In the late '80s, ads for Domino’s Pizza featured a character
called the Noid. The costumed claymation creation — in a red
costume with bunny ears — was to Domino’s Pizza as Wile E.
Coyote is to the Roadrunner. Using various contraptions, the Noid
tried to delay the delivery of Domino’s pizzas, or make them less
than fresh and piping hot upon delivery, and was always thwarted.
Thus, the sales pitch ran, buy Domino’s and “avoid the Noid.”
The Noid was very popular — so popular that it had an extended
run by advertising standards and was turned into a hit
video game. Children dressed up as the Noid at Halloween and late
night comics cracked jokes about it. Even today, over a decade
later, a restricted search for the phrase “avoid the Noid” produces
1,000 hits on the king of all search engines, Google.
However, one Kenneth Lamar Noid was not amused. In 1989, tired
of being taunted by people for his last name, Noid held two
Domino’s employees in Atlanta, Georgia, at gunpoint in their pizza
parlor for nearly six hours (and forced them to make him a pizza)
before he surrendered to police. He was found not guilty by reason
of insanity.
Over the past week, it’s been hard for me not to sympathize with
crazy old Lamar Noid. Nearly everybody I’ve talked to has seized on
my odd last name to ask whether I might be related to Sen. Trent
Lott (Stupid Party, Miss.) and they won’t take a simple “no” for an
answer. It’s come up at bookstores, the video store, the bank, the
local supermarket and even during conference calls — to Canada! —
on my immigration status. I’ve started paying in cash at checkout
lines to try to duck the issue.
Such comparisons had been made before, of course. When I worked
in politics several years ago, people often asked me about the
coincidence. But this is the first time that the connection has
been made by non-political types. Another first: The question has
turned into accusation. Previously, it was an idle query: “Hey, are
you related to Trent Lott?” Now, the flippancy is gone and the
inquiries are much more in the vein of “You’re not related to Trent
Lott, are you?” (as they back toward the door). And they don’t just
want a denial of genetic resemblance — what distant relative of
Sen. Lott wouldn’t deny it right now? — they want it to
sound convincing. They want me to deny Lott three times,
and claim to be a life-long supporter of the NAACP, Jesse Jackson
and reparations for slavery.
At least, that’s what I think they’re after. Even the use of
“they” would normally strike me as unbalanced, but when your
grocer, bookseller and banker all pursue the same line of
questioning, you begin to wonder if dark forces have it in for you:
The whole event has probably given me a touch of paranoia. The
headlines, for instance, read like a bill of indictment to which I
feel compelled to respond: “Lott was ‘too much in the moment’” (I
wasn’t that drunk); “Lott fought to keep blacks out of
college frat” (Did not!); “Lott should go!” (Oh, shut up
already.).
The hell of it is that, in a very distant sense, the inquisitors
could be on to something. My branch of the Lott family is more of a
tangled vine, and it may even be an assumed name, but we don’t
know. My great-great-grandfather and his nuclear family moved out
West in the dead of night, severed all ties to friends and
relatives and took their reasons for doing so to their graves.
(As family lore has it — and in the Lott family, family lore is
never too far from the truth — they were either escaping creditors
or a lynch mob. In one exaggerated telling of the story, old man
Lott was, in fact, a horse thief, and this was back in the days
before the Supreme Court decided that hanging horse thieves was
cruel and unusual punishment.)
But now the name Lott, already loaded down with enough baggage
to sink a small fleet, has taken on additional ballast — all
because a senator with a particular fetish for shoe leather decided
to let it rip.
