Damn these irresistible challenges! This was a long-ago list challenge that, among others, my colleague Bohemia (go see her take at Rapture: Quiet: Corcovado) and I both stepped up to the plate for.

FAREWELL to the FLESH

James and Josh had developed an obsession with catalogues.

Partly, Chris suspected, it allowed them to fantasize about The Future Marital Home; mostly, he and Joe agreed, just looking at the merchandise gave them a subconscious feeling of security and normalcy, out on the road. 'Kinda like Justin and porno,' Joe quipped: they still found it funny that the shupashtah Golden Boy got so much less than his talk would lead one to believe – or indeed than circumstances should reasonably have provided (or would have, had he had a personality beneath the glitter). After that line, Chris had started referring to the Bass-Chasez catalogues as their 'decor-porn,' and jibed them about whacking off at the sight of a crocheted afghan throw.

Not that it was just house-and-garden catalogues. It was Josh, mostly, who spent hours in touch with his feminine side, oohing and aahing over Williams-Sonoma, the ever-tacky Horchow, Neiman-Marcus, Bombay Company, the Metropolitan Museum of Art: all the middle-brow fantasies.... James, always the more butch of the two, gravitated towards Cabela's hunting and fishing gear, LL Bean, Orvis, tack and saddle catalogues, and men's clothing, sometimes designer, sometimes spilling over from his outdoorsy, woodsy fantasies – 'Josh! Look, hon: a dinner jacket in woodland camo!' (Josh never said anything about the stranger ideas the Land's End wannabes gave his lover: he himself had yet to hear the end of it regarding a certain dead bear he'd worn to the VMAs....)

At every third or fourth venue, the latest accumulated catalogues – the sale of mailing lists being what it is, James and Josh made sure the catalogues went to them at Jive's address – were waiting for them. Of course their nights were still filled with the passion of two horny young men in their twenties who've found True Love. But downtime now included quiet stretches where 'the Old Married Couple' – Chris's smart-mouth label, again, of course – sat snuggled somewhere, poring over ads for flatware and fishing rods.

They actually ordered very little from the catalogues, spending less than did most people who had a tenth their income. James tended to plow his money into FreeLance and startups and zero-coupon municipal bonds and blue chip industrial stock, and Josh ... frankly, Josh was just plain cheap, 'tighter'n Dick's hat-band' as his future in-laws noted (approvingly).

So it was a bit of a surprise they'd earned points enough for a vacation in Rio de Janeiro, at a cut rate even Josh approved of. In fact, it was the 'free' part that swayed Josh, when push came to shove.

Rio. Wealth, and beauty, and crawling, stinking, abject poverty, hopelessness and death. A drag-hustler of a city, tricked out with paste and illusion and padding from wig to toe-ring.

At least they had missed Carnival. There were no black-outs on this offer: they could as easily have gone during the festivities (every time Josh thought about how easily they could have rented an entire hotel, had they wished, even in the midst of Mardi Gras madness, and how much they were saving by not having had to pay for practically anything at all, it made him giddy. Which was fine with James: a giddy Josh, he had long since learnt, was a horny Josh...). But they'd discussed it, and decided against it.

Their bandmates had maintained that this was proof that, A, the two had finally lost it, and, B, that they were now officially boring as hell even by Old Married Couple standards.

'I mean, actually,' Joe had said, in a voice that held actual pain, 'Carnival in Rio, man. Topless chicks all over the place – oh, right: well, okay, Brazilian dudes in thongs, shaking their booty down the avenue in a big-ass omnisexual parade, man.... You're passing that up!?!'

Josh had shaken his head, looking wise beyond his years. 'Tourist shit, man. We want to see Rio without the crowds and the crap and the craziness. Hear some carioca –'

At that point, Chris, who'd been sneaking sugar cubes again, started bouncing off the walls, crooning 'The Girl From Ipanema' and 'Blame It On the Bossa Nova' – which Joe found impossible to resist, and then he started harmonizing, and a whole sing-along-with-Mitch-Miller might have broken out right then except they had to back up and explain the whole thing to Justin, who was still wondering 'why'd anyone have to go to Southern America or wherever just to hear karaoke?'

After Chris was done giving him shit about having the geographical knowledge of George W. Bush, they set in to explain that carioca music was the music of the cariocas, the native citizens of Rio – 'oh, yeah, kinda like salsa or merengue, huh, man? I love gettin' mah freak on to dat' – and when that, obviously, didn't work, Josh had broken out that old Disney flick in which Donald Duck teams up with the Mexican rooster and the Brazilian parrot named Jose Carioca, in hopes that a Disney version would educate Justin where their explanations could not. Most of his education, such as it was, had come from the Mouse anyway, one way or another.

'Dat's crunk. I mean, yo, stuff's like, I dunno, tranquilizers for your old eight-track –' which had annoyed Chris, who missed his eight-track and didn't care to be reminded of his age – ' 's got like no beat, no rhythm, no dirty-ill downbeats or stuff dat makes your hips wanna go like dis –'

'Stop him now,' Chris moaned. 'He mentions "dirty pop" or "poppin'-fresh dance moves" I swear I'll strangle him myself.' Predictably, Justin had immediately used both phrases, and Chris had attacked him with a stuffed panda bear, and things had gone downhill from there.

