Spanish Eyes: The Knight of the Doleful Countenance

By Ian McDuff

Song-ish fic for the latest BSB Challenge (the ‘Millennium’ CD). Three guesses.

People – well, not people: fans (who were, a lot of the time, barely human, in Nick’s opinion) – but, well, Fans and Other Non-Backstreet-Family-Members had this idea that Howie had ‘soulful’ eyes.

Yeah, right.

Long, long ago, when he was smaller than Aaron is now, and there wasn’t all the money to go around, and Jane dragged him to every audition, open call, or schmooze opportunity a stage-mother could find, he’d had a lot of downtime, had Nicky. Waiting. And sometimes, Jane would be in one of her more savage moods, and irked by his fidgeting, and irked equally by his drawing, the skritch of pencil on paper, that he would lose himself in to pass the dreary waiting time. And there weren’t all the handheld games available then, and there hadn’t been the money for them anyway, and even if there had been Jane wouldn’t have wasted it on some device to Keep Nick Quiet. It had been at one of those calls, some cattle-call that moved even more glacially than most, that an older audition candidate had taken him aside after Jane had hissed at him to put up his drawing.

The older boy had talked with him. Talked with him as if they were equals. As if Nick was mature and intelligent and, oh, all the things he knew, with burning agony, he wasn’t. They had talked about drawing – he’d seen Nick doodling away – and Disney, and classic Disney animation. And in the end, the older boy had taken a worn but well-kept paperback out of his backpack and given it to Nicky. For keeps, for his very own. To read when the call process dragged.

Jane hadn’t liked that very much: the last thing she thought wise or useful was to have Nicky come across as a bookworm. But the older boy had charmed her into it, with some polite bullshit about the Disney tie-in, and in Orlando, even if you were at a call for Universal, say, the Mouse was still god. Jane by nature was indolent in matters not touching upon her obsessions, and while she had no use for books herself, and would hardly have been concerned had Nick grown up illiterate, she was easily persuaded to allow things that took no effort on her part. The magic of the ‘Disney connection’ overcame her defenses, and from then on, Nick was able to bring a library book – once or twice, even a book he’d been allowed to buy, second-hand or at a Friends of the Library sale – to calls and callbacks, to read while waiting. So long as the book could be justified as having been Approved By Walt at some point.

Fortunately, the Disney studios had, over the years, adapted and vulgarized some true classics, so Nicky had been, as it were accidentally, exposed to Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, to The Swiss Family Robinson and the works of A. A. Milne, to T. H. White’s version of the Matter of Britain and Jules Verne’s visions of futures that never were; to the Hausmärchen collected by the Grimms and to the conundra of Alice, to The Wind in the Willows and to Joel Chandler Harris’s pioneering works of ethnography and folklore collecting, the tales of Uncle Remus.

And he saw the older boy every so often, and they exchanged friendly smiles, and Nicky privately fell more than a little in love, though he was too young to know what it was he felt.

And to this day, he thought of that older boy, all the time, and the first book, and how the boy who gave him the book and the hero of that same book had merged in his mind. And it was still true that Howie – the heroic older boy of auditions past, who had given him his very own copy of The Jungle Books, and charmed Jane into letting him keep it; now and for many years his bandmate, and more than that, his love and his lover – Howie was still like Mowgli in this, at least: that no matter what emotions might rage behind them, those brown, limpid eyes never changed, were always the same, deceptively gentle, ‘all one – like a stone in wet or dry weather.’

So it was not from Howie’s eyes, but from the clues of his posture, his rhythms, the timbre of his voice: from these indications, and from years of love exchanged: that Nick caught on to the fact that his Howie was dispirited.

‘Did. Um. D’you wanna talk about it?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Whatever’s bothering you. You, um, want maybe to tell me?’

Howie sighed. ‘Nicky. I love you. Thank you.’

‘C’mere. There: that’s good. Talk to me, Howard.’

Howie relaxed into Nick’s strong arms. ‘It’s. This solo project.’

‘Mmm. I know how it can be. Lonely and stuff.’

‘No, Nicky. You don’t know. And thank God you don’t. It’s not that, not the usual mierda that we all always have to put up with. It’s. It is the marketing.’

Nick soothed Howie with his hands and made an encouragingly interrogative noise.

‘I wanted to do this. I know I did. The music means something to me. But. When you did “Now or Never,” you did what you loved and that was that. When Brian wants to sing gospel, they don’t put him in a set of overalls and book him on whatever is the equivalent of “Hee-Haw” these days. Aidge … Aidge has had it worse than I ever did, down to being actually called things to his face, from “spic” to, to, God, to “nigger,” even. But rock … rock doesn’t market that way, it has room for you, Blue-Eyes, and for Aidge. But just because I want a certain feel to this CD –’

‘They’re trying that, huh.’

