I file onto Alitalia flight 649 — a direct flight from Rome, Italy to Caracas, Venezuela — groggy from the Wednesday morning dawn, irritable from the usual array of micro-inconveniences that comprise modern day air travel. My seat is 14L, a window. I get to my row and a short, pudgy Italian man in 14K pops up to allow me in. He's all smiles — one of those "morning people" I suppose.

He has a beach-ball belly, probably mid-60's, ear-length hair parted down the middle, with 70's-style, slightly tinted thick-rimmed glasses on. He looked like a Serpico-era Al Pacino that grew grey and rotund and forgot to change his clothes for the last three decades.

I sit. He retakes his seat next to me. He lunges over the armrest to begin talking to me, clearly breaching the invisible, unspoken demarcation of personal space between two airplane seats. He corners me with his small talk: Hello, where are you from? Oh you speak Spanish? Beautiful morning, isn't it? Are you on vacation? What do you do? Are you staying in Caracas? Oh how nice, I'm an actor.

Each word launches torpedoes of halitosis-laden air toward me; the man has possibly the most vile breath my lungs have ever confronted. I begin inching my head back farther and farther away from him, but the entire region is crop-dusted. He leans — no, invades — the invisible armrest-border into my territory, besieging me and my comfy 14L leather-chair empire, blanketing me with his esophageal stench and pleasantries; Markantinople is burning, burning with the stench of old man, ransacked and pillaged, subjected to wave after wave of non-conversation.

I retreat into my backpack and offer him a stick of gum. Disaster averted. I then counterattack by putting my seat back and nudging him off my side of the armrest. He's off-balance, chewing contently; the onslaught has abated. Then I make my move. I quickly follow up the seat-back jab with a combination right-hook of headphones in my ears and iPod on, and before he can gather himself, I blast the music and close my eyes. Uppercut.

It seems all is well and the flight will proceed as normal. But maybe 15 minutes later I feel a tap on my shoulder. I ignore it. The tap turns into pointy-fingered jab. WHAT!?!?! I open my eyes and zombie Al Pacino's face is hovering close to mine again, way over on my side — further, even — as he pantomimes silent words underneath the music. I pull my left earbud out, making every effort to not hide my irritation at him, I ask him the most angry Qué? I can muster.

More small talk. But this time it comes in cool mint.

Eventually, through Herculean efforts of passive-aggression and feigned sleep, I get him to stop talking and to (mostly) stop touching me. But he's ceded no territory. He's now spread himself across the armrest with his knee jabbing into my long thigh, the borders have been redrawn, the geopolitical tensions between 14K and 14L remain tense.

And as with any active border dispute, peace is a mirage, conflict is never far away. An hour passes. Awake and now eating, the Italian man, the Roman invader, the unrepentant Caesar, turns to me and reinitiates diplomatic communication. Am I married? he asks.

No, I'm not. Are you?

He was for fifteen years he says. But not anymore. He's "free" now, he says, extra emphasis on "free," — libré, he adds special accent to the end of the word for emphasis.

I offer a generic platitude in return: "That's great, it can be great to be single. "

"Yes," he says, "I can fuck whomever I want."

I try not to betray how awkward his last statement was, so I nod lightly and return my gaze to my food, my cold pasta suddenly mesmerizing me.

He leans over again, now launching an artillery of spittle and bread crumbs all over me, he looks me in the eye. The old bastard is serious: "True freedom is when you can fuck whomever you want."

Despite my past in writing thousands of words on promiscuity, dabbling in polyamory and defending the merits of casual sex at length, I somehow find myself utterly repulsed and speechless.

Then he put his hand on my