If what happened to Bernard could be traced back to anyone, it probably would be his grandfather, Heinrich. He was just too good to Bernie. When Bernie's parents died in an automobile accident, Bernard's grandfather took him in and raised him without hesitation and without denying the boy anything he needed. Thus, from an early life, Bernie trusted elderly men with white beards and gravitated to them for comfort.
Klaus Keller, who owned a clock shop near the square in Bamberg down near where the Regnitz flowed by, had been a good friend of Grandfather Heinrich's—and was of much the same age. When Heinrich died, Klaus took the nineteen-year-old Bernie in as an apprentice in clock repair. And Bernie trusted Klaus and was comforted by his white beard.
Bernie was a fair and finely formed young man. And Klaus comforted him. In time Klaus took Bernie into his bed on cold nights in the cold drafty flat above the ancient clock shop near the square in Bamberg, where, eventually, Klaus came to comfort Bernie closely and deeply. And Bernie, who had no one else but Klaus to care for him, was grateful and comforted and felt needed when Klaus embraced him close and filled him with his love.
When Klaus died, Bernie was barely twenty-four. He had learned enough about clock repair in his apprenticeship that he managed, if only barely, to keep body and soul together in the shop that he inherited from Klaus. It was a very lonely profession, though—and not one where a young men would meet many more young people.
There was a hole in Bernie's life. Since he had been a child, there had always been a gray-bearded man to comfort and protect him. Bernie missed that—and, in particular, he missed the way in which Klaus had shown how much he valued the young orphan, Bernie.
Not long before he died, Klaus had bought Bernie a computer and had helped him learn how to use it. Bernie found the Internet. And in those dark months after Klaus died, Bernie spent his lonely evenings exploring the Internet.
He found an Internet site named devoted to senior men, where, when Bernie had paid a fee to discover what lay behind the intriguing "Whitebeard" name that made him feel so comforted and mellow, he found, to his delight, that there were stories of young men seeking connection with something called "daddies" and nice-looking white-bearded men saying they wanted to be daddies to young men.
Bernie was a young man who felt the loss of several men who had been good daddies to him. He looked at the stories of all of these white-bearded men who were looking to provide just what his grandfather—and later, in a more intimate fashion, his mentor, Klaus—had given to him—back when he felt protected and comforted and needed.
Bernie decided he would put his story on this Internet site too, and maybe he would find someone as comforting as his grandfather and Klaus once again. He looked at the stories—which they called profiles—of the young men who seemed to have the most notes from white-bearded men, and he used many of the same words in his profile so that he might find someone to talk to as well. He had no trouble describing his body—which was some of what was required in the profile—because he did indeed have a very nice body.
He didn't want to mislead anyone, though, so he did admit that, although very well proportioned, he was quite small for his age—almost boyish—and he felt it only right to acknowledge that his penis was really quite small. Klaus had said he shouldn't be ashamed of that, though, that it was one of the reasons that Klaus loved him all the more—that he looked almost exactly like a statue by a Renaissance sculptor.
When it came to what Bernie would write that would tell anyone else the void he was seeking to fill from the loss of his kind and attentive grandfather and mentor, Bernie was at a loss for words.
In the end he just said he was interested in someone who would love him and hold him close—and, having seen how well it worked for other young men in encouraging older men to contact them on the Internet site, at the last minute, Bernie added "group and 1-on-1," whatever those meant. Bernie figured out how to add to his profile a picture that Klaus had taken of him in the park one day when he was very happy and then he pressed the submit button and went off to open his clock repair shop for the day.
Johan and Hans were gray beards, and very nice looking ones, as well. They were not all that old—Johan was fifty-five and Hans was sixty—but they certainly would seem like the grandfather type to Bernie. And they were just the type Bernie would find comforting. They were both tall and well filled out, but not fat really. And they were prosperous looking—and both had benign smiles—in the photos they put on a shared profile on the Whitebeard.com Web site.
They posted a shared profile because they were very good friends indeed and they wanted any young man interested in exchanging messages with them to know they liked to share. They put it right their in their combined profile—they liked to share. Bernie thought that was very nice and unselfish of them. It was good to share, he thought.
Johan and Hans lived in Nürnberg, where Johan was a banker and Hans was a lawyer. They saw Bernie's profile on the senior men's Internet site, and they were excited, because he was just the sort of young man they were interested in and Bamberg was not all that far away from Nürnberg.
They messaged Bernie to his Internet site account.
And Bernie, when he came upstairs into the flat after a day of repairing clocks and talking to almost no one, was delighted to see that he had a message in his account on the very first day—and from not one, but two, men who were much like his grandfather and Klaus. For the first time since Klaus had died, Bernie felt that someone else might exist who could comfort him and make him feel special.
In no time, Johan and Hans had convinced Bernie that he deserved a day off from repairing clocks and could think of nothing better to do with that day off than to come to Nürnberg and have lunch with his new friends at a little café they told him they were sure he would enjoy.
"It's a very nice café," Bernie said after he met his new friends Johan and Hans in a downstairs room on Jacobsstrasse in Nürnberg. "But I'm not sure I see anything special about it. Except maybe that there are no women here. Just a few young men—mostly sitting with older men. But it's a very nice café. It has a comfortable feel to it."
