I wrote this story in March of 2003. I remember being weeks late for the Rabid Transit deadline and treking over to a friend's apartment to write until 3 or 4am but I'd always end up watching at least an hour of CNN instead. My friend and his family were out of town. In fact they'd gone off to Disneyland less than a week before the Azores summit, less than a week before the invasion of Iraq.

"By the time you're done seeing Mickey we'll be up to our ass in war," I told him before they left.

He gave me the mail key and told me that he still had hope that we wouldn't invade. "There isn't the will for it. Nobody in America really wants it."

"People want it," I said.

"Not enough people," he said. "And they don't really want it."

"It doesn't matter what people want. It only matters what they can be sold, or what they'll accept."

Anyhow I watched the first missiles fall on Baghdad and then typed the following:


"It’s mostly a matter of the hand being faster than the eye," Scott says. "But also there are cracks in the rules. Not everything is always simple. It’s not all just cause and effect."
"So show me," I say.
And, after a bit more whisky, he does. Right there in the bar he shows me his real trick, over by the video poker machines. He takes out the newspaper headlines:

UN demands Iraq Dismantle Short Range Missiles as US prepares to Invade

Welfare Reform squeaks through without debate as Administration announces deficits.

Rhode Island Nightclub burns to the ground, 95 dead after metal band’s pyrotechnics unleashed

He folds them in half, and puts them in a deposit envelope. He folds the envelope in half and places it in the slot for the debit card into the ATM, and waits as the machine spits out cash.
"I usually get more for back than this," Scott says. "Today was sort of a slow day." He counts his money, it comes to just under five hundred dollars, and uses a hundred of it to pay for the whisky.