Cruisin’: If You Want It, You Got It, Forever

by Ian McDuff

For the Love’s Sweet Design Challenge. And for alexandriabrown’s birthday. Part of the Songbook. Anyone not immediately recognizing the title track will be shot at dawn.

Companion to Let’s Get It On: Let Your Love Come Down.

They had become adept at seizing moments, at juggling the necessities of love with the intrusions of life, at stealing a week here and a day there. And not all the time ‘in the studio’ or ‘in post’ or ‘on hiatus’ had to do with the demands of life and their careers; some of it, perforce, was cover for the times they stole away.

There are advantages to being rich.

Had it been up to JC, he and Lance would be in a villa in the wilds of deepest Tuscany. But that was the sort of thing that required more time, to do right, than they could swing: la dolce vita is not a vacation’s motto, but rather a way of life. And this – well, not a compromise: JC was perfectly content and more than content with it – this alternative, then, was as close to perfection as mortal life afforded. It involved the water: waters blue and green and wine-dark and tinctured with ancient meaning. It allowed Lance and JC to spend time with their counterparts, double-date partners, and Best Gay Friends, Nick and Howie. It was sweetly Mediterranean, and it was all aboard a sailing vessel that made both Lance and Nicky giddy with happiness … which, from JC’s perspective, and Howie’s, was a wondrous thing, in that, as they’d long learned, happy, giddy lovers tend to be gleefully amorous mates as well.

And because they could sleep six aboard, and because their chartered vessel really handled best with a full ship’s complement of six, it meant they had an excuse to drag along two of their friends, the two who were most at a loose end and least needed to be.

The sun was hot but not unbearable, a Mediterranean sun that effervesced in the blood and did not enervate, a sun kindly rather than brutal, in an air that was limpid and dry, aromatic with scrub and herb, not muggy like the oppressive airs of Florida and Mississippi. An almost Californian weather, but far more deeply imbued with magics that went back to the eldest days. An atmosphere that whispered a siren song by the very seas the Sirens themselves once knew. An –

‘C!’ Chris sounded impatient, and AJ, standing beside him with his hands on his hips, looked it. Apparently, this was not their first try at getting his attention.

‘Huh?’

‘We’re here, Spaceout.’

JC looked around him and saw that they had indeed docked. The Egeria, a 40' English gaff cutter built in 1904 by the English yard of Crossfield & Sons, her lines taken from the prawners of Morecambe Bay – a trim and ladylike vessel that, JC rather thought, Lance might love about as much as he loved JC himself – rode to her moorings with an air. She looked at the other craft, JC felt, with the sort of dry sympathy, the patronizing acceptance, of the English abroad: with one eyebrow raised, half in amusement, half in despair, with the fecklessness of the effete Continentals, the Lesser Breeds Without the Law. After all, she had been built, built in the high and splendid Edwardian noon of Empire, of sturdy Britannic wood, of elm and oak and larch and pine and the yew of English bowmen, to face the North Sea and the open Atlantic; she had made crossings from St Kitts to the Canaries in under three weeks and had never known nor suffered an engine in her long, lovingly-maintained, canvas-powered life; she was competent, seasoned, a dreadnought in a duck-pond compared to the nouveau riche and pampered ships of the lazy Mediterranean…. The Egeria, nymph of Latium though she was, was a fit consort for the stern Roman virtues of a Numa Pompilius…. Her relation to these other craft that crowded the harbor, looking tinsel and gimcrack by contrast no matter how much money had been poured into them, was that of the competent and seasoned towards the poseur, of the man of parts, the man of clever hands, the man who could do things, towards the slack-twisted Eurotrash of a thousand discos: she was, in fact, the perfect vessel for her current, if temporary, master, Captain Bass, whose own attitudes and relation to others was much the same….

They set him down bodily on terra firma, the four of them, Nick and AJ and Howie and Chris, but it was Lance’s touch once on land, the merest brush of hand on shoulder, that broke his poet’s trance and woke him at last fully to his surroundings, as it ever did.

