Who is Charlie Conti?

by Claus von Bohlen

  *

  I wish I still had the journal I wrote on the trip, not because it was of any literary value but just because there’s a load of stuff that happened that’s become a bit of a blur. I guess I was pretty high a lot of the time, and there’s other stuff I don’t want to remember.

  *

  Jeanine started doing lines of blow as soon as we hit the freeway, as I’d feared. Some people get really talkative when they’re high but not her. The only noticeable effect it had was that it made her horny. Obviously that wasn’t a problem most of the time, but I knew she kind of got off on the danger of getting caught. I’ve got to say, I’m not like that. If there’s a danger of getting caught then my mind’s on the danger, not on the sex. If I wanted that kind of excitement I’d play some kids’ game like hide-and-seek. But Jeanine didn’t see it that way. She unzipped my trousers as we were driving but I had to take her hand away. She got kind of pissed and I realized that maybe I wasn’t so beat, but I really didn’t think an awkward hand-job was worth a ten car pile-up. I mean, seriously. Also I’ve got a pretty macabre imagination when it comes to accidents, like I couldn’t help thinking about the mess if she went down on me and we had a frontal collision, with the steering wheel and the impact and all. I can’t pick my nose in a car because I always imagine what would happen if I got rammed from behind, whether the finger could go right through to the brain like the Ancient Egyptians and their hooks when they mummified people. Like I said, I can be pretty macabre.

  *

  Service stations. Boy I find them depressing. In Texas the landscape is the same for hundreds and hundreds of miles; flat and dry and dun-colored. Then you take an exit off the interstate and you’re in a service station that’s laid out exactly the same as the one before, and the one before that, and the one before that. The same franchises in the same places. The food is the same and the bright orange cheese paste on the hotdogs is like flavored plastic. It was a relief to do blow and not get hungry.

  *

  At dusk on an empty road through the desert I asked Jeanine to get in the back and masturbate. She did and I watched in the mirror. Then I stopped the Buick by the side of the road and we took the blanket from the trunk and walked into the dry, hard country. A huge cactus was silhouetted against the red evening sky like a giant phallus. We woke up shivering under the blanket an hour later and carried on driving until dawn.

  *

  The poor armadillos. Their crushed corpses pave the freeways.

  *

  The longest we went without exchanging a word was six hours. I’d have liked to know more about Jeanine’s life and what it’s really like to work in adult entertainment and why she wouldn’t speak to her parents, but those were things she didn’t want to talk about. Most of the time when we were driving she’d listen to music with her headphones on. It’s actually strange how much time you can spend with someone, I mean sleeping with them and all, and yet you never really get to know them or know what they’re thinking. I guess maybe there’re some people who aren’t thinking anything, so it’s not surprising you never know. But I don’t think Jeanine was one of those people.

  *

  She didn’t ask that many questions herself, except what music people liked. But one time we got talking about my mom. I was telling her the films she’d been in. Jeanine seemed pretty interested – she was an actress herself, after all. Then she wanted to know how much my mother’s estate was worth. She got annoyed when I said I couldn’t tell her. I meant that I couldn’t tell her because it depended on annual royalties and so on, but she thought I just didn’t want to tell her. She had no right to be annoyed so I didn’t explain what I’d really meant.

  *

  Even making love, Jeanine could be pretty distant. She turned herself on far more than I did. With feline movements she would run her hands through her hair and over her breasts and stomach; her own body turned her on. It was very sexy. I guess that on one level men try to take possession of women through the act of sex. But while making love to Jeanine it was obvious that the only person taking possession of her was herself. Maybe part of a man’s fascination with sex is the hope that through it he can access the mysterious world of femininity. In her movements and looks and gestures Jeanine demonstrated that world, but she never granted access to it. That was the source of the fascination.

