I first saw him in the Kings Road, Chelsea, one unsuspecting afternoon. My bulging eyeballs zoomed in on that long blond hair, beautiful face, slinky, denim-clad body. He had a Doberman puppy on a lead and was accompanied by a wispy-haired guy about twenty years his senior. They didn't look like father and son. Lucky older guy, I thought. A few weeks later I saw him again, this time standing alone and a little tensely against a wall in the grimy concourse of Piccadilly Circus tube station. It was late evening and quite busy. He inhabited his own little magical space. I was an inexperienced picker-up of boys back then, in the early 1980s, and I hesitated. Was he as available as he looked? I noticed another guy staring at him on the point of a predatory pounce and I made up my mind. I stepped in first and said something romantic like 'Do you want some business?' He looked a little surprised and said 'What?' 'Oh, I'm sorry,' I replied, confused myself now and turning to retreat. 'No, wait,' he said. And that was that. Our relationship had begun.
On the train journey back to my terraced house in Wimbledon I was very nervous, still scarcely able to believe my good fortune in having netted such a gorgeous creature. I kept expecting him to change his mind and call things off. The earth didn't exactly move during the sex, which was decidedly one-sided in enthusiasm, but it was enough for me that I was naked in bed with someone I found unimprovably desirable. The slim, smooth, lightly-muscled body with its faint sweet perfume, the perfect cock, the sensational arse, the strong, prominent-cheekboned, blue-eyed face framed on the pillow by that wavy blond hair. My very own Teutonic god!
I saw him a couple more times in quick succession. His name was Steve, he was twenty (twelve years younger than me) and from Vancouver. His father was Swiss-German and his mother Italian. He had had to leave Vancouver in a hurry, but was vague as to details – drugs, local gangsters, police, all seemed to have been involved. The guy I had seen him with in the Kings Road was now in prison for credit-card fraud (his just desserts, I thought gleefully) and Steve was living on in their Chelsea apartment under threat of imminent eviction. That was no doubt why, after a little hesitation, he agreed to move in with me, accompanied by one Doberman bitch puppy.
In no time at all I had fallen utterly, giddily in love with him. It was a bit scary. I was aware that we were a complete mismatch by any normal standards. He was a devil-may-care, party-loving extrovert. I was an introverted, fearful homeboy. In those days I was running a not-very-profitable horse-race betting business from home (don't ask) and had lodgers upstairs to pay the mortgage. I was in no position to support Steve financially. He didn't seem to mind about that. In his brief time in England he had made some very wealthy connections – company directors, a record producer. Occasionally he would go to see one of them to top up his funds. I wasn't jealous. I knew he was not impressed by shows of wealth and found these people boring. After a long weekend in Barbados with the record producer he came back in a bad mood. Not only had he been bored, but angered by the guy's attempts to control him. Big no-no.
I had soon realised that the only way our odd-couple relationship was going to work was if I gave Steve plenty of freedom. In the daytime we would walk the dog on Wimbledon Common, play golf (badly) at various local courses or just hang out with friends (mainly ones he'd introduced) at home. We had a lot of good times. I became an unconvincing, part-time dope smoker – Steve was the expert, capable, I do believe, of rolling a joint in a force nine gale with one hand behind his back. In gatherings, perhaps out on the lawn, he was always the centre of attention. He could be outrageous and very funny. His pleasant, twangy North American accent was ever ready to turn into rippling laughter. I found it fascinating to observe the reaction of newcomers, male or female, for whom nothing in their reserved English upbringing had quite prepared them for this wild and glamorous figure. Eyes would widen in awe as all self-will drained from bodies. It happened time and time again.
The evenings were when Steve did his own thing. He was bisexual with a preference for women. As he put it himself, 'I like having sex with guys, but I need to have sex with chicks.' So off he would go to West End night clubs and goodness knew where else. I found this the hardest part to deal with. I knew I had become a sort of safe haven for him from the emotional turbulence of his life. He could be surprisingly vulnerable, the result I think of a difficult childhood - his father, a tough hockey coach, would beat him sometimes and one day, in his teens, he awoke to find his naked mother straddling him in an act of seduction. You get the idea. So he valued my calming influence. But there was a constant anxiety that he would grow attached to one of his (many) girlfriends and leave me. In the early days he was always home by midnight, but that gradually stretched out later and later until he might not return at all. I never gave him a hard time about it the next day, but he could see how sad it made me. On more than one occasion he told me with commendable honesty, 'I won't be here forever, Pete.' I would just nod and look away. Didn't want to face it.