‘“The Water Rat,”’ Lance chuckled, ‘“was restless, and he did not exactly know why.”’ And Howie grinned, and said, ‘Verdad. “Wayfarers All,” indeed. “What seas lay beyond, green, leaping, and crested! What sun-bathed coasts, along which the white villas glittered against the olive woods! What quiet harbours, thronged with gallant shipping bound for purple islands of wine and spice, islands set low in languorous waters!”’

JC grinned, and blushed, and ducked his head, in the habit that he had and that Lance found utterly adorable. Chris was immune to its charms, though. ‘Well, here we are, where “every wave throbs with a deathless memory” and there are mandolins and guitars and garlic and wine, so let’s stop fantasizing about it and get going. Unless you guys want to sit around quoting children’s lit all day.’

‘Oh, give him a break,’ said AJ. ‘Cap’n Bligh and Long John Nicky have had their moments, after all, with their sailing fetish.’

‘And Ahab Bass still is,’ said Chris. ‘We could have stayed in Provence and ate ourselves silly and cruised the Riviera and gambled our asses off in Monte Carlo, but no. Fellatio Hornblower here had to take in Corsica and remind himself how much more cunning he is than Napoleon, man.’

JC smiled to himself, remembering their days in Ajaccio and the way Chris and AJ had strutted around with one hand in their shirt fronts whenever Lance’s back was turned.

‘Yeah, well, at least he can’t possibly turn this Sicilian expedition into another fuckin’ history documentary,’ AJ said.

Lance just raised the Eyebrow of Doom, pityingly. And Howie laughed in AJ’s face. ‘Hermanito, you have no idea.’

‘Patton, 1943,’ Nick nodded. He and Howie knew their Lance. And knew enough to have read up on what was likely in store for them.

‘The Greeks, no doubt,’ Chris muttered.

‘The Romans, too, and Phoenicia, and Carthage,’ JC smiled. ‘But I have a feeling we’re mostly in for, like, Byzantium and the Normans.’

Lance grinned, wolfishly, as AJ rolled his eyes. ‘Stick with me, Aidge, and y’might learn something. After all, if even Chris could….’

‘Hey!’

‘C is one patient fucker,’ AJ observed.

Chris just shot him a look. ‘Man, if this about his still being your bud despite Nikki-duh-Roach –’

‘Fuck. That’s behind us, man. Like, years ago. Him and me. We. We’ve talked through that long since. I still feel, though, I. I feel like –’

‘Look, my bad, okay? I was an asshole to bring it up. I just, I can’t. If that inbred Mississippi albino drags us up one more flight of stairs….’

‘Well, shit, idiot. Why’d you suffer in silence? It’s not like you. I can get ice for the knees, just fuckin’ ask, fuckhead.’

Chris sighed. ‘Okay, okay. Yeah. I get cranky, trying to keep up. I’m – it was nice of them to ask us –’

‘– Keeping us outta trouble.’

‘– Not just that, Aidge. J can’t get away, and the Daddies are a-daddyin’, and Kev has a tree to hug or somethin’. But. It was nice of them to drag us along, but, man, I am too old for this shit.’

‘The hiking up hills? Or the being alone with the two sappiest couples on the fuckin’ planet?’

‘Both. I mean, you’re beginning to look good.’

Aidge snorted.

‘Um, that was where you were supposed to return the flirt, man. Just as a compliment.’

‘Yeah. How long was it that Odysseus was lost at sea, trying to get home from the war?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Shit if I know. Ten years?’

‘Sounds right. If we get back on board and get lost for ten years, ask me around year nine, ’kay?’

‘Asshole.’

‘Yeah, but I’m the one who’s about to go get ice for the ruins of your knees.’

‘Hmmm. Maybe that’s why I like you.’

‘I thought it was my hot body.’

‘Shhhhyeah. As the possessor of the Fine Kirkpatrick Ass, I have much higher standards than that.’

