‘Sailing (Somewhere, Beyond the Sea)’

by Ian McDuff

This is my entry in the first of my own Summer Challenges: Red Sails in the Sunset: SDBs and Ships. It is also the second episode in what is becoming a Songbook miniseries, or perhaps I should say ‘medley,’ following Sexual Healing. The soundtrack, obviously, is … well, heck, folks, if you don’t know the œuvre of the great Bobby Darin, you need to stop reading slash and go find a CD store.

Each of them realized that it would be fatal to ask the rest of the group to take sides.

Each realized it would be fatal in another way to involve his – or the other’s – parents: there was a dread finality to that, a sense that all options were foreclosed and everything was over for good.

That left their friends. And inevitably, the friends it left were those who had long since become complicit in their confidences and private secrets.

James Lance Bass lived in perpetual fear. Chronic, if low-grade; but chronic fear.

Fear that led to bouts of insomnia.

Fear that brittled his temper.

Fear that honed his instincts towards savagery as a defense.

Fear that sharpened his tongue as well as his wits.

There was the fear that even now, the others, the label, the fans, the world at large, would realize that he didn’t measure up, had never measured up.

The fear that people would tumble to how much of the time he was winging it. Faking it.

Fear that the rodeo was nigh over. When Justin had first broached the idea of his solo project, he had accepted it calmly, said the right things in, for a marvel, the right tone, and concealed even from his Josh (or so he firmly believed) that he spent a good three weeks throwing up every night in panic.

There was the fear that he would not manage to achieve, after all, enough, would not amass enough honors and wealth and power and glory, enough that it would somehow make up for what he knew, knew beyond reason, knew in the face of all professions to the contrary, was, had to be, the shattered disappointment of Big Jim and Diane in having a gay son.

There was, always, unappeased, unassuaged, the cold fear that Josh would see through him at last, and realize how much better he could do; that Josh would awake from whatever trance had enrapt him all this time, and look at him, see him as he was, and move on to someone in his own league.

It astounded him, even as he used it to his advantage, that all these clever people he knew and worked with could and did mistake Josh’s adamant for gossamer, and, even more, could look at him, James Lance Bass, and mistake for bravery his mere bravado.

Josh was a panther willing to pass as a housecat. But he? He was like the hard, brittle carapace of a cicada on any Southern, late-summer tree trunk: to the eye, durable and impenetrable, but in truth hollow, empty, and disposed to crumble at a touch.

Fear of being exposed in his weakness was omnipresent.

But this fear, this chill stabbing in his bowels, the sweating looseness of tendon that unstrung his very knees, this was new. His nightmare had come upon him.

Josh had never pretended to have the sort of courage that Chris had, or Joe, or Justin, or – especially – his James, Lance, did. When he thought of Joe’s utter fearlessness: not the courage that comes of overcoming fear, but the fearlessness of simply not knowing how to experience fear; the unshaken and unshakeable conviction that everyone would do the right thing and that everything would work out, even if it took a few whaps of persuasion: when he thought of what it would be like to be like Joey, it seemed incomprehensible, alien, like trying to grasp the mind of another species. When he thought about what Chris had lived and lived through, and how he had done it, with hot determination and cold calculation, he was ashamed. When he thought how Justin had reinvented himself over and over again in response to the day’s need and the day’s challenge, had made every aspect of himself, from grin to eyes to drawl to abs, a weapon and a means of ascent, spurning the ground beneath him as he raced ever forward to whatever it was that he was going to become, he knew himself to be in comparison hopelessly adrift, at the mercy of wind and tide – and of his own fears and cautions.

And then there was the man who had occupied, still occupied, his heart and had for so long shared his life. He knew, perhaps more than Lance wished him to know, the daily and hourly price Lance paid in grim determination and stress to overcome his own fears. But Lance had never taken counsel of his fears, had never been once deflected from an objective save by Acts of God or force majeure. Not Lance: he just squared his shoulders, set his jaw, bulled his head down, and charged: not at a run, as Justin might, but at a steady march that was in the end unstoppable except by an extremity of opposing force.

When Josh had been young enough to be enraptured by the story and too young and innocent to understand the cold-stiffened terror of the reality, the year before Disney had changed his life forever and all but erased his very name, Roy had taken them all to Gettysburg. People spoke, carelessly, of Pickett’s Charge; but Josh had learned, on that steaming, July day when he was on the cusp of adolescence, that it had been something more than a mere charge, that it had been something graver than a headlong rush. Rather, it had been a steady march into withering fire, grim, unwavering, like a tide, ranks dressed as if on parade, unflinching until the last in the iron rain; until, like a tide spent at last at its high-water mark, it broke at last, the irresistible force of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia shattered finally against the unyielding and immovable object of Meade’s Army of the Potomac. That was how he thought of Lance, as that steady, relentless, unwavering grey surge moving steadily and grimly on, fear known but stared down and forced to slink away, duty and determination animating every sinew, a force that only immeasurably greater force could ever turn aside.