‘I should have seen it. I should have known. After Lou, you would think I would have learned. Yes. They are trying to pigeonhole me and market me as an ethnic stereotype, to put me in a musical barrio.’

‘Fuck ’em. No, I mean it. Walk.’

‘There’s too much invested in this now, Nick. But. It’s “Spanish” this and “salsa” that and “Latino” the other thing and “Borikén” everything else, as if I am nothing more, just a novelty act. They’re always looking for another ethnic hook, another possible cover or a new original that stresses my ethnicity. Do you realize how many damn songs are out there that use that same lame trope about “Spanish Eyes,” Nicky? Madonna, U2, us, Faith No More, Ricky…. Or maybe Spanish Harlem, that’s only been referenced by Ben E. King, Aretha, and Springsteen, by Bob Dylan and the Byrds, by Laura Nyro….’

‘Oh, Howard.’

‘Maybe I should have done an Irish album first,’ Howie snorted. Nick dropped a kiss on his forehead, and even as he did so, Howie could feel Nick’s lips curving irresistibly into a grin.

‘Howard. Mi adorado. You are not doing “Danny Boy” and “The Wearing of the Green,” dude, on a CD.’

Howie snorted again, but there was a touch of a chuckle to it this time. After a long, thoughtful moment, he went on. ‘The music does mean a lot to me, Nick. The style; the history. But, I don’t know, perhaps I am also to blame. No one ever has pure motives. No one ever has a single motive, unmixed. When…. Do you know why I decided to learn Spanish, after all, late in life?’

‘Tell me.’

‘When do I use it?’

‘Oh.’

‘I mean, yes, it was because it mattered on various levels, it was fascinating, it’s a daughter of Latin, it can be useful in business, I wanted to read the poetry in the original…. But.’

‘But it’s the language your mother and her family use at the most intimate, like, moments. And you use it a little with them, and a little with the guys and Lance and C, and mostly, well, with me. Especially, y’know. When.’

‘Yes.’

Nick drew Howie closer still.

‘I probably had various motives here, not just the love of the music and the culture. But. It has a special meaning, and, well.’

‘A private shout-out.’

‘Yes. And it was, I know part of me calculated also the angle, it was, is, marketable. I just – you would think I would know better by now – I just didn’t think the label and management could manage to taint it like this, to make it so degrading.’

‘More degrading than being in a boyband?’

‘“Vocal harmony group.” Kevin would kill us both.’

‘More degrading than beards? More degrading than all the compermisings we’ve had to, uh, compromise on?

‘Howard. Lookit. I did most of my growing up down here, okay, though I’m not Florida like you are. I’m just a mutt from New York, okay, German and English and Irish and Dutch and God knows what, even maybe a little Iroquois way back. But I’ve growed up here, mostly, and I’ve sailed a lot in Caribbean waters. It isn’t the whole of you, and they’re wrong to try and play it like that, okay? But, man, I dunno, I just … look. The warm waters and the beaches and the surf, the land breeze and the sea breeze, the old forts and the musics and the rhythms and the laughter and the family, the oranges and the moon at night? That’s what I think of when I think about the old Spanish presence down here and in the islands, something warm and romantic and moonlit and, yeah, erotic. Hot. And that is a part of you, not because of what Paula’s maiden name was but because you, you are all those things to me, you make me feel the same way as I feel when I sail into an island port and see the old Spanish fort gleaming under a full moon. If you put that in your music, you’re putting you into it, and that’s all we can do, ever, any of us, it’s what makes all the compermises and half-assed halfway deals worthwhile in this fuckin’ business. So, I dunno, babe. You can make this worth it, and everyone you give a shit about will know you’re more than the sum of your inheritage. That’s all I got. That’s all I can say.’

Easily, slowly, Howie turned in his arms, relaxed and pliant. Their eyes met. Howie kissed Nick, gently. ‘Nicky. Mi querido. Never let anyone tell you you are stupid, or even less than wise. Never let anyone tell you you are not eloquent, also.’ Nick ducked his head, blushing a little; but Howie put a gentle finger beneath his chin and raised his head up again, so that they were again eye to eye. ‘I mean it, Nick. And this, too, I mean. I love you more than I can say.’

‘I know. I can see it in your eyes.’

Howie smiled and slid lithely off of Nick, and reached down to raise Nick to his feet. ‘Vayámosnos a la cama, mi amante.’ Nick’s answering grin was dazzling.

END