Who is Charlie Conti?

by Claus von Bohlen

  When my eyes get tired of staring at the skyscrapers, then I look above them, at the stars in the night sky. That’s as far as you can see, but I know that our galaxy continues beyond the domain of the visible, and beyond that there are other galaxies which form part of our supercluster, and beyond that other superclusters, and beyond that who knows. It’s a bit like those Russian dolls, you know, the Babushka dolls. There’s always another doll inside. If you start from the inside, then stars and galaxies and superclusters are like that, and I guess the real question is: is there a last Babushka doll? I’d love to know, I really would.

  ‘Hey kiddo, that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen!’ The beard was wagging at me.

  I pulled my head back in and wound up the window.

  *

  I got out of the cab on the north side of Tompkins Square Park, right in front of a bar that looked as if it had been closed down pretty recently. The brickwork was covered in a spaghetti of tagging, but the boards in front of the windows were untouched, except for one verse of graffiti:

  Bums! Make love all you like,

  now it is warm and wet,

  but tomorrow it will be cold

  and the smell will linger till morning.

  I walked into the square, but I couldn’t get that damn verse out of my head. I mean, at the time I was a virgin and all; my knowledge of sex was limited to the medical drawings in our biology text books – the penis in cross-section, freakishly split by the dividing line of the urethra, the vagina like some weird ram’s head, horns capped by ovaries. I’d seen a few porno flicks too, but only in the company of other boys; I’d been too busy hiding my embarrassment to give them my full attention. At night and in my fantasies women were magical creatures and no part of them was more fascinating than the dark triangle between their legs, but in terms of real knowledge, of actual experience, well, like I said, I had nothing.

  I walked past a bum wrapped up in plastic bags from Wal-Mart, asleep on a bench. I was feeling a bit tense so I sat down on an empty bench to take stock. Tompkins Square Park is pretty small, just a couple of blocks. Under the trees on the other side of the park I could make out a guy who looked like he was dancing with a strip of orange fabric. He was leaping with his naked feet pointed like a ballet dancer and drawing the fabric behind him through the air, then spinning around and slicing at the air with the strip of orange. He was really absorbed in his dance and after a while I realized that I no longer felt tense and that I’d been staring at him for some time. I don’t know whether the strip of orange was hypnotic, or whether the dancer’s total obliviousness to his surroundings had rubbed off on me, but I certainly felt a lot calmer. I looked over to the bench with the Wal-Mart bum but he had been replaced by three people, two of them wearing hoodies. I strained my ears to catch their conversation; to my surprise I could only hear girls’ voices. The third figure was sitting on the ground and her head kept disappearing inside her sweater.

  On the other side of the park the guy with the orange strip was still dancing. He really seemed to have a lot of energy. It was a cold night, not quite freezing but not far off, so it was it pretty weird that he was dancing on the grass without any shoes. He made me think of the crazy lady I used to see on the Upper East Side when we first moved to New York, when I was twelve years old. She would be naked except for a black waterproof coat. She had this intense make-up too, big red circles on her cheeks like a clown. The rest of her face was pretty white, but that may have been her natural pallor, I’m not sure. Anyhow, she used to jog up and down the sidewalks in the darkness in the middle of winter, on nights when arctic winds knifed down the avenues, winds so cold they make you wonder at the ingenuity of your mind that could block out the memory from one year to the next. She would stop jogging from time to time and press her face up against the window of a café or someplace where people were warm and huddled inside. Then she’d make as if to kiss the glass, but instead she’d blow, ballooning out her cheeks like a bullfrog, the ones with the amazing elasticity, and treating everyone inside to a view of the inside of her mouth and her toothless gums. The first time I saw her do it I was with Izzy and our nanny. Poor Izzy, she got really freaked out; she didn’t stop crying all the way home. I’d been a bit scared too, but I talked about the lady all the way back to the apartment because I wanted to pretend that I hadn’t been. I used to be kind of mean that way.

