New Old Songs

by Ian McDuff

Another quasi-songfic. Howie-centric. Particularly dedicated to boomingvoice (Bri), Mercutio, Music Diamond, and Par.

It wasn’t that Howie was wakeful: he was about as pleasantly limp and pliant as a two-year-old’s favorite blankie, by this point. And it certainly wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep. He could, easily. Nor did he precisely choose not to, it was merely that his present state, floating like thistledown in a state of diffused consciousness, was so pleasant. Some nights, he dropped off to sleep immediately: they’d all had to learn to do that or suffer the consequences, early on. Perhaps that was why, on a night such as this, it was a luxury to drift off by stages, bobbing placidly along on a stream of consciousness like an autumn leaf adrift on a clear stream.

Beside him, of course, he felt the solid presence of his Nick, the rampart of that broad back; Nicky slept quietly tonight, sated, his dreams untroubled, his cares and fears not pursuing him into sleep. He gave off a gentle, steady warmth: for Howie, both physically and symbolically, this was like having his own personal hearth-fire to accompany him. Wherever the two of them were together, that was where home and hearth could be found, Howie mused. So long as he and Nick were under one roof, it was the roof of home, where the home fires burned; any place with them both in it was for that moment home, however transiently, as firmly as was ever the house in Sirmio long ago a home, its lares et penates in their due places, and the swallows darting into its eaves as dusk came over the quiet land and the son of the house returned from long voyaging. This was home, wherever they were, so long as they were there and Nick beside him. Even the occasional squeak of a not-quite-snore was familiar and comforting.

Home. Howie had long since determined that each of them had a word, one word that conveyed to them a complex of associations more than any other: the one word that summed them up. If Catullus was on his mind, he reflected, so too was Octavio Paz. They were all of them being written by some unseen hand under the vastness of the starry night, and for each of them there was a keyword. For Kevin, for example, the word was creation: the process of creating, the commitment to creation that made him a slave-driver in all matters Backstreet, but also ‘creation’ in the sense of the natural order, the wilderness that Kevin was convinced held the salvation of the world…. For Brian, of course, unquestionably the word that summed him up and explained all his motivations was family (the very word that, for reasons that were painfully obvious, was Nicky’s bane, that all but gave him hives). They all had keywords, all of them, himself included, from Bass’s belonging to Aidge’s challenge, the unwise pursuit of which had now led him to the greatest challenge of his life; they were all being written, spelled out line by line, letter by letter.

Written, and read.

People would never believe them, of course, if they knew what their interior lives were like. People would believe that the public Lance read business books, of course; people might conceivably believe that the private James read history and biography, avidly. But who would believe that the prosaic James Lance Bass read and re-read with delight and deep comprehension Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, unless they chanced to know as Howie did of Bass’s Jackson-area childhood and his adolescent friendship with the elderly Miz Eudora Welty? And who outside their charmed circle of intimates would imagine that the quickest way to get Bass and Timberlake to squabble was for there to be only one copy of a Golden Age mystery between the two of them, and they would wrestle each other for Innes or Sayers, Christie or Marsh? No one would ever know, nor if they knew would the public ever credit as anything but a PR ploy, the months-long discussion, sometimes more than a bit heated, over Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay between Nicky and AJ. None but a privileged few had ever seen, not the JC of a million spotlights, but the real and private Josh, carefully annotating the margins of Annie Dillard’s works, or Lorenzo Thomas’s poetry, concentrated, absorbed, the tip of his tongue protruding slightly from the corner of his mouth; reference books piled next to him, as he earnestly strove to make himself a writer and to fill in the gaps in his education, never satisfied, forever dedicated. On occasion, Howie’d been begged by the Bassman to join him for a movie, shopping, lunch, anything that would get James out of the space he shared with Josh. It wasn’t simply that James didn’t want to break his love’s concentration: they were adept at working quietly in the same space, Josh writing music and James reviewing a spreadsheet, say. It was, as James confessed, that when Josh went into student mode, it was so adorable that it was all James could do not to jump him on the spot.

But no one in the Wide World out there would believe that. No one would believe that the singing, dancing automatons read – or could read; much less would they believe that they read what they read.

Howie knew himself well enough, he reflected, to know why he read what he read, why certain things spoke to him in a way other works did not.

Like Josh, he read poetry. Absorbed it. Bathed in it. By the time Howie had come along, a Catholic education in America was generally more concerned with liberation theology than with Latin, but Father de Guzaman was having none of that. In the grim early days, Howie had feared that declining verbs was going to send him into a (possibly fatal) decline; but then, one day, a perfection of beauty came down upon him from the imperfect tense, and the stern poetry of Latin in-filled him, without regard to the sense, without being dependent on the denotation of the words: sheer sound enraptured him.