And he? Joshua Scott Chasez? People – his friends and family, his very brethren of the band and their counterparts in Backstreet – people had fooled themselves, somehow, unfathomably, into constructing a JC that never existed. They had deceived themselves, even Lance had deceived himself, into seeing him as someone far better and more courageous than he knew himself to be. They seemed unable to recognize the man he saw every day in the mirror, the man who was still the bewildered adopted child wondering when he would be sent away, and why he hadn’t yet been. The man who was still the youth whom Los Angeles had soiled and tossed aside, like a paper napkin from a fast-food joint. They would – even the ones who must, surely, know better – they would see him making a CD without seeming to worry about the critics, the market, the label, or the fans; would see him ramble on, or dress with idiosyncratic eccentricity, or simply take the stage in front of a screaming mob, and they would look at him as if he were doing something courageous. And he would realize the depths of their self-deception and stare at them with blank, stunned incomprehension.

But even at the worst he had never thought there could be a fear so great as this that could come so brutally true.

‘He’s hurting,’ Sarah had said, simply. ‘He has the right. And he’s lashed himself so long and so hard. Now some of it’s hitting others. He gets a pass, this time.’

And Nick had felt himself ashamed, and nodded, forgetting that nods convey little over a cell phone.

Kris had made herself scarce. Not because she feared, as the uninstructed might fear, a blow-up, but because she knew that Lance and Kevin needed the time to talk freely. It was evening, gentle on the land, and quiet save for twilight sounds of insects and birds and the slow creakings of the porch swing and the rocker.

Mississippi had been a brief respite. He and Josh – no: he and C, now – had at least managed to agree, tacitly, that it would be the end of all hope to involve their own parents or their in-laws in this, though of course Karen and Roy, Miz Diane and Jim, knew of what had passed between their sons. But with the only thing that possessed his mind effectively off-limits to their conversation, the Basses and the Loftons had been unable to help Lance by anything more than unwavering support. Unconditional love.

It would not, as a rule, have occurred to the Bassman to seek out Kevin Richardson, distant kin though Kevin and Brian were to him, in the way of the South that throws up odd coincidences as a matter of course, in the fashion by which Southerners with a mind to do so could find a remote and distant cousinage stretching from the Richardson-Littrell connexion in Kentucky through Lynn’s family in Tennessee to the Mississippi Basses to the Spears clan on the state line and on into the Louisiana parishes of Deepest Acadia whence Roy Chasez came. But Howie had made the suggestion, D ex machina, and for once in his life Lance had listened, as folks did listen to Howie; and now here he was, spending a few days with Kev and Kris despite himself, almost as a penance for having, when things first went to hell, begged D and Nicky for sanctuary.

‘I know,’ Kevin said, his drawl – in a pattern with which Lance was wearisomely familiar from his own life – markedly stronger on his home ground, ‘I know sure as shootin’ that I’m about the last of us you’d naturally come and talk at about this. But we ain’t all that differ’nt, you and me.

‘And that’s not about the superficial shit. Green-eyed Southern boys who sing bass and all. You can find one of them in any church choir from Lou’ville to Biloxi, from Norfolk to Waco, from Savannah to Memphis. But we have more in common than you nor I’ve ever really wanted to acknowledge.’

Lance looked at him: silently, steadily, and a trifle skeptically.

‘We’re driven as hell, both of us. We’ve got a mean streak a mile wide to go with it. We don’t neither of us know how to back down even when we get so far out on a limb we’re past the leaves. The people as care about us have to get us down. We’re fighters because we don’t know any other way. Mouthy, too. And our worst faults come of our best qualities. We care about family, and duty, and such all.

‘I know you look at me and half the time you see the man who badmouthed you and your boys to everyone in creation for a solid couple of years, but you know you gave as good as you got, and, you want to be honest with yourself, deep down you understand why and how I was suckered into that game and what buttons Lou and the suits pushed with me, and that if you’d been in my shoes and seen what you were told was a threat to your boys, your family, you’d’ve done the same damn thing. And I know you look at me, too, and see a man who stands for about half the things that rile you most, politically and all, just as sometimes I think you’re the damnedest NRA-sticker-on-the-pickup-window, money-worshippin’ right-winger this side of John Fuckin’ Ashcroft.’

‘Ain’t sure we ain’t both right, come to that,’ Lance rumbled.

‘We ain’t. I know, when I care to let myself admit it, you’ve got a heart bigger’n Texas underneath it all. And in case you’ve forgotten, long and ago, before you were hardly at Space Camp, I reckon, back before Backstreet, I was a straight-backed young EP in the Air Force Reserves with dreams of glory and duty and honor and country, myself. There’s more than a touch of both us in the other, Lance, like it or not.

‘And mostly what there is, is pride. And that’s good and bad. We’d neither of us gotten where we are without it, and the drive that comes with it. Not just in our careers, but in our lives. And it gave us dreams and the balls to go after them. I was sure I was bound for OTC and my wings and being a fighter pilot. For you, it was NASA. And even though my dreams changed, and yours may or may not ever come to pass the way you’d thought, those things made us … better rounded, gave us a depth that some of the others may not have – or have ever needed, either.

‘But I know, maybe better’n anybody you could have come talk at, the other part.