‘No ice for you!’

‘Okay, fine, Ice Nazi, it’s the hot body. And the tats.’

‘And?’

‘Well, mostly it’s your ice-fetching abilities.’

‘Them’s the magic words,’ AJ said, levering himself out of his chair to go get some ice.

Despite a few comments – from Chris – about Lance’s slave-driving ways (‘pro’ly hereditary. Southern chivalry, my ass’), and a fair amount of teasing about the way Lance became unnaturally fascinated by such items as Patton’s strategy in the race to Messina, the machinations of Dionysus of Syracuse, or the power politics of Robert Guiscard and Roger 2d in founding the Norman Kingdom of Sicily (‘little fucker’s plotting something, I can tell, I knew this trip would give him ideas. World domination, here we come’), the schedule was not in fact onerous. There wasn’t even as much walking as Chris liked to pretend there was, though obviously it wasn’t possible to sail into, say, Porto Empedocle in Agrigento or the harbor at Taormina and see all there was to be seen without ever stirring from the Egeria.

JC, hiding his smile, noticed a method, though, to his Lance’s madness. Of course Lance wasn’t going to miss a chance to measure himself against the Norman hedge-knights of an obscure family who, fifty years before other Normans conquered England, arose from nowhere and made themselves the unchallenged rulers of Southern Italy and the puppet-masters of popes, who made themselves the Kings of Sicily and of Jerusalem and victors over both the Byzantine and the Holy Roman Empires. These were Lance’s sort of people, after all (and what, JC wondered, did the Sicilians think as they watched, sidelong, as Lance strode along, imperially, and Nick ambled carelessly with Howie as if he were, all unthinking, the lord of all he surveyed, secure in his size and golden strength? Did some atavistic whisper in their blood tell the Sicilians that here, here were Normans come again, Normans of the old Norse stock not yet bred out along the mouths of the Seine?). But, JC noted, Lance, without ever seeming to, managed to keep AJ and Chris just busy enough to be too tired to get into trouble, but not so tired as to be mutinous; and Lance also somehow managed it so that, in sober fact, most of their time was open for less intellectual and more overtly romantic pursuits. For eating, and for walking amidst honey-colored ruins in breezes redolent of aromatic herbage. For twilights over the Mediterranean and mornings in dewy gardens. For sunrises and sunsets in the land where the citron bloomed, and where fauns and satyrs, nymphs and dryads, lingered yet. Time, mainly, for Nick and Howie to continue to heal, to get back – no, not to get back to where they had been, but to get much further forward than that, come to think of it.

People, JC reflected, sometimes laughed at Lance’s weakness for strategizing, but no one could say he wasn’t a genius at it. The more so when his effects were produced by stealth.

‘That JC,’ AJ said, again, ‘is one patient fucker.’

Chris shook off the disorienting sense of déjà vu. ‘Yeah, but why in particular?’

‘Bass, man. Little fucker. Look, I love the dude to death, but. Worse than Kevin. It’s that damn little superior smirk.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s only in public. He saves it up and lets all his dorkitude come out in private these days.’

‘Dorkitude? Dude, I’ve seen dorkitude. That ain’t it.’

‘Oh, yeah? So what is it?’

‘Gooberosity, man. Pure gooberosity.’

‘That’s weird, man.’ JC was looking at a mosaic that the best imported artisans from Constantinople had made: Christ Pantokrator, the Ruler of All, crowning a kingly mortal figure.

‘Wha-? Why, “weird,” babes?’

‘Part and parcel, hon,’ Lance said, pitching his voice to carry to where Nick and Howie stood nearby, marveling at an Arabic – but Christian – inscription there in the Church of Santa Maria del Ammiraglio, now better known as the Martorana. ‘Part and parcel. The admiral what endowed this church was George of Antioch. Bilingual, Greek, defected from Byzantium and was trained up in the service of the Zirid Sultan, defected again to Roger and the Normans, rose to become the prime minister – or as they called it, happily usin’ the Arabic title, the Amir of Amirs. And for a right long time, Roger’s naval Commander in chief: Amir al Bahr. It’s f’om his career and accomplishments in the Norman Sicilian navy that all Europe took the word “admiral.”

