Ad Astra / Excelsior: The Johnson Space Center, Houston: Higher & Higher

By Ian McDuff

This is an entry – which I volunteered for, very late in the game – in the Slash Across America challenge. Houston, the Eagle has landed.

This is not really a songfic, but it does have a soundtrack: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher – the real one, by Jackie Wilson.

James Lance Bass – the world’s own Lance-of-’N-Sync, actor (in films people laughed at), megahootingpopstar (whom no one ever heard, in a band that still couldn’t get any respect), mogul (for acts that went nowhere, in part because he was an actor-popstar no one would take seriously no matter how hard he tried: indeed, the harder he tried, the less willing they were to take him seriously), aspiring astronaut (which drew the most cruel and mocking laughter of all) – James Lance Bass, superstar punch-line, had famously and typically bulled his neck and proclaimed that he was by God going off to Russia and staying there until they either put him aboard a shuttle or deported him from the Commonwealth and Republic.

James, the real James, Jim’s and Diane’s boy, Stace’s brother, Ford’s brother-in-law (and Heather’s, and Tyler’s), Josh’s spouse in the eyes of all who mattered, Roy’s and Karen’s son-in-law, was, despite Lance’s rash pronouncement, by contrast having a quiet dinner in the privacy of Gaido’s Pelican Club, that Galveston seafood mecca, as starlight sparkled on the Gulf and the Bay. He was with his Josh – megahootingpopstar JC Chasez, to the world: ‘JC,’ like ‘Lance’ a cardboard character that had little relation to the real and precious man he loved – and with two other, equally conflicted men who were likewise saddled with megahootingpopstar status and all its horrors, his and Josh’s dear friends Nick and Howie. After all, as the four of them were wont to observe, what other gay couple can we double-date with?

The next night he would be elsewhere yet again, his Lance-mask in place, trying to prove to the non-Russian partners in the ISS that he was worthy of their confidence. That was his justification to himself for not actually holding his ground in Russia and for joining the whole prospective Soyuz crew in the Houston jaunt. This too was part of his training, even if proving himself to dubious American bureaucrats just when he had finally won over dubious Russian ones was worse than any other training exercise they had set him, and that is why he was in Galveston eating snapper Pontchartrain with his lover and their friends. He had been across the bay until now, at the Johnson Space Center - NASA, ostentatiously sticking to his rigorous schedule of training for a dream that might easily yet be denied him.

And where James had gone, of course, Josh had followed as best he could.

Josh looked at the others, there at the table. Sweet D was still and quiet, his unnerving Mona Lisa smile firmly in place, his eyes warm and indulgent as he ate his oysters Bienville and sipped his Alsatian Riesling. Josh stifled a grin: given all that they all knew of Nick’s insatiable libido, Howie must be eating oysters by the bushel these days. Nick was just barely shy of being capable of bending over the very table ‘right there in front of Gawd and ev’body’ as James put it: dropping trou if the mood struck him (as it did about hourly, apparently: Howie must have more stamina than anyone this side of James, come to think of it), and begging D to pound him deep. Josh and James tried to keep some balance in their own relationship, though it wasn’t as if they kept score, but Josh, being one at heart himself, could recognize in Nicky a true bottom-boy slut, a power bottom with profound needs.

Nick himself, still recognizably – as he might possibly always be – a boy still unused to his outsize man’s frame, was gesturing, an arm flailing perilously close to his glass of beer. That, Josh mused, would ruin a perfectly good order of crab.

He caught D’s eye, and they exchanged a grin of tacit complicity in their half-humorous affection for their two loves. Suddenly hoping that Howie hadn’t even imagined that he’d been thinking of D and Nicky in bed, Josh broke contact and ducked his head, focusing on his shrimp and sea bass.

D smiled. C was so sweet, so well-meaning … and so transparent. He had a pretty good idea what his slightly loopy friend had been pondering, and he, at least, didn’t feel at all threatened or affronted by it. That was just the slightly off-center way in which Josh’s mind worked. It wasn’t something he’d ever mentioned or would mention to Nicky-Gene, but then, his Nick wasn’t the type to notice things anyway, and demand impossible and embarrassing explanations. D dropped his patented wink in the direction of C’s bowed and unobservant head. C and James were so dear, and so cute, and weird enough to be perfect for one another. I mean, c’mon. Even with seafood, C has to have a red wine? And far from the public ‘Lance’ persona, and free of all expectations and quiet contractual commitments, James wasn’t forcing down another damned hard lemonade (though, D reflected, the surreptitious, not-exactly-overt endorsement fee must sweeten the swill considerably). Well, fine, no one sane would choke one of those down with snapper Pontchartrain, but – Southerner or no Southerner – James must have a cast-iron gut to be able to handle bourbon with fish, even if he was taking alternate sips of the Official Beverage of Dixie, ‘ice-tea’ as they ran the words together throughout the South.

James and Nicky, the waterbabies, were having a friendly argument, as the waters of the Gulf lapped at the piers outside. ‘Why,’ Nick had asked, all seriousness and maturity, ‘why up? Why the stars when the deeps are still unexplored? Shouldn’t we, like, figure the other seventy percent of our own planet out first?’

