Who is Charlie Conti?

by Claus von Bohlen

  ‘Let’s go, Charlie. C’mon, give me the keys.’

  I wiped my eyes and my bloody nose on my shirt. There was quite a lot of blood already on it which must’ve got there when I was hit in the chin because the stains were brown-coloured, no longer red. With my eye all swollen up I couldn’t see so well so I gave Stella the keys and moved round to the passenger seat which was covered with the napkins I’d been writing on in the diner, the soft ones. They were kind of bloody too. They’d been in Kramer’s pocket before so I guessed he’d used them to clean my blood off his hands once he’d loaded me onto the back seat. I gathered the napkins together and put them in my own pocket while Stella turned the Buick around and drove it out of the parking lot in the direction of the highway. In front of us the lights changed to red and Stella had to brake pretty hard. Instinctively she stuck her arm out sideways in front of my chest, like I was a little kid and she could save me with her puny arm. It was so cute it almost killed me. I smiled at her but that really hurt my jaw, so I stopped smiling. Stella looked across at me from time to time. Concern made furrows appear on her forehead. I liked that too. Then she asked, ‘Did he rob you?’

  ‘No. Yes. Not this time, but before. He’s already stolen pretty much everything that’s mine. That was mine. This time he just wanted to tell me not to go after him, and he took my laptop which has on it the evidence which proves that the guy who says he’s me isn’t me. Without that I’m not sure anyone will believe me, at least, it’ll take them a lot longer to prove that I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘So why don’t you just go to the police?’

  I leant back against the headrest. ‘It’s a long story. I mean, maybe I will, but not right now. I’ll tell you everything later if you want, but right now I’m just really tired.’ And it was true, I was beat.

  We drove for a while in silence. I was wondering why Stella had been so pissed at me that morning, but I didn’t want to ask because it seemed like she’d gotten over it. I didn’t think it was because she was scared I was a psycho who had followed her, because otherwise she probably would not have invited me back to her place now. My guess was that I had disappointed her by being just like all the other guys she knew, and I made up my mind not to disappoint her again. I mean, I knew what it felt like to believe in someone and then to find out that you were wrong; it felt bad.

  The red glow had seeped from the sky when we pulled off the highway and parked up in front of Stella’s motel room. The motel was pretty old-looking – the wooden steps were rotten and one or two of the windows were boarded up in the other rooms.

  ‘This your home?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I get it pretty cheap. I give the owner free dances at the Palace on weekends.’

  ‘Huh, I see.’

  There were some little kids playing on the red earth next to the motel building. They were shouting to each other in Spanish, then I heard a shrill voice from inside another of the rooms: ‘Ya estamos, chicos! A comer!’

  The kids went tearing into the room next to Stella’s. Stella unlocked her door and flicked on the light. The room was like any other cheap motel, anywhere else in America – brown papered walls, an old TV, two single beds pushed together to make a double and covered with a claret coloured bedspread. Stella closed the door behind us.

  ‘Let me have a look at your chin,’ she said, leading me over to the middle of the room until I was standing right underneath the light. She went to the bathroom and reappeared with a wet hand towel and dabbed at my chin with it.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Not so much. Just feels weird, kinda numb I guess.’

  ‘The cut’s pretty deep. If you don’t get it stitched it’ll take a long time to heal. You’ll get an ugly scar.’

  ‘I can’t go to a hospital.’

  ‘You said. If you want I’ll stitch it for you. I’ve only got cotton thread but it’ll do.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Sure, I trained as a nurse. I worked for two years at the Shriner in Houston.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I lost my job because I slept with a married doctor. He’s still there, of course. I wanted to go to LA, look for acting work. I figured I could act a nurse and get paid ten times what I did in Houston. But I ran outa cash so I started stripping, just to save some. Then I got work at the diner and, I dunno, I guess I got scared of having nothing again. Now I’ve been here for a year.’ She dabbed at my chin again.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s deep but it’s clean.’

