My unrequited love affair with a straight actor in South Africa, a man of devastatingly black-haired, blue-eyed Irish beauty, drove me not insane, but north--far north, along the Great Trunk Road from Capetown to Cairo--in an attempt to escape from the folly of myself. I should have known better than to fall in love with a straight, but in the immortal words of the Duchess of Windsor, whose inappropriate love for the King of England toppled him from the throne in 1936, "the heart has its reasons."

The actor and I were appearing together in a musical comedy at a Capetown theater. I had been warned by members of the cast brought in by the production company from London that he was "a bloody Irish savage with a thin veneer of English civilization" for his having been born in the west of Ireland, but brought up on the Channel coast. Ever the radical, it may have been my rage at their insular bigotry and jealousy that propelled me even faster on the path to collision with his exclusive taste for women. My infatuation overlooked the monstrous arrogance that separated him from our peers since I saw his inflated ego as justified, given his beauty, his talents as a singer and actor which would later earn him stardom in South Africa and England, and, of course, the oversize shillelagh bulging at the codpiece of his tights on stage.

The denouement of our non-affair came in a barroom brawl near the point where the Indian Ocean meets the South Atlantic at the Cape of Good Hope. We had gone off drinking with a true Irishman from the cast, a gingery cob from the southern cliffs of Ireland, who had no truck with the English and loudly damned them all in this rather elegant and quite quiet pub where mostly English-speakers, and not Afrikaners, met for sundowners to watch the sun set over the sea. That was not the thing to do in the presence of my hopelessly beloved, whose allegiance lay more with the Brits than with the Emerald Isle, in the first place, and whose unquestionably Irish temper often itched for a fight, in the second.

The true Irish bod wrinkled his lips in a sneer. "Faith, man, you've no race at all!" shouted he. "Yere no more than a ruddy pom!"

Not taking kindly to words used as an immigrant smear, my actor shouted in return, "Have at me, you Irish ox!" and pommeled the other to the floor, who promptly sprang up to give better than he got. It was then that I lunged between them for fear the fisticuffs would bloody my darling's face, and thus got it myself, square in the jaw. On the way down, as my head crashed against a table's edge, I saw him grimace with utter distaste and heard the last words he would ever speak to me: "Up your arse! I need no help from a disgusting queer!"

So did my ill-fated romance come to an end.

That despair thus drove me northward on the Great Trunk Road was not entirely true. Of independent nature if not of independent means, I had already decided to drive my Lambretta 150 motor scooter, the "Road Angel," to the Valley of the Kings, the cheapest and best way I could conceive to work out childhood fantasies inspired by author and adventurer Richard Halliburton. He had been my hero from earliest days and was a fellow American who also had the Irish in his veins. "The Royal Road to Romance" was the first book I ever read. I could not rest until in emulation of that closet gay (although I did not know this then), I would "Halliburton" my way around the world, and, by God, I did. The impetus to leave South Africa sooner, however, was indeed the death blow from my Irish love. I did not mind his calling me queer, for that I was, but my instincts recoiled from anyone who found my obedience to the sexual nature bestowed upon me by God disgusting.

He was the first of many romantic adventures on the so-called Dark Continent where starlight shone almost as brightly as the sun for want of cities that cast artificial light into the nighttime skies. Dark with mysteries it surely was, although the glare of events there in more recent times has sometimes left me with a hunger for the dwindling dark.

I shall tell here only of a New Year's Eve I spent in the Ruwenzori, known also as the Mountains of the Moon, in Central Africa, then spoken of, before the horrendous genocide of modern times, as "the garden of the world." And it was.

This was gorilla country, and sometimes the great hulking brutes came down from the hills to forage for wild celery on the lower slopes. I was out there alone one day, young fool that I was, when along came a big one, taller, I could have sworn, than old King Kong.

I screeched the Road Angel to a halt and sat like stone and tried to stare him down, but to no avail. I broke into a sweat when he drew closer and riveted his gaze on my unblinking baby blues.

"Hold on there!" trumpeted a voice.

My God, I thought, gorillas can talk? And with an Irish lilt?

No, just beyond the big ape stood a man.

"Don't move, my friend," the man said. "That's Giant Jack. He'll travel on in a trice. He's a pal o' mine, but he's not bloody likely a pal o' yourn."

Giant Jack did amble away after awhile, attracted by a female gorilla frolicking in a nearby celery patch. My savior walked over and shook my out-stretched hand. I took him to be twenty years my senior or so, very handsome, dressed in a khaki bush jacket and shorts with leather leggings above his ankle-high boots. He also wore a topi, a helmet-shaped hat useful against the heat and sun in the bush, which set on the crown of the head separated from the scalp by a ring of cork to give airspace and relieve the sweat.

"Name's Perry," he said. "From Ulster. My vehicle's in the glade."

Ha! An Ulsterman, like my grandpa, way out there in the bush!

He gestured toward an off-road Land Rover hardly visible from the dirt strip road. "We'll load up yere kiddy car. I ask ye to join me for a spot o' lunch."

After lifting the scooter into the back of the Land Rover, we drove off even higher into the hills where the vegetation struck me as more Alice-in-Wonderland than anywhere on earth. Plants I never saw before, and cabbage-size wild marigolds in full bloom on stalks six feet high, which was about my new friend's height, too. Not a husky man, neither was he lean nor spare. When he took off his topi in the car, he showed a "fine suit of sandy hair," as my Irish grandmother would have said, and looked over at me with a sparkle of good humor in his pale green eyes.

"You've got guts, I'd say, young man, wandering the bush alone, or just a bloody fool. Which?"

I blushed. "The latter. I nearly shit my pants."

He guffawed. "You American fellas do say the damnedest things! We've all felt that way at times. I did when I was new here. Used to it now. Hunt a bit o' game and pal with the gorillas mostly. Like 'em better than people, to tell the truth."

[ Part 1 | Part 2 ]