Kinemania: A Postcard from Lisbon

September 2005: Unannounced, I drop everything and board a flight from Lisbon to New York, alienating several new Portuguese friends in the process. The idea was to rekindle a guttering relationship whose vital fuel had long since flickered out. Months before, just prior to the Yemenite installment of our loveless world-gadding, we had fallen in with a Portuguese photographer named Tiago. He held out the prospect of hospitality in his home, inviting the two of us to stay with him in Lisbon once he had completed his world circuit. He was a warm and genuine person, and his offer was taken in earnest. My relationship soured formally in the interim, and I ended up making my way to Portugal alone at the beginning of August. Tiago was not yet there. He had expected to be home around then, but had been held up in Panama in a bid to conquer a fellow wanderer's heart.

When Tiago learned that I was in Lisbon, he arranged for me to be shown real hospitality. Within a few days, I had a little sleeping nook arranged in his friend Silene's apartment. A few days after that I shared a meal of bacalao with his mother and brother, and was given the keys to his old red Peugeot. I was speaking Spanish to everyone and was making myself understood. Silene took me places, introduced me to people. She was a very generous person. I liked her, but refrained from complicating the situation with advances. After I'd been in her apartment for a couple of weeks she was called to the south of the country on a film shoot. I remember being alone in the apartment, throwing beer after beer down the hatch and sensing abysses opening up all around me. For all the hospitality, I felt only the emptiness of one aimlessly adrift.

I had maintained some sputtering contact with my ex-girlfriend through this time. She, too, was desperate and adrift. I do not know precisely what it was that drove me to re-alloy our two miseries. One day I simply packed up my things, left a note of thanks on Silene's kitchen table along with Tiago's car key, and hailed a cab to the airport. I remember the driver assuming I was a Ukrainian laborer as the car traversed the sad, sundrenched scene. As circumstance would have it, Tiago was passing through New York when I got there. He made a show of being happy to see me, but I could see that he was puzzled and genuinely hurt by my move. It was an asshole thing to do, he said, but maybe it was the right thing for you. Quite a double edge. After he returned to Portugal, it did not take long for him to sever ties with me. He used something I'd said to one of his friends in an unguarded moment of revekry as a pretext, but I'm sure it had more to do with my ugly rejection of generous hospitality. This was the inglorious apogee of my kinemania, to mint a new clinical term. It was not just a matter of potential catharsis or grace this time. This time it cost me dearly: Two friends and the respect of everyone in their circle. I have vowed to make my deficiency whole by offering unconditional hospitality whenever I can--even if it results in the same disappointment experienced by my gracious hosts in 2005.