  ‘You sure you can stitch it?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s gonna hurt a bit.’

  ‘Like how much?’

  ‘I don’t know, it depends. Some people are more sensitive than others.’

  ‘Do you have any pain-killers?’

  ‘Not really. I mean, we can put some ice on it and I’ve got some Jack Daniels.’

  ‘Ok.’

  Stella opened the cupboard and pulled out a brand new bottle of JD. Truth be told, I hate whiskey. I mean, I hate the taste of it. I like the color and the bottles and the fact that the best stuff comes from Scotland or Ireland or someplace misty and old like that, but the taste of it makes me want to puke. But I thought that maybe this time I’d like it. I unscrewed the cap and took a big old swig and at first it was kind of ok, but a couple of seconds later the taste hit me. I didn’t puke this time, but I might have done if I’d had anything left to puke.

  Stella opened the fridge and took out an ice tray from the freezer compartment at the top. Then she picked up the sewing case from the table and started threading the black strand through the eye of the needle. It beats me how women do that, especially old women who have shaky hands and can’t see so well anyhow. Then she lit a lighter and held the needle above the flame.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Sterilizing the needle,’ she said.

  Still holding the needle in one hand, Stella turned the ice tray upside down with the other and banged the table with it a few times until most of the cubes had fallen out. The freezer must have been pretty cold because the ice was all rock hard and sticky-looking, like it would never slide across skin. Stella picked up a cube and put it in her mouth, moving it around like a kid with a gobstopper. Then she took it back out again and pressed it against my chin. I jerked backwards involuntarily.

  ‘You better lie down on the bed,’ she said.

  I was happy to. Truth be told, I was beginning to feel kind of light-headed. When I was flat on my back Stella adjusted the pillow under my head, then she kneeled astride me. She sucked on the ice cube again before sliding it gently over my chin a few times. She stopped to take off the sweater she was wearing. I’ve got to say, even though I was nervous about the stitching, I had to admire the way she took off the sweater, pulling it up over her head with both arms, her breasts lifted and expectant, then peeling the soft fluffy material down from her shoulders, over her pointy elbows and down to her wrists. It was smooth and sexy as hell. I noticed the tight fit of her t-shirt as she leant across to the bedside table and I felt the first stirring of sexual excitement. Then she picked up the needle and thread again and the excitement died pretty fast.

  ‘Ok Charlie, here goes.’

  I closed my open eye and bit my lip so as not to scream, then I grabbed the bed sheets with my hands and held them scrunched up and tight as I could. I guess it hurt a lot because I blacked out for the second time that day.

  *

  When I came round it was dark out and the room was lit by the flickering blue light of the TV. They were showing a British nature film about scallops, you know, the seafood. I tried to focus with my good eye, then I noticed to my surprise that Stella was breathing into the crook of my neck, where it meets the collar bone, and that she had her naked arm across my naked chest, and her naked leg entwined with my own. In fact, we were both just wearing our underwear; she must’ve undressed me while I was out cold. I turned my head sideways to look at her.
It was difficult, but I managed it without disturbing her. I know it sounds strange but I was struck by the sweetness of her breath. I looked at her lips, slightly parted and as inviting as lips can be. Briefly she scrunched up her nose like she was about to sneeze, but she didn’t. Instead she drew closer to me, until it was harder to avoid meeting her lips than it would have been to meet them. But I didn’t. I didn’t because I felt bad that I’d disappointed her, and I wanted to show her that I was not as predictable as she thought. It may have been pride or it may have been vanity, but whatever it was it meant that I didn’t want Stella to think that I was just like every other guy who wants to screw a stripper. So I turned my head away from her towards the wall, although I’d have really liked to kiss her.

  I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep but I couldn’t keep the voice that was narrating the film out of my head.

  The scallop is possibly best known for its beautiful and distinctive sculpted shell.

  It was cold in the room. We were lying on top of the blanket, not underneath. I tried to work the edge of it out from underneath me and then fold it over the two of us, but when I moved Stella’s grip on me tightened, like she was afraid I was trying to go someplace. Her lips were now practically touching my ear.

