The inventor: Sexual misadventures with an eccentric German engineer

How a hunk in a hi-vis stole my heart... until our differences proved too great

2011

I walked past your shop in the cool part of Munich - you know, the kind of area that every major Western city has, rough around the edges with a hodgepodge of independent stores, artists’ studios, gay bars and immigrant-run small businesses like laundromats and internet cafes, but on the cusp of irreversible gentrification. It was late evening and already dark, but you were at your desk behind a Macbook, your bearded face illuminated by its glow. I thought you looked cool and sexy, like the kind of quirky urban creative who’d probably never take an interest in me even if he turned out to be gay. Then a week later, after I’d returned to my own city, we saw each other on a dating website… and that’s when it started.

The next time I was in Munich, you invited me to stop by your store. You served me a slice of German cheesecake, and we sat and drank coffee at a table fashioned out of a triangular metal road sign. From the inside, the shop looked even more eccentric than it did from the outside - I didn’t understand what it was or what it did, as the interior was mostly bare and there were no products on sale apart from a few odd items of second-hand furniture and reclaimed junk haphazardly arranged as a window display. It was the type of shop that could have feasibly been run as a weekly flea-market stall, not as a going concern in an up-and-coming area.

You told me you lived in the shop, in a small bedroom in the back, and that the space had a toilet and washbasin but no shower or bath, so when you needed to bathe, you went to the local public baths - a beautiful century-old building located nearby. I was taken aback by this, but I was also aware of how many apartments in older European cities were built without bathrooms; that’s why a lot of Copenhagen residents have a shower in their kitchen. And I knew the public baths also dated from an era when they functioned as exactly that. Certainly you never had any hygiene issues any of the times we were together.

The more we talk, the more it comes out that like me, you neither want nor enjoy casual sex and you’re looking for something more. But our connection tails off, partly because I don’t want to pursue anything with someone who lives in a shop and has no bathroom. Later, you often commented on how nervous I was when we first met, as we sat there talking in the shop window. You were right - I was self-conscious and feeling out of my depth trying to navigate gay dating small-talk in my second language. Certainly my English accent always charmed and amused you. But you didn’t really do anything to help me fill those awkward silences.

2013

You’ve given up the shop and now live in a nice rental apartment (with bathroom) in the same part of town, sharing with an elderly female artist who you don’t get along with very well. We meet again and things get a little more intimate. Perhaps precisely because it was impossible before, we end up in the shower together. We realise we share one or two kinks, and that there are things neither of us has tried before that we’d quite like to try with each other. You tell me that your professional background is in electronic engineering, and that for most of your twenties you ran an electronics startup employing a dozen or so people, but when you were 29 you invented and patented some kind of component that made you a millionaire and you haven’t worked since. Instead, you do public art projects with a couple of straight friends, like getting people in the centre of Munich to spontaneously form a human smilie. For your next venture, you’ve bought an abandoned nursing home in former East Germany and you’re going to transform it into a commune. You’re a great kisser.

You come to my city to see me, and it’s the best weekend ever. We barely leave my bed, which at one point we break, to mutual hilarity. We make each other’s dreams come true. You’re probably kinkier than I am - hell, you brought your own straitjacket with you - but as long as we’re both having a whale of a time it’s no big deal. The fact that neither of us is particularly interested in penetrative sex, and that we’ve achieved such playful intimacy largely without it, seems like a huge plus. I love your Bavarian lilt, the way you can get away with saying ridiculous sentences like “wenn i mit meim Papi in die Berge gehe”. We have ice-cream in the city square. When it’s time for you to leave again, you tell me you don’t feel like going back to Munich and you might drive to Belgium on a whim instead.

The next time I see you, you’re wearing a full orange hi-visibility jacket and trousers - not because you’re a utility worker now, or even as part of an art project, but because it’s another one of your kinks. At first I think it’s a humiliation thing, that you get a thrill out of people assuming you’re a garbageman. But it turns out it’s more sensory in nature - you explain that you’re aroused by certain textures and materials, the way they look, feel and smell. I ask you not to wear it next time I meet you in the city centre, and you don’t. We have a few more great weekends and day trips together, then lose touch again when you leave Munich and move into the derelict nursing home.

2014

“I miss you.”

I’m going to Berlin anyway to see friends, so when you get in contact with me saying that we had great times together and you’d like to see me again, it’s an unexpected bonus as I’m already heading in your direction. And those three days we had were great… until they weren’t. Amid everything else that happened, my most enduring memory is of you being interrogated - berated, in fact - over your taste in music by a hipster guy we fell into conversation with late one night on the way back from a bar. He’s convinced that you must be Problematic because you listen to a particular rock band. I know that you’re not far-right or far-left, that you like the band because of their music and because they sing in a similar Austro-Bavarian dialect to the one you grew up with. The hipster guy’s girlfriend looks really bored.

