‘What happens if people start calling me at the university?’
‘Again, I’d get one of those answerphones.’
‘Everything comes through a central switchboard.’
‘Then tell anyone who needs to contact you to use your cell – and simply don’t pick up the phone. Sorry to sound dramatic but there are a lot of angry creditors desperate to find someone to cover the money they’re owed. Never underestimate the awfulness of people when money is involved and the individuals in question take offense at being cheated. The fact that you are the innocent party here is, I’m afraid, secondary to it all. You are the only alleged representative of the company so you will be the focus of their anger. But it will pass – especially as I plan to contact every creditor and inform them that my client was simply an investor in the company and cannot be held legally responsible for their debts.’
I started calculating just how much this exercise would cost me. There were over thirty creditors. Say Mr Alkan spent ten minutes emailing and/or phoning each of them. That would be three hundred minutes. Or five hours . . . at two hundred dollars per hour. And then there were all the phone calls with me, and all the discussions with Bob Block at Block, Bascombe and Abeloff, and all the other attendant business to do with keeping me from being swamped by this mess.
‘How much have you billed me for to date?’ I asked.
‘Let’s worry about that later.’
‘I need to know.’
‘Around four thousand dollars. But look – all going well, this round of emails and phone calls to all the creditors will hopefully get them off your back and then we can get a court judgment stating that you are not responsible for Fantastic Filmworks’s accrued debts, and that will be the end of it.’
‘In other words, around another five thousand dollars on top of the five I’ve already paid over.’
A pause.
‘I wish this could be cheaper for you,’ he finally said. ‘But all I can promise you is that I will try to end this all as quickly as possible. I’m very conscious of the fact that your resources are limited.’
‘Is there any sign of the two outlaws?’
‘None at all. Interpol are now involved, given that there are now allegations of fraud. I could, of course, engage a private investigator on our behalf, but the cost would be—’
‘Forget it. Just keep the vultures away from me and I’ll tough things out until everything dies down.’
Toughing things out
turned out to be exactly right. For the next two weeks I was the subject of a frequently intense and vituperative campaign of intimidation by several of Fantastic Filmworks’s creditors. According to Alkan, seventy-five percent of the creditors accepted his explanation that, as the sole investor in the company, I couldn’t be held responsible for their financial mismanagement – but these were the big organizations (the hotels, car and helicopter hire companies and financial services groups) who could absorb a bad debt, and probably decided that it wasn’t worth harassing a low-paid academic who was stupid enough to invest in a splatter movie. But then there were a handful of creditors who wouldn’t buy this explanation – and made it their business to frighten me into settling up with them.
The caterer in California – Vicky Smatherson – was one of the more aggressive ones. From the sound of her voice she was in her early forties – and she was very ‘take no shit’ in her tone. I was at home, playing on the floor with Emily, when she first rang. As soon as I heard the phone begin to chime I stiffened. As it continued to ring, Emily asked me: ‘Why you don’t answer the phone, Mommy?’
‘Because I’m playing with you,’ I said with a tight smile. Then the message kicked in, followed by: ‘This is Vicky Smatherson – and your associates owe me over ninety-four hundred dollars for a big party they threw out here. Now maybe ninety-four hundred dollars isn’t much to a bunch of big shots like you, but it’s a goddamn fortune to me and I’m damned if I am going to let you get away with
not
paying me. If you think I’m being a little extreme here, tough shit. You will find out just how fucking difficult and relentless I can be if—’
I made a dive for the answering machine and turned the volume way down. Emily looked both bemused and unnerved by the call.
‘That woman is angry at you,’ she said.
‘She’s just upset.’
Then the cellphone sounded. I checked the screen. I didn’t answer it. A moment later, the landline blared back into life. I double-checked that the answerphone volume was well and truly off. As it rang and rang, the cell also rang and rang. Emily smiled in the midst of all this cacophony and said: ‘Lots of people want Mommy.’
