I swung by Schatz’s warehouse, just to have a look at him. Not just that. He’s fun to be around, and there is always the chance of hearing a good story.
I found him in the Will Call office. It is an oblong room furnished with a steel desk, a duct-taped vinyl couch, a Mr. Coffee machine, two file cabinets, a broom, and a dustpan. Like a submarine, it lies entirely enclosed on the ocean floor of the warehouse.
“Mack!” he cried, when I walked in. He finished a few keystrokes on his laptop, then pushed the wheeled chair back. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I’m not hard to find.”
Schatz thought a moment. “That’s true.”
In contrast to the drab office, Schatz glowed. His gray hair and beard were carefully trimmed. He wore tan chinos, burgundy loafers, and a white dress shirt of heavy cotton, unstructured, rolled halfway up his tanned forearms. Schatz would never use a tanning bed. How one maintains a tan in March in a place colder than Iceland is a mystery.
We bumped elbows. The new handshake. Offering me coffee, he poured what looked like steaming motor oil into his own cup. I declined. “I’m thinking,” he said. “I should do something nice for you.”
“For me?”
“Take you to lunch, or something.” He sipped, wincing pleasantly. “You made me quite a bit of money.”
“I did?”
“You know that fellow Lars, at MSP News?”
I blinked rapidly. “Who?”
“Lars Abernathy. You talk about him a lot.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Well, I stopped at his office.”
“John, why in the world would you do that?”
“Settle down, Mack. On a bid list, I saw MSP News buying furniture. A lot of it. So I made a sales call. Fabulous building. You could see they like nice things. The receptionist blocked me, of course. So I asked for Lars. Threw your name into it, mutual friends and all.”
“You saw Lars.”
“He came down immediately. Hustled me right into the Chief Executive’s office. Then ran away. The CEO and I really hit it off. Splendid woman. I actually had dinner with her. Long story short, she ordered twenty-three Aeron chairs and two solid mahogany conference tables. I tried calling Lars to thank him, but he’s never in. That’s one hard-working reporter.”
“That’s one way to look at it.” I absorbed all this. Putting two plus two together, I started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“John, he must have thought you were someone else. Someone dangerous.”
“Why would he think that?”
“I’ve been trying to get an assignment, and fibbed a bit. I told Lars I knew a high-ranking official, someone looking into the Minneapolis council, the protests, media bias, that sort of thing. He thought you were that guy.”
“He did look a little nervous.”
“Believe me,” I said. “He was.”
By now we were both laughing. Then Schatz had a question. “Do you often lie, when you’re going for a sale?”
“I prefer the word exaggerate. Have you ever exaggerated, John?”
He considered this. Smiling, he had his answer. “Never.”
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com