by Ian McDuff

This entry in the ‘Darter / Basez Songbook,’ has its setting in the isles of the Pacific and its soundtrack firmly rooted in the dunes of the Carolina Grand Strand. The eponymous song is the Coastline Band’s most recent beach music hit, a runaway favorite amongst shaggers everywhere.

Josh would be the first to maintain, with fierce devotion and a string of unanswerable examples, that his James – James Lance Bass, mogul-singer-astroboy: his very own James – had the absolute best, most-breathtakingly-ingenious ideas, if only people would listen to him when he had them. After all, in ’02, when Britney had taken a hiatus at the same general time as ’N Sync had, it was his James who had taken her aside – and Justin’s ruffled feathers be damned – and told her this was her chance to ‘get [her] some damn respect.’ And it was James who elaborated on that when she finally broke down under his nagging, a year or two after, and asked him ‘just how in the Sam Hill was [she] s’posed to do that.’ Which meant that it was James who was responsible, in detail, not only for suggesting the album that finally shut her critics up, but for ramrodding it through and seeing to it that he, Josh, played a role in selecting the charts, lightly rearranging and updating them, and producing the entire CD.

It was James, too, who never mocked but always focused on Brit’s limitations and found the way to make them her strengths, and it was James who reassured her that no one would think she was overly ambitious in their choice of material, and that no one would read anything into it that wasn’t there. (It wasn’t altogether true, mind you, but it was necessary, and James, when in Lanceolate business-mode, could be a quite ruthless liar in a good cause. He’d learned a great deal since his first foray into managing Meredith.) It was James, in the end, who insisted she could handle the task, and it was James who recognized that what Britney’s particular set of pipes, and breathy sensuality, could best handle had to be the only guide to the entire production, governing every aspect from the set-list, to post, to when to step off the beat and not swing a chart, to where and when to go straight acoustic.

And when American Songbook became a critical smash and a modest commercial hit, with actual adults, it was James who stepped away from the limelight and let Brit and Josh and everyone else who worked on it take credit, even while it was also James who stood the racket when Justin, as ever reducing all things to the measure of himself, went ballistic about how the CD ‘made [him] look bad, I mean, it’s like a concept album, yo, and the concept is, “my ex is a prick,” you know what I’m sayin’?’ And it was James who bundled Justin in a firm hug, stepped back – still loosely embracing their friend-and-brother – and looked him in the eye, saying, ‘J, that’d hold water if I’d had her cover “You’re So Vain.”’ (Josh had had to leave the room, then, and to this day still collapsed into helpless giggles at the vision of Brit’s singing that incredibly apposite track about Justin.) ‘But I didn’t,’ James had gone on, as Josh later heard. ‘You are my friend, my brother, and very close to my heart, and I think the world of your talents, but Justin, you have yet to do anything, just like we as a group have yet to do anything, that stands comparison with Brit’s covers of “Fever” and “Miss Otis Regrets.” I know you care about music. I know you care about Brit, still. Well, this is the best work she’s ever done, and you damn well ought t’be happy for that and for her.’

Every time Josh heard – as you could no longer escape hearing, these days – Brit’s voice and his own arrangements and production, on ‘Black Coffee,’ or ‘God Bless the Child,’ or ‘Frankie and Johnny,’ or ‘Route 66,’ or ‘Satin Doll,’ or especially ‘Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,’ well, he was just recharged with his conviction that his James was the genius of all geniuses.

After all, who else could have managed to get Brit mentioned in the same breath as Carmen McRae?

On the other hand, while Josh adored James, worshipped James, spread the gospel of James to all and sundry, he wasn’t oblivious to his lover’s faults, including a certain mulish obstinacy and a fair dollop of arrogance. (Though James could recognize his limitations, as when he’d regretfully abandoned the idea, on logistical grounds, of sailing their yacht the Rafe Semmes across the Gulf, through the Panama Canal, and on to Hawaii.) James had been right, for instance, even if it had rankled at the time, when he’d told Josh, gently, that no, this was not the time for Josh to do his own cover album of the acclaimed standards: the market wasn’t right, and they needed to wait for Britney’s success to mellow down a smidgen before Josh came out with his own versions of ‘Somewhere, Beyond the Sea’ and ‘More’ and ‘Unforgettable’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ and ‘I Did It My Way.’ But frankly, James’s incessant determination always to top his own latest triumph with a still gaudier one sometimes made for friction. And, Josh mused, looking out the jet’s window to the vast Pacific beneath them, while he was excited about this mysterious Hawaii trip James had planned, James’s smiling, gnomic remark that ‘you’ll enjoy some studio time I have set up for you’ had him a bit dubious. Josh really, really didn’t want to find himself doing a Don Ho cover CD.

They had devoted three days to sheer, supine relaxation in the sun, at a hyper-discreet resort that catered to celebrities of their magnitude.

Thus rested and rejuvenated, Josh had been bundled into a car at what he considered an ungodly early hour (it was half past 11:00 AM, local time) by a very bouncily excited James, and taken to a Honolulu studio, sure enough, but not the sort of studio he’d assumed when James had been dropping hints. He stood stock-still when they walked in the doorway and the scent of paint and turps hit his nostrils, and he remained motionless for several beats. Then, eyes shining and face cracking with a classic Josh grin, he grabbed James, babbling incoherent thanks, and twirled him about a time or two, mane flying.

‘I see my subjects are here,’ their host said mildly, and James hastened to introduce Josh to a slim, ageless man with a faint High Plains twang overlaid by years of Island living, the premier modern painter of the male nude, Douglas Simonson.