‘Being made a fool of. Being embarrassed by someone who means the world to you. And the rage that comes of that humiliation. I’ve felt it and lived it, with Nick and with Alex. And. When someone you care about. Even when, maybe especially when, it isn’t their fault. Weakness … them being helpless … it scares you, and humiliates you, for their sake and yours both, and you get mad and embarrassed and all the wrong things that just make you madder and more embarrassed by your own reaction…. At the last, when. When Daddy was so weak. And I was so Goddamn fuckin’ helpless and there weren’t shit nobody could do.’

Kevin was looking away now, sightlessly, across the roll of the nighttime fields, his voice harsh. Impulsively, Lance shot out a hand and gripped Kevin’s own, and Kevin gripped back, convulsively.

‘Guess what I’m saying,’ he said, at last, ‘what I’m saying is, I know a little of how you feel. And hell, I wasn’t married to Nicky or Aidge. What I’m saying is, C matters even more to you than Nick or Alex to me, and … don’t you make the mistakes, the proud, bullheaded mistakes, I made. Experience is the best teacher, but the tuition comes awful damn steep. I’m giving you a shot at the Cliff Notes, here.’

‘I think,’ Howie said, gently, ‘that you two need each other right now. And I don’t mean that in any Twelve-Step way. Digame, niño. Can you handle this now? And do you see that it could help you both?’

‘D. Man … the times I ain’t listened to you, well, we both know how that’s gone. You think this is for the best, it’s for the best.’

‘If you’re sure, Alejandrito.’

‘No: if you are. You’ve always been my conscience, Howie, my better angel. Always. If you think it’s right, it’s the way it’s gonna be, okay?’

‘You have a conscience, Alex. What you need is to give yourself a chance. But, yeah, okay. I’ll shove him in your direction. And – Alex?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I know you’re hurting. But. Don’t pull a Timberlake, okay? Bitch to me, not the press. Sarah –’

‘– Didn’t deserve that. I know. You know I know. It won’t happen again.’

‘Good.’

‘See? My conscience. Jiminy D.’

‘You don’t need a cricket any more, Aidge. You’re a Real Boy now, not a puppet.’

‘It happened, James, I can’t change it. And I can’t not use it, whether I mean to or not, whether I even think about it or not, because it’s part of my history no matter how much I wish it wasn’t and everything I am comes through in what I write. It just does.’

‘You know I get tangled up in interviews –’

‘You’ve never got so bad before that you pulled a stunt like this-a-here, to the point I cain’t help but wonder if you weren’t fucked up on something when you gave the damn interview.’

‘That’s low – Lance. That is just petty and pretty fuckin’ low.’

‘Well, I’d a damn sight rather it was that than think you’re succeeding in tryin’ to turn yourself into Justin, Version 2.0! I’d druther you were so high you needed a step-ladder to scratch your ass than it to be that, by a long chalk, on account of rehab would fix the one, but there ain’t no hope nor cure for anybody with Timberlake Syndrome!’

One of the things AJ did – and Sarah, stopping by briefly, took Josh aside to underline the fact that Alex did not, as a rule, do this: that this was something special, something that resonated in him for Josh’s own benefit – one of the things Alex did, then, was sing, knowing that Josh could not, physically could not, forbear to join in. It was a therapy. But there were times when Josh found it just as therapeutic to listen, to absorb a voice so unlike his own and so plangent with blues actually lived. There were certain songs that Josh thought, privately, were all Alex’s, in which he would never join. And sometimes, he would just stand transfixed when the music was too apt. There was something overwhelming in hearing Alex, with all his past threaded through his voice, sing

It was at that point, wincing, that Josh realized his subconscious actually agreed with Bass.

That had been one of the nastiest moments of their life together.

He’d said some incredibly stupid things – publicly, to the press – over the years. They all had (James Lance Bass, for one, whose enthusiasm, as with the Grease III project, sometimes caused his mouth to run up a bill his efforts couldn’t pay; and even Justin, on just this subject and on Britney and Janet and all his thin and threadbare brag, showing off, trying so hard to be grown up); they had all had bouts of foot-in-mouth disease, but he was a consistent screw-up that way, to the point that the other four ran interference for him in interviews as a matter of course. But that quote was one of the most boneheaded rocks he’d ever committed. E-2, Chasez: any official scorer in the bigs would mark it that way.

He knew the minute he’d said it how his James was going to react. And he’d tried desperately to cover it up, as if Mogul-in-Training Lance Bass, Esq., was not going to see it, be shown it, have it faxed him by everyone from ill-wishers to the clipping service whose job it was to Keep the Junior Tycoon Informed. He’d been like a small child trying to hide a broken lamp before a parent came home.

But that hadn’t been at all the worst of it. The worst had been the fight that ensued, when both of them said things they would regret – even if, somehow, and he wasn’t sure any longer that there were a way, but even if somehow they got through this, and past this, and got back together – even then, these would be things they would both regret having said, would regret to their dying day.