  It was Hesiod who wrote that Venus, or Aphrodite as she was known by the Greeks, was born from the foam that was churned up when the testicles of Uranus were cast into the sea. Hesiod tells us that Aphrodite, most beautiful of all the Olympians, was carried ashore in a scallop shell.

  I touched my chin and gingerly felt the bits of thread sticking out where Stella had stitched the cut. I suddenly felt very grateful to her. I mean sure, all that Dictaphone stuff was kind of weird, and also she’d overreacted to seeing me in the strip-club, but all the same, I could never have hoped for her to take me home and stitch my chin and hold me like she was doing now, like she cared. I looked at her again and marvelled again at the way her lips curved ever so gently outwards.

  Famed in art and mythology, the scallop is also one of the natural world’s oldest species. Fossils have been found dating back to the Cambrian period of the Paleozoic era, about 510 million years ago.

  I wondered what Stella thought of me. I mean, so far we’d not talked much, not really. I thought how much I’d like to get to know her. But I also wanted to see Izzy, now more than ever. I didn’t know where I’d get the money for the journey; maybe I could sell the Buick and go by bus. Izzy knew who I was and that meant a lot to me, but seeing her would not solve any of my financial problems. Eventually I’d have to go to the police and they’d almost certainly arrest me. I didn’t have the money for a lawyer, not right now anyway. But perhaps if I presented them with the true account of what had happened, if I wrote everything down the way it was, then maybe they’d believe me.

  Just inside each valve along the edge of the mantle is a row of short sensory tentacles and a row of up to a hundred small blue eyes. The shells are opened and closed by a single, over-sized adductor muscle. Attached to the adductor muscle is the orange egg-sack, edible despite its garish colouring.

  Dawn was beginning to edge its way underneath the curtains while some satellite in outer space beamed information about blue eyed scallops and garish orange egg-sacks and the Goddess Venus into the room. For a moment I felt a glimmer of happiness; not happiness itself, more the realization that despite everything happiness was a possibility. I mean, in the unseeing eyes of the massive computerized institutions that mysteriously control our lives, I had nothing and I was nobody; for now at least. But Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise and Ken Kesey and William Burroughs and all those beatniks, I mean, they never had a dollar to their names and it didn’t seem to bother them. And I had a sister up in Maryland who loved me in her way, and a girl beside me who I wanted to talk to rather than screw, and not just because of propriety but because that’s what my heart wanted. And I’d decided that I was going to write everything down the way it happened and then the truth would be out there no matter who tried to twist it or what the massive blind institutions said, and that was a good thought too.

  *

  The sunlight was streaming into the room when I woke. The door to the bathroom was open and clouds of condensation were billowing out and clinging to the ceiling of the bedroom. I could hear the sound of the shower and Stella singing in a Hispanic-Caribbean accent:

  Down the way

  Where the nights are gay

  And the sun shines brightly

  On the mountain top

  I took a trip

  On a sailing ship

  And when I reached Jamaica

  I made a stop

  But I’m sad to say,

  I’m on my way

  Won’t be back

  For many a day

  My heart is down

  My head is turning ‘round

  Had to leave a little girl

  In Kingston town.

  The accent was kind of strange but she had a great singing voice, clear and girlish. Then the sound of the shower stopped and she came out of the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around her under her arms.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, have you seen your face? I did a pretty good job last night.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘Well go and have a look. And there’s another towel in the bathroom. I think you’d look better without the blood.’