Josh intended to say something coherent, impressive, and polite. What came out was, ‘James! This must have cost the earth!’ Josh immediately clapped a hand over his mouth and blushed a vivid red, but James and Mr Simonson merely smiled.

‘Actually, JC, the three portraits I’ll be doing aren’t the biggest part of Lance’s anniversary gift to you: it’s the fee for tuition.’

Josh was reduced to incoherence.

‘You’ve sat before, I believe,’ Mr Simonson had said (he kept insisting they call him by his Christian name, but neither managed, as Josh just couldn’t and James was determined to side with Josh on that one, to spare him embarrassment. Josh hadn’t been this giddily excited since the time he got Sting’s autograph).

‘Yes,’ James had answered him. ‘A couple of anniversaries back, we had matching portraits done by Joe Phillips.’

‘Ah, yes. Darn talented youngster. Brilliant: I’ve seen some of his canvases, as well, of course, as the graphic art and the cartoons and the calendars. In fact, you and some of your colleagues have appeared in those, I think? Lightly disguised?’

Josh had thought back to that week in San Diego, and how embarrassed Joe Phillips had been at first, meeting and painting two gay icons who had, as Douglas Simonson shrewdly noted, already appeared, lightly modified, in some of Joe’s artwork, especially the comics. They’d all gotten past that embarrassment quickly – Joe had been aptly named, in Josh’s opinion, as he reminded them of no one so much as a hip, gay, slimmer, African-American version of Joey Fatone, and was just as much fun to hang with – and the Klimt-inspired portraits of James and Josh that had resulted were treasured by them both.

‘Well, then,’ Mr Simonson had said. ‘You know how this works. JC, let’s get you started. No, no. Not sitting. Show me your brushwork, pupil.’

And so began a glorious, sun-drenched, sun-spattered – paint-spattered – time, beneath the genial Hawaiian sun, in the whispering ocean’s breezes. Mr Simonson was endlessly patient with Josh, as long as the light lasted, and Josh’s nights with James were full of sensuous languor as sweetly heavy as the scents of the tropical blooms that crowded beneath their windows. Josh soaked in sensations like a sponge, and he knew, as James smilingly knew, that music would come of it someday, the vibrant tropic colors recollected later in tranquility and transmuted into chords and the lyric. James, careful of the sun, yet managed to become gilt, and Josh was berry-brown by the end of their stay, his wild mane high-lit with old gold. There was time, too, for mere luxuriating, clambering the trail atop the Waahila Ridge, say, but their time afield was also grist for the artistic mill. Everywhere, always, Mr Simonson made sketches and studies, and under his tutelage, Josh did also. He grew increasingly adept, thrilling to the conjoint praise of his lover and his tutor when he captured, well beyond the usual measure of his powers, a detailed study of James’s face in leaf-filtered sunlight-dapple, which Mr Simonson praised and which James, half-joking in his own modesty, entitled ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye.’

But of course, the primary end and purpose of their journey was always before them. And it resulted, in the end, in three Simonson originals that James and Josh would always treasure, after. Josh marveled to see himself rendered as a Hellenistic nature-godling, posed and poised thigh-deep in foaming water amidst mossy rocks near the Manoa Falls, arms extended in Bacchic blessing with clear water spilling from his cupped palms, nobly nude and unashamed, potent with grace, Dionysian: all handled deftly and surely at the top of Simonson’s most Realist bent. James blushed and laughed it off, self-deprecating as always, when Josh was still more awed by Simonson’s portrait of James, in keen and resolute profile, with nothing but a diaphanous green silk shirt half off his shoulders, wind-whipped, on a deserted Mokuleai beach, fronting a stormy sea: James, complexly lit, staring implacably out to the left side of the frame, the only crisp and solid shape against an almost Impressionist background. James, breasting a coming storm, the scumbled sky behind and above him, a line of palms on the horizon bending in the winds, but James upright, and unyielding in every line, in all his glory. (Mr Simonson admitted to being rather impressed by the both of them, physically, as models. Well, Josh had always known they were both very fortunately endowed.)

And then, too, there were the sketches and studies Mr Simonson was tossing in, gratis to the deal.

But it was the double portrait that stunned Josh when it was completed. Mr Simonson had begun the studies for it on the crest of Waahila Ridge, serrate ridges crowding the complex horizon, at once lush and distinct, but it had been finished based on the odd sketch here and there whilst Mr Simonson stood behind him, coaching his efforts. Finished, it showed Josh in the middle ground, sun-bronzed and naked, his back to the viewer’s eye, an easel before him and brush and palette in his hand, painting a James who stood colossus-like bestriding the mountain turf, himself also nude, lit by a piercing shaft of sunlight and set against scudding clouds. Josh had never seen anything that quite captured the two of them and the mystery of their union and oneness – until now.

They had thanked the artist, the teacher, and Josh had basked in the glow of his praise – ‘Great strides, JC. You’ve come quite a ways’ – whilst James had attended to his cherished details, regarding shipping and framing. They had concluded, with pleasure and some regret, this too-brief period they had spent out of their usual time and rush. Now it was night, their last night on the island, and they sprawled across the vast bed in their villa, its sheets cool and crisp beneath them, with the subtle scent of night-blooming flowers wafting through the window.

‘Thank you,’ Josh said, simply, out of words, and kissed James gently.

‘I love you,’ James explained, pulling him closer, throwing a sun-gilt leg over Josh’s bronzed haunch.

That was all the explanation Josh required.

END