  *

  In Dallas we went to a Hooters restaurant. I’d never been to one before but I knew it was a pretty big franchise. I was on a bit of a downer and Jeanine thought it would cheer me up. It was a weekend and the place was busy. We sat down at one of the few vacant tables, right in the middle of the room. We were immediately approached by a waitress in skimpy black hotpants and a tight hooters t-shirt, all breasts and a perfect, flashing smile. Looking around the room I saw that the other waitresses were wearing the same skimpy outfits and they all had huge breasts. The other thing I noticed was that everywhere I looked there was a TV showing a football game. The place was packed with jocks sucking on Bud Lites. I thought to myself that this was what the Declaration of Independence had come down to in the 21st century: it is the inalienable right of every American male to be surrounded by huge breasts and perfect teeth and to be fed sports on a kind of intravenous drip. Wherever you looked, breasts and sports. Sex lite, war lite, Bud Lite. I guess it could be worse, like the Colosseum or public floggings or whatever. But still, I don’t think it’s what the founding fathers envisioned.

  *

  From Dallas we headed south towards Mexico. I was curious to see it. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff about Mexico that makes me angry. Or not really about Mexico itself, but about the way that Americans see Mexico. For example, most privileged American high school kids first get sick-drunk when they’re on spring break in Mexico, and so any book or any movie that shows Mexico as crazy and dissolute gets a great write-up just because some loser critic can identify with it. And whenever you see Mexico in a movie it’s over-exposed and bleached and trippy. I guess it may be kind of like that – I mean, I know the Mexicans are pretty crazy and the worm in tequila is hallucinogenic and all that – but I’m just saying, my reasons for going to Mexico were not because I wanted to buy into that formulaic bullshit. I just wanted to see for myself what it was like.

  We crossed the border at Brownsville Matamoros. There was a long line of trucks from central America, from Honduras I think, that were transporting shrimps into the US. The trucks had to wait to be weighed and checked by the drugs squad but there was a hold-up and the drivers had been hanging around for a day and a night already. They looked tired, unshaven and pissed. One of the trucks had broken down, or at least its refrigeration system had broken down, and the hot sun had been heating up the contents of the container. Boy, the smell of decomposing shrimp was pestilential. It was so bad people were retching outside the customs building. That didn’t help the stench. Mexican officials in knee-length shiny leather boots walked around with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths and noses. The border was a busy place but the stench from the truck had cleared a circle with a radius of fifty metres or so. I feel queasy just thinking about it.

  It was weird how different things were on the Mexican side. The road was potholed and there were chickens running around and people selling fresh tacos by the roadside. Big lumbering green buses rocked from side to side and belched out clouds of black exhaust fumes. There was a din of people shouting and chickens squawking and car horns blowing. There was a whole world of smells too: sewage, frying meat, tobacco and gasoline all mixed up. We were just two miles from the wide, clean, organized streets of Brownsville, Texas, but in those two miles we had moved from one world to another.

  I’d been reading a lot of Latin American stuff – guys like Márquez, Carpentier and Cortázar. I was intrigued by the way they described reality. I mean, they seemed to think that reality itself was different in places like Columbia or Cuba, and I was sceptical about that. What’s different is surely the way that people’s minds work, not the natu
re of reality itself. Like in the West we have a pretty narrow, scientific understanding of the world and anything which doesn’t fit the theory is conveniently omitted. And maybe Latin Americans have a more holistic view which credits mystical or religious or supernatural experience with the importance which those experiences have for the individuals concerned, whether they can be scientifically explained or not. But, like I say, that’s not a difference about the nature of reality. It’s about how we approach reality and how we translate the chaos of experience into something that makes some kind of sense. That was my view anyway, and I guess it still is, but during those first couple of days in Mexico I began to see why someone might think that reality itself was different. It’s not so much the busy streets and the chickens and the taco vendors by the side of the road, it’s more the pulsating energy of nature; I’ll tell you why.

  We checked into a seedy love motel three hours south of Matamoros. It was already late so we parked the Buick in the compound and went to our ground floor room. The bed was heart-shaped and pink, there was a mirror on the ceiling and the floor was paved with a some kind of fake veiny marble. I was pretty tired from driving all day and I fell asleep fully clothed. A heavy, humid darkness had fallen when I woke and Jeanine was asleep next to me. I switched on the bedside lamp and was about to swing my feet onto the floor when I noticed that the veins in the marble seemed to be moving. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating, but then I saw that some of the veins in the marble were not veins at all, but rather huge millipedes. The light made them paddle their way to the corners of the room. It was pretty gross.

