“Want to play it cool with someone? Seem busy and important? Then send a text — with a term of endearment — that appears to be written to someone else. Or ask ‘who is this?’ when you receive a text. Have a friend text you repeatedly when you’re on a date. Claim not to have gotten a text you actually received. Let’s call it bluffting: A text with a little bluffing.”

There are many reasons why I shouldn’t have the information I have about Papa John Schnatter, and only one reason that I do. The reasons why not are plentiful. I am not, for instance, a fan of his pizza, and have been critical of it in the past — I have said, on the record and in many instances to people who didn’t even ask what I thought of Papa John’s, that I think Papa John’s pizza “tastes like being in an airport feels” and “is basically an industrial accident covered with seven pounds of shredded cheese.”

These critiques, I am aware, are not necessarily unique. What put me on Schnatter’s enemies list, finally, were two things. The first was my attempt to write an unauthorized musical about him called Papa John: Turn Off The Dark. The second, in what I can now admit was a spiteful response to his legal team’s defeat of that project (for which I’d already secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing, and the songwriting cooperation of Spandau Ballet’s Gary and Martin Kemp), was my attempt to bring Schnatter to trial at the International Criminal Court for “the weaponization of yeast,” “crimes against dairy” and “that fucking garlic dipping sauce, which just gets more alarming the more you look at it and anyway tastes less like garlic than it does hangover-mouth.” The suit, justifiably, didn’t go very far, and led only to a reprimand from the ICC’s Special Rapporteur for Food Crimes regarding my use of profanity in the charge related to the dipping sauce. It was not a proud moment for me. But it did help me make the acquaintance of a highly placed Papa John’s source.

After the ICC thing, my name was in the press for a while, which was tough. My source, who has insisted that I call him “The Noid,” got my name from a mocking editorial about me in Pizza Marketplace Magazine, and reached out to me because he felt “people don’t know the truth” about Schnatter and Papa John’s. “This guy, everyone thinks he just spends his time invading the homes of exurban white people, handing out pizzas and dispensing those weird piston-y high-fives, like in the commercials,” he told me during our first conversation. “It’s either that or they think he spends all his time, like, scrutinizing green bell peppers to see if they meet his exacting standards. And it’s true he spends a lot of time staring at peppers, but there’s more to all this. He can be cruel. People don’t know about that. The second tanning bed in his office that he uses to ‘discipline’ executives. The way he whips honey chipotle chicken strips at people for no reason. The pranks, God. I have ‘Better Ingredients, Better Pizza’ tattooed on my lower back, and I don’t have any idea how it got there, so that’s barely even a prank, at least in my book.”

But those allegations, too, aren’t new. “The Noid” is still with Papa John’s — he says that if he left, the repercussions for his family would be “unimaginable, unspeakable — I’ve seen him make people, kids even, actually eat the Spinach Alfredo pizza.” But he has chosen to leak select memos from Papa John’s executive headquarters — located a mile beneath the University of Louisville’s Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium — because he thinks the public needs to know the Papa John he knows.

“They don’t see the guy who makes these terrifying surprise visits to different branches, and if you can’t name all the ingredients on the John’s Favorite pie he’ll make you chug honey mustard dipping sauce or put you on mushroom-inspection duty for a week. People don’t know that guy. He’s not who everyone thinks. And he’s very ambitious.”

It’s that last bit that matters here. Late on Sunday night, as the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain first came to light, The Noid called me. He was out of breath, although he often is — “the healthiest thing you can get in the cafeteria is the Grilled Chicken Club Pizza,” he told me once. This time seemed different, though. “I’m sending you something big,” he said. “The thing we talked about is happening. The big thing.” He had been sending me information about “the big thing” for some time: Papa John quietly retaining the services of Ed Rollins and Bay Buchanan as consultants; his “fact-finding” visits to Iowa and New Hampshire during the spring; the abrupt and combative tack to the right on Israeli settlements in Papa John’s television advertising; the forming of Pizza Party USA, a political action committee, last June; the subsequent announcement of 501(c)4 Super-PAC called Better Ingredients For America in September. The Noid had told me for weeks that Cain would eventually self-destruct. “He’s a weird guy,” Noid told me months ago, “by which I mean that when he was at Godfather’s [Pizza] he appointed an old pizza box to the corporate board and made everyone call it ‘Suzanne.’” Now, it seemed, Cain’s inevitable collapse was happening. And, as The Noid had said for months, Papa John was making his own run for President.