So many extraordinary things happened in the eleven months we lived together that I can't possibly mention them all. Here's just one of them. I saw an ad for people wanting to make a first parachute jump. I, who can get giddy just looking over a roadside kerb, promptly suggested that we should do it. It was one of my increasingly desperate attempts to impress him and keep him in my life. We did the 'training course' which mainly consisted of flopping about on rubber mats in some sports hall. Easy-peasy. Then one Saturday afternoon we drove down to Ashford airfield in Kent for the jump. It was a beautiful, calm summer's day, not a cloud in the sky. We got kitted out (I still have a photo of it that makes me smile: me stoical-looking, Steve grinning, our trusty Doberman bitch by Steve's side) and awaited our turn. About four o'clock, when we were due off next, the lightest of breezes got up, but because we were first-timers it was decided to end jumping for the day. I was both disappointed and relieved. I was keyed up to go but, faced with that open hatchway at two thousand feet, could I have overcome my fear (correction: terror) and jumped? I have no doubt that Steve would have jumped. Would I have risked broken bones, a heart attack or something else injurious to my health in order to avoid looking like a total wimp before my beloved? I honestly don't know. I've often wondered if my guardian angel had a better idea of the answer than me and sent that puff of wind accordingly. In the following week I read a report of a guy who had plunged to his death when his parachute failed to open. For some reason we never got round to going back for another attempt.
Towards the end of our time together I felt I was heading for a nervous breakdown. All those nights lying in bed wondering whether he would return or not, the endless phone calls which were almost always for him, the way my own sexual needs were being more and more ignored. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have known that it was time to end this thing. I just couldn't do it. Any degree of unhappiness seemed preferable to life without Steve. Laboratory rats given only painful options become lethargic and depressed. I was becoming lethargic and depressed.
Then events took a hand. Steve went to Switzerland for a few days, intending to renew his visa upon his return to the UK. But immigration officials weren't playing ball. They didn't believe his story that he was planning to do a language course and refused him entry. I drove down to Dover with the dog in the back of the car, barely able to focus on the road ahead in my anxiety. There was a tearful reunion in an anonymous immigration room; we hugged, Steve hugged the dog. But there was nothing to be done. Back in Wimbledon I remember letting the dog out into the garden, where she sniffed about happily, while I sat myself down at the kitchen table and bawled my eyes out.
It took me two years to get over Steve's departure. I lost a lot of weight early on. Steve had a hard time at first too, settling into his new life in Switzerland. We exchanged letters; his were very sweet and (sort of) flattering. ('Thanks for everything which was everything,' he wrote in one. 'I will never find someone like you. No one else understands me.') I went to visit him a couple of times, but found it hard to cope with the presence of women he'd met in England. As time went on, I came to understand that I had been lucky. Our parting was inevitable sooner or later. Given my darkening mood in those last weeks it could all easily have ended much worse than it did. This way we had remained friends, I had inherited a soppy Doberman bitch that I loved to bits and I had made some lasting friendships through Steve that led to some unusual business opportunities in Thatcher's entrepreneurial Britain. Yes, pretty damn lucky all things considered.
I last spoke to Steve by phone in 1988 after my first trip to Thailand (where my addiction to surface beauty was to get me into a lot more trouble over the years). He had married a Swiss girl by then and had a young family. When I jokingly suggested that he accompany me on a trip to Thailand, he got all serious and said no, he couldn't do that, the wife wouldn't like it. I thought he sounded a bit cowed which surprised me – not the free-spirited Steve I remembered. He also sounded a little embarrassed, as if he no longer wanted to be reminded of his past. I never phoned again. To this day I've had no further news of him. An internet search brings up nothing. He still makes an appearance in my dreams every few months. In the dream he is still twenty, incredibly sexy, and returning from some adventure to visit me. The erotic promise is never quite fulfilled though. I wake up with a deep sense of yearning and sadness. It quickly fades as I get on with another day.
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Originally Posted by snotface