  I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. At first I was pretty shocked. All around my eye was really black and kind of merging into a horrible sick-looking yellow. From the bridge of the nose across to the blackness was swollen too, so it looked like I had a trunk rather than a nose. But where Stella had stitched my chin it was all clean and neat. The little twists of black thread stuck out some. They reminded me of the pointed twists on barbed wire. I’d studied the Holocaust back at Belmont and I remembered a photo on the cover of one of the text books: it was black and white, a close-up of a twist on a barbed wire fence with blurred snow-covered huts and a watch-tower in the background, very haunting. It was a great book though, I remember that. They did some terrible stuff to the guy who wrote it, but the strange thing was he didn’t seem to hate them. You’d expect him to want to scream and shout and tear everything apart, but he didn’t, not once. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but it was like all these terrible things that had been done to him didn’t really touch him. Or maybe they did touch him but they didn’t breed hatred like you’d expect. Instead he just seemed to want to testify, to testify to the truth, like that was enough. Anyway, barbed wire – that’s what my chin reminded me of. But, like I said, neatly done.

  ‘Hey, thanks,’ I called out.

  ‘That’s ok. Now get in the shower. I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  I switched on the water and waited outside to check the temperature. I’m a bit chicken like that, I like to know that the water’s hot before I get in. It’s not that I mind cold water so much once I’m in it, it’s just that I don’t like the shock. But the water was hot and so I got in and held my head under the shower head. I hadn’t had a hot shower for, well, for a long time anyway and it was very enjoyable.

  I began to worry about the surprise Stella had for me. I mean, if she got back into the shower with me then I didn’t think that my resolution of the night would last that long. I wasn’t worried about disappointing her any more, but really I wanted to talk more than screw which was strange. As I was thinking this Stella’s slender arm reached in beside the shower curtain. In her hand she held a nectarine, you know, one of those hairless peaches.

  ‘Go on, take it. They’re best in the shower.’

  I took it and held it for a moment. The curtain closed fully again. The nectarine was cold in my hand; it must’ve come from the fridge. As I held it the condensation began to form into tiny pearls on the smooth skin. It looked perfect, like fruit in a commercial. I bit into it. The flesh was crisp and sweet but not too sweet; it was good and sharp and citr
ic too. And boy was it juicy. I took another bite and let the juice dribble down my face into the hairs on my chest to be washed away by the hot water. Now I understood what Stella meant: the coldness of the fruit and the heat of the water and the fact that you could take bites without worrying about the juice getting on your clothes or about what other people would think, that was a pleasure. It’s amazing how there can be so much to worry about even with something as simple as eating a nectarine. But eating in the shower was different, except then some juice got into the cut on my chin and started to sting like a bitch, which I guess is a lesson against thinking that anything in this world can be perfect.

  When I came out of the shower Stella was already dressed. She was wearing cowboy boots and a short denim skirt and another tight t-shirt; she looked hot, I have to say.

  ‘Don’t you have to go to work?’

  She clucked her tongue dismissively. ‘It’s my day off,’ she said. ‘You wanna get a milkshake?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Stella opened the door and sat in the doorway with her back against the doorpost. She’d put her wet hair underneath a cheap white cowboy hat. The back of the hat was pushed up by the doorpost so that the front pointed downwards and the angle of the brim echoed the angle of her nose. The morning air was cold and I was still wet from the shower so I tried to get dressed as fast as I could, but I got distracted watching Stella smoke a cigarette. The wraiths of smoke curled upwards like the ghostly fingers of a hypnotist. With a shiver I felt the beauty in that moment – in Stella’s profile and the angle of the hat and the twisting smoke in the pale morning light.

  I’m kind of surprised that anyone can enjoy the taste of smoke first thing in the morning. But that morning I thought about having a cigarette, just to solidify the moment, to pick it out from all the others as significant and worth remembering, like I’d done on the roof of the Buick after I first met Stella two days before. Watching her now I thought how the ritual of smoking takes time, and the smoking itself makes you breathe deeply, and that also helps to solidify the moment. I mean, I guess you could try doing something else instead, like taking a dip or chewing gum or whatever, but there’s not the same ritual and it doesn’t require your attention in the same way or make you take deep breaths either. I was tempted to have a cigarette then, because the moment felt significant. The world is not perfect, but there is kindness, and there is beauty, and there’s only so long things can keep getting worse.