We’ve already covered my mum’s and my arrival in Mallorca. How my dad took me aside and gave me a gold coin—a symbolic gesture I wouldn’t fully understand until years later. But what I haven’t told you yet is what came next.
Right after we arrived, we lived on Brioni—the family yacht—for a couple of weeks. But it didn’t last. Maybe winter was rolling in, or maybe the boat was just too cramped for my parents’ comfort, but soon enough we moved across the Paseo Marítimo to the Hotel Victoria.
It wasn’t winter yet—I remember still going to the pool, which sat bizarrely in the middle of the Paseo itself. You reached it by crossing a little pedestrian bridge from the hotel lobby. The chlorine levels were industrial. My hair turned green. There were also elevators that had no business being in service. I got stuck more than once. That’s where my phobia of lifts was born, and it took years to shake.
From there, we moved to the Racquet Club Hotel in Son Vida. If you visit it now, you’ll find a pristine five-star operation. But back then, it was motel-style bungalows and no-frills charm. My parents and I shared a small room.
Then came the big news: Bruce was coming.
My parents—out of kindness or strategy or both—had decided that Bruce should fly out to spend a month with us. Maybe they thought it would ease poor little Peter’s adjustment to this new world. And for me? It was the best idea they’d ever had.
I remember waiting at the airport, buzzing with anticipation.
But Bruce wasn’t on the plane.
Somehow, Iberia Airlines had lost him in Barcelona. As an unaccompanied minor, he’d missed his connection to Mallorca and ended up being put up in a hotel by the airline—completely unsupervised, eating room-service food and watching television, which wasn’t even available in South Africa at the time. He was having the time of his life.
Eventually, after a string of frantic calls, they found him and got him on the next flight. He arrived safe, smug, and slightly taller.
We stayed a little longer at the Racquet Club, then returned to Brioni. At that point, the boat was moored in Cannes, France, so we flew there to meet it, and from there, set out on a trip down the coast to Genoa.
Bruce and I spent the voyage lying on the bow, heads over the front, watching dolphins ride the wake. The water was so blue it barely looked real. And then—we saw it.
A massive, floating turd, split clean in half by the prow.
Moments later, the water turned brown.
Welcome to Genoa.
When we docked, we couldn’t get into the yacht club, so we ended up moored in a cargo area—surrounded by massive industrial ships. One of the crews told Bruce he needed to keep his head down. He didn’t have a visa to be in Italy, and apparently the customs officers were coming.
I spoke to Bruce about this recently, and he remembers it like yesterday: hiding under the bed, terrified, while customs walked past the porthole.
That night, a huge cargo ship moored beside us simply vanished before sunrise. Bruce couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard a thing.
After that, we returned to Cannes, and from there, flew to Denmark to visit my dad’s son from his first marriage—Torben. He lived with his German wife, Elisa, and their kids in a mansion (by Danish standards) in Hillerød, just north of Copenhagen. Indoor pool, big estate, the works.
Torben had inherited a mountain of money from his maternal grandfather, and with no need to work, he became deeply involved in the Esperanto movement. But none of that was what made the visit memorable.
Torben and Elisa were nudists.
Bruce, bless him, was about nine or ten. Fresh off a plane from apartheid South Africa. And now? He was playing tag in a house full of cheerful, confident nudity.
I’ll never forget the moment he opened a door at full speed and ran face-first into Elisa. He basically got lost between her breasts. Later, we sat outside having lunch. Elisa spilled spaghetti down her enormous, pendulous bosoms, scraped it off with a knife, and popped it straight into her mouth.
Bruce’s eyes were on stalks.
We went into Copenhagen and saw girls walking around the pedestrian zones topless. Then we went to the beach—same thing. Bruce was agog. He wrote a postcard home filled with nothing but the word “boobs” repeated multiple times.
To this day, his family calls him Boobaloops.
Eventually, we made our way back to Mallorca. It was time to move into Son Vida. Bruce’s visit came to an end. He’d go on to visit two more times, but this—this—was the first. And it was unforgettable.