Bears in Mourning

It's as if in every generation of boy children there are a few who put their fingers in their ears during tellings of Goldilocks, filtering out the female elements in the story, until what they are left with is a fuzzy fable of furry sleepers, of rumpled beds and porridge.

Every happy period is a sort of childhood, and the last ten years have been a happy period for the Bears, in spite of everything.

So when I say that Victor was an absolute Bear, I mean that he had pale skin, heavy eyebrows and a startlingly dark beard, full but trimmed. No human hair is black, even Chinese or Japanese, and Raven Black hair dye is sold as a cruel joke to people who know no better, but Victor's came close. He was forty-two or three then, I suppose, and five foot eight, ideal Bear height. He pointed his feet out a bit, as if his tummy was a new thing and needed a new arrangement of posture to balance it.

We met in a bar. Under artificial light the drama of his colouring wasn't immediately obvious, and I mistook him for a German who had been rude to me in another bar a couple of months before. I suppose my body language expressed a pre-emptive rejection, which in the event Victor found attractive. After a while he came over to me and said, 'You win. You've stared me down. Let me buy you a drink.'

I went home with him in his old Rover to Bromley, an unexpectedly long journey, and a suburban setting that didn't seem to fit with the man who took me there. Later I learned that this had been his childhood home. When his mother died, Victor had let go a West End flat so as to keep his father company. It was a doomed gesture, as things turned out – one of a series – because his father soon found some company of his own. The companion may in fact have dated back to days before Victor's mother died.

It was late when we arrived at Bromley. I assumed we were alone in the house, in which case Victor's father was stopping out with his lady friend, but perhaps he was asleep in a bedroom I didn't see. If so, he slept soundly, and got up either before or after we did.

The bedroom was in chaos, but not knowing Victor it didn't occur to me to wonder whether it was an ebullient chaos or a despairing one. There was a big bulletin board on the mantelpiece, with photographs, letters and business cards pinned up on it, but there was still an overflow of paper and magazines. There was the inevitable shelf of Paddingtons, Poohs and koalas, and a single Snoopy to show breadth of mind.

Victor wanted first to be hugged and then fucked. He mentioned that this second desire was a rarity with him, and I could believe him. He was vague about the location of condoms. Eventually I found a single protective in a bedside drawer, of an unfamiliar brand (the writing on the packet seemed to be Dutch) and elderly appearance. I could find no lubricant that wouldn't dissolve it. I put it on anyway, to show willing, and lay down on top of Victor. I enjoyed the heat and mass of the man beneath me; I made only the most tentative pelvic movements, just vigorous enough to tear the dry condom. Then Victor remembered that he had some lubricant after all, under the bed.

Victor was apologetic about the confusion of our sexual transaction, but looking back I find it appropriate. He was both in and out of the world, even then, and he could summon up separately the elements of love-making, desire, caution, tenderness, but not string them together.

At some stage I noticed he was crying, and he went on for over an hour before he stopped. I hugged him some more, but I can't say that I took his distress very seriously. I didn't make anything of the fact that we didn't have a particularly good time in bed. Good sex isn't very Bear, somehow. I was already well used to awkwardness, lapses of concentration, sudden emotional outpourings. What could be more Bear than a fatherly man on a crying jag?

Bears are never far from tears, or wild laughter come to that. I have seen Bears cry just as hard as Victor did that night, beards matted with their tears, and be cheered up by a bowl of cereal or a cartoon on television. But of course Victor only stopped crying when he fell asleep. The curtains were open, and it was already beginning to get light. I hate sleeping like that – this Bear likes his cave dark – but I didn't stay awake long enough to do anything about it.

That was my only intimate contact with Victor, but the Bear community continued to revolve in its eccentric orbit around him. Everybody I met seemed to know him, and I ended up keeping track of him without making any great effort. Victor's father died a few months after we met, which I think was the great event in Victor's life. After that he had a succession of room-mates at the house – Bears, inevitably. They didn't stay long. Victor was hard going by then, even for Bears. But while they stayed, and while he stayed coherent, Victor took a fatherly interest in them, and would try to fix them up with compatible Bruins. That's a nice characteristic – that's a good thing to remember.

I invited Victor to dinner once about that time, and he phoned me on the evening arranged to warn me he'd be late. He never arrived. From friends on the Bear grapevine I learned that this pattern was typical.