  I went outside to get my bag from the car. I opened the door and was about to cross the wooden veranda when I saw a small cat sitting just at the outside the pool of light cast by the lamp from within the room. As I approached the animal it didn’t move. After a couple of seconds, when my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, I realized that the animal was not a cat at all. It was an enormous toad and it was staring at me with the serene imperturbability of a minor deity. To get to the steps which led down to the car I had to walk within a couple of feet of it; it didn’t flinch. After seeing the marble vein millipedes and then this ranine divinity I climbed back into bed with the horrible feeling that there were bugs creeping all over my body.

  *

  From Matamoros we continued to drive south. The air became more and more humid and the vegetation increasingly lush. As we headed a little into the hills we hit a three-mile stretch where the roadside was lined with Mexican convicts in orange jumpsuits, chained to each other and armed with machetes; they were swinging away at the plants that grew either side of the road and that would have swallowed up the narrow strip of tarmac within a month or two if left unchecked. Some of the plants they were attacking looked prehistoric: huge leaves the size of the Buick’s hood whose contours curved wildly in and out from the centre. As we descended back down towards the coastal road we disturbed clouds of bright yellow butterflies, many of whom splattered on my windscreen. I kept having to stop the car to remove the mushy yellow pulp from the rubber edge of the wipers. This was only Mexico; if nature becomes more rampant the closer you get to the equator, then perhaps I’d end up agreeing with those Latin American writers who say that their reality is inherently different to our own.

  *

  Outside Veracruz we pulled over at a roadside taco vendor. Mexican tacos are totally different from the ones you get in America; for starters the tacos themselves are soft. You put a spoonful of spicy meat in the middle then squeeze a lime over it, then roll it up like a mini fajita. They’re pretty good, except that these ones gave me the shits. Funny thing was, I didn’t even care that much. I guess I was bored of solid American stools.

  *

  We stopped at a beach an hour north of Veracruz. I went swimming while Jeanine sunbathed. The waves were small but at times I felt a pretty strong undertow so I didn’t swim out so far. I floated in the shallows, thinking about the trip. Mostly I’d been enjoying it. At times the actual driving got pretty boring. Jeanine didn’t drive but she’d cut me a line on the back of a CD case and hold it for me so I could snort it without pulling over. Then I’d smoke a joint and I wouldn’t feel tired and everything I saw or heard or thought would seem interesting and it didn’t even matter that Jeanine would rarely respond. I guess she gave me an excuse to voice my thoughts. Sometimes she looked at me a little sadly. It was rarely in response to anything particular I’d said, more like she just felt sorry for me in general. At the time I was grateful for that; I thought it was her way of expressing affection. Now I’m not so sure. But like I said, she used to do a lot of blow. I didn’t think it could be good for her to be like that almost all the time, but I guessed she was old enough to know what she was doing and anyways, given the way things were between us, it would have felt weird and a little ridiculous if I tried to get her to behave any differently. In a way I guess I thought it was pretty beat to be driving through Mexico with a cocaine-addicted porn star in a bikini; problem was, when I thought about it I also found it kind of depressing. I mean sure, I was living a male fantasy, but from the inside it felt pretty empty. So I tried to avoid thinking about it.

  When I came out of the sea I saw that Jeanine was talking to a Mexican guy. I wasn’t jealous or anything but I’ve got to say, he looked pretty sketchy. He had a pencil thin moustache and long curly black ringlets down to his shoulders and his face was weaselish. As I got closer I saw that he was selling pirate DVDs, though he kept saying to Jeanine in bad English that he could get her whatever she wanted. Even when I was standing next to her he ignored me, so I thought I’d try some of my high school Spanish on him and declined his offer on her behalf. My Spanish isn’t so bad, but that’s because I grew up speaking Italian and they’re pretty similar.