I was so popular that the two phones kept ringing off and on for the next ten minutes until I had the good sense to unplug the landline and turn off the cell. After that I got Emily to bed, poured myself a double vodka and phoned Christy in Oregon – where I managed to catch her in her office.
‘As always,’ I said, ‘I have something of a story to tell you.’
As always, the story came rushing out in one long rant.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said when I reached the part about Theo and Adrienne vanishing to the ends of the earth or wherever the hell they were right now.
‘My guess would be Morocco,’ Christy said. ‘A good place to go to ground – and handy for the South of France, should they want to sneak back across the Mediterranean for a decent meal.’
‘I think you can eat pretty well in Morocco,’ I said. ‘Especially with other people’s money.’
‘You mean, especially with
your
money.’
‘I’m absolutely certain that the funds are well and truly spent. Now their creditors are going to take my apartment away from me.’
‘No, they won’t.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I won’t let them. Anyway, I’m certain you’ll get the favorable court judgment that your lawyer is promising you, and then everyone will be off your back.’
‘And if that
doesn’t
happen? If it goes the other way . . . ?’
‘Then you’ll survive somehow – which is what we all do. If you lose the apartment you’ll get another apartment. If you have to declare bankruptcy to meet all the debts, then you’ll eventually recover from that. It’s all very unfair, I know. But life is so often like that. Unfair, unjust, and more than a little cruel.’
Cruelty was something of a specialty of one Morton Bubriski. He was Fantastic Filmworks’s landlord in Cambridge and he was very determined to collect the $19,000 in back rent that they owed him. Having found my phone number in the local directory he began a campaign of harassment that made Vicky Smatherson’s angry phone calls seem like the height of politesse. He first phoned me around eleven one night at home – and thinking that Christy was about to ring me back (I’d left a message at her home earlier that evening), I grabbed the phone without thinking.
‘This is Morton Bubriski and you owe me nineteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-six dollars. I know you’ve got it because I know you’re a professor at New England State. Just as I know where you live in Somerville and the fact that you own your apartment. I even know what crèche you drop your daughter into every morning—’
That’s when I hung up. Thirty seconds later the phone rang again. When the answerphone kicked in he went vicious.
‘Now you listen to me, you little bitch, you hang up on me again and I will not only fuck with your career, but I’ll also destroy the rest of your life. Your associates completely screwed me around. And now I’m going to collect. And if you don’t pay me—’
I grabbed the phone and shouted: ‘Threaten me like that again and you’ll have the police on the doorstep.’
Then I slammed down the receiver and pulled the cord from the wall.
‘More yelling!’ Emily said.
‘That’s the last of it.’
I kept both phones off for the rest of the night – but I couldn’t sleep. My exhausted yet hyperactive brain began to picture all the legal proceedings I would be facing, and the very public disgrace of being evicted from my home and having it sold from under me. No doubt the university would soon learn about my financial disgrace and that, in turn, would be another black mark against me, further proof (as if that was needed) that I was trouble.
As it turned out I didn’t have to wait that long for the university to discover that I was the target of a very angry group of creditors – the charming Morton Bubriski phoned the English Department the next morning and spent ten minutes haranguing Professor Sanders’s secretary. He got so vehement and scatological that she too put down the phone – but only after having taped the entire conversation. (‘It’s a new university regulation,’ she explained later. ‘If someone starts going postal I hit the record button and we have his nastiness on tape.’)
In turn, the record of Morton Bubriski’s nastiness was played for everyone from the chairman of my department to the Dean of the Faculty to the university President himself. When the Dean of the Faculty demanded that I present myself in his office at three o’clock that afternoon I made an emergency call to Mr Alkan and begged him to drop whatever he was doing and accompany me to the Dean’s office. To his credit he said immediately: ‘No problem,’ and was there just before three p.m.
The Dean was disconcerted when I walked into his office accompanied by ‘my lawyer’.
‘This is not a trial, Professor,’ he said.
‘I just thought it best to have counsel present,’ I said.
