"A Pretty Tall Tale"
30 September 1999

Only eleven in the morning but I have tossed back two glasses of wine, three paninis, and visited 14 hotels. I'm still starving, and they're all full except the last one which had a "family suite" for £400,000. I asked about a student discount. The receptionist laughed a slow sorrowful laugh. Just what my ego needs in a city where my Spanish might as well be Portuguese.

Eighteen was my lucky number though. And £200,000 the price. No, I didn't buy a small house in Goleta. Simply a room with no circulation, a microscopic shower, empty mini-bar, and a couch that sinks to the floor under the weight of my luggage. Television that has replays of that 1969 Canadian snow storm and a fan that revolves slower than a Bourbon Street hoo...I mean...well...never mind.

The miracle though, was that while walking for five hours in a city where street widths are measured in marbles I found Matthew. A laugh, shriek actually, escaped my lips as we discovered we had been at the same bar for 30 minutes drinking Bellinis and ordering cheese and olives by the tin.

His story from Istanbul was dictated in that typical monotone, accented wildly with hand, foot, and facial gestures. The entire trip went smoothly except in Sarajevo, which is what he had expected.

Arriving drunk on Yukon Jack, wearing a Bigatti trench coat full of holes, and reeking of cigarette smoke (which he had traded for his guess t-shirt, a pair of Revos, and a Brittany Spear's autograph -another story entirely), he slithered through the inspection line like a jurassic slug inept at everything save its own survival.

From that point he only had to descend into the station and pull himself over to track 17. The problem was that a small party-gang if you will-of street thugs were holding back would-be passengers -bound for Venice- in protest of the NATO bombings some months before. A drunk, like Matthew claimed to be, would have had bottles of booze on him, or at least empty bottles. All these punks found on Matthew after a quick frisk was a black bag with a tiny label with the letters G-U-C-C-I. That was enough.

After a quick discussion he was carried down to the "cellar" (though not the same one Tito or Stalin used), where he was interrogated for a quarter of an hour before he broke.

"I love Disco!"
"Viva la France"
"Lenin was a GOD!"
"IMAC rules!!!"

He was so close but that last remark brought out all that seething hatred his captors had tried to suppress.

"IMAC?!?" the leader (he was later identified as the mastermind in a plot to corner the world's supply of beanie babies) screamed. The sequence of torture Matthew received is on the record but varies from source to source. It is rumored that towards the end he was made to watch Bill Gates corporate speeches with his eyelids taped up, while a dozen white mice ran round under his feet.

Released some short minutes later, and apparently placed physically on the train West, he arrived in Venice repeating only a strange sequence of syllables over and over:

WIN-WIN-WIN
DOES-TWO
ZERO ZERO ZERO
BY
WIN-WIN-WIN
DOES...

the mad innkeeper
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