Max

a little story

Max lived in Berlin and was my regular host while I floated around Europe without any real intention or money. We met in a sauna when I was nineteen and had accompanied a friend who was wired on bad coke and needed to calm down. When his ramblings, those of my friend, became too inappropriate for the early morning health types, I ushered him out, and Max giggled and came to make nice with us. I was grateful for the comfort and we spent the next few days together, swimming and lying around in his house, smoking hash and drinking. We once tried to have sex, sloppily and with love, before admitting to one another that we were both gay. He slept on a mattress on the floor, which would become littered with clothing and drugs and empty packs of cigarettes every time I came to visit. Recently he had moved from speed to heroin and it reflected in his physique which was now very chic and gaunt. The bottom of his flat stomach always showed at the hem of his tshirts. He managed to hold a job but never had more than ten euro to his name, his money sucked like the blood into a fit as soon as it entered his bank account. He was gloriously beautiful and had a shag of curly hair that was once blond but now was so matted and ashy it seemed more grey. Max was tall and very stylish, and when I came to seek asylum at his doorstep we presented to the world an enviable lavender marriage. Max was the closest I ever got to really loving a man, someone I could kiss as we drifted to sleep despite our ambivalence to one another’s bodies. All the same we were soulmates. We would drink gin martinis in dark bars, whose tenders were either old lovers or friends and would lavish us in free alcohol all night while we sat and rushed through topics, one after another popping to the bathroom to do a bump of the good speed that Max would buy special whenever I was in town. Once Max left me at a bar in Neukölln to score and came back bloodied as the dealer had been on a bender and had hit him with a bottle. He returned, cool, covered in blood and glass, came and sat at the table and lit a cigarette. I knew him well enough to know he would ask for my help if he wanted it and so I let him sit there, and we smoked and drank for an hour more before we calmly stood and booked a cab to the hospital. He had his periods of being the crazed man on the train, after switching to some synthetic drug or another. He had slept in stations and been fucked in alleyways for fixes. But to me he was my perfect man, my heart’s great lover. We linked together in an unbreakable chain of deadbeats and losers with no life plan except to get through each day without coming down. Sometimes I would come to Berlin to look after him, since I had all the money in the world coming from home and it felt good to care for him with it. My family would never know that their endless loans to me were being spent on his rent and our cocktails when we wanted to pretend to be sophisticated. On some such nights we would dress in what we thought made us look like the classiest people on earth; I would wear pearls and silk slips and he an old Hugo Boss suit a lover had given him; obviously enough we always still looked poor, forlorn and dirty. Nevertheless we would strut to a fancy bar with money from his work or mine and live luxuriously for a night, getting drunk and buying a bag of cocaine to lift our spirits. Eventually I would have to leave him again, my bag rattling on the cobblestones and giving him a migraine. These farewells were always bittersweet, as we both knew there was every chance the next time wouldn’t come. The truth was, I knew he would die. Someone that glamorous and bright had no shelf life. It was all too dull and too mundane for him. It meant that when the day finally did come, and I got the call from his sister, my heart actually lightened a little. I had been living in Mexico City, tanned and glowing, working as a teacher for about a year. I had saved some money and so I went on a trip to Berlin to say goodbye to my friend. I sat in the overgrown cemetery, where we used to sit and smoke joints and laugh and fall asleep as people came to grieve their losses, only this time it was my grief, and it was a light grief, as knowing someone so shiny and charming even for a short time made all the years I had ahead without him seem more possible.