, and if the agents choose to look closely enough, they will see his hand resting on the swell of her hip, his arm around her, his face equally twisted by the champagne and some sort of excitement, an open bowtie around his neck and white shirtsleeves rolled.
Abed creeps up behind the agents and points at a person in the far background of the picture; it’s Abed, a pink tuxedo t-shirt on and a video camera in hand. “July 18 of this year: Britta and Jeff renewed their vows at the party room at the Olive Garden downtown.”
Neither agent comments. Abed begins to pace.
“Exhibit B!” Abed throws down a post-it-note. On it, it reads: WATER THE PLANTS & LEAVE OUT TUNA FOR BRITTA’S MONGREL. THANKS, JEFF (& BRITTA. I GUESS).
One agent starts to grumble, but Abed stops him. “March 21 of this year as well - Britta and Jeff went on vacation, to Las Vegas. I don’t know how familiar you are with the cinematic canon that covers this region of the United States, and depending on which director and which route and which genre you pursue, you pretty much know what kind of trip a trip to Las Vegas is, and the eye in the sky is watchin’ us all - ” the DeNiro impression earns an eyeroll, and cut to -
“Exhibit C! Halloween 2011. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Couple’s costumes. Need I say more?”
“Exhibit H! Britta Perry’s signature on Jeff Winger’s dry-cleaning bill - ”
“ - and I’m not sure if this qualifies as hearsay, The Practice and Ally McBeal and Boston Legal all offered differing opinions on the subject and no prevailing precedent, soooo, but! Since I am the witness I can tell you, that on more than one occasion Jeff Winger has intimated to me that Britta Perry is “not so bad,” end quote. Here are the transcripts.”
“And last, but not least, gentlemen of the jury, I direct your attention to Exhibit CC.” He throws down a greeting card with a snowman wielding a machete on the front.
Inside it reads: Happy Bloody Holidays -
Jeff and Britta Perry-Winger.
“I rest my case.”
COURT ADJOURNED.