My mother married young; I was born when she was only 18. Her younger brother was only 6 when I was born. We lived only three doors away from mom's folks, and my uncle was like a god to me. When I was 9, he was 15, and kayaking in the Pennsylvania mountains, and shooting rats at the Doylestown borough dump. He was the star on his high school baseball team, an enormously talented second baseman, and I often went to his games. But he also was the first trumpet at the statewide youth orchestra. He was an eagle scout, and he almost never needed to study, and yet wound up as valedictorian of his class, and got virtually perfect SATs. He was enormously popular, and always the center of a group of the 'right' kids at his house. He was president of his class until his senior year when he served as president of student government. He always dated the most popular and beautiful girls, who virtually hung all over him.
He won a baseball scholarship to Stanford, and during his college years I saw much less of him than when he was still at home. But for years and years we had always had a wonderful relationship. As a youth, he regularly babysat for me and my little sister, and we always loved it. And I always went to him when I needed an idea for a book to read for a report or a social studies project and he always had a great suggestion, just perfect. He always found time to play catch with me, and often when I had my own friends over, he'd sometimes show up and make a big fuss over me, tousling my hair or giving my some little present like a notebook or a keyring or a baseball. My friends were in total awe of him. As was I, for to me he was like a god striding the earth. It didn't hurt that he didn't have any brothers of his own and that I was his only nephew -- and that in fact I was named for him: He was Mike, and in the family I was Little Mikey. And of course he knew that I worshipped him.
But, really, how could I not? In addition to being wonderfully talented in every department he was impossibly handsome. He'd always been really good looking (an album full of photos from when he was a kid shows that he was always a cutie at every age), but as he grew to be an adolescent he really came into his own. He early grew to be six feet tall, and thanks to great genes and working out he developed a wonderful mesomorphic body, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, great legs, and his arm muscles had muscles on them. His abs were six-packed, and his pecs were imposing, large and defined. His eyes were, well the only name for it is azure; and he had long curling lashes. He had a Tom-Cruise nose, and a square chin, and, yes, killer dimples. His medium blond hair was in loose curls. And he was very hairy. Lots of young guys have very hairy legs and forearms, but he was remarkable in this respect. His limbs were thickly covered in golden hair, every year bleached almost white by early summer. But he was precocious in developing a mat of dark-blond, almost light brown chest hair, thickly covering his pecs, with a wide trail running down the center of his belly to his navel and on beyond.
During his college years he worked every summer, his first couple of years as a guide and horse wrangler at a dude ranch in Colorado; and in later years he got great summer jobs with software developers. He excelled in his computer engineering course of study, and he came to be a great favorite of his professors. Because he went to school clear across the country, I didn't see him often during his college years, but whenever he came home, he'd specially spend time alone with me, maybe taking me on a hike or taking me down to Philadelphia for a Phillies game. All my friends knew him and admired him. And during the school year he'd often drop me an email or send me an interesting web page he'd browsed, or a lunatic joke, or give me a phone call from time to time.
It wasn't surprising that he found it easy to befriend me. As a matter of fact, I was a great deal like him, and followed in his footsteps to a remarkable degree. Like him, I excelled in school, and was always at the top of my class. In the autumn I played wide receiver; forward in winter, and in spring, consciously emulating him, I fought for and easily won the second-base job. I didn't play the trumpet, but I too was selected for the state youth orchestra as first seat trombone. And like Mike, I was an eagle scout in the his old troop. I had classes with a lot of his old teachers, and of course they all remembered him, and repeatedly referred to him with friendly stories, and often asked how he was doing. Like Mike, I was an effortlessly popular kid, and like Mike I was best buddies with the most popular guys in town and enjoyed dating the most beautiful -- and interesting -- girls in my school.
Physically, I bore a very strong resemblance to Mike. By the time I was 15 I was an inch taller than him, and while I had the same general build as him, it took me a while to catch up with him in general muscular development: but I eventually would. In little ways, like our hands and ears, we were absolutely indistinguishable. But unlike Mike's deep azure eyes, mine were the color of cornflowers; and instead of curling medium blond hair, mine was straw-colored and floppy. And while as a highschooler, I wasn't yet as hirsuite as he, my arms and legs were almost as hairy as his, and prolific golden vellous hair prefigured the thick mats that would come in time to garnish my chest and belly, just like him.
When he graduated from Stanford as a computer engineer, he got a job he loved, with a big bonus and big salary at a software firm in Sunnyvale. And he continued dating Alice, his steady girl during his last year and a half at Stanford. He had brought Alice home a couple of times, and I was smitten by her: who wouldn't have been? She was a golden, fabulous California girl, with lots of brains and a wonderfully sweet personality. We hit it off immediately, and my girl Cassie even got more than a little jealous!
When Mike was 24, he and Alice were engaged to be married in her home town near San Jose, and Mike asked me to be his Best Man. After the wedding they were to move into a good-sized townhouse, and just before the wedding he flew back to Pennsylvania to pick up a truckload of furniture -- including several family heirlooms and antiques -- to furnish their new place. Mike invited me to go drive across country with him, sharing the driving and keeping him company. I needed to get out to California for his wedding anyway. And Mike had put in a good word for me with his old bosses as the dude ranch, and after the wedding I was to spend the rest of the summer working in Colorado. After the wedding I?d fly from San Jose to Denver, and one of the hands?d pick me up there.
For me, Mike was more than ever a god. A more perfect guy you couldn't imagine, and for me, on the brink of making college and career decisions, it was the best of opportunities to get his advice on a million things. And just to shoot the shit with him was like the best times in my life. But it wasn't a one-sided relationship. Yes, he basked in my admiration, my worship, but he had not only a deep-seated affection for me, I know he found me amusing and fun to be with. We shared was the same sense of humor and taste for irony. The hours spent with him were the most golden in my life.
We planned to leave on Friday, right after I got out of a long-scheduled dental checkup and cleaning, for what was planned as a five-day drive across the country. Because I was fully scheduled, Mike wound up packing up almost all the furniture into the rental truck himself. I only helped with a couple of awkward pieces at the end. Due to our late start, we only got as far as Clarion, PA, before we stopped for the night at a roadside motel. After a quick meal at one of the franchise joints down the road, we went back to the motel, and took our bags into the room, outfitted with two queen beds.
After all the furniture moving and driving, Mike opted for a warm bath instead of a shower. After a few minutes, he called to me from the tub and asked me to bring the atlas so we could plan our route the next day, because we had several options, not wanting simply to take I-80 all the way across country. So I joined him in the bathroom, taking a seat on the john, and we discussed the distances and routes. And I really enjoyed taking in his gorgeous body, so perfectly proportioned, so powerful, so extremely masculine. Of course I had often seen him in nothing but brief, tight athletic shorts, or a towel around his waist, or occasionally a brief view of him in the nude in some incidental situation, but this was different, really drinking in his perfect body, covered with hair, now wet and matted densely on his chest, his belly, his arms and his legs, with a lock of wet blond hair falling across his forehead, and the stubble of a two-day beard erupting from his chin.