Let’s Get It On: Let Your Love Come Down

by Ian McDuff

For the Love’s Sweet Design Challenge. And for hurricanemegan’s birthday. Part of the Songbook. Anyone not immediately recognizing the title track will be lashed around the fleet.

Companion to Cruisin’: If You Want It, You Got It, Forever.

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.

There are curious disadvantages as well.

For Nick and Howie, as for the others in Backstreet and their counterparts in ’N Sync, there was a peculiarly curious element to fame and fortune, to their being rich for the reason and in the way in which they had become rich. It is as a rule the very poorest, the most downtrodden, the homeless or those in one or another institution of the State, whether adjudged mad or adjudged criminal, who pass their lives so thoroughly in the presence of silent warding, who never know true privacy. As a rule, the richer one is, the more privacy one is afforded. This was not always so: Charles 2^d, Philip 5^th, Louis 14^th, all knew a daily routine in which they were surrounded by servants, guards, and courtiers even when moving, ceremoniously and to the sound of trumpets, their bowels. Before the XIX^th Century, the greater a man was, the more public were the details of his life. But that is no longer true, except in the rarest of cases. Few persons now living know what it is to wield power (and at any high level, power and money are interchangeable, and riches are power) and yet to live in an artificial environment in which, by the end, the omnipresent shadow of guards becomes mentally transparent, taken for granted, forgotten. Only crowned heads, heads of state, and these few young men in their twenties and thirties live this way. Howie had long understood that the fact that the bars were gilded in in no wise changed the nature of the cage; which was why he treasured the times when he and Nicky and the others – JC and Lance, say – could slip away to the open seas or fly to some place where no one would believe it was truly the four of them sitting in a café drinking Pernod.

He had also learned, long since, that when the bodyguards told you to do something, you did it, without question, without concern, trusting wholly in their proven judgment and their fierce loyalty.

It was the week after Howie had spent time with Bri-and-Miz-LA-and-Baby-Bay, and his Nicky had sat at the feet of their elders in marriage, Lance and JC, and been lovingly lectured as to repairing the rifts between the two of them.¹

An hour or so before dawn, at the Carter Compound in Tampa, the bodyguards quietly entered Nick’s whimsical tiki-hut of a bungalow and shook him gently awake. ‘Got a road trip come up,’ they told him, and he nodded, sleepily, knowing not to question them, knowing that whatever arrangements – down to the very toothbrush – that needed to be made had been made, knowing that he was in their hands, and he stumbled to the waiting car and promptly went back to the sleep he’d never fully left. And at just about that time, in Orlando, at the pied-à-terre Howie kept there for business purposes, and at which he chanced to be that night, his own detail half-walked and half-carried him, between sleeping and waking, to the car, and within five minutes heard his slight snore resume, as he slept trustfully, accepting that ‘something’s come up, Mr Dorough.’

Afterwards, both Nick and Howie were to wonder if, at some point, when their journeys turned south and a little east, they had subconsciously noticed, and begun to wonder what was afoot; but for now, they slept, knowing they were safely under guard, trusting their longtime protectors.

They woke aboard the Rafe Semmes, the 48' sloop they co-owned with Lance and JC. It had been their initial idea, the four of them, to sail her themselves, with such trusted friends, bandmates mostly, as they could shanghai (she could be sailed with a crew of six, but handled best with eight). But they had soon learned that scheduling conflicts rendered that option unchancy at best. A hired crew, on the other hand, however bound by NDAs, however discreet, was simply not workable: the whole point of the Semmes was to be a place where they could be themselves, two couples, far from the risk of exposure. Lance, characteristically, had solved the problem at last by the expedient of sending everybody’s bodyguards, those for all ten of them, through the necessary certification courses at his own expense. It had been a typical Bass solution: unassailably logical, wholly unexpected, and faintly show-offy. Lance always had a weakness for the grand gesture, honed by years of practice in casually tossing the riches of the Orient or some crown imperial at the feet of a delighted JC, whose appreciation (which was why Lance did this sort of thing) was generally … demonstrative in the extreme.

When Lance had first sprung that surprise on them, Nick had been nonplussed. But Howie had started chuckling, then laughing until he was too weak to sit up straight, overcome by the mental vision of their three-hundred pound bodyguards moving nimbly in the rigging aloft.

But here they were, waking together, comfortably and unconsciously snuggled in to one another, in the cabin of their sloop, standing out from Stuart towards the Bahamas in the crisp morning lambency. This had the Bassman’s fingerprints all over it.

At that moment, their suspicions were confirmed, as Howie’s bodyguard padded in with breakfast … and a CD.

‘Y’know,’ Nick observed, to no one in particular, ‘I really think we should not let Bass watch Mission: Impossible ever again.’

‘Eat yo’ damn eggs, Carter, and listen to the CD.’

‘Hey!’ Nick called as the cabin door closed. ‘We can get polite crewmen!’

Curiosity, of course, got the better of them.

The CD was all audio (apparently, Lance hadn’t had time to put together a Power Point presentation. Only Lance would do relationship pie charts), and began with a few seconds of silence, or at least shuffling and the faint sound of a laptop’s keyboard being worked, in the background. Then the shuffling ended, and JC’s voice came on.