Once, Lance had been absorbed in playing Trade Empires on his laptop – which had always led to merciless teasing about his mogul proclivities, his tycoon tendencies – when Chris had gone from merely kibitzing to outright barracking. He was in one of the Middle Eastern episodes, and CK had looked at his merchant roster and started riffing, in his best Borscht Belt comic mode. ‘What, you have moichants named “Assnipples” and “Meshugener,” yet?’

‘“Assurnasirpal” and “Meskiaggasher,”’ he’d said, patiently.

‘“Me-what”?’

Lance knew what was required of him as the Second Banana. ‘“Meskiaggasher.”’

‘This they named him? I told you someone involved in that family was meshugeh!’

Sometimes, having Chris on a roll – and in a role – was like sitting through a local dinner theater’s production of The Sunshine Boys. But Lance had always known there was no vice in Chris’s shtick, even when it was Borsht Belt shtick indeed. It was tribute, not mockery, not stereotyping, any more than it was when Chris channeled Jerry Clower or Richard Pryor – or John Leguizamo. The fact was, as Chris had never quite confirmed but as they all had learned, it was Nichols and May, Jonathan Winters, Ernie Kovacs, Bob and Ray, Stan Freberg, who had made Chris’s childhood bearable; even more had it been Caesar and Reiner, Brooks and Jackie Mason, vintage Jack Benny and Mort Sahl – and, yes, the vinyl LPs of ‘The Buttoned-Down Mind of Bob Newhart’ in Newhart’s standup days; Korman-and-Conway glimpsed on someone else’s TV set; Alan King. Store managers and shop owners and the occasional teacher, and elderly neighbors from time to time, older people who believed – with reason – that their day had been the golden age of comedy and found in the young Chris an apt pupil, had of their charity given Chris an entrée into a world in which circumstances even as dire as his own could be transmuted into laughter. Music had meant, still meant, a great deal to Chris, and performing, still more, but both were in part utilitarian as much as they were a joy to him: means of ascent, vehicles that would carry him and his mother and his sisters out of poverty and hopelessness and want, to a freedom he had dared greatly even to have imagined.

Comedy, though, comedy had been a lifeline, a medicine, a measure of sanity.

And one time, one of the others had asked him about the private roles and private monologues that he kept, just for them; asked, with a faint note of warning, of affront, even, what business he had playing with forms that were not his own. Lance would always remember the sudden, rare tenderness of Chris’s face as he answered, eyes candid: the fugitive sweetness that was always within Chris but that he shared, and then rarely, only with his sisters and Bev, and with the four of them. ‘Somehow, some way, deep down, every good comic is a little bit Jewish,’ he’d said, earnestly. ‘Especially the Irish ones. Just like every good cook is Italian, every great lover is French –’ Joey and JC were both smiling shyly already – ‘and every singer,’ Chris said, petting Justin’s curls, ‘every singer with soul is somehow a little bit Black inside.’ And he’d grinned at Lance, then, and added: ‘And y’know, deep down, every real gentleman’s from Dixie.’

Sitting on the front porch of the Richardson retreat, there in the velvet dark of the Kentucky night, Lance remembered that wisdom Chris had given them. Kevin had been an unexpectedly good friend at a time when Lance most needed one, and a right gentleman, as Howie had known when he’d suggested the visit. And it was time for him, James Lance Bass, to be a gentleman again, no matter what hurts and bitterness had had received from – and had doled out to – a certain French Acadien boy whom he loved.

‘“Timberlake Syndrome”? “Timberlake Syndrome”?’

‘You heard me – JC. Ever’body and his dawg is lauding you for bein’ bold and innovative and Idunnowhatall. But f’om where I stand, neighbor, you’re just followin’ the market and followin’ Somebody as used to follow you. Fine, it was a soundtrack and it had to match the film and that’s all well and good, but “Blowin’ Me Up” ain’t the only thing you’ve done this go-’round, and whiles it’s good and I’m plumb tickled you got to work with Dallas on account of y’all two get along well and I’ m pleased as punch it’s doing well, it ain’t you, or didn’t use to be. Not all this. What the hell happened to the man I knew and love, the young man as liked jazz and vocalese and wanted to revive the sort of style and grace that gave us the standards you could sing so well, the man who I thought had it in him, does still have it in him if he don’t whore himself out for market-share, to be the next Sinatra, the next Bobby Darin? Instead, you’re out there maunderin’ about drugs, and being seen on the hip-hop scene, which, fine, nothing against that except it ain’t you, and generally tryin’ be a damn Timberclone! And look where it got you: tangled up again in that damn life and gettin’ stoned and hangin’ out with, hell, makin’ a damn trashy video, that don’t do no service to your music nor talent nor sense, with, that damn skank Tara! Jesus Christ and General Jackson, if you’re goin’ to sell out at least ask more’n thirty pieces of silver for it, and at least don’t make a splash with a beard who looks like a bad Elvira cloning experiment!’

‘I didn’t direct the fucking video, Lance! You’re so damn smart and superior, you’d know that by now. You know how this business works. And as for Tara, I repeat, it was a video. It’s called acting! Maybe you should brush up on that, given On the Line, remember?’

‘We said such terrible, terrible things, Alex. About. About talent. And writing. And musical choices and markets and being real. And, um. About acting.’

