John / Alex M.

My friends John and Alex may be cute - hell, they’re darned cute! - but they’re also just the wackiest guys I know.

They always have been.

They’re always the first guys in town to want to try out anything new. No matter how weird it is, they’ll be the first to have it or to use it. (And if the “it” in question’s a hot new guy, they’ll be the first to fuck it too.)

Just to give you one example, John bought a book about Princess Di.

For a few months after that he cut his hair like Di.

He started looking down at the floor and fluttering his eyelids like Di.

He even threw away his birthday gift from me, “The Bumper Book of British Queens”, which, having never actually opened it, he’d assumed to be about queens who sit on thrones rather than ones who sit in toilets.

And when he read about Di’s interest in colonic irrigation, he bought up so much rubber tubing from Mrs Halvorsen’s hardware store that none of the town’s gardeners could water their plants until next month’s delivery.

So when John and Alex called me over to their apartment one evening, I feared the worst.

“Well, Pinky”, they said. (I wish they didn’t call me that. Please don’t ask why they do.)

“We’ve got a great new toy.”

That worried me.

I remembered that their last “new toy” had been an enormous “Johan Paulik Love Tool - A Guaranteed Replica of the Czech Boy Babe’s Throbbing Love Stick in Durable Polymethalene (Non-toxic. Batteries not included)”.

That Love Tool had certainly needed to be durable in John and Alex’s apartment.

But this time their new toy was comparatively straightforward. A digital camera.

And it was even, they claimed, going to make them some money.

“I’m going to shoot pictures of Alex and we’re gonna e-mail them to modelling agencies”, said John.

“We figure if they ever need a model in this part of the world they’ll call us up and use Alex. That way they don’t need to pay to fly some guy all the way here.”

I bit my tongue. Alex was hardly Marlboro Man. More of a Mary Man. But I knew when to keep quiet.

I’d been called over, it seems, to document the project for their scrapbooks. When they were famous, they wanted to be able to look back at their humble beginnings.

I managed to keep a straight face.

Seeing as they were at the cutting edge of avant guard photojournalism (they said), Alex and John dispensed with expensive backdrops and lighting.

John simply switched on the camera and began clicking away as Alex adopted a variety of poses. I was pleased to see that today he’d given up trying to look like Princess Di - though he hadn’t yet progressed much beyond the Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

John instructed Alex to take off his top. He was clearly conscious of current trends in the modelling world. I noticed a pile of GQs on the coffee table in place of the usual copies of Homo Homes (“This month: a new look for an old friend - the born-again bidet”).

Actually, I have to admit, stripped to the waist Alex looked surprisingly good.

As he studied the digital images in the camera, John, too started to unbutton his shirt.

“It’s important that the photographer empathises with the model”, he muttered.

As he did so, I could hear Alex - the educated one - whispering “pour encourager les autres” in a voice of deep artistic significance.

The photoshoot continued and, inevitably, Alex was soon down to his boxers.