Lance (in background): Good! Real sailors sail!

They heard footsteps and a chair being pulled up. Obviously, Lance and JC had put this together in JC’s home studio, also known as the Shrine of Perfectionism.

Lance: You’re doing fine, babe. Now. Y’all. Listen on up. Nick, you made a mistake. You made it purt’ nigh unconsciously. We all know that and Howie accepts that. But your heart’s in the right place, and the rest’ll follow. You didn’t do this on account of some subconscious impulse to leave Howie before he could get tired of you, the more so as he ain’t ever a-goin’ to. Howie, same token, you didn’t cause Nicky to stumble, and you have got to stop readin’ into ever’ damn pothole in the road some omen that he’s a-fixin’ to up and leave, or that you’re subconsciously hauling off to leave him your own self. Y’all get you some Bahamian sun and stop jumpin’ at shadows, f’ the love of Gawd. We love y’all, y’all love each other, that’s all she wrote. Now I’m headin’ back to my email.

And they heard the casters on the chairs as he rolled it away.

JC: Oh. Um. Anyways, dude. The biggest problem we had to work through, and still do, is. I mean, it’s not the conflicts, and there were some, about, like, religion and family and what the ’rents expect and upbringing and manliness. Yeah, we’ve had to deal with all that, every gay boy in history’s had to, and you cats are no exception any more’n we were. But for us, the stumbling-block was. At first, it was my bad memories from Los Angeles. And then, when I went off the rails, that just added to it. I was. I felt I was dirty, soiled, used. That if I touched Lance I’d corrupt him, contaminate him. And he. I mean, it seemed to him that I was finding excuses, that maybe I wasn’t really interested after all, that it meant he was unattractive. As if. But, you know. Neither of us had a good self-image.

Unthinkingly, Howie snuggled in to Nick more closely, and closed his eyes as Nick’s hand began to card through his hair.

JC: And I know everybody back then got a big honkin’ laugh out of Lance’s interview answer, when they asked him what happened if someone put on Marvin Gaye, and he said, you remember, ‘That’s between me and mah date.’ And that was just funny to everybody else, ha-ha, get a load of that Bass, yadda, yadda. But. It meant everything. It was a public declaration, in a private code. Because. If you’ll actually, like, listen to the lyrics of ‘Let’s Get It On,’ man. That was our song, and Lance made it our song, because. There were concepts, man, that mattered to us. I mean, we were both too sensitive for own good. And. What we had to make ourselves realize was that there was nothing wrong with it, our giving ourselves to each other, as long as the love was true. It was important not to push, but we had to stop beating around the bush, too, and face things. It was important that we realized that this wasn’t something dirty, that it was … it was a sacred thing, sanctified; that we could each be sanctuary for each other when it seemed everyone was hunting us down. That what we felt wasn’t just a phase, it was, well, the Southerners have a phrase, it was ‘love come down.’ And it was ‘come down,’ like a dove from Heaven: it was real and special and something to treasure….

JC sounded a little misty. Howie and Nick knew they were.

Lance (in background): I can hear you, hon.

JC (over shoulder): Well maybe you can take a hint, then.

They heard the studio door slam, as Lance, clearly, left.

JC (distracted): Um, anyway. So. I guess what we’re – what I’m sayin’ – is. Go find your song, okay? And know that you’re neither one dirty or not good enough or whatever, that what you have is what poets have tried and failed to convey and what every human heart searches for all our lives long, okay? It’s real and it’s special and it’s permanent and you are so damn lucky you have it, and it’s not going anywhere. And neither are you two. Okay? I guess that’s all we, all I have to say, is –

The CD had not caught the studio door opening, but it caught the approaching, slow footsteps, and the hitch in JC’s breath as he, evidently, turned from the board to look behind him. And it caught Lance’s bass perfectly, as he softly sang,

Baby…. Your foreplay just blows my mind
So why don’t we stop all the talkin’, boy,
Why don’t we stop wastin’ time?

Lance (speaking, richly seductive): Nicky. D. Y’all get yourselves a song, like my man said. Get it on: there’s nothing wrong with y’all or what y’all got. Sanctify it. And if you’ll excuse us –

JC: Oh, God. The mike, gotta cut the mike….

But before he found it, apparently, there was a distraction, and Nick and Howie, shallowly breathing, heard a few seconds more of Lance covering Barry White, after all:

Then the CD, finally, cut out, and Nick and Howie looked at each other, blushing for a myriad of reasons.

The next morning found them in crisp white sheets smelling of lavender, in a yellow-stuccoed bungalow on Eleuthera, with tropical flowers spilling from the windowbox in the ocean breeze. Nick raised a sleepy, tousled head, blinking, and saw his Howie, propped up on one elbow, looking at him from eyes of immeasurable depth and limpidity.

Softly, Howie began to sing.

If the spirit moves you, let me groove you
… good;
Let your love come down,
Oh, get it on….

1 See Overture, Segue, Coda: The Creatures of Prometheus / My Confession.

END