I will never forget the end of my last conversation with Noid. “Shit, I have to go, I have to go,” he said Sunday night, “check your email.” When he got off the phone, as he always did, by saying “Better ingredients, better pizza,” his voice was small, frightened. I could hear the weird, whooping laugh of Schnatter himself — already familiar to me from his television commercials and my nightmares — in the background. Below is a transcription of the memo that The Noid sent me.

TO: [Redacted]
CC: DKoch22@aol.com, MrCharlesKoch@earthlink.com
FROM: Team Schnatter, Ed.Rollins@papajohnsusa.com, Bay.Buchanan@papajohnsusa.com
RE: THE TIME IS NOW

Executive Summary: Circumstances in the Republican presidential campaign currently present a unique opportunity, with the scandal currently surrounding Herman Cain opening the “pizza hole” in the field. Candidate Schnatter polls strongly among crucial demographics, has a pronounced messaging advantage, and enjoys a significant imaging advantage as well. In short, THIS IS OUR TIME.

1. Polling
   Due to the unofficial nature of our campaign, early polling on Candidate Schnatter has been limited — but very promising indeed. Nationally, Schnatter is the most recognizable of any of the current or potential Republican nominees; as discussed, even if [Tom] Selleck opts to pursue the Republican nomination, Schnatter remains a close second. Promisingly, 14 percent of likely voters believe that Schnatter is already the President of the United States, giving us a small but critical incumbency advantage. Candidate Schnatter’s negatives are notable, but of the 47% of voters who answered in the affirmative when asked, “Are you afraid that Papa John is going to show up at your house with a dozen rapidly cooling pizzas and a bunch of two-liters of Diet Coke, then make you watch Conference USA football games and do lots of high-fives?” nearly half said that their biggest concern was having to watch Conference USA football, not high-five Candidate Schnatter. The three phrases most commonly associated with Candidate Schnatter were “weird nodding and unmotivated laughter in his commercials,” “clammy-but-somehow-also-parched, couch-bound indigestion” and “bold leadership.” In short, there’s a lot to work with.
2. Messaging
   Here is where we can really shine. Other candidates struggle to put their beliefs into brief, catchy slogans. For example, Mitt Romney’s current campaign slogan, “This Thing I Believe: The Exceptionalism Of America And Its Unique Business Leader Community And Job Creation Environment Which Is Under Assault Is Not Something To Apologize For, At Home Or Abroad,” polls poorly among English speakers; Newt Gingrich’s “ This Historical Thriller I Co-Authored About What Would Have Happened Had The South Won The Civil War Should Answer All Your Questions About My Views On Muslims And Immigration,” to take another example, is just a hyperlink leading to his author page on Amazon.com. Candidate Schnatter, on the other hand, already has numerous successful slogans, all of which can be easily “scaled” up into political slogans — “At Papa John’s, It’s About Better Pizza” can easily become “At Papa John’s, It’s About Better Pizza And Reducing Needless Entitlement Spending And Freeing Our Job Creators From The Highest Business Taxes In The Developed World,” for instance. “Nobody does what Papa John’s does” scales easily into “Nobody does what Papa John’s does… Which Is Let Small Business Owners Innovate, Without Bureaucrats And Onerous Regulation Get In The Way.” Other candidates’ messages can be absorbed and repurposed, as well. For instance, Romney’s “No Apologies” becomes “Papa John Doesn’t Apologize For Using 100% Real Premium Meats On His ‘The Meats’ Pizza, And He Won’t Apologize For American Greatness Abroad, Either.”
3. The Ground Game
   With thousands of franchises across the United States and hundreds of “Pizza Consulates” in the United Kingdom, South Korea, Canada and other major “pizz-allies,” Team Schnatter has a reach that no other campaign can boast. Additionally, the Papa John’s franchises in such Middle East nations as Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait position Candidate Schnatter as the most experienced foreign-policy hand in the Republican field — “I have been to the Middle East, and I know that what they hunger for is the same miserable, cheese-squelched pizzas that we enjoy here in The Greatest Country In Human History,” for instance. “The total destruction of our freedoms and way of life” can be substituted for “miserable, cheese-squelched etc,” depending on the audience.

