Will this get me laid? Alright, I’ll take two.

(Read that line with a Norwegian accent.) This was the famous line uttered by Tomas in a surf shop in Oregon, as he was thinking about buying a shirt or something. Tomas was one of the gang of young Norwegian guys I knew in university. Tomas hit on every woman, using the most outrageous lines. On meeting a girl friend of mine and shaking her hand he said – without an ounce of shame, and hear the thick accent, now – “Oooh. Your hands are so cold. I hate to say it but you need a man to keep you warm.” OK, that's not that outrageous, but you get the idea.

The Norwegians were unstoppable. They could eat more, drink more, study more, fuck more, and do it all with an easy manner, complete conviction, and big wholesome grins on their faces. Typical day as far as I could tell (weekends anyway): Drink a two-four (one case each that is), party until 5 AM, then get up at 7 AM to bike a few hundred kilometers up the Sea-to-Sky highway, climb a mountain, fight off grizzlies (stripped to the waist and with their bare hands) to gather wild honey, kayak home, bake bread, eat it with the wild honey while quickly tossing off an A+ term paper, and then be ready to start drinking again by early afternoon.

Aanon, (pronounced Oh-nen) my favourite if only for his cool name, was an objectively beautiful man, one of the drinker-cyclist-maniacs who still managed to make and eat healthy well-balanced meals and get excellent grades in school. But he was kind of cold and aloof, so we never really got close. The other thing that made him my favourite was that he used to answer the door wearing nothing but astonishing underwear. Red bikini briefs. Slutty European sexuality-is-healthy-and-fun underwear that strained my WASP-y sense of shame and propriety as surely as his nasty Norwegian meat package strained the fabric of those shocking man-panties.

He’d just fling open the door like he was expecting family for Christmas dinner. Lean against the door-jamb, casually fling one arm across to the other side, and say “Well, hello there!” First thought: Oh my god the man is naked. Then I would catch a glimpse of some wisp of garish material in the crotchal region in the bottom of my peripheral vision. Leading to the second thought: “don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down”. And as he stood there completely unselfconscious I tried to do the same, tried to look like I saw men in their underwear all the time and not blush and not let my voice crack as I asked “Is Monica home?”