Who is Charlie Conti?

by Claus von Bohlen

  To get to the old library you had to go up a spiral staircase. I used to go up there a lot. On cloudy days it was pretty gloomy due to the smallness of the windows and the darkness of the vaulted wooden ceiling. There were a couple of windows that were like those slits that medieval knights used to shoot arrows through, although these ones were glazed. The slit windows only came up to my waist; if I wanted them to be of use I had to sit right next to one, then there was enough light to read by. I remember that feeling of contentment I’d get from huddling up next to the narrow old windows in that gloomy old library. Massachusetts winters could be pretty mean but it was a pleasure to feel warm and safe up in the attic while the rain and the hail lashed against those narrow windowpanes, making them shudder in their stone frames.

  Back then a tutor and a housekeeper were only employed to take care of me during the vacations; the apartment in New York was empty during the semester. Later, when I got kicked out of Belmont and went to school in the city, they were employed to look after me full time. But when the apartment was empty the school wouldn’t let me go home on weekends like the other kids. A few times I went to stay with Mikey but his parents were often travelling and then he had to go and stay with relatives himself. It might seem strange that my mother didn’t have any friends who offered to look after me but I never thought about that at the time. Now that I know she died of an overdose I guess it makes sense. There was an old lady called Mrs Oppenheimer who lived in the same apartment block and who offered to have me stay, but to tell the truth I was a bit afraid of her, and at that time I preferred to be by myself anyway.

  So when the other kids went home on weekends, I had to stay at Belmont. I wasn’t the only one; the headmaster’s own children were there, and a couple of kids whose parents lived overseas, but I didn’t much like any of them. It was a pretty sad place to be when everyone else had gone and the school was all empty and silent. That’s when I missed mom most, and when I used to think back to being in Rome when I was very young, before my mom was followed around by photographers. Also I liked to remember walking in the countryside on wet afternoons, looking for snails and prodding them gently with twigs and watching their tentacles retract in surprise. Izzy used to love that. But I was also aware that I was forgetting more and more of our time in Italy and that whereas I used to be able to play back films in my head of the three of us together, now it was more like snap shots; I wasn’t even sure whether I was remembering the events themselves or just the old photos that I kept in a box at home.

  Thinking about my mom got me down. There was a lot of stuff I’d have liked to ask her while she was still alive and now I knew I’d never be able to. For one I’d have liked to know for sure who my father was. And I’d have liked to know what mom was like when she was a girl, and what she wanted to be when she was older, and what books she liked, and how she felt when I was born, and how she felt when she found out about Izzy, and a lot of other stuff too. Like I said, thinking about her got me down. The best way to stop thinking about her was to climb up to the old library and huddle against the shaking window panes and lose myself in one of the books up there, and so that’s what I did.

  The books up in the attic library were pretty old. The first time I went up there I browsed up and down the shelves, daring myself to penetrate the gloom at the far end of the east wing. The shelves stopped at shoulder height where the roof began to slant inwards. The oversize books – mostly old atlases and maps of the constellations and so on – lay piled horizontally on the bottom shelf. Crawling on my hands and knees into the darkest and dustiest corner of the library, I discovered a big old volume bound in faded green cotton with the title An Examination of the Habits and Customs of the Peoples of the Empire. Boy, did that old book suck me in. Even the smell of it attracted me, leathery (though it wasn’t bound in leather) and slightly smoky, musty and mysterious. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but no one ever said anything about the smell.

  It was a crazy book – a collection of early anthropological texts accompanied by faded full-page albumen prints, published in London in 1868. The best print was of two Gambian hunters, framed against the broad Gambia River. The hunters wore loincloths made from some plaited material and their naked bodies were wiry and strong. Around their necks hung necklaces of curved fangs. Both men’s faces were round, their brows beetled and low. They were both grinning ferociously, and I mean ferociously; their teeth had been filed down until they tapered to points as thin and as vicious as rose thorns. It made them appear savage beyond belief. My own infrequent visits to the dentist paled in comparison to what I imagined those men going through, endlessly filing away, maybe striking the nerve. What if they accidentally bit their lips, or crunched down on a piece of bone? Printed beneath the image it said: fig. 12, Two Gambian Hunters. The attenuated points of their filed teeth indicate seniority within the tribe.

