The day the story broke, Evan Ingersoll was pumping iron in the basement gym of his friend Jesús Halévy’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment complex, Hyundai Hut. The two had recently attended a midnight screening of Deliverance and were now determined to look their best.

“Jesus! Jesús! Jesus!” Evan screamed suddenly from the squat rack. “Get over here!” 

Jesús hopped off a nearby treadmill. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen the lawsuit yet?”

“What, the Maestro Jerkoff thing? Yeah, I saw. It’s all over the news…”

“Music Director Jerold Offerman, Fired For Illicit Board Games, Sues the Algonquin Opera” —The Metro Times.

“Offerman With His Head! Maestro J.O. Vs. The A.O.” —The Metro Post.

“An Offerman They Had to Refuse: Algonquin Opera Now Due in Court” —The Village Void.

“Hillary Still Silent On Opera Snafu” —CNN

“You don’t know the half of it, dearie!” Evan interrupted. “Have you read the actual complaint?”

Jesús furrowed his brows.

“Check it out!” said Evan triumphantly, flashing his cell phone. “Ogler.com just posted all 49 pages of it. And holy fuck. It’s basically everything you want it to be.”

“O ye gods and little fishes!” exclaimed his friend, summoning his favorite retro oath. “Wanna feed me some highlights?”

The surprise lawsuit of disgraced Maestro Jerold Offerman, filed with the New York Supreme Court not a week after the Algonquin Opera abruptly terminated his employment over allegations of having played “blue board games” with his protégés, named both the company and its general manager Carlos Alberti as defendants.

For breach of contract, defamation, stupefaction, sudden penury, ignominy, listlessness, personal incubus, alienation of affection, agoraphobia betriggerment, and “spleen of the nastiest, most harrowing, Baudelairean sort,” it sought over $15 million in damages. It also shone a spotlight on certain longstanding tensions the Algonquin Open might sooner have kept hidden away in the wings.

While formally directed at the Algonquin Opera Corporation, the plaintiff’s lawsuit—ostensibly based on several periphrastic days’ worth of candid interviews with the plaintiff’s two sapient attorneys—in fact appeared to reserve most of its personal invective for the company’s general manager, and relayed, through a masterfully curated hodgepodge of exhibits, drawings, diagrams, and bullet points, the tale of a brilliant, epoch-defining career cut tragically short by the most conniving, malicious, misguided, callow, demeaning, diminishing, undermining, ungrateful, overweening, mephitic, and almost impossibly odious neophyte ever to set foot inside the house.

Having engaged a “positively marsupial” investigative committee to help decide how best to respond to the recent crop of spuriously demoralizing accusations made against the virtuous plaintiff Maestro Offerman, the defendant (“Carlos Alberti” or “Alberti” or simply “that dump truck in Brooks Brothers”) had flaunted his McCarthyist priorities from the very get-go of the scandal.

The defendant’s allegiances, the plaintiff felt strongly, were always to the feeble-minded children from the Boca Young Artist Development Program, the slanderous twins from Montenegro, the wooden-headed second bassoonist from the Akron Orchestra’s “Piping Guppies” Training Camp—and never to the humble emeritus conductor targeted by the Algonquin’s libelous campaign.

As the plaintiff’s account argued further, however, the dismissal that followed the investigation, while undoubtedly toxic and humiliating, was surely no great shocker; it could just as easily be taken as the latest in a frustratingly long timeline of equally humiliating, almost daily personal defeats for Offerman, each of which had been endured at the sinister, victimizing hands of a young, pettily jealous general manager who’d wanted, since his very first chaloshes day on the job, nothing more than to knock the Algonquin’s cherished music director emeritus from his celebrated perch.

“Interpreted in such a way, this ‘Boggle with the boys’ business is nothing more than mere pretext for a termination that had already been years in the making,” asserted the top of page 4. “Acrimoniously driven by sheer personal grudge, the scheming, exploded-catheter-for-brains cynically proceeded to exploit a popular movement benefiting actual victims of blue board games, all in order to evict not only the founder of the Algonquin’s own beloved Polanski Artist Maturation Program, but also the greatest conductor of Hänsel und Gretel the world has ever seen.”

