Adrian K does himself

Mike

If you ever happen to venture up into northern Ontario you will find that the topography looks very much like Finland.  It also evokes other parts of Europe and Scandinavia.  Lots of birch forest and scrub and rolling hills make up the landscape.  I am myself half Finnish by blood, but carry an Estonian name.  It's not an uncommon mix.  Finnish is recognised as an official language in Sweden, where my grandfather worked in the merchant marine.  My grandmother's maiden name was German after that famous director of Metropolis, although she spoke Finnish and some broken English.  My father spoke Finnish too, but I do not.  Such is the plight of the third generation.

My middle school and high school were packed with Finns, who seemed to make the south end of my city the spot where a lot of them decided to settle.  My middle school was just a block of classrooms, so once a week on Fridays we were bussed to the local high school to take advantage of the expanded facilities.  It was there that I happened to see Mike.  I was 15, but he seemed to me fully a man, although really only a few years older.  He had a lot of dark stubble and wore a moustache in that 70s style, close cropped on his full lips, like one of Touko Laaksonen's men.  Being as hirsute as he was is somewhat unusual for a Finn.  They are not an especially hairy race, but I do recall a basketball game where he scored with scant time to spare and threw up his arms.  I marvelled at his hairy armpits.  I was a 15 year old voyeur.

The end of school Fridays were lines of students and rows of yellow buses, swinging in, picking up, and rolling out of the parking lot.  I was standing behind this tall, seemingly self-confident fellow, exactly where I wanted to be.  There is something about being tall and mature in high school that young men wear as a badge, and know it is an advantage, as fleeting as it is.  I do recall making a point of standing behind him in line.  It was early spring and we were in shorts.  His legs were beefy, tanned and hairy and I recall being shamelessly mesmerised by them.  There was a ripple in the line.  He stepped back.  Our legs touched, and I could feel the curly hair on his thigh slide against my own.  It was an evanescent thrill, split second, like the bristles of a brush, but I have never forgotten it.

My brother played drums in a band and Mike was a best friend to the singer, so he made a point of coming around to the farmhouse to listen as they practised.  I started to see him regularly and we became friends, more out of simple periphery than direct contact.  I remember that he seemed without guile.  He was also sweet-natured, exploding the myth I had in my own head that he would ever want to be on friendly terms with me, an awkward 15-year-old.  Unlike most older boys in high school, who used their advantages of age or strength against me, he was a gentle fellow and quite innocent in his own way. He liked beer and Rock, and had a shaggy head of hair.  I found later that he took a mechanic's certificate, at a college up in Timmins.  It's an occupation that, if you knew him, seems perfectly fitted to his personality.

Once I was in high school I saw more of him, at school and at practise in the basement of the farmhouse.  We had become easy friends, but I did not seek him out.  I knew I would see him around, and I did.  Then in the winter he invited me to a party.  I don't remember how I heard, whether I spoke to him on the phone about it or not.  I also don't recall how I made it to his house.  His parents were gone for the weekend.  I didn't have a license so I have no memory at all of how I came to be there.  I also remember the party ended up being just he and I.  There was a snowstorm that must have partly put a stop to things.  We listened to music and drank some beer.  His family had just purchased a Yamaha stereo system, and I do recall we looked it over and discussed its merits.  What otherwise from beer to music those hours were filled with aside from talk, I can barely recall.  The storm meant I was there to stay for the night, "It's no use heading back home," he said.

Then all of a sudden it was time for bed.  Although there were at least two or three beds in the house we slept together in his.  It was cold.  Finally, I was in my underwear and I threw myself on the bed.  My head was on a pillow and my arms were up, both hands holding the back of my head.  He jumped up onto the foot of the bed, his legs were just outside of mine as he stood over me in his t-shirt and underwear.  Then he crossed his hands to either side of his waist and peeled off his shirt.  There stood above me almost naked, the object of my secret affection.  That image of him, now bent by memory, was of fine limbs leading to a hairy belly and chest, and a flop of curly hair and stubble.  It was completely erotic and suggestive.  He was showing me his body, those tanned limbs I had lusted over.  He stood for a few seconds, let me take him in, then dove under the covers laughing and shivering.  He knew what I knew but dared not say.

Or so it seemed.  We chatted for a bit in bed, like a married couple.  Then he switched off the light.  I could have touched him in the dark .. or could I?  I wanted to.  How had this come to be?  Was I being set up?  He made it happen, surely?  All I had to do was touch him, lay my arm over him in the dark.  Something.  But I did nothing.  I was afraid.  I wasn't ready.