  There were other pictures that fascinated me – tiny pygmies in the Ituri forest of Zaire, or Nigerian women whose backs were decorated with thousands of minute bumps made by rubbing poisonous plants into little knife cuts; the smooth black skin was left looking like some kind of human brail. There was a picture of a head-hunter from Papua New Guinea whose nose was pierced by a large curved tooth which looked like a moustache, and pictures of tattooed warriors from the South Sea Islands. But I was always drawn back to the pointed teeth of the Gambian hunters; they were the first to entrance me and I remained faithful to them.

  I told Mikey Katzounnis about the book. Mikey was more into sports than I was – he worshipped the New York Yankees – and books in general held less appeal for him. But, like all schoolboys, he was fascinated by the macabre. I took him up to the old library and showed him the print of the Gambian hunters. He was sucked in at first but then got bored and wandered off, pulling out odd books here and there, until he discovered a whole shelf of texts about African Witchcraft, Yoruba, Jamaican Obeah, Cuban Santería and the different strains of Voodoo. C. Arthur Allen had obviously also had a taste for the occult.

  We spent many afternoons trying to make sense of those old texts. A whole shelf of them were in French, mostly published in Port-au-Prince around the turn of the century. For a month or two both Mikey and I began to pay much more attention in French class. The most promising book was a slim, leather-bound English volume which had been hidden from view, pressed flat against the wall at the back of the shelf by the noses of the other books. The pages were thick, almost like parchment, and the text was written in a small, spidery hand. The book was called Advice to Fishermen from Black River to Alligator Pond, and the first three chapters provided a load of information about the tides and the seasons, where to find grouper and when to stay inside the reef because of the sharks on the outside. However, the more we read, the more the book moved away from the practical advice of the opening chapters and began to discuss occult practices – lists of charms and ‘gris-gris’ that a fisherman should carry with him to avoid ‘the fate of Jonah’, incantations to protect oneself from a watery death, sacrificial observances to ensure a good catch and rituals to cast a ‘ju-ju’ on another boat. The last chapter was again harmless – advice on how best to open up the shell of a sea turtle. It was as if the meat of the book had been enclosed within the deceptive shell of a practical fishing guide, possibly to deceive the cursory eye of a lazy censor. At least, that was our theory. And it was the second to last chapter that excited my imagination the most; it contained instructions on to how to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

  Looking back now it sounds ridiculous, but at the time I really thought it might work, or at least that it was a possibility. If you want something enough it’s amazing what you can believe, and also what you can choose not to believe. And in fact it’s not so crazy; I read a leaflet recently about solvent abuse and how a lot of homeless people do it because it makes them hallucinate their loved ones back to life. Of course I didn’t know that at the time, but I guess I had a sense that, when the mind real
ly wants something, then it is capable of much more than we think. When I was fifteen and by myself up in the old library at Belmont, what I really wanted was to communicate with my dead mother, so I decided that I would try to summon her spirit from beyond the grave.

  I persuaded Mikey to help. He was pretty sceptical but he agreed. We noted the strange words of the incantation and the items required – ‘personal effects of the departed’, ‘fire-water’ and ‘gallows grass’ which we later discovered was hemp. Since the book said that the gallows grass should be packed into a pipe I guessed it was cannabis. It would have been safer to perform the séance in New York – both Mikey and I were going to be there over the Christmas vacation – but the instructions said that the summoning could only be performed in a place of worship. I thought it would be easier to steal the keys to the school chapel from the groundsman’s hut than to break into some church in the city, so we decided to wait until after the vacation. The book also said you had to fast for two days before the séance; that would have been tricky over Christmas. Mikey said he could get hold of some grass; he’d caught his sister smoking on the fire escape of their building last summer and he was pretty sure he knew where she kept her stash. I was to take care of the rest.