‘That was what made this place so unique, Norman Sicily. May’ve been the only fully multi-cultural society in history. And from out this small island under a dynasty as come out of nowheres a-tall, they created a world power for a time. It was the merger of the influences, it was the tolerance and the mutual mixin’ of very different strengths, what did it. Greek and Latin and Norman and Arabic all at once. Kind of like a good marriage,’ Lance said, he and JC both carefully oblivious to the listening Howie and Nick.

‘Oh, God,’ AJ moaned.

Chris’s eyes were glazed as he slumped against AJ. ‘Jesus,’ he breathed.

‘Yeah. I mean. Yeah. I have never….’

‘I know,’ Chris said. ‘It’s like food porn.’

‘I don’t even like eggplant, but damn.’

‘I dunno who Norma was, but if that’s pasta alla her, I wanna marry her, man.’

‘And that caponata. Dude.’

‘Oh, God. You know,’ Chris mused, ‘there’s something about that stuff, ’s almost familiar. If you made it with, oh, black and green olives instead of eggplant –’

Lance was standing in the doorway, with an amused (and, yes, superior) smile, JC behind him and enveloping him, chin on Lance’s shoulder. ‘You’d have,’ Lance said, startling them, ‘the standard olive tapenade for a traditional Nawlins muffuletta, like the originals at Central Grocery in the French Quarter. Hell you think that is, Creole food?’

(JC muttered something about how the Perrones’s Progress Grocery, next door to the Central there on Decatur Street, had a better muff sammich, but they all ignored him.)

‘What the hell are you two doing here?’

‘Well,’ JC said, eyes all a-twinkle, ‘we heard the moaning and the oh-Godding next door, and we thought maybe we’d finally gotten you two to bat for our team.’

‘As if,’ AJ smirked.

‘Damn,’ Lance said. ‘I was hopin’ to qualify for a toaster.’

Chris groaned, again, and slid the waistband of his shorts a little lower under his distended belly. ‘Would you mind, oh, fucking the hell off if you’re gonna mention food and cooking? I mean, this is the first time in my life I was too full for dessert.’

‘For which,’ Lance said, ‘we are all of us unfeignedly thankful. Last thing I need is to be trapped in a foreign country with you on a sugar high. And I can just imagine what pignolata balls and buccellati’d do to you two.’

Lance managed to hammer the romantic point home to Nick and Howie a couple of days later, when they were standing in the ancient Greek amphitheater, the Teatro Greco, in Taormina. The sky was a brilliant blue, the ruins pure as Classical meter, the sea ever changeful and the plain below rich, as they looked across to where Etna brooded and smoldered.

Once again, JC, always telepathic when it came to his Lance, fed him the straight line, musing about Etna’s domination of the horizon and the gallant persistence of man in building his works beneath that lowering threat.

‘And yet,’ Lance replied, ‘the same force that can erupt and destroy is responsible for all that fertile richness. It’s made the very soil that bears such fruit and life. It’s a paradox, babes. Sort of like love.’

AJ and Chris, watching Nick and Howie carefully as the two snuck a glance at one another after Lance had spoken, quietly slapped palms. Oh, yeah. The Bass was good.

The next few days were light ones. (Lance had maneuvered things to where he had made his point; his work was done.) By now, they had seen most of what they had come to see, and eaten more seafood and more tomato sauces and more melons and citrus fruits than they’d ever expected. They had walked in the Bellini Gardens, and Lance and JC had exchanged a smile when they noticed Nick and Howie falling back, walking slowly, talking in intimate whispers, and brushing hands as often as they had dared. JC had happily begun humming Bellini arias. And once Chris and AJ had tumbled to what was going on with the Carter-Doroughs, they’d unobtrusively caught up to the Bass-Chasezes, exchanged grins that confirmed everyone was in on the plot, and stuck strictly together, leaving Nick and Howie undisturbed.