The dossier included several troubling examples, attachments meant to conjure and convey the maniacal extent of Alberti’s inexplicable distaste for Offerman.

“Make no bones about it,” read the statement. “Alberti, who used to callously resort to the schoolyard bullying and intimidation tactics of a latter-day Lucy van Pelt, was the antithesis of collegial, and delighted in cutting down his superiors. One by one, he felled each and every last luminary who posed a threat, searching for weaknesses both public and private upon which he would exercise his singular talent for cutting, Grand Guignol-style executions.”

One theme the examples kept returning to was “the dilapidated pile of murine fecal matter one sometimes mistook for a general manager”’s penchant for calling attention to Maestro Offerman’s well-known and highly sensitive handicap: his leglessness, the result of a small explosion he’d experienced while conducting a youth choir in the Cocos Islands.

Exhibit 2, for instance, featured a small 3-by-5 index card of unknown provenance, upon which a doodle had been drawn depicting the saintly conductor rendered supine in a grassy field, an X over each eye, tongue spilling loosely from his little pig snout. Above the porcine figure’s head flew its two dismembered legs, detached gruesomely from the kneecap and catapulting freely in opposing directions. In small yet unmistakable block print, the word “KABOOM!” could be found exploding above the grisly amputation like fireworks, or fugitive detritus.

A side-by-side forensic comparison demonstrated the extent to which the disturbing illustration resembled other cartoons Alberti had absentmindedly sketched during his tenure at the Algonquin. An enclosed letter from a handwriting analyst (Exhibit 2c, Dr. Kymbarleigh “Kim” Conlin) spoke to the obviousness of the devastating KABOOM’s uncanny likeness to Alberti’s other chirography elsewhere, as well as to the fact that this flagrant KABOOM betrayed the unambiguous lines and loops of a “textbook ASPD- and DPD-grade sociopathic syndrome.”

The perdition didn’t end there. Exhibit after merciless exhibit uncovered private correspondence between the newfangled general manager and various personnel. In one, Alberti could be found describing his music director emeritus as “that Humpty Dumpty Humperdinck”; in another, as the company’s “resident Stumpy Humbert in a wheelchair.”

Offerman also recalled one heartbreaking occasion when, midway through a 2015 rehearsal of his annual “Festival of Children’s Choruses,” he was approached by Alberti at the podium.

“Are you sure you’re well enough to make it through ‘Avec la garde montante’?” the defendant had apparently asked the plaintiff. Such a question, the report concluded, suggested that the defendant felt death was near and imminent for the plaintiff, thereby causing him (the plaintiff) inevitable psychosis as he endeavored to lead his young performers through Britten’s “Oh Ye Lumpen Girdle of Mary,” and a mild insult-induced encephalitis whose effects left the Maestro depressed, housebound, incapacitated, and green around the gills for days.

Since the Algonquin had categorically rejected the plaintiff’s repeated requests that he meet privately with his accusers aboard his steam yacht prior to answering questions, Offerman was left gagged with his hands tied throughout the final phases of the witch hunt.

Only now, properly armed with his lawyers, exhibits, and favorite security coccyx cushion, could he plead his case and describe how torturous, untimely, and catastrophically dark his termination had actually been for him.

Only now before a trial court, the complaint concluded, could the plaintiff satisfactorily detail the full, shattering cost of the Algonquin’s reckless decision to terminate.

The blind producer from ABC7 News—he’d proposed to her last St. Valentine’s, his sister seemed to recall—who left him when news first aired of an investigation…

The certain insolvency he would face—the heaps of unpaid bills to contractors helping him realize his Debussy-themed parc aquatique—now that he was ousted…

“When’s the trial?” moaned Jesús, burying his face in his hands.

“God only knows,” Evan replied. “And I haven’t even told you the best part yet.”

“Oh?”

“The Algonquin just came out with its response.”

---

Illustration based on a drawing by Ben A. Cohen

More BASTA