My mind was already doing a series of complex alcohol-fueled mental gymnastics to determine whether I should be flattered or frightened at the prospect of being recognized in a crowd, and just as frail vanity was about to override my profound paranoia she finished her introduction by saying, “This guy is a cannibal!” She then proceeded to describe some details of my adventures in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, which for legal reasons we won’t go into here.
     It turns out that I’d met this young woman a couple of years earlier at a PLANET° release party and had shared the story — most likely in a bold-faced attempt to convince her to go home with me. (You’d be surprised how effective a good cannibal story can be in that department.)
     I mention this episode in relation to the Marco Polo assignment because it’s a perfect example of the power of a good old-fashioned outlandish travel narrative to capture an audience and anchor a place in people’s memories. (I can assure you, it wasn’t my sparkling personality that the redhead remembered; it was the oddity of a story about cannibalism. And it was not the person of Marco Polo that fixed his name in history but his stories about personally knowing the Mongolian Emperor Kublai Kahn . . . and yes, one or two stories about cannibalism.) I mention the redhead too because it serves to illustrate what my attorney always tells me to say: that veracity is in the eyes of the beholder. Whether you’ve actually eaten human flesh or not, people will believe what they want, and factual truth is an oft-times overrated element in really good adventure stories — especially when trying to convince an ignorant Europe that the Far East was not populated by dragons, monsters, and murderous Mongol devils but by a culturally diverse and exceptionally sophisticated amalgam of races and religions held in check by the military genius and the centralized economic authority of the world’s most powerful and progressive ruler, Kublai Khan — or, as in my case, when trying to convince an attractive redhead to go home with me.
     In any case, I have always thought of Marco Polo as the prototypical adventure travel writer. And with all due props to the father of Gonzo, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, for giving it a name, a face, and a soul, after reading Bergreen’s descriptions of Marco’s peripatetic nature, his compulsive curiosity, his maniacal self-aggrandizing narrative outbursts and his rumored experimentation with exotic opiates and narcotic concoctions, I have now also come to consider Marco Polo to be the Great-Great-Grandfather of Gonzo journalism…. Right or wrong, he was his own authority, and he was among the very first to write about his wayfaring experiences with other cultures from an emotional and experiential point of view rather than the clinical and clerical accounts offered by state officials and missionaries. Marco’s stories were stories of fascination not just fact. His Gonzo narratives literally changed the world by changing Europe’s perception of the East and his book served as the virtual Lonely Planet Guide of its day for later travelers like Christopher Columbus, who took it along when he went looking for a faster, cheaper, easier way to get to China and ended up discovering instead the land of fast, cheap, and easy.