  IV

  THREE DAYS BEFORE the end of the vacation Mikey called me.

  ‘Charlie, remember what we were talking about? About the séance and all? Well, the thing is, I can’t find my sister’s stash. I was thinking, maybe we should just call it off.’

  ‘Shit Mikey, I’ve been waiting all vacation for this.’ That was true. Christmas vacations weren’t much fun with a tutor. One or two of my mom’s friends had called but I could barely remember their names and couldn’t wait to get them off the phone. Mrs Oppenheimer, the old lady who lived in the same building, had dropped by with a Christmas gift for me – a tiny Egyptian scarab wrapped up in tissue paper. It was kind of her, but it didn’t make me find her any less creepy. It was pretty different to the Christmases we used to have back in Rome. Italians are really good to kids, especially at Christmas. We used to get gifts on the sixth of January which was called La Befana. If you’d been bad you got given a piece of coal instead of presents, but even the coal was really just blackened sugar and you’d always get some presents too, so that was ok. I’d been thinking about the sugar coal and my mom and all, and I guess I’d started to believe in the possibility of communicating with her more and more. That’s why I was so disappointed when Mikey wanted to call it off.

  ‘C’mon Mikey, you’re chicken shit,’ I said. I knew he wouldn’t like that; he had that whole Greek macho thing. ‘Have you even looked for your sister’s grass?’

  ‘Sure I’ve looked. She used to keep it in a shoebox. I found the shoebox but there wasn’t anything in it.’

  It sounded to me like Mikey was holding something back. ‘Nothing at all?’ I asked.

  ‘There wasn’t any smoke.’

  ‘So what was there?’

  ‘Jeez buddy, you don’t give up. If you gotta know, there was a used condom. Nearly made me puke.’

  ‘Shit, sorry Mikey.’

  ‘Tell you the truth, it’s not so much about the grass. I mean, I’m sure we could get some down by Tompkins Square Park. But the thing is, I’m just not sure about all this supernatural stuff. I mean, there’s a load of wackos out there. Sometimes normal people turn wacko and I guess something must’ve happened to them to make them like that.’

  I was about to reply when Mikey went on, ‘I mean, do you know who Daniel Rakowitz is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I just saw a film about him. He’s in a mental institution out on Wards Island now, but he used to hang around downtown in the eighties. He was a bum, but he must have had something going for him because he hooked up with this Swiss lap dancer. Anyway, one night he went back to her apartment and knifed her to death, then he boiled her head and chopped her into little pieces and made a stew which he fed to the other bums in Tompkins Square Park.’

  ‘Jeez Mikey, what the hell? I don’t want to eat my mother, I want to try to communicate with her spirit.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m just saying that you don’t know what you might be getting yourself into. Like that film director, what’s his name… Polanski, Roman Polanski.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘His wife got murdered by Charles Manson. Actually, not by Charles Manson himself, but by his followers. There was a bit about him in this film too. Anyway, they murdered her, although she was eight months pregnant, and then they wrote “Pig” on the front door. In blood.’

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with us.’

  ‘Charlie, Polanski made that film about the devil who gets a woman pregnant, Rosemary’s Baby. I mean, I guess I’m just saying that I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in that kinda shit.’

  ‘Alright, I understand that. I don’t want to get mixed up either. But I don’t think that the supernatural has to be evil. I mean, it depends on what you are trying to use it for. What’s so bad about wanting to talk to my mom?’

  Mikey was silent for so long, I thought maybe the line had gone dead.

  ‘Mikey, you still there?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, will you do this?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  Boy was I relieved when he said that. I guess I pressed him pretty hard but, like I said, I had really started to believe that it might work.

  ‘Thanks buddy. Don’t worry about the grass, I’ll get it. I’ll go down to Tompkins Square Park. I might get a Swiss lap dancer to go-go while I’m there.’

  Mikey didn’t think that was so funny.

