It’s dark when the ferry makes landfall. I walk inland and stop in the first open restaurant I see. There is only one other customer present; an older man with a silver beard. He wears a blazer and a turtleneck. He is specifically himself.
I order a fish which is overcooked, and jot notes and watch the end of a news broadcast that I mostly do not understand. It does say that there was a marathon – half marathon? I’m riding context clues – over the April 25th Bridge (the Not Quite Golden Gate Bridge). The man in the blazer and turtleneck finishes his wine and leaves.
I’m about ready to head out, but the owner comes by my table – literally the only table ordering at the moment. He asks if I want to watch soccer (sím!). It’s another Portuguese League game, and thusly sloppy. But thrilling! The first goal is a screamer, rising into the net from outside the 18. We talk about it, and I ask the owner what his team is, and it’s Benefica, and Benfica and Porto drew in the last 24 hours – thus the significance of the game I saw last night – so it’s a tight race for the title. He shows me on my phone where Benefica’s stadium is. He tells me it’s not far, if I want to make the pilgrimage.
His mom – I think it’s his mom; I speak “yes/no/beer” Portuguese – stumbles a little in the kitchen. The owner rushes over to her, and she brushes him off, and he tells me, “Too much for her!” and they hug and laugh. Somehow, this results in me getting a glass of red on the house. Portugal is fucking awesome.
As I receive my glass, the table over chuckles. It’s one guy and three girls, which means that my odds are sensational for flirting successfully then fucking it up in the third act. They came in a little after Turtleneck left, and I need to be friends with them immediately.
The owner returns to pour me a shot of grappa. He pours it right into my empty espresso glass. One of the girls looks across the way and smirks, making a comment to her friends that I don’t understand. Contact! I give her an obvious, “the fuck problem do you have with me?” look, which gets a laugh from the table. I theatrically down my shot (note: do not ever take a shot of grappa from an espresso cup). I walk over.
“Sorry,” I tell them, “I don’t speak Portuguese.” I say this in what I think is Portuguese; but then, I don’t speak Portuguese.
The table loves it. They, it turns out, speak English. They’re from Madrid. We make introductions. The girl with the darkest hair and eyes asks me, “So, Sazerac, you want to drink with us?”
My brother once played a little tennis with a college letterman friend of his. My brother says he wanted to see what a scholarship serve looked like. Before they played, Varsity Blues stretched, and he immediately poured sweat: His body was so well-trained, it knew what was coming next.
This to say: when the Spanish girl with the dark eyes tells me I should drink with her people, I can feel my liver break a sweat.
The Spaniards are great company. They’re kids: still in or just finished college. Spanish occasionally flickers around the table, and I make loud guesses: “She said I’m cool, right?” “Listen, leave my mother out of this.” (About ¼ of these land.) They ask about me, and I end up explaining the thing about being a composer, and Tinto de Verano – the guy – says the word in Spanish is “Compositor.” (When he says it, two of the girls say, “Ah!”) This word fills me with love, probably because I am also filled with white wine to wash down the red I had. But also because the word is a perfect word: it is crisp and proportional and rolls of a ledge at the end. I try to explain this majesty and classical refinement to Tinto D; I try to explain the beauty – the illumination – wrought in this word; how the twirling language mirrors the dance of Iberian hills. He says, “Sometimes, the words are very nice.”
I ask him how he likes Lisbon.
“Oh, it’s great,” he nods. “They have these” – he puts his hand on an incline – “you know; ding ding?”
I tell him it’s “trolley.”
“Hmmm! Yes,” he is pleased. “They have these in Spain, but maybe forty years ago. It is here, Portugal, like Spain in the seventies.” If that’s the case, I was born in the wrong time. A whole life – not mine – flashes before my eyes: sangria on sunny, tiled streets; a loose paisley shirt; circular, blue-tinted sunglasses; cards in alleys; naps in the afternoon.
Eventually, we quit the table. The owner claps both his hands together, shaking them back to himself and slightly bowing. “You will come back, yes? And tell your friends!” I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t have many friends in the neighborhood. Zurracapote – the dark-eyed girl – leads us out. She has a place in mind. “It is not so expensive,” she explains. “They give us drinks, very cheap.” The Spaniards are on vacation, and scoped out this place – with the very cheap drinks – the night before. “It is Monday,” explains Zurra, “so not so many people, yes?”