It was last day before they were to reboard the Egeria and cruise northwards, to Sardinia and then back to Provence and to Toulon, to berth her at Saint-Mandrier, drive to the Grand Canyon du Verdon, and then to Paris for the flight home. The six had returned to Taormina, and spent the morning at the Duomo. By common consent, the remainder of the day was free. They stopped by the beach at Isola Bella, between tides, and wandered Mazzaro. It was there, as JC was later to recall, that they saw a young man, perhaps twenty, who, he thought dispassionately, was the most beautiful human creature he had ever seen: berry-brown, of course, in old canvas espadrilles, shorts, and a tee-shirt with one trace of grime across the chest, perhaps half a size too small on him: a young fisher lad striding along beside his grizzled grandfather, so far outwardly untouched by life and labor. His body was simply aesthetically perfect in its molding, and his profile could have been carved by Phidias as an example of the Greek ideal. JC noticed that even Chris and AJ could not help but glance, then quickly look politely away. Lance nudged him, and grinned, and JC blushed, knowing in that moment that no grace of form, no bodily perfection, could ever mean to him a tenth of what moved in him at the sight of Lance’s lupine grin or a glimpse of the well-known scar on Lance’s brow, which his fingertips had mapped and traced a million times. He marveled at the young man, but was unmoved, his appreciation – to his own surprise – purely aesthetic. And that, he reflected to himself, pretty much summed up what love was for him and for Lance.

Tacitly, the six went their separate ways, Lance and JC to a canopied restaurant on the Lido Mazzaro for a bite and a Campari and soda apiece, and thence, probably, back to their cabin aboard the Egeria for an afternoon’s slow loving, AJ and Chris to the scenic railway, and Nick and Howie … well, that was their business, wasn’t it.

But Nick and Howie rambled long and quietly, peaceably silent, up the slopes and through the ancient streets of Taormina, and found themselves at the end of the day at the Greek Theater, with twilight drawing on and a distant flame coruscating upon the crown of Etna across the plain and bay.

They sat down on the wide, curving marble seats where men of times now lost had sat, where a scholar attached to the Court of Dionysus might have sat with his younger lover, erastes and eromenos, watching Euripedean tragedy, where the young Cicero, in his first post, as quaestor in Sicily, might have sat watching one of Plautus’s plays and dreaming of glory and the consulship.

‘He’s so funny when he’s being subtle,’ Howie said, affectionately.

Nick put an arm around Howie and drew him closer, snuggling. ‘Yeah. Bassman. Subtle as a rhino in heat.’

‘Volcanic love.’

‘Something new and special out of blending two different traditions. Right.’

‘They really want us to make this work.’

‘Not as much as I want it to.’

‘Do you?’

‘Howard.’

‘I’m not being insulting, Nicky. But I have to know. I’ve. I’ve invested too much in this for it not to matter. I mean, I was your first, I know this. But you were my first for anything that mattered, this you know and I have told you: my first, and my last. I have never loved anyone the way I love you, and I don’t think I would ever be able to love anyone else this way. I don’t say this to pressure or force you; it’s simply … you have a right to know where I stand, too. I know you have thought, sometimes, that I would grow tired of you, or that I think of you as … a toy? A child?’

‘Never a toy, I never thought that. I know you, Howie, you’re better than that. But, yeah, okay, I can’t help but feel, sometimes … I mean, look at you, you’re smart and sexy and perfect, okay, not perfect but damn close, and so mature and growny and shit. And I’m this halfwitted lug who trips over his own feet and when you’re a sexy tycoon of forty I’ll be some ex-singer with a beer gut and I’m an idiot and I’m immature sometimes and frankly, I still can’t believe that you haven’t got tired of me already. Sure, you’re sweet and patient and shit, but it would take a fuckin’ saint to put up with me.’

