Scandalicious
by Ian McDuff
For Jain’s Now or Never Nick Carter Songfic Challenge. I’m a late-inning substitution, pinch-hitting.
The green-eyed, dapper, stern-faced blond man was remorseless. ‘You are familiar, are you not, Mister Carter, with the morals clause in your contract?’
‘It’s what I been trying to tell ya, kid,’ his agent chimed in: a fast-talking, middle-aged man crammed to obesity with false bonhomie, a sweaty man who seemed strangely familiar despite an unbelievable patterned suit and a painted tie wider than Kevin’s stubborn streak. His agent. How did he know that? ‘Hedda’s calling every hour and Louella showed up on my doorstep while I was having breakfast! The Hays Office will – I’m telling ya, Nick, it’ll look like a pogrom in Pinsk.’
‘And I assure you,’ the younger man rumbled, in a bass voice still tinged with some vestige of somewhere slow and Southern and given to lynching, ‘Louis B., and Jack, are already perfectly prepared to throw you to the wolves. Or to Louella, which is worse. You are within a whisker of becoming the biggest story for the Hearst papers since they started a war in Cuba and made Teddy Roosevelt president.’
Overhead, the fan shuffled the warm air. Nick stared at it a moment: it was dizzying, but less disorienting than this surreal conversation. Then the phone rang. It took him a moment to realize it: it didn’t sound like a phone ring, and it didn’t look like a phone. Black, chunky, rotary….
Jesus Christ, Nick thought, realization flooding him. I’m in the fucking Thirties with Lou Pearlman and Lance Bass. This is really it, I really have died, and this, this is Hell. Hell is spending eternity in the Thirties with Lou Pearlman and Lance Bass in a room without air conditioning.
It stunned him. But there could be no other explanation. Why else would everything in the room look like a period stage set? Why else would The Bass be sitting there in horn-rimmed spectacles, hair slicked down, in a classic, pre-War Brooks Brothers seersucker suit and two-toned, co-respondent shoes? Nick looked down at himself, and saw that he was himself dressed in a white linen suit. There was a hatstand in this small office of Lou’s – a hat stand with fedoras on it, and a straw boater that screamed ‘Bassman,’ and a white Panama that must surely be his own. Outside, the scent of orange blossoms and gasoline fumes, a Nash parked in the lot and a DeSoto next to it. Yep. This was Hell. It had to be: where was Howie? Nowhere. So. Hell.
With a sour look, Lou handed him the phone receiver. ‘Tell him you’ll call him back.’
‘H- hello?’
‘Not in a place to talk? Don’t worry, Mr Carter. Call me back. We can handle this.’
Nick stuttered thanks to the unfamiliar caller and handed the receiver back to Lou, who replaced it on the cradle as if its touch contaminated him.
Lance – surely this was still somehow Lance – did his patented Raised Eyebrow Thing. Lou shrugged. ‘Jerry Giesler.’
‘That would be our only hope,’ Lance said, curtly. ‘Best lawyer in Hollywood, a fact I would not admit to anyone outside this room, as I prefer that title for myself. Of course, he was trained by Earl Rogers, so, it’s only to expected.’
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Nick was tired of being talked around. The other two winced at his cursing. Right. Thirties. Not the way to talk. Fuck ’em, I ain’t playing this game.
‘We didn’t make him a star for his brain-power,’ Lou said, sourly.
Lance was correspondingly dry. ‘Evidently. On the other hand, Mr Carter, if you truly have no recollection of the, ah, incident, that might give us an out. Some form of … nervous trouble, say. Amnesia, perhaps.’
‘I want Howie here. Where’s Howie?’
Lou threw his hands into the air, despairingly. ‘So much for the happy lack of memory.’
Lance was simply staring at him. ‘The last person whom you should be seen within miles of right now is Mr Dorough, Carter. Who is surely having a similar conversation at this moment with my partners, Mr Richardson and Mr Littrell.’ Oh yeah, definitely Hell. ‘Do you really not grasp this?’
‘Um. That would be a fat, fuckin’ “NO.”’
