Quitting Time 

What finally broke his spirit was a love song. As we all know by now, the normally irrepressible Jason Chaffetz—the curly-haired former placekicker and crusader against all forms of nakedness—will not run against six-term senator and Washington monument Orrin Hatch.

The announcement took everyone by surprise. Under the glare of TV lights, with cameras clicking, a pale and disheveled Chaffetz told his crestfallen supporters that challenging Hatch would eventuate in a “multi-million-dollar bloodbath” (The Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 22, 2011).

City Weekly has learned that money had nothing to do with it. The tea party faithful and other true-believing loons had pledged their purses along with their hearts to ensure the defeat of the eternally youthful Hatch at the chubby hands of the cherubic Chaffetz. He had plenty of dough, did Chaffetz. It was not a lack of lettuce that killed him, but a surfeit of love, as we shall soon explain.

In the early morning hours of Aug. 19, the boyish Chaffetz was rousted from his cot in his congressional office by masked thugs. (Our thrifty representative saves money, which he pays no taxes on, by bedding down, at taxpayers’ expense, in his office and washing up around the corner in a secret congressional lavatory.) Chaffetz had apparently ignored a “message” he had found a few days earlier: At the foot of his cot when he woke up was a bloody football punctured by an icepick.

Unlike many of his congressional compatriots, Chaffetz does not sleep in the nude, thus depriving the goons of the pleasure of seeing him naked. (It is a well-known fact that TSA officials spend a substantial portion of their waking hours conspiring to get Congressman Chaffetz into an airport body scanner, where, he has told us, “They want to see me naked.”)

Because they were wearing masks, the identities of the thugs are not known at this time, though intimates of Chaffetz suspect they were TSA officials in the employ of Sen. Hatch, who, as we shall see, was behind the raid.

Congressman Chaffetz was hustled off to one of many secret chambers in the Capitol, where he was subjected to several days of torture that would have done in a lesser man within a few minutes. Although preternaturally youthful Hatch—it’s all those vitamin supplements he takes—denies involvement, sources tell City Weekly that the particular room in which Chaffetz was roughed up is a favorite destination for Hatch, who uses the Spartan hideaway for guided meditations and deep-tissue massages.

The Hatch team was confident that Chaffetz would crack under the first round of torture and agree not to challenge Hatch. Young Chafe-Itch, as Hatch playfully calls him, was forced to stand inside a body scanner (still wearing the BYU warmup gear he uses as sleepwear) for several hours, while thugs disguised as TSA officers tittered at detailed X-ray images of his naked body. Despite the humiliation, Chaffetz stood fast, even maintaining the arms-to-the-square position required of body-scanned air passengers.

“Say uncle,” the torturers screamed, but Chaffetz would not capitulate. “Say uncle, and let Uncle Orrin stay in the Senate!”

Hatch’s minions next stuffed Chaffetz’s mouth with hundreds of vitamin pills. But to no avail. He still wouldn’t say “uncle!” Desperate to bend Chaffetz to their will, the torturers next subjected him to a form of water torture, a diabolical scheme in which the unlucky victim is forced to drink exotic fruit juices said to increase virility. The torturers didn’t know that the peppy young congressman is, like Hatch, a great advocate of healing juices and holy snake oil (he owes his complexion to liberal doses of Nu Skin, for which he once worked).

As a last resort, the operatives played love songs penned by Sen. Hatch, thinking that no one could listen to the tunes for longer than three seconds. But Chaffetz toughed it out, even though he was writhing in pain.

“Say uncle, say uncle!” Hatch’s stooges turned up the volume, careful to wear protective earphones to keep the love songs from breaching their brains.

Thinking all was lost, the downcast loyalists turned off the music and began to shuffle out of the room. But then from down the hall came a distant warbling. “Here I come to save the day!”

It was Uncle Orrin. He pulled out his sheet music and began to sing his most famous song, “Don’t Turn Your Heart Off, and I’ll Turn My Heart On.” Chaffetz immediately cried, “Uncle!” And the rest is history.