‘Space?’

‘Um. Yeah. Space, too.’

‘You know, J thinks and maybe Chris thinks from last time when you got on your high horse about this, and I’m not minimizing it, I’ve apologized and apologized and you still want your pound of flesh, you just won’t leave it, but they think you get so bent out of shape over this because it’s a temptation you don’t understand and you think it’s tacky and trashy and beneath your holy Mississippi Southern Gentleman feet. But I know better. I know better. Yeah, you’ve got morals and yeah you’ve got ethics and yeah you’re pretty much a fucking snob sometimes and I always loved you anyway, but what it comes to is that you’ve spent your whole life except in bed trying to be a Model, Right-Stuff Astronaut Hero, and that’s what it is. And you still are, even though you’re not.’

‘Tell me that at least you didn’t tell him he was bad in the sack, man.’

‘No. I wasn’t … um, well, maybe I was that mad, but, I wasn’t quite that stupid. But. We said things we can never take back.’

‘You don’t take things back, C. You apologize.’

‘You apologize,’ Kevin had said. ‘Hardest damn thing in the world to do. I learned that the hard way, even before Aidge had to, though different. You cain’t take things back, you can only apologize for them, and mean it. And you learn from that, both ways. What not to say. And, well.’

‘You learn from it,’ Alex said. ‘Not just not to say that shit, but, y’know, it wouldn’t hurt quite way it does if there weren’t a kernel of truth in it.’

‘There. Um. There was. Truth to it.’

AJ waited.

JC addressed his remarks to the countertop, in a low mumble. ‘Ja- – Lance, um, didn’t really care for Justified. It’s just not, well, his thing. But he has to gush – I don’t mean for J’s sake, or to J, or even about J’s album, it’s, he doesn’t really care for hip-hop at all but of course he has to be extra enthusiastic about it because, well, it’s, see, he’s from the South, and, y’know, there are actually people crazy enough, fans, critics, media, that they’d read something into that, him not liking it I mean, would, like, think he’s a bigot or something, so he has to make an extra effort there and pretend to like it, when. Um. He doesn’t. And I like it, I can get into it heavy, man, maybe on a different level than J, but, yes. I can groove to it and the, whatchamathing, the idiom, I can work. But. Okay. He doesn’t, he just doesn’t happen to like hip-hop, because, I mean, this is Lance, y’know, and country, country for him is what jazz is to me, and that’s all there is to that, I mean, working with Nelly he enjoyed a lot, and he loved Gloria, and, y’know, everybody we’ve worked with, but y’know, when we worked with Alabama and when we worked with Tim McGraw, that was when he was just glowy, and that’s just the way it is….’

AJ waited patiently.

‘So. Um. And he hated “Cry Me a River,” because, well, he thought. Brit. He’s not getting involved in that, never was, and, y’know, fault on both sides, but. He actually called him, J, to his face he called him a cad. And a chickenshit, too, I think. Maybe pissant as well. I sorta got out then. I mean, two Southern hotheads, dude. Lucky there wasn’t pistols-at-dawn. But they got through it. Anyway. He. Lance. Not in public, but everywhere else but, he, I mean it’s not mean, he makes it clear, but yeah, he lets people, people he can trust to understand, know. I mean, he lets them know he actually liked Nick’s CD a whole lot better.’

At that, AJ’s eyebrows did shoot up. He knew that the Bassman had said that to him, quietly and in implied confidence, and he’d figured he’d told Nick and D and Bri and Kev. But – other people? Even in the Inner Circle? AJ prided himself on being unshockable, but this took him all aback.

‘But. I mean. Thing is. I kinda did too. Like it better. Nick’s, that is. Because, well. You know. I love J, he’s my brother since forever, and I admire the heck out of him and all the talent and musicianship he has, but. Okay, see, that was right for J, maybe, he really does get that, it really is in him, it is part of him, though, c’mon, you can’t tell me that he didn’t have an eye on the market, and. Yeah. But. James was right.’ Josh didn’t hear himself slip. With a carefully suppressed grin, AJ did. ‘When I did this, it wasn’t this pure act of music that I tell people it was, it was, hey, I can do this, and this is what the market will take right now, and, well. Heh. Now or never, I guess.’

‘Yeah,’ AJ smiled. ‘That was how Junior felt. Thus the title.’

‘But.’ JC looked up now, his face defenseless, heart bared, all earnestness. ‘But Nick did his own thing, man. The cat did what his heart told him to do, he followed his own dreams. I didn’t. And. When. When Lance called me on it, it stung like fire. I lashed out, Alex. And I don’t know if we’ll ever get past that.’

‘LA, the Sam Hill are you looking at us thataway? Setting there staring like a tree-full of owls.’

‘What, dear? I can’t enjoy the sight of two incredibly good-looking guys – one of them my Very Own Husband – at a range millions of teenies would kill their grannies to get within?’

‘Miz LA!’ Lance actually blushed.

Brian’s wife laughed at them both. ‘No, actually I was just thinking about genetics.’

‘Hon, if you want to talk about a sibling for Baylee, I can have Cousin Bass step inside.’