Lance’s face was a mask of distaste. ‘I’ll try to put it in simple words of one syllable,’ he snapped. ‘Your private life, like the private life of any star in this town, is your own – just exactly so long and so far as it remains private. But you are public property. The All-American Boy, the golden leading man, the aw-shucks romantic, action, and comic lead who was so destined for this carnival you didn’t even need a stage name, because you came here with the same name as the most popular dime-novel detective of the past generation. That is what you are, who you are, and the minute you stop being that, you are nothing. You are nobody, on a train back to New York State – assuming you’re not in prison or the madhouse first, as a deviant.
‘Now. When the Golden Wonder Boy of the Silver Screen is caught at one of Ty Powers’s and Randolph Scott’s little queer beach parties, by a reporter and, worse yet, a photographer for that rag Hollywood Confidential, spooning and necking with Hollywood’s most sizzling Latin Lover, the man who was – until this morning – being groomed to make the world forget it ever heard of Valentino, much less Romero and Navarro … suffice it to say that when that happens, the studio tends to become a tiny bit miffed. Unless you can get – or Giesler and I can get you – out of this jam, you won’t be able to get a job as a janitor in this town. Not even at, God help us all, RKO. Good God! You might as well have let Dorough sodomize you at high noon on the corner of Hollywood and Vine! Do you have the faintest idea –’
‘And my heart, man, it was just, I thought I was having a heart attack. I barely made it outta bed and to the shitter before I was doing the Technicolor Yawn. It’s. It’s eerie, because, I mean, what the shit do I know about ancient history, the Thirties and shit?’
‘Maybe,’ Chasez said, trying to be soothing, though his worried look wasn’t exactly helping the cause, ‘maybe it was something you saw, that stayed in your subconscious. Like, you know, on Biography or A&E or the History Channel?’
‘Or Cartoon Network,’ AJ said, helpfully. Nick glared at him. ‘Well, c’mon, I got a big picture here of Junior watching documentaries.’
‘It scares me,’ Nick said, ignoring him. ‘What if it’s, like, a warning or somethin’? Pre. Um. Precong. P-. Oh, fuck it.’
‘Nicky, mi adorado. There are no such things as precognitive dreams.’ Howie actually did manage to be soothing, even whilst he was being bracingly rationalist as well.
The Bass snorted. ‘Howard. This is your guy, here. Kid believes in aliens, for the love of God.’
Nick gave his friend a reproachful pout.
The dreams, unfortunately, were not stopped by Howie’s cool rationality. In fact, they got worse.
‘Are you insane, Nick?’
Nick just watched Kevin with a sick fascination. The eyebrows were scary enough, but he’d never seen that vein throb quite like that before.
Kevin stopped just short of hitting him in the face with the paper as he threw it at him. ‘If this were the Enquirer, Nicky, or the Star, we could survive this! But this. This. I guess I should congratulate you, huh? You’ve managed to do something we never did! Front page of the New York Times, by God! And a full color photo at that!’
‘Wh-. Where’s Howie?’ Nick was surprised that his voice sounded that small.
‘So long as it’s packed and on a plane, that’s all I need or want to know,’ Kevin spat. ‘Thank you both for ruining three other careers, Nick. Don’t even think of contacting the rest of us. We’ll bury the corpse of Backstreet through lawyer-to-lawyer communication.’ And he slammed out, the door flung back on its hinges with force enough to crack the plaster of the hotel walls.
Numbly, Nick looked at the Times. There was nothing wrong with a picture of him and Howie on a beach. Not per se. Him and Howie on a beach, naked, wearing nothing but Pride gear, cuddling, against the backdrop of a South Beach Pride event, on the other hand…. He looked at the accompanying story, not for the headline, which came as close to screaming as the Old Grey Lady knew how to do, nor for the text, which he really, really didn’t want to know about, but in hopes that the by-line might offer one last chance at getting out of this. Nope. The story was credited neither to Rick Bragg nor to Jayson Blair.