The next morning I woke up and he was making us breakfast.  We discussed this and that, and I asked to borrow a porn magazine he had shown me the night before, straight porn.  I rolled it up and took it.  I don't know how I got home, but I have a feeling he may have driven me back to the farm.

Months later in the spring I saw him for the last time.  He had finished high school and was going away to work, or maybe to college.  He had come to a practise and came upstairs into the farmhouse to use the bathroom.  I was at the landing as he climbed, and then suddenly he looked up at me.  His face was covered in bandages.  Possibly drinking, he had smashed his car.  His head had hit the windscreen upon impact.  He looked a little bit like the Invisible Man.  He sheepishly said hello and explained as I swore to Christ.  'That handsome face!' was all I could think to myself.  From then on I heard that he wore a beard most of the time, to hide the scars.

Saleh Helalat's amazing caboose

 

My afternoon with the Prince of Wales

 In 1971 I travelled on a jet for the first time in my young life.  I was just 8 years old and my parents (that is, my father) decided that we would take a trip to England.  He had been stationed in Bournemouth during the war, loading bombs onto Lancasters to drop in Germany, and wanted to see ol' England again.  It was March, still a cold month in northern Ontario, as we headed to Toronto to take a 707 via BOAC.

My parents had paid off their mortgage and had money to burn.  My mother in 1970 had started writing letters to possible relatives in Australia and England, hoping, by chance, for a hit.  All the letters from Australia came back 'deceased', but a cousin in England answered my mother and that started a decades-long connection of overseas travel.

It was certainly a different time.  I was in travelling clothes, a little suit and tie.  We all sported maple leaf pins so the British would know we were Canadians, and part of the Commonwealth.  My brother and I, upon check in, received a packet from the clerk at the check in counter.  I was honourably enrolled in the Junior Jet Club.  I got to meet the captain, get his signature in my logbook, and tour the cockpit.

After landing, I marvelled at the fact that flowers were in bloom at Heathrow, care of the Gulf Stream, and where we had left there was still snow on the ground.  My cousin lived in Virginia Water outside London, in a grace-and-favour called The Clock Case.  Past a gate and down a leafy winding road I saw rabbits racing in the green.  Virginia Water would later become famous as the spot where Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest, to be paraded before the International Court for his war crimes in Chile.  My cousin's husband had worked as a gardener and landscaper in Windsor Great Park, and upon his retirement the Queen had granted him the property as a tenant.  It was a common practice with the sovereign at the time.  He had passed away by the time we first visited, but she was there at least until the 1980s when I visited again as a young man during Thatcher's time in office.

Here I am hamming it up in front of Westminster

One day in those two or three weeks in England, my cousin told us we were going to take a trip to a polo pitch and it was sort of 'hush hush'.  Clearly, something was afoot as my father had rented a car.  My brother and I, with my mother, travelled in my cousin's Vauxhall.  My sister and my dad took the rented car.  When we got to the pitch nothing much was happening.  There were a few cars and horse trailers.  As time went on, more cars and horse trailers arrived.  There was going to be a match.  At one point my cousin got our attention after a very sleek Aston Martin DB6 peeled onto the grounds.  It was the Prince of Wales in the sports car his mother had given him on his 21st birthday.  No visible security.  Probably the reason the game was known to only a few.

To our surprise, Charles decided to change right there next to the field.  To my sister's absolute delight she snapped a picture of him shirtless as he was changing with her Kodak Duoflex 620.  I do remember she moved onto the pitch to get as close as she could as we were on the other side.

I don't remember too much about the game.  Horses went back and forth, mallets swinging as they went.  To be frank, as an 8 year old, I was pretty bored.  I think I recall my cousin saying that his team had won the match.  She also told us to keep our eyes peeled.  Charles, still on his horse, out of his helmet and mallet in hand, crossed the field and whacked the polo ball in our direction.  That was our cue as he trotted by, my brother and I scampered onto the pitch and retrieved the match ball.

If you know anything about polo, you know that a polo ball is made of soft wood and painted white.  By the end of the game it was pretty badly bashed and the white paint was chipped.  No matter, we packed it as a souvenir and brought it back to Canada.  It ended up moving around the farm as the decades passed.  Finally, it was in the barn, having probably been packed with other things that were too much for the house to store.  By the time I was in university all the paint had peeled off, so one Sunday I tossed it into the sauna fire.  A practical end to it I thought, and completely without any kind of republican sentiment.

Here he is the same year I saw him play.  This may have been taken at another match, as a horse trailer is apparent in the background.

Juliano Cazarré

See him unzip his trousers here: JC