‘And it was me who
insisted
that she have counsel present,’ Alkan lied, ‘because she is a completely innocent party here.’
The Dean played us the call from Morton Bubriski. It wasn’t pleasant listening – and when I was about to say something in my defense, Alkan put two restraining fingers on my arm right before I was able to open my mouth. (Did they teach him that move in law school?) Once the tape was finished Alkan informed the Dean that he was planning to have a restraining order issued against Bubriski by the close of business today – and ‘the man will find himself in jail if he contacts you or my client in the future’.
Before the Dean could get another word out, Alkan kicked in with a detailed explanation about why I was being chased by assorted creditors, how I wasn’t responsible for these bad debts, and how the two principal officers of the company had ‘gone to ground’.
‘Isn’t Mr Morgan the father of your child?’ the Dean asked me.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘The problem for us – and I have actually spoken to the university President himself about this – is the perception that Professor Howard may have engaged in some sort of bad financial speculation. Were this to be made public – to end up in the press, for example – and were someone to start digging around in her background, they’d discover that her father also went on the run after being exposed for financial chicanery . . .’
‘I’m not going on the run,’ I said, sounding angry. ‘And I resent the sins of the father being visited upon—’
Again Alkan put two restraining fingers on my arm.
‘There will be no publicity surrounding this case,’ Alkan said, ‘because there is no case for Professor Howard to answer. As to your assertion that she is in any way following in the footsteps of her father when it comes to financial dishonesty—’
‘If you both would allow me to complete the sentence I was attempting to finish . . . of course we knew when we hired Professor Howard that her father was a fugitive from justice. Of course we accept your assurances that she is not to blame for her partner’s bad business management. And yes, as long as we do not have further threatening phone calls or any publicity about the case we foresee no problems . . .’
I asked: ‘But if something is made public – or some angry lunatic phones you here . . . ?’
‘Then we will have to reassess our position.’
‘No, you won’t,’ Alkan said. ‘Because I know all about the statutory clause in every university contract. Maybe you remember the Gibson vs Boston College case last year . . .’
I could see the Dean turn a little pale. Gibson vs Boston College involved a professor who had written a rather scandalous book about her extra-curricular sex life. Even though she published the book under a pseudonym (but was outed by that right-wing blogger Matt Drudge) the university tried to fire her on the grounds that her account of having had over four hundred lovers in the past three decades (not to mention picking up a recently ordained Jesuit outside the men’s room at Boston’s South Station) brought the university into disrepute. Not only did Boston College end up having to reinstate her and issue her with an apology, they were also forced to pay all her legal fees and offer her a year’s paid sabbatical to make up for the unfair dismissal.
‘Now, we’re hardly dealing with a case like that here,’ the Dean said.
‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ replied Alkan. ‘Because if you do try to dismiss my completely innocent client over bringing New England State into disrepute—’
‘I can assure you we won’t be taking such action.’
‘Excellent,’ Alkan said. ‘Then I think we’re done here.’
Outside the Dean’s office I said: ‘You were brilliant.’
Alkan just shrugged.
‘Well, that’s the university dealt with – for the moment anyway. And don’t worry about Bubriski. I’ll have him muzzled by nightfall.’
Even though Alkan later emailed me, enclosing the details of the restraining order that had been placed on Bubriski, the man filed a countersuit against me the next morning, demanding the $19,000 in back rent plus another $20,000 in assorted nonsensical damages, ‘psychological stress’ and the like.
‘It’s easily defendable,’ Alkan said. ‘Don’t sweat it.’
But I did sweat it – and suffered another sleepless night.
Two days later Vicky Smatherson also filed a similar suit against me – as did six other Fantastic Filmworks creditors.
‘The good news,’ Alkan said, ‘is that the sum total of all the demands is just under eighty thousand dollars, which means, at the very worst, that’s all you’ll be liable for. But that’s the absolutely worst-case scenario. The truth is, once we go into court next week it will all be cleared up.’