Michael called up Ernest Hemingway from a photograph of the old gent in his bathtub, proud of the erection that peeked over the top of the tin basin. Michael preened it and stroked it, and found that even after a few minutes' conversation, Ernest Hemingway was a black hole of boredom. Every single hearty thing he said – God knows, about bulls or fishing or shooting or his war wound or the nurses who tended him – struck Michael as phoney. Hemingway really seemed to think that shooting, fishing and boxing were what made you a man. When not having erections was his real problem.

Then there was the man Michael had glimpsed in the changing rooms of the Oasis public baths when he was ten years old. The man had been blond, pale, athletic and embarrassed, quickly lowering trunks and pulling on underwear. He showed up in his swimsuit, full of early-seventies misgivings. He kept jumping in Michael's embrace, nervous, uncertain, still not really believing that it was legal or decent.

There was the lead male actor of the old silent film The Crowd, angelically beautiful and distant. And in person, blind drunk.

There was the fruit-and-vegetable man who in 1977 first told Michael about the Clash. Then he had seemed an adult, all of nineteen years old. He had a head of permed hair that looked now like a joke wig, and huge beautiful front teeth. It was his face Michael remembered. The slim and rather indifferent body seemed to melt into the sheets. But he and Michael stayed up late drinking lager, playing the Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, the Vibrators, but they decided, finally. The Buzzcocks were best.

There was his barber, Italian and sweet, on whom Michael had had a crush all through childhood and who, to give the adult Michael a better blow job, pulled out all of his even white false teeth. His gleaming toothy smile had been why Michael fancied him.

There was even the porn star Brad Rodger, who looked impossibly beautiful in publicity photos. In person, he was tiny and slim with a dick that was large only in proportion to the rest of him. Worst of all, he was, not to be prejudicial, quite the stupidest person Michael had ever met.

'I really would like to do some serious roles.'

'You're kidding,' said Michael. 'You can't really think you'll get into serious acting doing the kind of thing you do.'

'I make up all my own dialogue, you know. I mean, I really improve those parts.' His voice did not rise and fall like a normal voice. Brad whined, like a caricature of the beautiful nasal stars wiped out by talkies. 'Like once, you know, they wanted me to say, like, oh give it me, give it me. I mean, what kind of line is that?'

Michael had to admit it didn't sound particularly original.

'So I changed it to fuck that ass baby. Fuck it hard. I mean, you know?'

Michael did his best with Brad Rodger, before the Viagra side effects began to grind away behind his eyes. He looked into Brad's pale blue blanknesses and decided it was too much like fucking a particularly pretty sheep.

There was the sweet Afghani who had asked him for instructions in the street, with unshaven stubble, and a slightly baffled air. Michael had held him in conversation. His name was Mustafa, and he was here studying engineering. His home was now rubble; his brother had been killed. 'My heart goes out to you, for being my friend,' he said. On his forehead was a callus where it habitually touched the prayer rug.

Michael called up Mustafa's Angel and found his only desire was to leave the innocence undisturbed. They sat eating chocolates and holding hands. And when it came to leave, Mustafa kissed him on the forehead. 'I love you,' he managed to say.

Michael was confused. 'Do you want to make love?'

Mustafa looked surprised, then coy, if not unpleased. 'Oh no. No, no,' he said, in a gentle voice a bit like a pigeon's. 'No. We… become romantic with each other.'

Michael saw in his eyes, a pleading: I want, but if I do, it cuts out the heart. Leave me the heart.

There had to be somewhere and somehow a way to combine the two, the heart and the body.

You discover two things if you can sleep with anyone. The first is that life is bountiful. It is more bountiful than an orchard at harvest time; more abundant than a pick-your-own field of strawberries that stretches beyond the horizon. The harvest of human genitalia attached to reasonably good-looking, reasonably behaved people is inexhaustible.

No matter how completist you are, you cannot collect the entire set. It grows too quickly: there are a half-billion penises in India alone. Like a kaleidoscope, ever blossoming, more and more genitalia, more and more beauty, unfold at high speed out of the old.

We walk around blind to prevent ourselves seeing this bounty. Its vastness diminishes us; its availability makes not only ourselves but our love seem arbitrary accidents. If we did more than only glimpse it, it would drive us mad.

Secondly, in contradiction to this, you learn how rare attraction is. We don't sleep with most people, because we would not remotely enjoy sleeping with most people. They smell, they fart, they occupy our space, all the things people we love do and which make us leave them in the end. Only, we don't understand what these strangers mean. Their preoccupations are alien to us. We are unmoved by the thing that most moves them. Their genitalia look shrivelled, hairy, forbidding.

Only sometimes are there exceptions.

Michael thought again of monks, and remembered his time in California. He had often visited an old Spanish mission surrounded by fields and an ancient graveyard. It was the only thing in Oceanside that a Brit would recognize as history, and it was shaded and cool. In the old storerooms there were exhibits of early California life: dummy Indians grinding maize; a replica of a colonial bureaucrat's office.

The mission had been restored in the 1930s by monks. They smiled out of old photographs in the historical exhibition. Unlike most people in old photographs, they looked contemporary. You could see who they were. They were all in their thirties or forties, some plump, some slim. But they all looked secure, satisfied, and even merry. They looked happy slaving in hot sun while wearing thick woolly robes. They sang or joked in photographs posed to demonstrate the robust Christian life. It seemed unlikely even to Michael at sixteen that they could all be quite that good-looking by accident.

Michael invited them all home. It was a Thursday evening and he made a party of it. The Californian monks had come from Spain, from Costa Rica, from Ireland, and they sang romantic 1930s songs on the guitars that came with them. They made something like sangria with a different name and became boisterous. The Irishman sang an old love song in a high and wild voice that was only slightly off-key. They began to dance arm in arm around his apartment floor until the downstairs neighbours thumped on his door.

'It's a religious gathering,' Michael told his neighbours and invited them in. The neighbours were Polish and rather shy. Michael knew them only well enough to nod to in passing in the corridor. He learned their first names: Thadd and Marta Miazga. They spoke a strained and cautious English and were overwhelmed by the ten thumping, handsome monks who sounded like a jolly tower of Babel and who wore robes and sandals, and who welcomed them with cries and kisses and resumed their religious songs, as if around a campfire. At one point Mrs Miazga slipped out of the flat and returned with more wine. At 1.00 am her husband shyly took the guitar and started to sing 'Good King Wenceslas' in a tired, happy voice. Michael suddenly saw that he was handsome too, and his wife. In fact everyone in the world suddenly seemed beautiful.

Finally, someone glanced at a watch. The Miazgas had hatched out of their shyness, into a pleased, flushed conviviality.