He’d done it. He’d ruined Frick’s life and Aidge’s and Kev’s. And Howie’s, obviously. This was his fault. Scandal.
‘Nicky. Nicky. You. Amante, you have to see somebody about these nightmares. They’re bad for you.’
He didn’t want to go to this stupid industry party. He’d stop by, mingle, make sure he got credit for an appearance, then leave.
Twelve feet in, hardly time enough to get his bearings, almost within distance to make a break for the door, and he heard her behind him. ‘Sex On the Beach, handsome?’
He whirled. This was no teeny fangirl. This was a woman: somehow at once lush and petite, with a wicked little heart-shaped face; a brunet with a knowing smile, deceptively soulful Howie-eyes, the experienced maturity of thirty-or-so, and a dairy case that made his latent het side not only sit up and take notice, but roll over, chase its tail, offer a paw to shake, and beg. Do everything, in fact, but play dead.
Hot, older, worldly, and packaged in a tailored black suit that could almost have been a catsuit. Whoa.
‘Cheesy line,’ she was saying, throatily, ‘but – made you look.’
This was a huge improvement on the nightmares, as dreams go. He knew how the song went, and this was a vast improvement on the outing dreams, even if it had been years since he’d had a wet one about a female. He grinned at her. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t wanna touch your mind, heart, and soul, right?’
‘Right. Just a few drinks and some fun with more tangible body parts.’
He woke to blinding light and a blinding headache, a hangover that was the next thing to Hell (which, after all, would have involved being stuck in the thirties with the Bassman, Lou Pearlman, a pending morals charge, and no air conditioning.) He reached over, gingerly – moving hurt – to shake Howie awake and plead for aspirin. Or … arsenic, for that matter, would be an improvement. His hand, however, found an unfamiliar skin – with truly unfamiliar appendages. A demonic parody of Annie Lennox began singing in his head: Mammaries / Are made of these….
Oh, fuck.
Bedraggled, rumpled, and reeling with a hangover that the Richter Scale would have been inadequate to measure, he rang the doorbell and sank down against the doorjamb. Chasez opened it, sniffed, winced, and helped him inside. Into his cellphone, on which he’d obviously been having a pretty intense conversation before Nick got there, he said – far too loudly for Nick’s condition – ‘Um, he’s here. Just arrived. I guess this was the closest. No, I’d say not. Not right now. Man, for one thing, I don’t want him puking into my cell, okay? Give us about three hours.’ Good old Sashay. Nick appreciated his friend’s seeing that he was in no fit state to talk to whoever – whomever? Eh. Whatthefuckever – was trying to pester him.
‘Hey, babe!’ Damn Sashay, that sonofabitch. Yelling – yelling – up the stairwell. ‘Help me pour this trash into a bed somewhere!’ This might be Hell after all. And who the hell makes that much noise coming down a flight of stairs, it’s a like a herd of buffalo – oh. Hell, Phase Two. The Bass. Nick sagged into them as they each heaved an end up and dragged him ungently to a guest bedroom.
The afternoon light in the guest bedroom of the Bass-Chasez LA mansion was bearable. The hard emerald glitter in The Bass’s eyes and the icy blue light in Sashay’s, however, was not.
At least the Bassman kept his voice low – in both senses. ‘You can deal with us. Or you can deal with a whole slew of other folks as you really, really don’t want to deal with –’
‘– Trust him on that,’ Sashay said.
‘– Or you could deal with Howie, and you’d have to get through us first, and you do not want to try that right now. You know we don’t intervene right much, but here? We’re doing the both of y’all a favor, on account of how neither one of y’all needs to see t’other just yet.’
Nick made an interrogative mewling noise, which was about the limit of his powers just then.
‘Where shall we start, Mr Bass?’
‘A right smart question, Mr Chasez. And not the easiest to answer. Perhaps we could begin with the overnight phone calls.’
‘Starting with Kevin?’
