Who is Charlie Conti? (4 page)

‘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.’

‘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.

I
SHOWED
M
IKEY
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 have 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.

I hate horror movies anyway and the one I was watching was not helping to calm my nerves. It was one of those movies that has long silent bits but you know that something scary is going to happen, and when it does happen there’ll be a really loud noise and the searing burning sensation will shoot through your veins. I hate movies like that. They’re the movie equivalent of hiding behind a door and shouting ‘boo’ at someone. Sure, it can be entertaining, but it’s no more than that. The other reason I hate those movies is because I’m really susceptible to them; either I can’t look and have to hide behind a cushion, or else I spend the whole time telling myself that it’s only a movie and they’re only actors and I make myself think about where they placed the cameras and so on. But really, neither of those are great ways to watch a movie. And although I’d walked into the 
TV room midway through the movie, I was still finding it pretty scary.

In this movie a young couple had driven up to Scotland for a weekend in some big old house covered in ivy and all. There were lots of other guests. Over dinner the couple sat either side of the hostess who told them about the history of the house and about the closure of the east wing, and how there was a tower at the end of the wing which was haunted. The boyfriend was one of those pompous British types with red faces who like saying stuff like ‘Absolute rot!’ and ‘What nonsense!’ I find those kind of characters pretty funny. Anyway, this guy’s girlfriend was getting angry with him and when the hostess excused herself she leaned across and told him to ‘jolly well pipe down’ which made him go even more red and bug-eyed. You could see that he really saw himself as the champion of common sense in a world of impressionable, superstitious women. I’ve got to say, he was a pretty good actor.

When the hostess returned, the boyfriend asked her whether she had ever been in the east wing. She said that she hadn’t; the corridor had been boarded up. As far as she knew, the last person to go there had been a handyman who had been in to patch a hole in the roof when her father was just a kid. The handyman had slipped on the tiles and fallen to his death. No one had seen it happen but afterwards his face had been crisscrossed with deep cuts that the undertaker hadn’t been able to disguise. It was strange because he had fallen onto an empty flowerbed.

Anyway, in the film the guests are hanging around in the drawing room after dinner and playing card games when suddenly the girlfriend notices that her boyfriend is not there. She asks 
whether anyone else has seen him; no one has. She becomes more and more agitated and then grabs the hostess and tells her that she is sure that he’s gone to prove a point by checking out the tower in the east wing. The hostess panics; she seizes her brother by the cuff and they march off towards the east wing with the by now ashen-faced girlfriend behind them and the rest of the whispering guests following behind her. The camera follows their progress from above so you get the eerie feeling there’s someone, or something, watching them from up there. When they get to the corridor that leads into the east wing they see that one of the boards has been prized away and neatly leant against the wall. They pause for a moment and a couple of the brother’s friends are sent to find candles since the electrical wiring which used to connect to the east wing no longer works. When they return the candles are lit and the party steps through the hole in the boards and, led by the hostess, they start tentatively calling out the boyfriend’s name: ‘Archie’. They shuffle down the corridor and the spectral faces of anaemic ancestors loom out of the darkness for a moment as the candlelight flickers over old portraits. They keep calling out and a note of desperation enters their voices. The light from the lit part of the corridor on the other side of the boards begins to fade and the darkness envelops the party on either side. By now everyone is holding hands. At the end of the corridor an iron ladder with thin, tubular rungs ascends the stone wall and disappears through a hole in the vaulted ceiling high above them. As the party stares at the ladder in the candle’s penumbra it appears to shake. One of the girls at the back of the group screams but almost immediately Archie’s voice is heard:

‘It’s fine, it’s fine. Stop that racket.’

The hostess calls out his name, less tentatively this time: ‘Archie, is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me. I went up to the belfry,’ Archie’s legs appear through the hole in the ceiling. He climbs carefully down the ladder with his back to the party and an unlit cigarette lighter in one hand, ‘and, like I said, it’s absolute rot about the place being haunted.’

‘I can’t believe you did that. Never do anything like that again or I won’t invite you back, ever.’

As Archie negotiates the final rungs he replies, ‘No need to do it again. I think I’ve made my point.’ Then he turns around to face the party and there is a moment of silence before a cacophony of screams. The camera zooms in on Archie’s face; his expression would be comic were his face not rendered hideous by the crisscross pattern of deep red cuts that cover it.

At that moment I felt a tug on my sleeve and jumped a mile.

‘Let’s go.’ It was Mikey who had slipped into the TV room without me seeing.

‘Jeez Mikey. Don’t ever do that again.’

‘Come on buddy. This was your idea. It’s now or never.’

We snuck out of the TV room into the foyer and then out of the house. I was wearing my overcoat so I didn’t feel the cold so much, but Mikey started shivering almost immediately in his bathrobe and pyjamas. We made our way towards the chapel at the other
end of the school, hugging the shadows between the pools of grimy orange light cast by the sodium lamps attached here and there to corners of buildings and doorways. We didn’t speak; Mikey was shivering too much and I was still thinking about Archie’s face.

The chapel crept up on us pretty fast. The school was justly proud of the building; it was modern and the design was impressive, particularly by day. The entire back wall, behind the altar, was made out of glass and looked out over the playing fields. Beyond them, the rolling hills folded their way gently up through New Hampshire to Canada. My pew was right beside the huge window and I spent half an hour three mornings a week gazing out of it. The distant hills were only visible on clear days; they were dark and wooded and I liked to imagine them stretching northwards in an unbroken line to the empty expanses of snow and ice.

The main door to the chapel was usually locked but the vestry door never was. That was so that boys on punishment duty could report to the old verger in the afternoons and clean the floor or polish the brass fittings for an hour or two. I’d been on punishment duty there once because I told Nick Fisher, the head of our dorm, that Herpes was the messenger of the Gods. I later found out that Mr Rowland-Smith had made him a laughing stock because of that. But because of the hour I’d had to spend polishing brass I knew that the verger usually left without locking the door so that boys could let themselves out.

We hugged the side of the building and slinked round to the vestry door. It opened soundlessly when I pushed it and we snuck in. On either side of us hung the red and white cassocks worn by the choir. The white ruffs were visible even in the darkness, so we
used them to navigate to the other end of the vestry where another door led into the main chapel. I opened the door; it creaked. I lit Mikey’s lighter then tiptoed over to the carpeted area in front of the altar. I remember the gold thread in the green altar cloth reflected the light of the flame. The huge wall of glass that loomed above us was an expanse of darkness. There was a faint whistling noise which I had never noticed before, presumably made by the wind high up on the roof. I sat down on the carpet and Mikey did the same. Then he began to empty the pockets of his bathrobe.