  I was still watching the dancer in the park with the orange fabric when I heard a girl’s voice:

  ‘Hey Mister?’

  I jumped.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t hear you coming, that’s all.’ I had that burning feeling in my veins from the shock. I really hadn’t heard her coming. I looked across to the other bench where there were now only two girls, so I figured this was the one who’d been sitting on the floor with her head inside her sweater.

  ‘Do you have a light?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  She held my eye for a tiny bit longer than was necessary. ‘That’s too bad,’ she said. She seemed pretty sure of herself, but I guess she realized that I was a few years younger than her. As she was turning to leave I remembered the cigarettes I’d found in the cab.

  ‘Hey, wait a second. I might have one.’ I fished the pack out of the big pocket on the side of my combat pants and looked inside. There was a lighter wedged into the pack.

  ‘Here.’ I extended it to her.

  She took the pack and the lighter, stared at the lighter, turned it upside down and then smiled at me. ‘Nice.’

  I squinted in the darkness and realized it was one of those lighters where some naked chick’s g-string slides off when you turn it upside down. It was embarrassing but I figured it would be better not to make a big deal out of it.

  She looked at me again, for longer this time. ‘You want to join us for a smoke?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  We walked over to the bench, past a streetlamp whose orange sodium glow was reflected off the girl’s nose stud. I hadn’t noticed she was wearing one until that moment. I guess it must have been pretty small; I usually notice stuff like that.

  ‘I’m Ally, this is Macha and Charlie,’ she said, introducing her friends. Back then I used to find it annoying when girls had boys’ names.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Ally, the one with the nose stud.

  ‘Charlie,’ I said.

  ‘No way, for real? Huh.’ Ally sat down on the ground again. It didn’t look comfortable, but it would have felt weird for three of us to be on the bench and just one on the ground, so I sat down on the twig covered sidewalk next to Ally. It was hard to see Charlie and Macha because of the light from the streetlamp behind them. Charlie had frizzy hair, that much I could see. And, looking across, I could see Ally’s profile and the stud in her nose. Generally I like girls with nose studs, but I guess that’s because most girls wouldn’t wear a nose stud unless they thought their nose was pretty cute. Maybe Ally thought that too, but to me it looked pretty severe. In fact, her whole face was severe.

  Charlie passed my lighter to Macha. She put a small pipe to her lips and held it there before lighting it. In the glow of the flame I could see her more clearly. She had broad, Slavic-looking features and dark rings around her eyes which I found strangely sexy. When I looked back at Ally I realized that she had been watching me.

  ‘Why are all cute guys gay?’ She directed the question at me.

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it. Do you think? Maybe it’s just one of those things people say.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She paused. Macha lit the pipe again. Ally went on, ‘So, Charlie, you come here to pick up guys or what?’

  ‘Hey, I’m not gay,’ I said.

  ‘Oh really.’

  ‘I swear, I’m not gay.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie boy. You can’t hang around here selling your ass to dirty old men and then pretend to us that you’re not gay.’

&
nbsp; ‘What the –’

  ‘Look, how many cute straight fourteen-year-olds sit in Tompkins Square Park by themselves at midnight and have lighters with pictures of naked guys with massive cocks?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that’s not my lighter. I didn’t even look at it. It was in the pack of cigarettes that I found in the cab on the way here. And I’m fifteen anyway.’

  ‘So you’re not gay?’

  ‘Jeez, no I’m not.’

  Ally looked at me sceptically. ‘Prove it,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kiss me.’

  I could see that Macha and Charlie on the bench were enjoying this.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. Read my lips, loverboy: kiss me.’