‘Starting with the PR rep who called Kris who woke Kevin who called Howie who, of course –’
‘– Knew nothing about this, as he was sleeping the sleep of the just, the pure of heart and the faithful –’
‘– Quite, only to be awakened with news that could hardly have been worse if a certain Nickolas Gene Carter –’
‘– Who was not just, pure, or faithful –’
‘– Had been in the hospital. Or the morgue. Which I’m not sure Brian ain’t rootin’ for, matter of that.’
‘But instead, he was on eBay, was Our Nicky.’
‘In glorious, livin’ color. With CD-quality sound.’
‘Giving a remarkably … passionate … performance.’
‘So much so that the bidding was extremely heavy and the bids astronomically high. And when I say “astronomical,” I speak as a duly certified cosmonaut, here.’
‘Though the bids are nothing –’
‘– Compared to the legal fees incurred when a fair-sized chunk of the Florida State Bar was routed from their slumbers –’
‘– Assuming lawyers sleep at night –’
‘– To track down inhouse lawyers for eBay –’
‘– At a still more obscene time of night, too, with this place being four hours behind dawn on the East Coast –’
‘– To get the videos pulled, and also to get the seller’s name and address, and get someone to that address with a bunch of Nondisclosure Agreements and a checkbook.’
‘But, on the bright side –’
‘– Such as it is –’
‘– They’re about seventy, eighty percent sure they got the original and all the copies.’
They were implacable, Nick could see, and very, very angry indeed.
‘But of course the scandal –’
‘– Such as it is –’
‘– Is hardly the point. Is it.’
‘Why, surely, Mr Chasez. You are right as can be.’
‘The label, after all, actually sees some use to the scandal.’
‘So they do, so they do. After all. It surely does cover up all those nasty “gay” rumors. Covers ’em like the dew covers Dixie.’
‘Why, it’s better than a beard, and gets more buzz and more mileage.’
‘Sure enough. What a very helpful suggestion.’
‘Well, the label seemed to think so.’
‘Yes, yes. But as you are a-fixin’ to point out, that aspect of the matter was pretty much lost on Mr Dorough, was it not.’
Nick whimpered. It made no impression on his two – friends? Former friends? They remained hard as adamant. This was Hell, Cubed.
‘Now, now. Let us be fair. It made just as little impression on Mr Littrell.’
‘And Mr Richardson.’
Hell to the nth power.
‘Though Mr McLean had a certain … empathy.’
‘Oh, of course.’
‘Still, I do believe it would be fair to say –’
‘– Oh, indubitably –’
‘– That no one was particularly pleased by this event. I know that I was not.’
‘Nor I, my dear sir, nor I.’
‘Because of course –’
‘– Of course –’
‘– None of this would have occurred –’
‘– Or, alternatively, it would be useful as publicity, in a twisted sort of way, just as the Suits thought –’
‘– Oh, unquestionably. None of this would be at all important, though, were it not that Mr Carter here –’
‘– Such as he is –’
‘– Was supposed to be faithful to the aforesaid Mr Dorough.’
‘As opposed, say, to getting severely fucked up.’
‘And going home with a groupie.’
‘A female groupie at that.’
‘With a kink for filming her encounters.’
‘And selling the same online.’
‘Boyband porn.’
Nick had long since pulled the covers over his head. It meant he didn’t have actually to face his inquisitors. It did nothing, though, to block out their voices. It did nothing to block out the new voice that now entered into the conversation.
‘If you two are done with the Chuck Jones / Robert McKimson cartoon gophers routine, I wish to speak with Nicky, por favor. Privately.’
‘D, man –’
‘Do I need my battles fought for me? Do I? Am I some porcelain kitten, perhaps?’
‘Howard –’
‘Get. OUT. Inmediatamente.’
Nick curled into a fetal position, waiting for the final torment of Hell.
‘Nick. What happened last night?’
Silence, and a faint whimpering.
‘Do not do this. Do not try to hide from me, Nickolas Gene Carter. What happened?’
‘It.’ Nick’s choked reply was muffled by the bedclothes. Ruthlessly, Howie stripped them away.
‘It was. Real?’
‘What did you think it was, for the love of the Virgin and all angels and saints?’
