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Ray Zacek is an IRS agent with literary aspirations. His plays, full of freaky characters, are finding an audience.
By RON MATUS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 11, 2003
SOUTH TAMPA -- Ray Zacek's words are strong stuff.
Sometimes when people hear them, they cry and cuss and call him names. Other times, eyes water from laughing too hard.
They cry because the South Westshore resident is a no-nonsense collection agent with the dreaded Internal Revenue Service.
They laugh because when he's not setting up payment schedules for the people who owe Uncle Sam, he's writing plays with freaky characters and knee-slapping dialogue.
His first full-length play, now showing at Gorilla Theater in Drew Park, features an ex-stripper, a cowardly drifter-turned-handyman and a no-tell motel owner who is -- what else? -- behind on his taxes.
For a career bureaucrat who always dreamed of being a writer, nothing could have been sweeter than hearing applause on opening night.
"As we got to the last few lines of the second act and we're coming to a close, I thought, 'Jesus, I finally did it,"' Zacek said last week, over a plate of grilled tuna at the Chili's on Dale Mabry Highway. "I actually did it and it works."
Zacek is a double agent. But his split identity wasn't planned.
He was unemployed, living in Seattle. The IRS was hiring.
Zacek and his wife, artist Theresa Beck, were just a few years removed from Northern Illinois University. Not the time to be picky about jobs.
But 20 years later, Zacek is still at it.
He works in a low-slung building on Columbus Drive with tinted windows and an American flag out front. He secures "delinquent returns."
His voice mail message is congressionally mandated to tell callers he is IRS employee No. 59-01091. If those mind-numbing forms you file by Tuesday are full of errors, you might be sitting on the other side of his desk one day.
You won't like it.
"Just this morning I had this case, this guy owes like four or $500,000 in income taxes," he said. "Would you cry? You'd cry."
You might even hurl insults.
A co-worker once got a letter addressed to: "Scum from the Pit of Hell."
Forgive Zacek if he's defensive.
"I don't go to work and sharpen my ax every morning," he said, wearing a baby-blue dress shirt and blue-gray tie. "Hell, we're people too," he added later.
Still, the truth is, Zacek would rather be writing.
He has wanted to be a writer since he was a bookworm in Chicago's southwest suburbs. In third grade, he wrote his first play, a parody of Aladdin's Lamp. In college, he majored in English. In Tampa, he couldn't help but fire off cranky letters to the Weekly Planet.
Like any hard-core word fiend, he spends a lot of time with the dictionary. Dictionaries, actually. His favorite: Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld, a lexicon of Anglo-American criminal slang. (For those who need to find out that an "alley apple" is a brick thrown during a street fight, this is the book for you.)
"I take a great deal of satisfaction out of a good line of dialogue or an interesting character or even, if I'm writing prose, just a good sentence that goes from Point A to Point B," Zacek said. "I just love words basically. Always have."
Until a few years ago, Zacek's writing success was limited.
He managed to get a few short stories published in small college literary magazines. He won first place in a Weekly Planet fiction contest.
Then he wrote a monologue.
The Ninth Caller centered on a country-and-western DJ riffing off a 10-minute rant. An actor-friend suggested Zacek send it to a local theater company. The producers liked it so much, they put it on.
Zacek has been writing for the stage ever since.
"That's been largely successful for reasons I don't fully comprehend," he said. Somehow, "I've found something that works for me."
Several of Zacek's short works have been produced by community theaters. One featured a dominatrix; another, a paranoid white shaman. Desperados, his latest, is set in the fictional town of Hobart, Ariz. "Scar tissue on the highway," one character calls it.
The play opened March 28 and continues until Sunday.
Zacek's strength is character and dialogue, said Anna Brennen, the founder of Stageworks, which produced Desperados. He creates believable characters who can be goofy and philosophical at the same time, she said.
"It's hard to write serious subjects and be funny and not be yuck," she said. "Ray has the capability to write characters that are multileveled."
Sometimes, Zacek said, the people he meets through IRS work inspire him. Coyote, the handyman in Desperados, is partly based on a belligerent construction worker who insisted he couldn't be found in any government computer.
Zacek's next play: Brother's Keeper. He describes it as "a retelling of Cain and Abel set in contemporary central Florida."
Zacek is the first to admit he's still learning his craft.
When a theater critic for the St. Petersburg Times pointed out last week that his current play rambled on, Zacek had to agree.
He's used to criticism.
At the IRS, he's heard it for 20 years.
-- Ron Matus can be reached at 226-3405 or matus@sptimes.com .
AGE: 51
JOB: IRS collection agent
PASSION: Writing
FAMILY: Wife, Theresa Beck; daughter, Brita, 12; son, David, 15; beagle, Sam.
FAMILY TIDBITS: Mother is a former Republican state committee member in Arizona; stepfather is a recreational gold miner.
FAVORITE WRITERS: Shakespeare, Hemingway, David Mamet, Sam Shepard.
HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING: "Finishing."
HOBBIES: Watching old movies, people-watching.
COMMON VISITORS TO HIS OFFICE: Doctors, lawyers, dentists.
WHEN HE TURNS IN HIS TAX FORMS: About April 15.
WHETHER HE'S GOTTEN IN TAX TROUBLE: "I'd rather not discuss that," he said, laughing.