‘Silence, singing munchkin! Your empress speaks!’ LA winked at Lance, who was trying, unsuccessfully to stifle a snicker.

‘She’s right,’ Kris chimed in. She gestured towards Kevin, who had followed her out onto the porch with a full tray: she had just finished making lemonade. ‘How anyone can not see how you three favor….’

‘Why, Kris, hon, you said they “favor,”’ LA exclaimed. ‘We’ll make a belle of you yet.’

Kris snorted, simultaneously with Kevin. ‘Yeah right. I could live to the age of 110, and if it was up to you Southerners, my headstone would read, “Dearly Beloved Though a Stranger Amongst Us.” But c’mon, you three guys. It’s that jaw. It’s like a Habsburg Lip, and it seems to crop up all over the South. You three, Justin a little, Shelby Foote…. Sometimes it’s so powerful through the width it makes you guys look like you got less chin than you really have, even. I guess, though, Roy’s bunch missed it, since Josh is perfectly chiseled without it.’

Kevin and Brian exchanged a quick, slightly bug-eyed look. If Kristin and Leigh were a-fixin’ to start in on the Bass, it was their cue to sidle unobtrusively towards the door. Angels might rush in where they weren’t fool enough to tread, but they’d be fools not to get out while they could. Unfortunately, their two angels, and the Bass, were too alert for that, and pinned them, immobilized, with a glance.

Kris was not deflected from her objective, and she had LA backing her. ‘Come to think of it, you’ve started calling him “JC” again, haven’t you. I never did understand the name thing with you two.’

‘I don’t sleep,’ JC blurted out. That shocked AJ more than he’d been shocked to hear that Lance had praised Nick’s CD to those not on a strict Need To Know list.

‘I mean, I doze. A lot. I mean, even for me. But. Real sleep? I’ve forgotten. Um. I’ve forgotten how to sleep alone.’

Sometimes, privately, James Lance had called Josh ‘the Human Anaconda.’ Sleeping – literally, sleeping: not sex, but actual sleep – sleeping with JC was a full-body experience. Lance missed that inexpressibly. He hadn’t slept worth a damn since the, er, blow-up.

It was always the little things. The tilt of a head, the ability to converse with half-finished allusions that were understood without the need of more, the scent and feel and sound of a relationship.

And there was – had been – ‘the name thing.’

In the beginning – the beginning of what had become his heaven and earth, ’N Sync – he had known himself hopelessly, haplessly out of place. Chris and Joey, Justin and JC, Chris and Justin, and especially Joey and JC: there was history there, comprehension and knowledge, and none of it anything he shared or could decode. So he had watched, watched unrelentingly, even as his body forced itself through exhaustion and muscle fatigue and sleep deprivation to be remotely fitted to hammer into the pre-existing machine, with shaving and grinding down and a shim or two, a Rube Goldberg fit but just enough not to be discarded. Had watched, unblinkingly, even as he flogged his mind to a last despairing effort, to learn the parts, learn the language, learn the pat answers and the Lou-approved bullshit and the canned personality that had Lou’s and the fans’s imprimatur, and at the same time to keep up with his schoolwork and appease a mother who was itching to pull the plug on this insane idea and take him home to Hinds County.

Had watched and listened and never ceased even in sleep, even in his troubled dreams, to analyze, to deduce, to figure the angles. And had – typically, he thought to himself, with would have been bitterness had not long use dulled bitterness’s edge – had gotten it wrong.

Joey might or might not have had the right. Even to him – even now: and even, which was the more troubling, to the others, after years of half-truths and horseshit – even to him the truth of Life Before the Band was murky, and there were at least as many stories, versions, as there were people to tell the tale. Perhaps Joe had done it as one of his rare affectations, in the way some Old Hands on the Hill ostentatiously called a politician by an earlier title, ‘Governor,’ say, to parade their length of service: I Knew Him When. Whatever the cause, and motive, whatever the rights of it, Joey had called JC ‘Josh’ sometimes, which, intended to do so or not, was a reminder to all of them, even Justin, that Joe had known C longest, from his first arrival in Orlando.

And Lance had misconstrued it, had mistaken the meaning of the signal, had thought it was a sort of password within the band’s inner circle, and when he had felt himself firmly enough ensconced had used it himself. The first few times, JC had ignored it. Joe had winced, perhaps, but remained irresolute, not sure of how to break to Lance the enormity of his presumption. Sometimes Joe’s very kindness set others up for a worse outcome. And so Lance had gone innocently onward, and used the name one time too many, and JC had taken him aside and coolly torn a strip off his hide in a way that still could make Lance writhe when he thought about it.

Afterwards, too, there had been the Suit-Approved lie that no one called JC ‘Josh’ except Karen ‘when she was mad at’ him; and Lance had gotten heartburn every time he thought about his faux pas.