  I’d never kissed a girl before, which is strange, I know, but it’s true. I didn’t want them to know that, but I didn’t really want to kiss Ally either. In fact, I’d have preferred to kiss Macha. But although Ally looked pretty severe, I knew I’d enjoy telling Mikey what had happened. And in any case, I didn’t really see how I could get out of it without them thinking I was selling my ass. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to kiss her in front of her friends, or whether she wanted to go for a walk under the trees, out of sight, or what. In the end I didn’t have to make a decision because she grabbed the back of my head and pulled my mouth onto hers. I was just thinking how different this was to the way I’d imagined my first kiss would be, when suddenly her tongue pushed into my mouth. I remember how strangely unpleasant the taste was, though now I realize that it was because she’d been smoking a cigarette. The taste was kind of metallic and reminded me of that feeling you get when you chew on a piece of chocolate which still has a bit of tin foil stuck to it which you didn’t see.

  We kissed for a while, our tongues kind of wrestling. It must have looked pretty gross, although Macha and Charlie were too busy relighting the pipe to take much notice. I’d have liked to pull away, but I thought it might be a bit impolite, like letting a door swing in a girl’s face. So I just kept wrestling until she pulled away.

  ‘Wow, don’t you ever come up for air?’ she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. Even now her comment confuses me. I mean, do people hold their breath when they kiss? I’d never kissed anyone before but it seemed pretty intuitive to kiss with my mouth and breathe through my nose.

  ‘So, if you’re not gay, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?’ she asked.

  Metallic and messy as the kiss had been, it nevertheless emboldened me to reply: ‘I want to buy some smoke.’

  All three girls laughed at this. In spite of the cold, I felt the heat begin to rise to my face, until Ally said, ‘Well loverboy, looks like it’s your lucky night. We’ve got more smoke than we can possibly sell.’

  So I left Tompkins Square Park a quarter of an hour later and fifty bucks poorer, but with a bag of chemically enhanced cannabis in my pocket and the faintly unpleasant, lingering taste of tin foil in my mouth. It was a small price to pay for not being chopped up into fourteen pieces or made into a stew or scattered into the Nile or fed to poetic bums or whatever.

  V

  I SHOWED MIKEY the bag of smoke while we were brushing our teeth on the first night back at Belmont. In winter the bathrooms were icy cold and lit by fluorescent lights which made everyone look kind of green and even more pimply than usual, but teeth-brushing was really social despite that. Each bathroom had six sinks and you were allowed to talk there during late prep which you couldn’t do in your room, at least not without the risk of getting caught. I’m pretty sure that it’s only because of that little loophole that I never needed a filling until after I left Belmont. I mean, back then I used to eat plenty of candy, and I wouldn’t just suck on them like I do now. I used to chomp right down crushing the boiled sugar until it splintered and molded itself to the indentations in the top and bottom of my back teeth, sometimes even fusing the upper and the lower together for a few moments. And did I ever need a filling? No sir, I did not. After Belmont I ate a lot less candy, but the dentist used to find some goddamn cavity every time he looked.

  Like I was saying, I showed Mikey the bag while we were brushing our teeth. The book had also said that I needed a ‘personal effect of the departed’ and ‘fire-water’, so I had brought back a ring of my mother’s and also a quart of scotch decanted into my empty aftershave bottle. I’d gotten the scotch from the pantry at home. The cook used to keep a few bottles of liquor up on the top shelf. I don’t know whether she used the scotch for cooking or for herself, but she sure made it easy for me. The aftershave itself had been a Christmas gift from old Hartfelder. I guess in a way it might have been a kind thought, but I hated the way that everything he did made me feel awkward. I mean, why give a kid aftershave when he’s never had to shave? I used to have to go to Christmas drinks at old Hartfelder’s. When he introduced me to his stuffy old friends he’d always say something like: ‘This is the famous Charlie Conti, the late Isabella’s son. In a few years the ladies will be fighting over him, I’ll bet you.’ In itself I guess that really isn’t such a bad thing to say, but it just leaves you feeling like a moron. I mean, you sound like a fake if you deny it – ‘No sir, I swear the ladies will not be fighting over me’ – and like an even bigger asshole if you don’t.