CONCLUSION: The “better ingredients” for a winning campaign are all in place. Our task now is to make the “better pizza” of a campaign that accurately and compelling communicates Papa John’s exceptional values. The national “pizza hole” is open as never before. It’s up to us to help Papa John shove a bunch of hot garbage into it, and win.

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Criminology was taught by one Buddy Longo, a figure of legend around the halls of SHHS. I have no idea how Buddy was qualified to teach the class, other than the fact that he knew a lot of cops and had a friend who was supposedly some kind of former spy, who came in one day to show us the Zapruder film (“Look how his head comes off! Like the lid of a cookie jar.”) Buddy LOVED serial killers, and would enrapture us with stories about Edmund Kemper eating his mother’s larynx like he was reading “Make Way for Ducklings” to preschoolers.

— Every high school should have a senior elective called “Criminology”! It sounds like it’s good for young minds.

It’s not every day that Joy Williams, who is possibly America’s greatest living writer, publishes something new, so make sure that you save yourself some special time to read this new story that Granta has published online. If you’re looking for more short stories to read, why not start with Taking Care or Honored Guest?

“A drill-down to the zip code level shows that the zip code with the largest number of very rich households is 10023 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with 7,621 such households. That zip code, plus one other on the Upper West Side, one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the Washington suburb of Potomac, Maryland, each have about 0.2 percent of all the nation’s very high-income households. Rounding out the 20 zip codes with the most very high-income households are several in Manhattan (on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Midtown East, and Greenwich Village), the New York suburb of Scarsdale, Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Cupertino in Silicon Valley, the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, part of Houston’s west side, the Chicago suburb of Barrington, Princeton, a suburban area north of San Diego, and the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.”
 — Here’s where the rich people live. This will come in handy when the fires start.

Photo by Kiselev Andrey Valerevich, via Shutterstock

“Doctors who took an ultrasound of a man’s testicles to find out what was causing him pain were astounded to find a gaping face staring back at them.” You’d better believe there’s a picture.

“It’s like saying, take your penis and hit it with a hammer a couple of times,” says a urologist who is discussing a subject I don’t want to think about because, you know, taking a hammer to your penis.

Photo by Kritiya, via Shutterstock

“This fall, nobody’s more in touch with their inner Lisbeth Salander than the women of Brooklyn, terrorized by more than 20 sex attacks in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington over the past eight months…. And now, in an appropriately Swedish turn, regular women can channel their outer Lisbeth, too. H&M;’s 30-piece Dragon Tattoo line was created by Trish Summerville, the Fincher film’s costume designer, and distills the essence of her character into slightly less S&M-y; threads.”
 — Take back the night, it belongs to H&M.; (via)

“Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the brokerage firm….The recognition that money was missing scuttled at the 11th hour an agreement to sell a major part of MF Global to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global had staked its survival on completing the deal. Instead, the New York-based firm filed for bankruptcy on Monday…. The discovery that money could not be located might simply reflect sloppy internal controls at MF Global. It is still unclear where the money went. At first, as much as $950 million was believed to be missing, but as the firm sorted through its bankruptcy, that figure fell to less than $700 million by late Monday.”
 — Yesterday’s revelations about MF Global, the company with Jon Corzine as CEO, have gotten even more hysterically revelatory.

The Loon Goes Silent: Remembering Tom Keith

by Abe Sauer

On Sunday, October 30, 2011, for reasons yet unclear, Tom Keith collapsed in his home. Keith’s passing robs us of one of the most enjoyable personalities ever to occupy a Minnesota Public Radio studio. Most Americans who knew him probably did as Garrison Keillor’s sound effects guy, the one who lent Prairie Home Companion sketches that all-important extra dimension. Others — Minnesotans — knew him as Jim Ed Poole and Doctor Larry Kyle, characters he created for his hosting gig on The Morning Show, which he inherited from Keillor, and which he left in 2008.

