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.