And James had started to answer, and the conversation had, as you’d expect with those two, soon expanded and burgeoned to take in everything under the sun and beyond it….

Josh had, frankly, stopped listening.

Instead, as he ate steadily, determined not to catch D’s eye again, his mind drifted back to that day at the JSC.

It was nice to be able to go to important places and get VIP-ish treatment, and yet be taken seriously and not have to do press. The NASA / JSC personnel had treated him very well indeed, keeping him occupied and interested while James was off doing training, and treating him like an equally intelligent man who just happened to be from a different discipline. A Dr Benson, Stu Benson, had taken charge of him: a short, slightly tubby middle-aged man with a round face, a receding hairline, and glasses, and with, clearly, a vein of humor and a complete absence of arrogance. Dr Benson actually had a poster of the Muppet, Dr Bunsen Honeydew, whom he resembled, there in his office, and his colleagues, who evidently regarded him with great affection, equally evidently had a running gag with Benson, calling him ‘Dr Honeydew’ at times and asking where his intern ‘Beaker’ was.

Dr Bunsen – Benson, darn it – had shown him around Mission Control, and introduced him to everybody, and a spare, young astrophysicist with a ponytail, very different from the buzz-cut ’60s IBM types who had peopled NASA in Josh’s imagination theretofore, had smiled, and said they might get a request from the Russians for advice about what music to play for the ISS wake-up calls, and did JC have any suggestions? A motherly lady with four PhDs and as many teeny daughters had twinkled, and suggested ‘Space Cowboy,’ and Josh had blushed, and then managed a come-backer: ‘Only if it’s the Steve Miller Band one. Lance is sick of mine, I think, by now.’ And that had somehow started a conversation about mathematics and music, intervals, Pythagoras, computers, and binary digital languages: a conversation in which, especially when it transpired that math had been one of Josh’s best subjects in school, Josh was quietly forced to participate fully, and in which from the first he was treated as an equal.

The hours, as a result, as Dr Benson (and an ever-changing group of scientists and technicians as their duties spared them time) showed him all over the JSC, had flown past.

It had been a good day.

Josh was returned to his surroundings, there at dinner, and his trip down memory lane interrupted, when D nudged him gently. The waterbabies were arguing now exclusively about boats, and James, although not maliciously, had just dismissed Nicky’s beloved powerboats as ‘stinkpots.’ The great Sail versus Power Debate was on, for the trillionth time since the first yachtsmen had discovered the internal combustion engine … and rejected it. Already, James was off and running on Moths-I-Have-Conned and Yawls-I-Have-Helmed, while Nicky tried feebly to interject a plea for motors and speed.

‘Dios,’ D whispered. ‘James really is all horses and yachts and the Wall Street Journal, isn’t he. You do realize you’ve tied the knot with a total closet preppy, don’t you?’

Josh smiled back. ‘You have no idea,’ he said. ‘When we’re out of the spotlight and off tour? It’s tassel loafers with no socks, Nantucket reds, blazers with flat buttons, Duck Head khakis. I mean it. “Closet” prep is right. I mean…. Wall to wall madras, dude.’

D laughed, a light, tinkling sound that broke the argument between Nick and James, and reminded them they’d both been neglecting their men.

They remedied that assiduously for the remainder of the meal, and the four departed to their hotel in high content. After a round of good-night embraces in the hallway of their cordoned-off floor, Nick – a trifle too hastily for total politeness – dragged D into their suite, his eyes glazed with need and lust. James and Josh had barely finished brushing their teeth and changing for bed before faint, muffled sounds reached them from across the hall, culminating in a distant whine in Nick’s distinctive bedroom voice that swiftly rose to a tenor bellow: ‘D, babe … ppppplllleeeaaasseee … oh, God … mmph - oh, yes – fuck me, daddy!’

James and Josh stifled grins, half-embarrassed by the stiffening of their own flesh as they heard their friends in the throes of passion. Wordlessly, they took each other’s hands and sidled towards the bed. Embracing, wrapping one another in love, just before they sank to the mattress, erection straining deliciously against erection, James whispered as he nibbled delicately on Josh’s ear, ‘Was today okay for you, hon?’

‘Y- yes.’ Josh shuddered and gasped. ‘They were great to me. J- James?’

‘Mmmm?’

‘What does weightlessness feel like?’

James drew back a bit, smiling, so he could look his love in the eye. ‘You should know, ethereal thin one.’

Josh pouted. ‘Jaaaaames…. I mean it. What does it feel like, being weightless?’

James’s face became intent as he moved in slowly. Their lips met, and Josh surrendered avidly to James’s insistent yet tender tongue. Slowly, luxuriantly, amorously, with an evident passion as evidently reined in by devoted love, James kissed him, and Josh returned the kiss with every least sixteenth-note of the music in his soul. When James withdrew, Josh was floating, panting, trembling on the brink.

‘It feels like that,’ James breathed, ‘like loving you.’ He held Josh closer. ‘Like that. Exactly like that.’

END