In the hotel bathroom, we strip naked and cover each other in wallpaper paste, then make love in a pool of methylcellulose goo. You love sensory experiences like this: subsumed in a liquid world, with our senses of touch heightened, the overall effect is akin to sex in a floatation tank. Later, once we’re clean and dry again (and with the bathroom fully rinsed down), we move back to the bed, where somehow I make you come just by kissing you deeply and intensely for what feels like hours in complete darkness. You tell me I’m the best kisser out of every guy you’ve dated. We both feel a post-coital euphoria that I have rarely felt since.

The next day we have lunch at a Very Cool Cafe, then picnic and cuddle in a park full of other young couples doing exactly the same. I guess I’m living the Berlin lifestyle. This city is the biggest hipster magnet in Europe, and it’s starting to become overwhelmingly so in a way that I’m not sure I like anymore. I remember how much I loved coming to Berlin in the 2000s when it was cool but not too cool - seeing the sights, spending hours in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, catching undubbed English-language films at the cinema on Potsdamer Platz, walking until my feet blistered. Even then, though, my favourite thing to do when in Berlin was get out of it for the day - by taking the 2-hour direct train to Szczecin, Poland’s seventh largest city, which had a completely different vibe: architecturally beautiful but working-class and completely non-touristy. Authentic, not “authentic”; the antidote to Berlin and its hipster colonists.

On our last night, we sit on a bench near an ice-cream parlour in Berlin-Schöneberg that was the target of a “kiss-in” by gay activists after a waiter was accused of refusing to serve to a same-sex couple because they were kissing. I explain I’m uncomfortable with mob tactics like that against a working-class small business owner from an immigrant background by a group of affluent gay men who are mostly newcomers to the city - especially as we don’t know exactly what happened during the original incident (the story is heavily reliant on hearsay and we don’t know what was said or why, or how exactly the gay couple were behaving that caused the waiter to react). My lover disagrees but isn’t strident on the issue, we simply see it in different ways. Back at the hotel, lying on the bed, we talk more about food and nutrition, and I remark on Denmark banning trans fats. My lover says he doesn’t think additives and chemicals in food make a difference to your health either way because he “doesn’t believe in science”.

He tells me how things are going in the commune. Some students have moved into the vacant rooms, and they’ve organised a few concerts in the courtyard by local bands. Geocachers love to go there. It’s a non-stop party. But not all of the rooms have doors yet, so there’s a problem with animals entering the building - in particular, a stray cat keeps coming into the kitchen and taking food. He tells me he’s going to poison it.

I argue stridently that he shouldn’t kill the cat and that there are lots of other ways of solving the problem. He goes into a sulk, stops speaking to me and sleeps with his back to me all night. The next morning, he silently takes his things and leaves.

2015

“You’re snoring.”

The inventor and I see each other for the last time, on the pretext of going to an event together, which is a mistake in judgment on my part. I couldn’t get my head around how it had all ended last time as it was so ridiculous, and I at least wanted to close things out on good terms. He’d obviously had some kind of amygdala hijack and wasn’t reacting rationally. When we meet, I ask him what he’s been doing for the past twelve months. He says “I watched the whole of Star Trek: Voyager on Netflix.”

We share a room but don’t have sex. The first night, he snores extremely loudly - he’s gained weight since I last saw him - so I lie there next to him in the dark, messaging with a friend on my phone. I go to reception and try to book my own room, but it’s the middle of the night and not possible. Eventually I take a walk out into the city, where dawn is breaking. I venture into a hotel I’ve stayed in before, but there’s no-one on the reception desk. When I return to our hotel room, he’s gone, so I put the “Do not disturb” sign on the door and finally get my night’s sleep.

When I wake up, it’s early afternoon. We find each other again at a Pride event and I get to meet some of his Berlin friends, most of whom have dyed hair and facial piercings. One of them is vegan and talks at length about how it’s unethical to spray whipped cream on your partner during sex. We have dinner and head off to a club night together. He thinks the reason I was messaging on my phone in the middle of the night then left for a couple of hours is because I arranged a hookup, and doesn’t believe me that it was just because of his snoring.

At the club night, he’s visibly rankled when I strike up conversation with a charming art dealer, and we separate for the rest of the evening. The art dealer and I have a really enjoyable one-on-one conversation for an hour or two, until he tells me that AIDS doesn’t exist and HIV is just “a harmless carrier particle”, and I realise that this otherwise sophisticated man has fallen for an online conspiracy theory and is fervently trying to convince me of it. I make my excuses and leave.

I get a good night’s sleep because the inventor doesn’t return to the hotel room all night. He turns up at breakfast and tells me he fell asleep in a gay sauna, then crashes in the room for the rest of the day while I work on my laptop. He takes black-and-white shirtless selfies in the bathroom mirror. We have a final drink and say goodbye.

I go to Poland again, and this time I don’t look back.