  When I spoke to the guy in Spanish, he stopped ignoring me. He seemed happy that I spoke his language. I sat down to dry in the sun and we carried on talking. When I asked him what he thought of tourists he said he didn’t like them much. He told me that every summer twenty or thirty Americans get pulled out to sea by the rip tides and the local Mexican kids swim out to try to save them; he personally had dragged two American women back to shore this year already. But, he said, the Americans are so rich and yet they don’t even give you any money for saving their lives. He said he hadn’t received a single cent, then he spat into the sand. I thought about this. I guess, from our point of view, if someone saves your life you don’t really think to give them money. The gesture would seem laughable. And even if you did want to give them something, any small sum would feel like an insult and any large sum would seem like an attempt to place a monetary value on the life that was saved, and you don’t really want to be doing that either. But then, I guess the error is to see a relatively small sum as laughable or insulting. In Mexico, if you’re selling pirate DVDs on the beach, then that sum could mean the difference between going to bed hungry or not, and there’s nothing laughable about that. For most Americans on holiday in Mexico that’s a pretty alien concept. I understood why the Americans he’d saved hadn’t given him any money, but I also realized that, if he didn’t understand the reasons for himself, there was no way I could make him understand.

  *

  We stayed in Mexico for a week and did some pretty touristy stuff – beaches and Mayan temples, that kind of thing. Then we drove back north, headed for New Orleans.

  *

  Bourbon Street, New Orleans. Boy was it humid and hot. The smells of spilt beer, human sweat and horseshit were overpowering at first, but you got used to it. On the old town square we had our tarot cards read by a man with a bulbous nose and a bright red beard, then we wandered down to the gay quarter. It was kind of hard to stay on the sidewalk: men in tight tops with muscles bulging like subcutaneous pretzels were everywhere. There seemed to be some sort of rally starting up. Soon it was so crowded that we ducked into a tiny alleyway between two old mansions, just to get a breath of air. I saw a doorway in the
side of one of the buildings. There was a small dusty window set into the wooden door. A sign read ‘Voodoo Museum’; tacked underneath that sign was another one saying ‘Open’. Jeanine looked uncertain but I held her arm and opened the door.

  It was pretty dark inside and the temperature was surprisingly cool. There was a smell of dust and old books, reminiscent of the library back at Belmont. There was no reception and there didn’t appear to be a curator either. At the other end of the room a dark doorway led into a narrow corridor. Once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom I started looking at the artefacts on the walls; tiny stuffed crocodile heads and dried bats were pinned to the crumbling plaster. Underneath each object was a little rectangular card. The card itself was yellowed with age and the information on it was handwritten in a regular but spidery script. The sign underneath the dried bats read: Gris-gris. To be dropped into a lady’s porte-monnaie as a warning. When I showed the exhibit to Jeanine she was disgusted; I guess the warning would have worked well on her. There was a shelf with jars containing mutations in some preserving liquid. I saw a baby chicken with four legs and then, more frighteningly, a snake with three heads. Two of the heads were right next to each other, where the proper one should have been, but the third appeared half way down the snake’s body. The next two or three jars were smaller and contained tiny embryonic shapes which may have been mice; in the half-light it was impossible to distinguish their mutations. I was fascinated by the pallor of the creatures’ translucent skin and the way they floated as if suspended in amniotic fluid.

  Jeanine whispered into my ear that she had to get out. I didn’t want to go so I said I’d meet her outside in half an hour. She left; I could see her through the window in the door, smoking a cigarette. I entered the dark corridor. The walls were hung with old photos of a witch-doctor called Marie Laveau. She looked surprisingly friendly. I continued walking along the corridor until I got to the open doorway at the other end. Stepping through I found myself in another room, smaller and even gloomier than the first. In one corner there was a human skeleton with a cigarette clenched between its teeth and a black trilby cocked at a jaunty angle across the polished skull. The expression was humorous and grotesque, like the face of an old man who’s just said something dirty. Next to the skeleton I saw a large glass box containing the scaly coils of a huge, thick, sulphurous-yellow snake. As I stared the coils began to rearrange themselves with slow and oily exactitude.