From Baltimore to the Bay: I Can’t Help Myself

By Ian McDuff

This is an entry – which I volunteered for, very late in the game – in the Slash Across America challenge. Maryland, my Maryland.

This isn’t precisely a songfic, which in fact I pretty much eschew. But if you need a soundtrack, put on The Four Tops, (Sugarpie, Honeybunch) I Can’t Help Myself.

It was odd, being back in Maryland. But Lance, his own sweet James, had wanted to explore Josh’s home state, and, well, that was that. It was odd, being in Maryland at all without the ’rents, knowing that they were in Chicagoland, knowing that Ty and Heather were scattered to the winds of adulthood. It was odd, being in Maryland after all they’d seen and done.

But James had wanted this, and was reveling in it.

It was a perfect late September day, and already in the Catoctins and the far western ridges of the great Allegheny-Appalachian chain the leaves were beginning to blaze: there was a snap already in the nights’s airs, a gentle morning haze each day spicy with the wild scent of autumn and the fall of the year. September was fast running down to October, like a maple key spiraling, a leaf drifting down to the forest duff: it was late September, and the early ’80s were but a distant memory, so their first stop had had to be Camden Yards for the last homestand: it wasn’t as if, in these days, in a time that knew not Cal nor Dempsey nor Palmer, the Orioles would have a postseason.

Seeing his native state again through James’s green-gilt eyes. They had gone to the Eastern Shore, where already the grasses and grainfields were tawny, and Lance had stood enraptured as the earliest geese drove purposefully through scudding clouds and slip-slid to the grey and restless waters of the Chesapeake. James and Josh had gorged themselves on crab and oysters and long, crisp nights of love under the comforters in Crisfield, and it was good.

Maryland was different, somehow, now that he could tread its soil again with his James. They had stood silent in sunken lanes and cornfields and churchyards at Sharpsburg, at Antietam, that bloodiest of battles. And Josh had smiled to himself when the Park Historian and his James had had a polite tussle about the placement in the line of battle of the 18^th Mississippi, Barksdale’s Brigade, McLaw’s Division, Longstreet’s Wing (I Corps), Army of Northern Virginia. And it was good.

They had covered the state, from Port Tobacco to the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad in Frostburg, from St Mary’s to the Drum Point Lighthouse. It was strange, how a different and lambent light lay upon the land when you walked it with your love. The very redolence of the McCormick’s Spice warehouse was mystically different as they strolled, discreetly touching hands every third or fourth step, through Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. And lo, it was good.

It was in Baltimore, by arrangement, that they met up with D and Nicky, who were traveling back from New York.

They had been fighting, clearly, or rather, Nick had: Howie refused to fight, which lashed Nicky to further rages. James could half understand that, though he could neither excuse nor accept it; to Josh, it was wholly a mystery. But then, Josh shared that odd, Zen-like calm that was so integral to Sweet D’s character.

One of the few things that could shatter that placid and pacific calm in JC was when Nick treated Howie poorly. He was white with fury that night after an appallingly uncomfortable dinner, throughout which Nick had sniped and goaded an unmoved D. ‘That – that … I … why does D … I cannot, I cannot believe the way –’ Josh was pacing, his hands flailing like Toscanini’s during an all-Wagner concert. ‘I could kill Hamhock,’ he snapped, using his pet term of disdain for Nick.

‘Sugarpie,’ James rumbled from his prone position on their bed.

Immediately the Pavlovian reactions set in: in the first place, that bass thunder left Josh hard as a rock, and in the second, he was powerless not to respond, pitch-perfectly, ‘Honeybunch?’

James grinned, as lazy as a Mississippi summer afternoon. ‘ ’Tain’t our bidness or our problem. D knows how to handle Nick. And in his own head-up-th’-ass way, Nick counts on that and needs D more’n anyone can right fathom. Sweet D’ll sweeten Nick’s disposition, just you watch.’

And in that moment, in the last moment before coherent thought fled and Josh slipped into James’s arms and thence into unthinking ecstasy, an idea lodged in his mind, one that he would recall the next morning.

Sated and sleepy as a fed and petted kitten, Josh awoke mid-morning the next day to find James looking at him with a smile of perfect tenderness. ‘Joshy?’

‘Mmm. Babe.’

‘You ’fess up now. Just before we went to bed, I saw a light go off. You’ve had one of your ideas, now haven’t you?’

Josh smiled, slowly.

‘You and your surprises,’ James whispered, licking Josh’s ear as he did so. Josh nearly missed his turn. In the back seat, Nick sat sullen, glowering, and D did his celebrated imitation of the Buddha, mysterious smile and all.

They were in a residential suburb in North Balto, a long and tree-lined street that gave no hint of the secret it contained. They stopped before a house that, save for the cars parked outside, seemed like any other private house.

Josh was bouncing a little, quivering and taut as a bowstring with excitement. ‘C’mon, let’s go. This – you’ve never … man, let’s go, come on!’

Grudgingly, scuffing his feet like a ten year old being dragged to try on school clothes, Nick followed. D cocked an inquisitive brow at James, who shook his head, and they exchanged grins over the eccentricities of their lovers.

In they went, and stopped, astounded. ‘Jesus,’ Nick yelped, in gosling, adolescent tones. ‘This place – this was on that food channel!’

Josh nodded, as vigorously as his own bobble-head doll, unable to conceal his glee. ‘Moore’s Candies, the best in Maryland, best in the world. Look at it, just look at it!’

James and Howie chuckled, then gave in to Josh’s enthusiasm. It was impossible not to: they were inside the ultimate candy store, Moore’s, lurking as it does behind the mom-and-pop façade of its first beginnings. The proprietors, the Heyl family, successor to the Moores, greeted them, knowing who they were yet knowing better than to make a fuss, and they were taken in hand for the grand tour. Nick’s eyes popped when they went down to the basement and he took in the rich scents and watched the handmaking of premium candies live and up close. Within a quarter hour, he was as ‘up’ as any of them – well, perhaps any save Howie, in their most private moments – had ever seen, eagerly tasting, avidly getting a hands-on demonstration, and then, when they were all back upstairs, showering D with every candy and confection he could buy him. All four of them were giggly by the time D and Nick began feeding each other candies shaped like softshell crabs. At one point, James leaned over to D and murmured, ‘My Gawd, can you imagine the havoc, we’d been dumb enough to bring Chris in here?’ And they busted up laughing. And it was good.

Hours later, laden with boxes upon boxes of sweets, they began the drive back. Nick, grinning from ear to ear, started singing, ‘You are my candy, boy –.’ James turned around and cut him off, beaming. ‘Oh no, Carter, that ain’t the song that inspired Josh to bring us out here.’ He started, and Josh took the baritone because Nick’s lower register wasn’t as good, and D took the counter-tenor, and the car rolled on into the dusk, filled with joyous singing:

I can't help myself
I want you and nobody else….

END