  The grass was in a bag inside my vitamin bottle. Mikey was impressed when I showed it to him. I guess he thought I wouldn’t have the balls to do it. Or maybe he just thought I wouldn’t bring it back to Belmont. The school had a zero tolerance policy – if you got caught with smoke you’d get kicked out immediately. Everyone knew that. There were some kids who smoked cigarettes but that wasn’t so serious, and they were very cautious about it. I never really thought they did it for enjoyment either – some of them used to get up really early and smoke by the ventilator in the showers to extract the fumes. How fun is that? But like I said, cannabis was much more serious, so I stashed it quickly back in my vitamin bottle.

  I’d emptied the aftershave out of the bottle that Hartfelder had given me and filled it with scotch instead. The aftershave and the scotch were pretty much the same colour so you couldn’t tell what I’d done. I unscrewed the top of the aftershave before offering it to Mikey. He took a sniff, screwed up his nose and then had a sip. I guess I didn’t wash the bottle out too well because Mikey spat the scented scotch right back out and started vigorously brushing his teeth.

  The first days back at school were always somehow exciting. There were trials for sports teams and you got new teachers and different classes. Also you wanted to catch up with the friends you hadn’t seen. I guess the catching up was pretty predictable – you already knew which kids had been to Europe and who would have some story about kissing some friend of his sister’s and which kids would be comparing snow conditions in Vermont or Aspen or wherever. Every year some sports jock would come back to Belmont with a new smoking habit which would make him grow his hair and consign his childhood pro-ball dream to the trashcan of history. Like I say, it was predictable, but maybe that was also the pleasure of it. It felt like news at the time, but catching up with your buddies was really about slipping back into a world of routine and familiarity, like putting on school uniform.

  Mikey and I decided to do the séance five days after we got back, on a Saturday. That evening we went first to the movies in Rochester to catch the eight o’clock show; this was a privilege we were entitled to as sophomores. I can’t even remember what the film was about; I was much too excited thinking about what I was going to ask my mom. I really thought it might work, so I wanted to be prepared. Even way back then I used to hate the feeling of regret more than anything else in the world. I still feel that way now; regret makes me physically nauseous. The worst kind of regret is if you didn’t tell someone something before it was too late, or you didn’t ask the right question while you could. I don’t just mean stuff like not asking a girl out, though I know how bad that can be; I mean questions about what other people’s lives hav
e been like, the things that no one else knows and that will die when they die, unless someone, anyone, cares enough to ask.

  As we left the cinema Mikey said he was feeling sick. I said that wasn’t surprising, seeing as he’d eaten pretty much the whole jumbo tub of popcorn himself. Usually I’d have had half of it, but the book had said we weren’t supposed to eat before the séance. Anyway, Mikey’s sickness turned out to be pretty convenient since it gave him a reason to go up to the dormitory before the ten o’clock bell, something which would otherwise have been against the rules. Once he was up there Mikey got the bag of smoke, the ring and the whiskey from my dop kit and retrieved Advice to Fisherman from Black River to Alligator Pond which he’d stowed underneath his bed. Then he changed into his pyjamas and put on his bathrobe so that, if anyone tried to stop him between the house and the chapel, he would be able to say that he was sick and had snuck outside for air. His appearance would make the lie convincing.

  While Mikey was upstairs collecting the stuff, I was hanging around at the back of the darkened TV room. If you were in ninth grade you weren’t allowed to go to the cinema but you could watch movies in the TV room on a Saturday night. Of course, the movies were supposed to be family films or rated PG13, but usually someone would get an approved film from the video store and slip some other movie into the case and hope that the prefect who put the film in the machine wouldn’t notice. Or even if the prefect did notice they didn’t really care because they used to do the same thing themselves, and they really preferred having all the lower grades shit scared and glued to some horror movie in the TV room and not running wild in the house because they were bored.