I had an opportunity to speak with Keith when he agreed to a “high concept” interview of mine. Sad to say, I dragged my feet and we never completed the project and now we never will.

After his retirement from The Morning Show, I reached out to Keith to do an interview about his career. I was especially interested in his time as a U.S. Marine, something few of Keith’s MPR fans probably knew about him. But also, I wanted to challenge him “to do sound effects in print.” The idea, which now seems a lot stupider than it did then, was to get Keith to write down what he thought certain sound effects would look like spelled out. It was a total stunt. (Yet, it was not entirely without precedent, as Minneapolis’ City Pages once attempted to spell out a Keith sound effect in 2008).

But Keith was kind, patient and cooperative, writing back to me:

“Well, we could try. Usually the sound effect directions I have written in my script don’t always come with verbs. But if the door is to be closed forcefully my written direction would probably appear like (DOOR SLAM). Sometimes I might see (BIG METALLIC CRUNCH) which is a tough one because I don’t have a metallic crunching prop in my sfx kit so I just try and come up with something that sounds big and destructive. I could use a combination of crunching one of my Styrofoam plates (I use for breaking wood) and a vocal sound and my crash box filled with empty tin cans that I stick a foot in and stir up.

Let me know. This could work. Who knows.

Tom

Busy with other projects, I back-burnered the Keith interview for a few months because I figured, we can do it any time.

For nearly four decades Tom Keith was a figure in Minnesota Public Radio. In June, Keith was interviewed at length by the Prairie Home Companion website and he discussed how he came to work with Keillor:

I was the engineer on duty at that time of morning. I had never heard the earlier shows but I first heard about Garrison when I was taking a comedy class at the University of Minnesota and our class had to critique an article he wrote for The New Yorker. I told him about that and he asked me what I thought of the article and I said, ‘It was OK.’

The interview is a must-read for anyone looking for a comprehensive review of Keith’s career. It also includes numerous clips from his career at both Prairie Home Companion and The Morning Show. Keith’s advice for youngsters looking to do what he does: “The first thing I would say is to take off those stupid earphones and listen to the sounds of the world.”

Two years ago, I speculated about the death of Garrison Keillor. The voice of Prairie Home and Lake Wobegon had just suffered a minor stroke. If death was coming for anyone on the show anytime soon, Keillor was the most suspect. The man in the red shoes even knew it. Keith’s health was never publicly in question. Though many rolled their eyes at Keillor’s 2013 retirement announcement, Keith’s departure makes it more likely to happen. It’s always been a question if the show could survive without Keillor; it cannot be easy for it to survive without Keith.

That Keith’s sudden death came in a manner that seems to mirror a plot point of the 2006 Robert Altman adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion is not lost on the show’s biggest fans. Keith appeared in the film, more or less as himself.

Prairie Home Companion fans certainly have their favorite Tom Keith sound effects: the wind of his Alberta Clipper whipping down the plains or his revolver action spins from Guy Noir. Every Lives of the Cowboys episode was fleshed out by Keith’s work.

It’s clear that one of Keith’s own favorite sounds was of the loon, Minnesota’s state bird. Numerous skits not just used a loon call, but meta-enabled the loon sound effect. A 2009 skit focused on a “Fred Farrell’s Animal Call Warehouse” sale of outdated model of loon calls.

A year before that, Keith and Keillor did a memorable bit about Keith himself, with the latter quizzing the former on the difficulty of loon calls. It is an extraordinary highlight of Keith’s effects talents and his expert comic timing.

The show embodies, parodies and celebrates the private Midwesterners who never get all that high and never get all that low because life goes on and the chores aren’t going to do themselves. The show will go on because it has to. People are counting on it. But A Prairie Home Companion will never be the same.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He is also on Twitter. His book How to be: NORTH DAKOTA is out next month.