And yet they had been for some years now James and Josh. To their intimates, even, a collective entity, Jamesanjosh.™ Josh had finally given in, had faced the fact that he was cold-shouldering Lance because anything less, any less resolute refusal to enforce a distance, would cause all his own defenses to crumble into sand and leave him abjectly, hopelessly, and finally openly in love with Lance. And in sweet surrender, he had confessed to Lance just how affecting had been hearing his own true name, his real name, the name of the real Joshua Scott Chasez, on Lance’s lips. How it had been an act of desperation on his part, one of his final attempts to deny what he felt for Lance, to shove Lance away from that intimacy as well. ‘But now,’ he’d said, ‘now you have the right. Only you, ever. Because. It makes me feel good. It lets me know that you love me, would have loved me if we’d met without the group, would have even if I’d never gotten a break or been on TV or anything. It makes me feel safe, like when I was little and they took me in.’

There hadn’t been much Lance could say to that. Nor to what Josh had said next, with serene determination and sublime indifference to whether it might be true for Lance, as apparently it hadn’t actually been for Josh, that the use of his given name called up faint memories of an angry parent: ‘And I shall call you James. It will be something just for us.’ Fortunately, as James had later explained to Chris, who worried about just such issues, Daddy was always ‘Jim’ or ‘Big Jim’ or ‘Mister Jim,’ and when Diane was riled with her son she called him by his full set of names, Christian-middle-and-surname. ‘Good,’ Chris had said, faintly, ‘because, um, having a flashback to your mom yelling at you when you’re, um, busy….’ And Chris had shuddered while James had blushed.

But as Josh had decreed it, so it had been. And it had become a way of demarcating the private from the public and professional, a password to an inner circle after all, a means of shedding the often uncomfortable personæ they’d been assigned, in favor of their own skins.

That was why Josh was ‘C’ to him right now.

‘And. I’ve lost the music, Alex.’

‘Wha- no, man. Tell me you don’t mean –’

‘Not, y’know, for good. But. He was right. And. You know, when you sing “City of New Orleans,” man. It’s like, that’s somehow your song. I never even hum along. There’s just something, I dunno. You and it fit. And James, man. He always said the standards, and new standards, which for some reason he thinks I can write. But, the standards were supposed to be mine. And. It was funny, kind of, when it was Nicky, when he and Sweetness had a spat, and that’s all it was, and he looked so shocked, shocked, that there were so many songs about missing someone. But it isn’t funny, really. James is such a water baby. I mean, like, water is his element, not earth or air or fire, y’know? And I hear something that involves, sailing, maybe, or water, or the sea, and I just, my throat seizes up. I mean, you can forget about our doing the “Sailing” cover, man. And the other day someone was playing Lyle Lovett, “If I Had a Boat,” and I nearly broke down. That is so James, with the boat and the pony and “fuck-you, world, I got what matters to me and I am sailing off outta here” and all. And James Taylor’s “The Water is Wide,” and “Take a Ride On a Riverboat,” and “Proud Mary,” and “Dock of the Bay”…. I can’t even stand Nick’s “I Got You” right now, thanks to that damn video, and forget you guys doing “Drowning,” and frankly, I liked that song until this, dunno if I ever told you but I do.’

AJ snorted. ‘Kev called that our tribute to Air Supply.’

‘Huh. He got lines. And did them well, though, man, you guys have, like two baritones, really, you and him, I mean, no offense, but James couldn’t hit notes that high if you put his balls in a vise, man.’

‘Yeah, yeah, he’s Barry White, I know. We let Kev pretend he’s a big manly basso, man. It makes him feel more secure about the manskirt. But seriously, pal, you have got to get this straightened out with the Bassman. I mean, it’s even affecting your music? That is like ultimate serious with dudes in our business.’

‘I know.’

‘Jayce?’

‘Yeah?’

‘What’s your song?’

‘Um.’

‘Look, you said “City of New Orleans” was me, somehow. “My” song. Same deal. Gun to your head, five seconds to answer, what’s yours?’

‘Uh. “Sailing.” Not the Christopher Cross one we covered. The Bobby Darin one. It’s one of James’s favorites, and he loves me to sing it, and it’s about his beloved ocean, which he can rival Nick about, and, well, it’s all wrapped up in him, and us.’

‘And that’s your song. The way we mean that, here.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And it’s all wrapped up in James Lance Bass and what you two have together. Do the math, babes. Do the math and fix this. Because let me tell you. You have it easy, compared to where I am with Sare. Fix this one: because you don’t know what a luxury it is that you can.’

‘I don’t know if I can! Everything – James, the music, everything – and I fucked it all up, okay, okay, he and I both fucked it all up, just with a few angry words, after I’d been quoted saying some fucking stupid ones. All this, from words.’

AJ took a moment to find his own, right words. ‘I guess,’ he finally said, ‘what you gotta do is, you can’t consult your fears, man; it ain’t the words, though words have power, it ain’t the fears: it’s, do you have any doubts, honestly? Not fears, not wounds from words: you got any real doubts? Didn’t think so, man. So. You do what you hafta do, no matter what words are between you guys.’

‘It’s not that easy, Alex,’ Josh said, softly. ‘It’s – I know beyond a doubt that what we had was the real thing. But I do have doubts whether we can erase the words we said.’

