Me and the My Pillow Guy

Crazy-ass book cover design by Jason Farmand

Hello, hungry people.

I know what you’re saying: Make it stop, make it stop!

Sorry, but I can’t figure out how to do that.

So read fast and keep scrolling.

***

My old pal Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy, was on trial last week. And now he’s waiting for a jury to decide his fate in a $67 million libel suit brought by an executive of one of the ballot-counting companies Lindell trash-talked after the 2020 election.

(THIS JUST IN: Jury found Lindell guilty. He has to pay $2.3 million)

Despite all the damning testimony the plaintiff rolled out during the trial—and there was plenty of it—I’ll say this about MPG: He has always manned up about being a (former) crackhead, parenthesis necessary because he has displayed massive crackheady behavior in all-too recent years.

I won’t get into boring details of the trial—it was mainly lawyers pissing and moaning and performing—except to say that if Lindell loses, I hope the court leaves him with a little something in the bank.

Because Mikey-boy still owes me a couple thousand bucks.

***

Photo credit: Mike Lindell’s crack dealer.

“This is the photo of me I want on the front of my book.”

It’s the photo you see above, the face of a man who is either deeply troubled or highly constipated, a face that makes you want to run and lock all your doors right now. And put a My Pillow over your face.

“My crack dealer took it … the night he told me he would never sell to me again,” Lindell said, showing me the photo on his iPhone while we sat in his office just outside Minneapolis.

It was April 2016, the day after Prince died. Prince’s home was near the My Pillow headquarters and there were tributes in purple piled all along the highway.

“Prince loved My Pillows. I’m sad he’s gone,” Lindell said. “He could have written something for the book cover.”

Which were strange words to process. I had a hard time picturing Prince sleeping on a My Pillow, much less him and Lindell buddying up.

But what a great cover blurb that would have been, huh?

Prince writing something like: “Mike knows how to ‘Party Like It’s 1999.’“

***

I was there to sign an agreement to publish Lindell’s autobiography. It’d been ghostwritten by a writer acquaintance of mine. Lindell wanted to call it: “Against the Wind.”

Him being a big Bob Seger fan.

“Sounds too much like breaking wind,” I told him.

Me being not much of a Seger fan.

So, based on that lovely photo, Lindell settled on: “What Are the Odds: From Crackhead to CEO.”

***

This was at the height of My Pillow’s popularity, before Lindell became totally Trumpified and went all MAGA whack-a-doodle.

Looking back now, it was a relatively quaint time in our history wasn’t it? Just nine years ago. We didn’t realize how truly crazy things could get, did we?

I didn’t have any major qualms about doing business with the MPG. I knew him only from his cheesy, ubiquitous TV commercials, not his politics.

Besides, my writer acquaintance had penned a readable and compelling manuscript, the story of someone who had overcome all sorts of obstacles to become a gazillionaire.

And I was fine with Lindell throwing some of that money my way to publish the book.

***

“How many copies do they print of John Grisham?” Lindell asked me. “Or Stephen King?”

I told him I didn’t know exactly, maybe a couple hundred thousand on a first printing.

“I want two million,” he said.

I was doing the whole ka-ching, ka-ching thing in my head. It would have meant a lot of money for our little publishing company.

“Where do you plan to store all those books?” I asked him.

Lindell gave me a tour of his humongous assembly-line/warehouse/fulfillment center. He told me he was expanding and there would be plenty of extra room.

Still. Two million books? With each book clocking in at 500-plus pages?

“I’m guessing that’ll be at least 100 truckloads,” I told him. “Maybe we should consider a smaller quantity to start off with.”

We eventually settled on 500,00 copies. It marked the only time I’d ever talked someone into paying us less money. Which was still a lot of money.

And I kept thinking: Be careful. Or you’re gonna wind up holding the short end of this stick.

***

One thing Lindell insisted upon:

“This book has to be printed in the USA,” he said.

Our publishing company gets 80 percent of its books printed in China, 15 percent in Canada. We’d love to print more books in the USA, but:

• There are only a handful of quality book printers left here.

• The ones that are left charge way too much money. Even with today’s insane tariffs tacked on.

“It’ll cost you an additional 30 percent,” I told Lindell.

“I don’t care,” he said. “It has to be printed in the USA.”

***

So we put together an agreement, Lindell paid us a little money to get started, and we got to work on the book.

Complicating everything was Lindell deciding he wanted a hologram on the cover.

“I want it so that when you pick up the book you see me as a crackhead,” he said. “Then you turn it and it’s me as the CEO.”

I can’t recall that I had an appropriate response. I can’t recall that my mouth could even form words. But Jason Farmand, our art director, had something to say.

“That’s fucking insane,” Jason told me.

Consider the source, I said.

“Is he still on crack?” Jason asked.

Consider the source, I said.

***

After much searching around, we found a printer that could make a hologram cover.

It cost a chunk of change just to get the printer to create a sample. And it was gonna cost an unbelievable amount of extra money to print 500,000 hologram covers.

“At least another million dollars,” I told Lindell.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

***

Not long after that the FedEx truck arrived with five big boxes containing fifty My Pillows.

We planned to use them in a photo for the back cover.

“I want it to look like the pillows are raining down from heaven. Like God is showering us with pillows,” Lindell said. “Because God is behind everything I do.”

I wanted to ask: “Even the crack?”

***

My lovely wife and I test-slept a couple of the pillows. For one night only.

They weren’t awful, but we liked our regular ol’ pillows better.

Plus, I was having misgivings about doing business with a guy who was becoming a mouthpiece for the VSG¹ . And I didn’t want him sharing our bed, even if it was by proxy of pillows.

***

Weeks went by.

Lindell stopped answering my emails. He owed us more money so we could hire a photographer for the back-cover shot and pay the copy editor and send the printer a deposit for all the paper we would have to buy, tons and tons of it.

By this time, the VSG² had been elected to his first term and Lindell had signed on as one of his devoted acolytes.

Things were getting squirrellyer and squirrellyer.

And then came the phone call.

***

“I just got back from Mar-A-Lago,” Lindell told me.

Whoopee-shit, I wanted to say. But Lindell kept talking.

“And President Trump introduced me to one of his very good friends, a publisher from Australia, who says he’ll print my book for much less than what you’re charging.”

“Thought you said it had to be printed in the USA,” I said.

“It’s a much better deal to get printed in Australia,” he said, reeling off the numbers. “Can you beat that price?”

“No,” I told him. “I can’t.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m sure.” Because I was even more sure I no longer wanted any part of the deal. “And you still owe us some money.”

“No problem,” Lindell said. “Just send me an invoice.”

Which were the last words we ever exchanged.

***

I sent Lindell an invoice.

It wasn’t for a whole lot of money, just a couple thousand to reimburse us for what we paid the printer who made the hologram. Plus, a little extra I tacked on as a pain-in-the-ass expense in hopes of salvaging a tiny bit of profit.

A month later, I sent a second invoice. Followed by a third one.

Then I said to hell with it and wrote it off as a loss.

***

My wife and I got rid of the My Pillows we’d slept on.

We donated the 48 that were left to a homeless shelter.

I hope they’ll find it in their hearts to forgive us.

***

And you know how I started off this piece by saying if the jury in the libel trial finds Lindell guilty, I hope they leave him with a little money so I can collect what he still owes me?

I take it back. I hope they clean him out.

1. Very Stable Genius

2. Vladimir’s Staunch Groupie