The job has become consumed by preparations for the Star Wars Holiday Special, as I’m calling it. We’re shooting a big show at the Mall of America next Monday – stop on by, say hello, throw tomatoes – and we have a pre-taped hardy-har segment on Thursday, and a music show to shoot tomorrow. The music will be excerpted for the Holiday Special, and I assume we’ll be doing non-sectarian stuff, no hark-the-heralds.

In case you’re wondering: yes, I do work for a newspaper. But as our name reflects: we’re a media company now. Adapt, adopt, improve; wasn’t that the Musketeer motto? No; picked it up from a Monty Python sketch, I believe. The one where Cleese robs a bank. Anyway, it’s a fine motto, no?

Speaking of which – brief hiatus, as I finish up the enormous and enormously likable Python documentary. Pity they didn’t get all together to do it, but I suspect the egos and aggravations have expanded to the point where they don’t fit comfortably in a room; alone, they can be more expansive about each other, and generous. You do wonder who made the most money, though. I suspect it’s Cleese. Palin seems the most normal, but somehow the most remote; Jones is the fellow with whom you get into terrible arguments; Idle the one who wants to get the band back together because life has been so much less exciting ever since they broke up.

Ah, probably not possible. I can’t imagine getting together with the guys I worked with in my youth, unless they were the fellows with whom I shot pinball and discussed life and international Communism; we still see each other. The Crazy Uke, for example. We were roommates for a while at a house his dad built; it was 1983. Three of us, the troika filled out by Victor, a younger fellow who loved the Stray Cats, later became a private detective operative, and then an Orthodox priest. (I think. More or less.) For some reason when I recall the house I remember a comrade from the Daily newspaper, an utter drunk, a fellow who looked tailor-made to play an upper-class dissolute serving time in India, self-medicating with gin and quinine, making sardonic remarks about the Hindoos or the Mooselmen until he went native and became one or the other, or died in a last gasp of heroism during the Sepoy rebellion, stirred by the smell of gunpowder to find his essential qualities as an English-speaking person and die with the Union Jack clutched to his homesick bosom. He did coke, I seem to recall. Later he started up a magazine.

Everyone started up a magazine in those days. Those who didn’t wrote for them. His version lasted one issue, which was typical. I don’t remember what I wrote for him, but I do remember the payment. I went to his apartment to get it. He apologized for not having actual money, and handed me a check he had designed on his Personal Computer and printed off on a Dot-Matrix Printer, state of the art. It would be good for one hundred dollars in the future.

Never saw him again. I was thinking about that last night after I wrote the piece about Money, and it set off a row of dominos that click-click-click until they dead-end at the Obelisk of Betrayal. Said object was erected, oh, a year and a half ago? I’ve never talked about it.

Well, as the dentist said in a Moorhead office building when he discovered my first cavity and prescribed a filling, “no time like the present.”

My last book, the sequel to Regrettable Foods, was sold by the same agent who sold my previous seven books. The difference with the eighth? He kept a large share of the royalties, which is a kind way of saying he took the money from the publishers and did not give it to me. In this business we expect 15 percent to be shaved off, but 100 percent seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?

I began to be intrigued by the slow delivery of royalties, and called the local branch of the agency. She promised to get right on it. I heard nothing. Calls to the head agent, now in New York,  went unreturned. Mind you, we’d been friends since 1985. I was happy to be with the agency. Proud! They had a great client list, New York cred, success after success. If you wrote a book in this town, he was the agent you sought. We did deal after deal, and I figured thus it would always be.

Except he wasn’t returning my phone calls.

I assumed he was busy. He used to tell a joke: a man comes home from a business trip to find his house burned down. He calls a friend, who says “your house is gone, your wife ran off with the insurance adjuster, the dog is missing, your car was stolen, and your teenaged son drained your bank account. Oh, and your agent called.” There’s a moment of stunned silence; eventually the man says “my agent called?”

Hah hah! Well, we had a laugh about that. We had many laughs. Last time I saw him we were in a Village bar with plank floors, meeting with my Random House editor about the next book. All very New York Publishing World and very cool and amusing. Top of the world, Ma.

But now he wasn’t returning my phone calls. Heck, even if I’d been a pity client from the old days whose work he couldn’t sell, I would get a mercy call now and then. Not now. And the checks were missing. I didn’t think there was any connection. But. Well.

The local branch didn’t return many calls either, but when we did talk, she promised to get on it. And call me back.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater on a summer afternoon, watching the trailers before “Batman Returns.” Phone rings. It’s my agent. I make the great fatal mistake: hey, good to talk to you, but, I’m about to see Batman; can I call you in two hours? I’ve been trying to get the check for the last book. He says absolutely.

When the movie is over, I call back. Answering machine.

He never did call back, that day, or the next.

One call to the publisher informed me that the check had been sent, and cashed, a looong time ago.

If you’re wondering why I had not made that call before, well, I’d been used to slow payouts for a long time. DIDN’T YOU THINK YOU WERE BEING ROBBED? No. By my friend? Why? He had books on the NYT list. He handled just about everybody on NPR. He was the guy.

Armed with the information about the payoff, I confronted the agent who ran the local branch. To this day I don’t know what she knew exactly, but I suspect she had her suspicions – and while she always struck me as a good person in a tough spot, I can sum up the year that followed:

Sorry; vague words about what happened; you’re not the only one; we will repay; money is coming from a settlement, be patient; I’ll sign a contract that sets up a payment schedule; sorry the payments are late, but I’ll set things right; the settlement didn’t happen.

Leading to: if you want to sue, I don’t have anything.

I think I’m as furious about this now as I was when I discovered the perfidy.

It would be difficult to press criminal charges against the local agent. Any legal judgment would probably be paid off as quickly as the money the agency owes me, which is to say: never.

I feel bad about this, for the local agent’s sake, because I believe the misappropriation was solely the lead agent’s doing, and she didn’t profit from it. Everything I’ve seen from her indicates shame and horror at finding it all blow up like this. That said, we had a contract. I would have been content to get fifty bucks a week for the rest of my life. The last series emails and phone calls have gone unreturned; radio silence since last summer.

More tomorrow.

Out of context ad challenge around 10:30 or so! See you then.

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