The place is indeed empty. It’s a drywall cave with neon Heineken signs and sticky tables. We sit at one.
“You want to play?” asks Tinto D.
Since the Spaniards came into that first restaurant, they have been intermittently playing a card game. I’ve never seen this card game before. The cards are green, with pictures on the face.
Zurra explains, “The game is ‘Families,’ yes?”
Yes! They have served me a drink that tastes like Gatorade and Axe Body Spray™. If you drink it fast enough, you can’t taste anything. It’s starting to taste like nothing to me. Who wants to play some fucking cards?
“You must hide your cards,” Zurra admonishes me, as I wave them like a Japanese fan at the table. “The game,” she tells me, “is to have the most of all the family. You must ask the other players if they have the family, and if you are right when you guess, they must give up that card.”
“I want very much to kiss your face!” I say. Mercifully, it appears that I have not said this out loud.
I turn over the cards, and want less to kiss anyone on the face.
It turns out Families is bonkers racist. The families in Families are not kings, queens, and aces. They’re characters: groups of people. Groups of brown people. Brown people labeled “Indian” and “African” and “Chinese.” (If you’re about to protest that Chinese people aren’t exactly brown, tell it to the illustrators of Families.) There’s a “Hindu” family instead of an “Indian” family, because the Indians here are ostensibly from North America, and look like the grinning one from Cleveland’s baseball team.
Each of the families ranges in age from children to grandparents – pairs all the way up. You get to see a dash-eyed, mouth-breathing cherub with massive bucked teeth and an idiot grin mature into a dash-eyed, mouth-breathing pile of bones with massive bucked teeth and an idiot grin. The illustrators of Families performed rigorous research on each society here represented: every single character has a pot-belly and those bucked teeth, granted; but they’re differentiated by authentic garb: the Indian (from North America), for instance, has a bow and arrow, and the boy from China has a low, conical hat. See?
So, anyway, I play like a dozen hands of Families.
I am not proud of this. It’s just what happened. I mean, he who has not indulged a racist fantasia while drunk on the taste of store-brand Sprite and Sailor Jerry, throw the first goddam stone.
As a good white progressive, I do voice meaningless, performative opposition. “It’s so fucking racist!” I explain as I lay down another hand.
“You say this,” says Zurra, “and I wonder why? Why is it bad?”
I look at her the way I do when people refer to Justin Bieber as an artist. Listen: there is not a fucking Dutch family in Families.
The night gets pretty blotchy here. It is not contiguous: I see something, or speak, and moments later I come to seeing or speaking something else. Somehow, I’m out on the streets again, and it seems like highly probable that the bar has closed. I am talking to Tinto D about how beautiful Lisbon is. Then I am turning away as the girls scream at me. “Don’t look!” I am not supposed to be looking at them piss on the sidewalk. When they are finished, Tinto says that he, too, must piss on the street. I agree that pissing sounds good. Tinto, somehow, has already taken care of himself – it is entirely possible I was talking to him, loudly, the entire time he was taking a leak. “Just go on the wall,” he tells me. I tell him I can’t do it: I tell him that Lisbon’s beauty is sacred to me; that I cannot befoul those cobblestones smoothed like tile. He nods. I piss on the cobblestones.
Several minutes or hours later, the night ends: The Spaniards bring me in for hugs. I am confused, and I try to explain to the girls, “Wait! I was supposed to sleep with one of you!” Fortunately, I am not very good at explaining things, and what comes out is a sort of concert-cheering howl and the words “Fun night!” in different combination. One of the girls asks me if I’m all right to get home. “Pffft,” I explain. “I’ll be fine.”
I do not remember another step. I wake up in a bed, and it is the bed I was supposed to be in, and I have all my possessions, somehow. I also have a head which weighs much more than the rest of me, and I can feel my heartbeat in my teeth.
Running a dry tongue over these teeth, testing for structural integrity, I figure that this is a fair karmic price for playing Families.