‘I guess,’ James finally said – James, now, with these concerned friends, a James without his Josh but no longer hiding behind the constructs of ‘Lance’ and ‘C,’ and determined to earn his Josh back – ‘I guess what it comes to with the name thing is, “JC” is the one the public sees. But “Josh”….’

‘Josh,’ Brian said, quietly, ‘isn’t the JC doing a Mad Max drag race for the favors of Tara Reid, Josh is the man who outran that Beemer in the red Porsche with you by his side in the “Bye, Bye, Bye” video.’

‘That’s about it, I reckon.’

‘Well,’ AJ said, finally, with a wry half-grin. ‘Words can hurt. A lot. And the drugs, man, that’s – look, you and me, no need for words, right, we know just how bad that shit is for the karma. But hey, at least you didn’t sleep around on him as well. Uh. Did you?’

‘No! No, man. I mean. Dude!’

‘Okay, okay.’ The grin was a full grin now: the classic lupine AJ Grin. ‘So why aren’t you comforting me, man? I think that puts you waaaaaaay ahead on points.’

JC ducked his head, blushing a little, but then grew serious again. ‘That was bad, Aidge, sure. You know that. But. I hurt his pride about as bad as if I’d done that.’

‘Yeah. I hear you. It’s about more than just pride, right, with Sarah and me on that. But I get where you’re at. And when it comes to his pride, man. Southerners, shit. Bass singers. Even if he wants to climb down, now. You’re gonna have to help him do it. He’s the type, man, ain’t capable of climbing down himself.’

‘Way I’m going with words, I can’t talk him down.’

‘Did I say use words? Show him, man. Show him. Action, babes, it’s action that can do this thing.’

He had made sure – just as he knew full well that Josh had made sure, when he talked to the others – James had made sure that he avoided the topic of The Fight when he spoke with Chris or Joey or Justin. But Justin had raised it, once, in that afternoon’s phone call.

‘Look, dawg. He wants this the way you wanted Soyuz Five. And I know you want him to have it as much as he wants it, more than the three of us even can want it for him. And I know you don’t like the shit, but – all he wanted was to get a foot in the door at the next level, and that means some compromise. But music, man. We’re talking his legacy here.’

James had snapped, ‘Look, June Carter Cash just died. The Carter Family and the Cashes, that’s a legacy. Hank Senior and Hank Junior, that’s a legacy. We’re a boyband, J.’

‘But, fuck, man, you repeat this, I’ll deny it, but fuck, he’s better at all this than I am –’

‘– No argument from me.’

‘Yeah, well, you’re biased.’ Justin had smirked, audibly. ‘You never got none from me. But yeah, he is. And he could go all the way.’

‘Not by trying to dog your footsteps, though. He shines brighter in his own light.’

Justin snorted. ‘Shines, flames, what-evah. Fine, you think this is the wrong break-out for him? Fine. You’re the mogul, and you know him like no one else. You’re probably right. And I know you’re pissed about the way this puts him in the scene with a lot of people who smoke up the way you drink Diet Dr Pepper. ’M saying is, I ain’t the one you need to be havin’ this conversation with, homes.’

It pained him to do so, but James had to admit that Justin was right. In four or five years, he might even live that admission down. Or at least get J to stop crowing about it.

‘Whatever it takes, Joe.’

‘Hey, D, I’m on board – no pun intended. You think I like having my oldest bud from the group, and my best bud, Briahna’s godfather, on the outs? Basta. You bet we’ll manage it. If Chris and I can’t pull this off, no one can.’

They were in Howie’s dressing room at the San Diego venue, stealing a few last moments of counsel and comfort before the show they were co-hosting.

‘I bet you have your signature purple on, at least somewhere,’ Josh smiled.

‘Always,’ Howie said. ‘You know why?’

‘It’s your favorite color.’

‘Yes. But do you know why? I mean, it’s not just to give the Bitch Public another reason to say, “Oh, yeah, the gay one, right?” It means something.’

Josh looked at Howie with grave attention.

‘Pink ribbons are for breast cancer. Yellow for the troops overseas. Red for AIDS. Josh, what color is the ribbon for lupus?’

‘Purple,’ Josh whispered, suddenly understanding any number of things he had long been blind to.

‘Josh, Caro was sister, confidante, best friend, almost everything to me in many ways. But James, to you…. He is what Roy is to Karen, Nick to me, Miz Diane to Mister Jim. You know this. And at any moment, in the split second between one heartbeat and the next, any one of us could lose our own loves. Don’t let another day pass on this. Don’t.’

‘I. I don’t want to, D. I never did. I don’t know how, though. I don’t know how to fix this.’

‘Weeeeeeeeeell,’ drawled a deep voice from the doorway, ‘first off, darlin’, y’all do this show. And then you get back to Alex’s. He’s been kind enough to make himself scarce, and I promise you I can dump CK and Joe in the scramble to sneak out of the VIP box before the last number tonight. And tomorrow, you wake up in my arms where you belong to be, and we chart a new and better course. Once I’m done apologizin’ for bein’ a horse’s ass and we have a lot of make-up sex.’

‘One minute,’ the ASM called down the hallway.

END