The accidental fact that these words, the sudden dawn-trumpet beginning of the Gospel of St John, stated what Howie truly believed, had nothing, in that moment, to do with it: this was pure incantation, and it affected him with the same emotions as did the first, exhilarating apostrophe of Henry 5^th, ‘O for a muse of fire! That could ascend / The brightest heaven of invention,’ with the same trembling anticipation as did the low pedal C, that first instant of sunrise and daybreak, in Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra.’

From that moment, Howie’s life had changed. He had not learned Spanish late in his teens merely to ‘explore himself’ or ‘get in touch with his roots,’ anymore than his reading Yeats was the equivalent of his going out with Hoke and John on St Patrick’s Day to listen to pipers and drink Guinness. He had learned Spanish because he had learned from Latin and from English that, in the end, no poetry makes its fullest sense in any language but its own. He had learned Spanish so he could revel in Sandra Cisneros and Garcia Lorca, so that he would become the man he was, who had both Catullus’s homecoming and Octavio Paz’s Hermandad: Homenaje a Claudio Ptolemeo within his soul, along with Donne and Eliot and Shakespeare.

Why? Because even if any poetry makes its truest sense only in its own tongue, there is, Howie was certain, some common animating spark that recked nothing of language. When he thought in Spanish or in Latin, he knew he did not merely formulate sentences differently than he would in English: he thought differently, his very habit of mind changed, subtly but perceptibly. Yet all three languages shared a common, if deep, root; and much more nearly, Spanish was the daughter of Latin, yet they too differed, and his mind differed with them. What fascinated Howie was not the differences, but the deep commonality: a commonality of emotion and desire, of hopes and fears. A common humanity that found in poetry its expression, a humanity that in its common aspirations and wants transcended the realities of sex, the hard facts of orientation, and the false constructs of race and cultural accident. Certainly peoples differed; certainly different peoples had each a special character and ethos: their very language differences drove those developments. But – homo sum, Terence had said, truly; nihil humani a me alienum puto. ‘I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.’

All his life, Howie had been fascinated by the deep unity of humanity, despite the infinite variety of human experience. He wanted to know how others thought and felt. And all his life, at first unconsciously, and then, thanks to Fr de Guzaman and the Latin poets and the Vulgate, consciously, Howie had been looking for the universal language that underlay all language and all human expression. Some lost or half-forgotten language that was everyone’s native tongue – and not, as John had once snarked, back when he was still struggling to accept Howie’s coming out, any ‘lost language of cranes.’ At one point, Howie had thought he had found that common tongue in music. He knew better now.

Beside him, Nick shifted, even in his sleep desiring that all of them that could touch, did.

People tended to think that Howie’s empathy, his interest, was a mere product of his sweetness of character. It was, of course; but it was still more the fruit of his insatiable desire to know how it felt in someone else’s skin, how the world looked through another’s eyes, a desire that coursed in him not because he was dissatisfied with his own being, but rather because he hoped to find the common factor in each person that made all of them human together.

The warmth and strength of Nick at his back was like the land itself, in summer. Howie’s mind drifted to what he knew and had pieced together of another couple’s early years.

The Fifties and the Sixties, in Florida. He could see them now, Paula and Hoke, impossibly young. A line from a Robert Earl Keen song, sung by Lyle Lovett – he had the Bass to thank for that: Gone are the days / Of the post-wartime lovers…. A Florida forty years and more gone. A Southern state, still, with a thin stratum of old planters and grove-owners resting on a bedrock of crackers and segregation and old, worn miseries that people had grown numb to, conscience-callused. Flagler’s Florida, too, the southern pole of the social axis that linked New York and DC and Palm Beach, a social world of seersucker suits and strawberries and cream and the pre-War British Embassy hosting New York’s Four Hundred and the slightly carpetbag Palm Beach Social Register in parties on a Washington lawn. The world of the Palm Beach suit for gentlemen, a world of which ghosts still lingered in the Palmetto train and the Auto-Train that Amtrak ran from Lorton to Palm Beach and Miami. A Florida in which Key West was the beery, Hemingwayesque capital of the Conch Republic, and no one had ever heard of a ‘gay vacation spot,’ a Key West that was a waystop on the trip to the casinos of Havana.

He could see them now, the people who would become his parents, against a candy-apple-red vinyl backdrop silvered with metal-flakes and geometric designs, a Florida sky that was a banquette seat in the world’s biggest Fifties diner.

