Gay News from GXR News

FOR a time, he was the world’s most enigmatic young man - a haunted, gaunt figure known only as “the Piano Man”. Now, nearly two years after the breakdown which landed him in a psychiatric clinic in Britain, the Piano Man has a name and a new purpose in life.

Andreas Grassl, 22, has escaped from the Bavarian village he hated, to being a face in the crowd of cosmopolitan Basel in Switzerland, it has emerged.

Here he is free to pursue the French literature he adores, and to live the gay lifestyle that was unthinkable amid the farmers’ sons he grew up with.

His friends say the catalyst for his strange journey to Britain, a spell in a psychiatric clinic and on the front pages of newspapers around the world, was a shattered gay love affair.

He crawled out of the sea at Sheerness, Kent, on 7 April, 2005 and police found him wandering the streets in a suit with the labels cut out of it. He had no passport, no credit cards, no money. He was also mute. Police put him in the care of psychiatrists.

He was given a pen and paper by staff at the Medway Maritime Hospital in the hope he would write his name. Instead, he drew a detailed sketch of a grand piano. When they brought him a piano, he played for hours at a time.

Finally, in the last week of August, he found his voice and admitted to being a farmer’s son from the small village of Prosdorf, in eastern Bavaria, Germany. He returned to the community of less than a dozen houses, but it would never be home again.

Now as a university student in Switzerland’s third-biggest city, he has found freedom - to go to gay bars, to surf the internet for hours on end, to read the literature of Voltaire, Guy de Maupassant and Molière that he loves.

His parents pay the £400-a-month rent for two rooms above an office-equipment repair shop in the quiet, upmarket Bachlettenstrasse a ten-minute walk from the university complex. But Grassl remains a solitary figure.

“Andreas is a nice boy, quiet, no bother to me,” says Romeo Cassini, the owner of the spacious house, who rents out rooms to several tenants.

“He is polite and well-mannered and the rent is paid on time. I have heard of this Piano Man stuff. It’s not something I have spoken about with him. He is always dashing off somewhere, or studying. I am sure if he wanted to tell me he would have done.”

Markus Groebel, a shy 23-year-old, claims to be a friend of Grassl, whom he says he met in gay nightclub Elle et Lui not far from the banks of the Rhine.

“He met someone in France,” says Groebel. “It was a love affair. And it all went wrong and he cracked up. That’s it. I guess that’s why he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

According to Groebel and other university associates, Grassl seems to spend most hours outside lectures hammering away on the keyboard in the internet room below the campus building on Petersplatz.

And they agree: the boy who once translated an entire pop magazine into Latin when he was 14 “for a laugh” had his heart broken in France and it pitched him into the Piano Man breakdown.

In March 2005, one month before he washed up in Kent, Grassl found himself in the small Breton fishing village of Pornic, a mirror-image of Prosdorf and all he wanted to leave behind.

Karl, a fellow Basel University student, said: “He fell in love with someone in France, it fell apart and so did he. Pornic was where the wheels came off.”

Charles Henri Soulard, the manager of the small apartment Grassl rented there, said: “His parents were looking for him then but I didn’t know it.”

On 7 April Grassl appeared in Kent and the rest is history.

People at the university talk about his Channel dip as being a half-hearted suicide attempt - a cry for help that, ultimately, he feels ashamed of, like the Piano Man episode which followed.

Karl added: “He only spoke once about Pornic, but he says it was where he ‘became ill’. He never mentioned anything else about himself.

“He is a self-contained man, bright, brilliant at French … but there is something inherently sad about him.

“No-one has a bad word to say about him, probably because he doesn’t reveal much about himself.

“He is very well-liked by the girls on the course. Of course, they don’t see a skirt-chaser but a sensitive, intelligent man capable of quoting great tracts of poetry and helping them all with their homework when most of the guys just want to sleep with them.”

In fact Grassl is so good at French that the university waived the usual foreign-language test it sets for students after hearing him speak at the interview to enrol for the degree course.

Thin with bright blond hair, he walks to the main university complex or to the French-literature faculty in the old town most days for lectures.

He rarely goes drinking in bars but frequents Templus, at the corner of his street, popping in for strong coffee and to read the local newspaper.

Neighbours also say they often see him carrying bottles of red wine into his rooms in the evenings.

He often travels the four miles from Basel city centre on the bus to St Louis, across the border in France, where he buys books from a store just off the town’s main street, Avenue Charles de Gaulle, and where he has a small clique of friends.

Karl added: “They like to go to poetry and philosophy readings. I don’t think he has a special friend, a relationship with anyone. I think he is still looking for that.”

Grassl refuses all requests to be interviewed. “That Piano Man stuff, no-one is interested in that anymore,” he said, moving to lose himself in the crowds that, in part, give him the security that life on the farm never ever did.

Source: scotsman.com