‘Not a saint, mi querido. Just a man who is very much in love, and who knows when the best thing in his life is sitting beside him. Just a man who is very, very lucky to have you, so much so that I’m afraid always that my luck will run out and you will finally see yourself as you are and go find someone younger who is more nearly your equal, who can give you more than I can –’

‘More than love? More than trust? More than treating me like an equal and never mocking me and always understanding me even when I get tangled up? What “more” is there I could have with anyone else, Howard?’

‘I. Well.’

‘Look, I don’t like the face in the mirror, a lot of the time, okay? I’m getting better, and if I am, it’s because of you. But. When I see me, I see me the way Jane taught me to see me, looking for flaws and finding them, the way the fans have whenever I gained a pound or got a zit or busted a note, the way Lou fuckin’ taught me to see me. Even, though they mean well, the way Kev and the guys sometimes saw. But when I look in your eyes, I see a me I like and want to be and want to live up to. A me that can be, isn’t yet, but can be, a me worthy of you. And I wish I were at least good enough that I could be your mirror, too. Because I want you to see what I see when I look at you. The hottest dude in creation. The love of my life. The best thing – fuck fame, fuck fortune, fuck even havin’ the guys and you as a family of brothers when I had no family worth calling one and you guys taught me how to be human and be a brother to Aaron and the girls – but fuck all that, even that, I look at you and that’s when I see the best thing that came out of Backstreet, the one thing that makes it worthwhile. Because that’s what I see when I look at you. My life. My heart. My whole fuckin’ future, right here, as long as you’ll have me. I want that. You want that. What more is there we can want?’

Howie was silent for some moments. ‘I want … I want to know that when we cruise away from here tomorrow, we are going in the same direction, that you are going my way, even when we aren’t here in some romantic spot any longer, even when things force us to be half a world apart. That we will always be inside each other this way, heart and soul. That is all I have wanted.’

‘That’s what I’m offerin’.’

‘Verdad. And I accept it, and I offer you all I have to give. If you want it, you have it.’

‘Forever.’

‘Forever. That is what I want and what I am offering: forever.’

‘You are my forever, Howard. And I will always be yours.’

There remains little more to tell of their journey. That night, on reaching their hotel, they found a note from JC, reading, ‘Lance and I are staying ashore tonight. So is CK. So’s AJ. Up to you guys, but there’s a pretty neat picnic basket in the cabin with your name on it, and some decent wine. We love you.’

And that night, anyone else at the yacht basin would have noted the Egeria snubbing at her moorings despite a dead calm, faintly rocking; and heard a few low sounds and one sharp incoherence of pleasure as Nick spasmed beneath Howie in the still of the Sicilian night.

And as the six flew back to the States some days later, it was obvious to AJ and Chris, who were grinning like two Sicilian grandmothers at a wedding, that Nick and Howie were back on track; and Nick and Howie for their parts let Lance and JC know, subtly, in the unspoken way that was between the four of them, that their efforts had paid off. And all was serene on the flight except once, over the grey mid-Atlantic, when Chris, AJ, Howie, and Nick, and the rest of the first class passengers, were startled from their doze by JC’s sharp voice, asking, with all the pain his thrifty soul could feel, ‘What do you mean we bought the damn boat?!? We already have the Rafe Semmes, Lance, and that wasn’t cheap!’

And the four of them smiled in the cabin’s darkness as they settled back to sleep, listening to Lance’s soothing rumble, saying, ‘Now, C, a man cain’t have too many yachts, ’specially ones like the Egeria. Besides, when we ain’t in Europe, she’ll earn us money bein’ chartered out, just like the Semmes. I swan, pardner, ever’ so often, you take all the fun plumb out of being a multi-millionaire….’

Sometimes, it seemed, James Lance Roger d’Hauteville Bonaparte Patton Bass’s strategy could backfire. That was somehow comforting, the four thought, as they drifted off. It might yet mean that world domination could be averted, after all.

END