So that hadn't worked either, and now they were in Rio, having left behind three bandmates who thought the Bass-Chasezes were totally looney-tunes.

'Are you sure you don't mind that we missed Carnival?' Josh asked, for the hundredth time.

'Hon....' James sighed. It had been a great day, the sixth great day in a row. Clubs where no one bothered them – small jazz and piano bars as much as Caneçao and the Imperador; meals ranging from strange Portugese-Brazilian dishes – galhino ao molho pardo – to beef orgies at rodizio restaurants to peixadas fresh from the sea, to haute cuisine at the restaurants founded in boom years in the late Nineteenth Century by French and Italian and German expatriates; all-but- (and sometimes wholly-bare-assed-) nude, mixed beaches, gay-and-straight, where no one bothered them for their celebrity but merely hit on them as being hot and tried the usual scams on them as being North American tourists: beaches where they could feast their eyes, secure in the knowledge that neither wanted anything from anyone save the man beside him, and where they could admire the outer beauty that – they knew – covered with an ephemeral and evanescent gloss the ills of poverty and the highest AIDS rates in the hemisphere ... a fact that they thrust from their minds whenever it occurred to them, though they would only have looked-and-not-touched in any case, as neither could imagine being with anyone save his lover, his other half....

It had been a great day, and Josh was still obsessing insecurely about it. Fucking Chris and Joey ... they'd just had to spout off, hadn't they?

James rolled onto his side, looking down at his love. The nighttime city sparkled behind them through the window of their luxurious suite, a suite that had the comfort of the most expensive modern hotels, the charm of the oldest inns, a private beach, and a bed big enough to host a battalion. Why the hell could Josh not see that this was just fucking perfection? The city lights bejeweled the velvet night, masking the death's-head poverty and degradation on the streets below ... it was a Southern Gothic mood, there thousands of miles from the American South, and the Mississippian wore it like a comfortable old sweater....

'Sugarpie. One last time, love, it was as much my idea as yours, missin' that-all lunacy. Fat Tuesdays ain't that big a thing among us Southern Baptists just for starters, and hell, I've been to Nawlins and Biloxi and Mobile for 'em. I can see drunks on wrought-iron balconies yellin' "show us your tits, honey!" back to home.'

Josh snuggled closer, beginning to be reassured, once again, by the source of his strength.

'Well, I dunno, I mean, it's just, it's like a super-party, an uber-party, the, like, Platonic ideal of a party, and Mardi Gras, bidding farewell to the flesh, there's a resonance there –' Josh was babbling, again, and it was clear to James that however far his lover's journeys took him, there was still a part of JC Chasez – Methodist-like-Mom, RC-like-Roy's-Cajuns, Neo-Platonist, Mennonite, Taoist, whatever the fuck he was this week – that would never quite escape a Maryland part-Catholic upbringing, that would always surge to the tides of the Chesapeake and the last faint dream, three hundred years old, of English Catholicism finding its refuge in the wilderness....

James shut him up the best and most effective way he knew how, with a deep and soulful kiss that flipped the breakers in Josh's mind – as it always had and always would.

'Sweetness, I wanted just what we have here. I wanted us to be able to walk around, soak up sun like lizards on a chert rock – and I like bein' so sensitive to it you have no choice but to slather me down ... all ... over ... ever' quarter hour; I wanted us to be just ourselves, just James an' Joshy, wanderin' and stravaiglin' around a city in which they ain't but one person knows who were are.' He gestured to where, above the fevered city with all its false laughter and grim reality, the statue of Jesus Christ, the Monumento Cristo Redentor, looked compassionately down, arms wide in benediction, absolution, and embrace: 120 feet of cool, imperishable stone high atop Corcovado, soothing the febrile city far below. 'I wanted us to be able to just be ourselves, drinkin' coconut water straight out the shell, listening to samba beats and hearing the caromble drums in our damn pulses even. I wanted this as much as you did, love. The way I always want what you want and you want what I want and we live to make each other smile. The way any place – even those terrible, sad favelas of the poor here – any place is Eden that has you in it, any time, anywhere. Haven't you got that through that hard haid yet, Joshua Scott Bass-Chasez?'

Josh kissed his soulmate tenderly. 'I think I'm getting there, babe. I really think I am.' He looked over at the window and out through the night to the Monument of Christ the Redeemer. 'You think He minds?'

'About us?'

'Um-hmm.'

'Do you think He does, Josh?'

Josh lay there quietly a moment. 'You know what? I don't. I really don't. I don't think He minds at all.'

James smiled, and placed a soft, feather-light kiss on Josh's brow. 'Something else you're figurin' out, finally.' His smile and his caress took away any sting in the words.

Josh laughed. 'Maybe I am. Maybe I finally am.' He grinned up at his love. 'And I'll tell you something else, too, you wild-eyed Southern boy. I am not giving you up for Lent.'

END

Happy now?

– Ian