  *

  To tell the truth, Mikey’s story about the wacko Rakowitz had freaked me out a bit too, so when it came to it I was kind of nervous about heading down to Tompkins Square Park. Also, back in those days it was pretty hard to get away from my tutor. This was years before Martin – some cranky old guy whose name I can’t remember. But at the same time I wanted to go. I guess I was beginning to get a sense that the world that had been created around me – the tutors and cooks and housekeepers – was kind of fake, and that I was deliberately being kept away from the real world. It felt a bit like I was behind glass. So, although I was nervous about heading down to Tompkins square, I was excited about it too.

  To escape from my tutor I either had to go early in the morning or late at night, but I figured there’d be more dealers hanging around at night. Not that I knew what a dealer would look like, or how to go about scoring. But anyway, I went to bed early that night and waited for my cranky old tutor to go to bed. That old Park Avenue apartment was on two floors and his bedroom was above mine, so I’d always hear his slow steps climbing the stairs. As soon as I’d heard his door close I got out of bed and pulled on my sneakers. I’d decided to wear sneakers in case I had to run for it, and a hooded sports sweater so I could hide my face if necessary. It was still pretty cold in the city, so I tied a scarf round my neck. Then I remembered a talk given to us at school a couple of years back by a cop. He demonstrated the way that his tie was not a proper tie – when he pulled it just came away from his collar. He said that wearing a real tie was like an invitation to be strangled. I thought that maybe a scarf was like that too, so I took it off again before slipping out of the apartment.

  The elevator stopped on the fourth floor on the way down and Mrs Oppenheimer tapped her way in. She was the one who had given me the scarab. She was very old, and kind of wacky, and really rich. She was wearing a white fur coat with markings like a leopard. Maybe it had once been a snow leopard, who knows. In one hand she held a walking stick made of black wood; the top of it was carved into the shape of some wildcat’s head – it looked pretty fierce. It was so intricate, you could make out the individual teeth. In her other hand she held a tiny, hairless dog with a pointed nose. Sometimes Mrs Oppenheimer recognized me, sometimes she didn’t. This time I really hoped she wouldn’t.

  ‘
Good evening Charlie. Isn’t it rather late to be going out?’ she said, straight off.

  ‘Yes ma’am. Problem is, sometimes I just can’t sleep and my legs get all jumpy, so I go for a run around the block.’ That was true about not being able to sleep and my legs getting jumpy, not about the running. To tell the truth, I hate running.

  ‘I’m sure you know best.’ She paused for a moment, then she added, ‘You wouldn’t see me out so late except that Anubis is incontinent.’ She gave the hairless dog a little upward push.

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  ‘But I guess we’re really both just waiting to die.’ Mrs Oppenheimer lifted the dog up until it was level with her face. She spoke to the dog: ‘I’ve had a lovely little casket made for you, so there’s no chance that you’ll suffer the fate of Osiris.’ Then, to me: ‘Did you know that Osiris’ body was chopped into fourteen pieces and thrown into the Nile? Only thirteen of those pieces were ever found.’ Like I said, Mrs Oppenheimer was kind of strange.

  Once I was outside I flagged a cab and told the bearded driver that I wanted to go to Tompkins Square Park. He seemed pretty bad-tempered so I decided not to give him the packet of cigarettes that I found lying on the back seat. I didn’t use to smoke much but I figured the packet might come in handy if I had to hang around Tompkins Square Park for too long. Then I opened the window and stuck my head out and stared upwards. I like doing that: the tops of the skyscrapers whizz by with the stars above them and you lose track of where you are. You can’t see many stars in New York but the main ones you can. Sometimes it can really get you wondering. I like to stare at the roof of the cab, I mean, stare really hard, until my eyes hurt, like I’m doing one of those magic eye things. Then I stick my head out the window and stare at the tops of the skyscrapers. Boy, they look high. I guess it’s like dipping your finger into really salty anchovy paste and licking it and then drinking sugary coffee; the coffee tastes much sweeter that way.