Nick could not bear to look at him. ‘I thought. I walked in and this girl offers me a Sex On the Beach, and I thought. I thought it must be another dream, like. Like the Thirties one, and the one about the Times outing us, except this wasn’t a nightmare, it was just, like, I was dreaming my own song.’
‘You thought you were in a dream that was remixing “Scandalicious,” Nick? You thought you were in a dream?’ Howie’s voice was almost a yell, giving new pain to the still hungover Nick.
‘Really, I did, I told you how vivid the, the nightmares had been, you know that yourself, me waking up in a panic, God, Howard, do you think I would, I would do this?’
‘You just did.’
‘But I didn’t mean to!’
‘You –.’ Howie stopped himself. ‘Okay. Okay. I said not long ago that if this ever, inconceivably, happened, we would get through it. At worst we would be professional and part as friends.’
‘Oh, God. No. Howard.’
‘At worst. And. You know, anyone else. Anyone else, I would know I am being bullshitted. But you. I can almost actually believe this, from you. No one else would be that….’
‘Stupid.’
‘Nick –’
‘Stupid. I know I am, and you’re the only one who’s ever not made fun of me for it, the only one who ever believed I was anything but a fuckin’ idiot, and that’s. That’s one of the reasons. That’s one of the reasons I … I love you, and I know that’s the last thing you need to hear right now, but I do, and I won’t blame you if you quit on me but it won’t change the fact that I love you and I’ve never loved, never been able to love, anyone else, not really, and that. That won’t change even when you leave me.’
‘Nick. It has always been my greatest fear that you will leave me someday. And last night….’
‘I wouldn’t. Howie, I wouldn’t. I know you don’t believe that, you can’t believe that right now, but. ’S true anyway. Just. If this is it. Don’t be professional. Don’t be all growny. Hit me or something, yell, well, no, don’t yell, but. I deserve it. And I can stand that better than you being all clinicnal about it.’
‘That’s not what professionalism is, Nick. Stepping in to cover for someone, doing the job when there’s no inspiration, just a deadline and a promise, not being sidetracked, blinded, from a responsibility. That’s professional.
‘And you know that because you’ve done it a thousand thousand times. And I guess that’s why I believe you despite the sheer fucking insanity of that explanation, because you would never do anything that unprofessional – or that stupid – even if you did fall out of love with me and wanted to leave.’
‘But I haven’t.’
Howie sighed. ‘You know what I first thought when I heard about this? I thought you’d gotten scared. Maybe even persuaded yourself it was for the best, for me. That you’d gotten so rattled over these nightmares about being outed that you’d set out to “prove” you were straight.’
Nick choked back a sob.
‘Nicky. Last night. Were you, um. Were you safe?’
Nick buried his face in the pillow. ‘I don’t know. I was so trashed. Surprised I got it up, really, especially with a, you know. Girl.’
Nick felt the mattress shift as Howie sat down, his back against the headboard. Then Howie gathered him up and held him as Nick snuffled into Howie’s shoulder.
‘You’ll need to be tested. And. If. When we. There will be some changes. Precautions.’
Nicky clung, desperately, to that ‘if’ and that ‘when we.’ And clung despairingly to Howie.
Half an hour later, a still grim Bassman poked his head around the corner. Nick had cried himself into exhaustion. Howie, with a bleak stare directed at nothing, held Nick, motionless, his face set.
‘D.’ The Bass spoke softly. ‘If it’s too painful for you to watch, we can, or Alex, I guess. Somebody you can trust. I have a copy. Of the tape.’
Slowly, Howie swiveled his head around to stare at his friend, who had apparently gone mad. ‘Why would I want to see one frame of that piece of shit?’
‘Beats having him tested for the Big A ever’ six months. I thought you could see if he’d been safe.’
Howie nodded. ‘Okay. That makes sense. Which is the first thing today that has. I. Dios, this is going to suck. But I think I should be the one.’
His friend nodded, and tossed the tape softly onto the bed.
‘If you need us….’
Howie nodded, and the door closed softly behind a retreating Bass. Nick did not stir. Howie settled in to wait.
END