The young Hoke Dorough, come to Florida in the pursuit of a dream; come to a Florida that had yet to know the tang of the Apollo Program and the vast transformation of tourism, a Florida of grits and oranges and hardly a word of Spanish to be heard on any but certain big-city streets. Hoke, moving against that background of short-sleeved button-down madras shirts and chinos and penny loafers, listening to Stan Kenton and Buddy Holly and Otis Redding. And Paula. She had been, Hoke had once confided to his sons, the most exotic and the most beautiful sight he had ever seen; and, he told them, with quiet unanswerability, she still was.

He had come to Florida out of the Army, Paula in tow (they had met in DC when he was still in the service). He had come to Florida to conquer his future, had Hoke, his head and heart full of dreams and determination. Determination, in the end, to be a cop, a good cop, a damned good cop; perhaps to become a detective, maybe even a homicide lieutenant. He had ended up one of the best, one of the first members of the new K-9 unit, in the days when the police station and municipal courts building still leaked in the rain and there was an officer detailed to the duty of shooting the pigeons off the roof. Could he ever have foreseen, in those innocent days of ‘Up On the Roof’ and ‘Under the Boardwalk,’ that he would someday have to arrest an elderly Haitian who attacked him when he ticketed the man for a housing code violation? Or that he would by then be working as a code enforcement officer only out of devotion, out of vocation, after retiring from OPD after a triple bypass; working at all as a mere luxury, because the son of his old age would be one of the ten biggest popstars in the world – and that that son would be quietly married, at least in the eyes of all who mattered, to another man who was another one of those ten?

Hoke had come to Florida on the cusp of the Kennedy years, with their youthful vibrancy, triumphalism, and overarching belief in American omnipotence, determined to conquer his future as American arms had conquered the Axis; had come in the full flush of that time’s American self-confidence, and having been captivated, captured, and conquered happily in his turn, by a flash of Spanish eyes in far-off Washington, while he was still in uniform.

Howie could see it unrolled before him like a scroll, from the stories Paula and Hoke had loved to tell once he indicated that he truly did wish to hear them. Those were the days when lovers used to slow-dance all night long, to songs of which they knew every word; dancing under the stars in the hot velvet nights, with torches flaring around the patio or Chinese lanterns hung between the palms, huge citronella candles in vast galvanized tubs, burning to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Dancing to the old songs, to which, as he well knew, not even Backstreet’s ballads were new rivals. Those were the days of malt-shop dates for the very young, and for the young Paula and Hoke, of nights at steak houses that served a wedge of iceberg lettuce with iridescent dressing for a salad, and where the side vegetable was onion rings; a world before cholesterol, its air redolent of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes and Camels. A world of Nehi Grape and ‘Co’-Cola’ that the country folks still put peanuts in, of tequila sunrises and Singapore slings and old forgotten blue-collar beers: Southern Brewing’s ‘Old Tampa’ and ‘Silver Bar,’ Jax, the Florida expansion of Schlitz after ’56: where the most exotic place in any given town called itself something like ‘The Tiki Wok’ and prided itself on its ‘Flaming Puu-Puu Platter.’

And forever in memory, there were tailfins on cars, the Platters and Jerry Butler on the jukebox, and Hoke and Paula, forever young, with stars in their eyes, slow-dancing under the clear Florida skies.

And in finding one another, in courting and marrying and starting a family, home, and future together – all the old ‘American Dream’ ideals that their younger counterparts would soon come to mock and sneer at, even as they spat at Hoke and called him ‘pig’ – Paula and Hoke had symbolized something greater than themselves. Hoke had opened himself and his arms, as America would soon open itself, to the unexpected new, the exotic, the unfamiliar; and Paula had, in Hoke, wed the best of traditional America, with all its limitations and all its peculiar strengths.

And here, and now, in this bed, their unexpected last and youngest child pressed himself more firmly against Nick. Howie did not need to open his eyes to see how the two of them fit, in complementarity, the golden boy with ripe-wheaten hair and eyes as blue as a North Sea sky and the cinnamon-hued man beside him with the limpid brown eyes of Andalusia…. To embrace Nick was to embrace a large iconic swath of America, its mythic All-American Boy Next Door; but Howie had never loved Nick because it was some form of assimilation, but because their souls meshed and their hearts beat to the same rhythm. Yet for him, Nick was home, and to see Nicky after any absence was to be Odysseus returned at last to Ithaka; and at the same time, Nick was, every day, his New World, and he an avid explorer if not a conquistador. In the end, after all, Howie knew his own keyword to be discovery, a word that was virtually the same in all his heart’s languages, and in the true common language of all hearts that is the language of love; and when all was said and done, Donne said it best:

In full possession of his discovered land, at peace, at home in the New World they had made for themselves, Howie slept at last.

END

Elegy XIX, Jno Donne, 1669, is in the public domain. Any fragmentary portions or paraphrases of song lyrics and poems not in the public domain, which are copyright to their respective authors, are used under the Fair Use Doctrine.