Just turning 21 years old Lloyd fell in love with a guy from Argentina who was visiting the United States for the first time. He was a friend of Lloyd's classmate in a college film production class in Los Angeles.

Lloyd and his classmate, a girl who was studying abroad from Argentina, had just finished filming a pretentious black and white avant-garde student film called "Josef K". It was a silent film in which the titular protagonist wanders around a surreal landscape where he is haunted by visions that follow him and direct him on his journey. This leads him eventually to his grave where he looks up startled to see his name being inscribed letter by letter onto the tombstone above him.

Around that time an actor friend of Lloyd's classmate came to visit her and to see the United States for the first time. After being introduced, Lloyd and the actor from Argentina spent three months together in Los Angeles during the winter of 1993. Lloyd became his tour guide and showed him all the sights including spending two weeks driving the California coast between Los Angeles and San Fransisco.

When the actor from Argentina departed, Lloyd began to listen to Spanish language audio cassette courses everyday for hours to learn basic communication skills. He would walk 40 minutes back and forth to work and around Pasadena, California always with his Walkman on him as he tried to teach himself the Spanish language of his first boyfriend. Within 6 months he saved up enough money for a plane ticket.

Without fear or any concrete plan for what would happen next, Lloyd was on a plane flying from Los Angeles to Argentina in South America. It was his first time outside the USA and only his second time on an airplane. The 17 hour flight that transported him to the other side of the globe wasn't only far away in space but also somehow that Argentina of 1994 was existing in a different time.

Those first few months were an extreme culture shock that nothing else in Lloyd's life had prepared him for. He realized something quickly that was true in every country he would visit in the future. Everyone he met would made him feel so special and privileged to be from the United States. Everyone wanted to meet and talk with him about what life is like for someone in the USA. Everyone wanted to be his friend. The United States is like a myth to the people on the rest of the planet. Lloyd also realized, almost immediate, how he could use the language barrier between him and everyone else as a kind of disguise to hide his introverted, paranoid awkwardness.

"Let Your Mind Go and Your Body Will Follow."

🌎

Upon arriving in Argentina one thing became immediately clear... no one... absolutely NO ONE could pronounce, read or write the name "LLOYD". In Argentina Spanish two L's sound like JA and a Y sounds like JA. JAOJAD looked and sounded like complete nonsense to everyone. So in an effort to be better understood "Lloyd" became the phonetic and easy to read/write/pronounce version "Loid". And that version stayed with him the rest of his life.

The South American experience ended after almost 3 years because of his boyfriend's dramatic deportation at the Los Angeles International airport.