Who is Charlie Conti?

by Claus von Bohlen

  I nodded.

  ‘Unless your face gets beat up,’ Jud smiled at me. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked.

  I thought about lying; I didn’t want to go into Kramer and all. But in the end I just said, ‘I got hit,’ which was true but kind of evasive, not that Jud seemed to mind.

  ‘Huh. Yeah,’ he said, looking sympathetic, ‘I used to get in fights all the time, but I got off the wagon a while back. Drink used to make me real aggressive. I’d be brawlin’ most Saturdays, except I’d never remember what happened come Sunday. Hal never had that problem. He’d just get real affectionate, tell everyone they were his best friend, that kinda thing.’

  ‘Really? I mean, that’s strange isn’t it? If you’re identical twins aren’t you supposed to have exactly the same genetic information?’ I remembered Martin once teaching me about identical twins – they are two halves of the same zygote.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Jud. ‘And I guess it is weird that we’re so different when we’re drunk. I mean, it’s weird because we’ve had the same parents and schools and upbringing and all.’

  Jud smiled and I sat back in my seat thinking to myself that that was surely the real mystery: what makes people different if everything about them – their genetic information, their background and upbringing – is the same?

  *

  When I next woke we were past Indianapolis and Jud had already gotten off the bus. I was sorry about that; I’d liked him. So I dozed for a few more hours, then I watched the enormous freshly planted wheatfields rolling by outside. We were driving through Indiana now and it’s true what they say, the skies are really big. They made me think that, whatever happens, there really ought to be enough of everything to go around. Then I tried to think about the way I wanted to write my story but I couldn’t concentrate so well and thoughts of Stella kept coming into my head. She’d really been good to me. She was a bit crazy too, I mean that stuff with the Dictaphone and getting so pissed at me because I’d been at the strip club and that. But I liked her craziness. I still didn’t really understand it, but I liked it. Most of the time I think it’s important to understand, but if you find something you really like maybe it’s best just to leave it the way it is. And maybe, if you really like something, it’s better not to want to own it or possess it or make it yours; maybe it’s better just to try to be happy that it’s out there, that it exists at all. I guess if I thought that way a bit more then I wouldn’t have to regret stuff all the time.

  XVI

  I ARRIVED IN Frederick in the early afternoon. It was still wintry and I realized how slowly spring moves north. Then I hitched a ride to Paradise with a young family who were going camping in the Susquehanna State Park. They had tents and cookers and fishing rods all jumbled together in the back. I sat next to the two young boys while their mother held the baby girl in the front. It was kind of them to take me, I have to say. They were pretty religious – Seventh Day Adventists they said. But I guess a religion’s got to pretty admirable if it means you’ll take a hitchhiker into your crowded car when you’re going on a camping trip. The only problem was that the baby made a terrible smell. I guess she just shat in her diaper or whatever, but it damn near made me heave, even with the windows down. It was unbelievable, it really was, but even more unbelievable was that the parents hardly seemed to notice. I don’t know if that was their Seventh Day Adventism or whether parents just get immune to the smell of baby shit but I ended up wishing I’d walked, even if it would have taken all night.

  I jumped out of the car outside the Paradise Tavern that had given the town its name. I remembered parking there the very first time I’d gone to visit Izzy, not long after my mother died. It seemed like another lifetime. Things looked different now, though I guess that was because of the weather. The trees were bare and the sunshine was pale and washed-out. That first visit to Paradise had been at the height of summer when the days were long and tiny bugs bounced up and down in the warm sunlight as if attached to invisible elastic threads. And I guess I was pretty different back then too.

  It was the summer before I started my freshman year at Belmont – I had just turned fourteen. I know there are smart people who worry about what it is that makes them the same person they were at birth, I mean, given how your cells are renewed at least every ten years so no part of you is ever more than ten years old and how your character changes and all. But when I arrived outside the Paradise Tavern I was really struggling to connect myself to the person I had been back when I first visited. I guess we shared a few memories from childhood, but I was beginning to forget a lot of those too. Maybe it’s just that I had more in common with that fourteen year old than anyone else did, even if we weren’t identical; maybe that’s all there is to it.

  That’s what I was thinking as I walked up the hill to Happy Lives. Either side of me were neat lawns and white fences and well-kept homes, some with flagpoles from which the occasional star-spangled banner flapped in the breeze. Rusty BMXs and choppers were leaning against the sides of houses, waiting for warmer weather. I could see the roof of Happy Lives behind the bare branches of a big old chestnut tree that pretty much obscured the building in summer. Happy Lives was an elegant old stone building; it had been a school back when Paradise was only a small settlement. There was a narrow driveway leading to a parking lot for three or four cars, then you had to walk along a little path to the front door. The last time I visited, Martin and I had walked straight through to the garden at the back where the barbecue was, but now everything was silent and the doors were locked and it was not very welcoming. I rang the doorbell and waited.

  Eventually I saw a shadow moving behind the frosted glass. The door opened and a large lady with scraped-back hair and narrow horn-rimmed reading glasses eyed me suspiciously. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘Hello, my name is Charlie Conti. We haven’t met. I’m Izzy’s brother,’ I said. The lady looked at me pretty quizzically and I remembered that I still had the black eye and my nose was still a bit swollen.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m the afternoon supervisor, Judy McGrabe.’

  We shook hands. ‘Is Ma Petri still here?’ I asked. ‘She knows me.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that Ma Petri is no longer with us. But if you’re Izzy’s brother we can sign you in. It’s strange that Izzy’s never mentioned you.’

  ‘Hasn’t she? She used to talk about me a lot. That’s what Ma Petri said.’

  ‘Well, there’ve been a few changes here since she left.’ Judy McGrabe gave me a significant look before leading me into the hallway where there was an open visitors’ book.

  ‘Why did she leave?’ I asked, signing my name.

  Judy McGrabe looked embarrassed. ‘We had a bit of trouble here,’ she said, ‘but at least it can’t happen again. We now require all our visitors to identify themselves.’ Then she turned round and lead me down the corridor to her office.

  Judy McGrabe indicated a chair to me, then she sat down on the other side of the desk. ‘I just need to photocopy your passport or your drivers license for our files, then I’ll show you up to Izzy’s room,’ she said.

  Again I felt a sinking feeling. In fact it was a feeling I was getting pretty used to, though that didn’t make it any less unpleasant.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have them with me,’ I said. ‘I’ve never had to show them here before. But you can ask Izzy, she’ll tell you that I’m her brother.’

  ‘Well I’m sorry but we have to be rather more strict these days. That’s what led to the trouble last year. If you can’t identify yourself you can still see Izzy, but you’ll have to be supervised in the visitors’ room.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous, she’s my sister and I’m her legal guardian,’ I said.

  Judy McGrabe pushed her glasses further up her nose. ‘Do you have the guardianship papers with you?’ she asked.

  ‘No, they were stolen from my house,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m really sorry Mr Conti,
without identification of any sort and without the guardianship papers I’m afraid I cannot leave you alone with Izzy. But, as I said, I can arrange for you to see her for half an hour now.’

  It really seemed pretty ridiculous that I wasn’t allowed to be alone with Izzy despite the fact that I was her brother and her guardian and that of course she’d recognize me. I followed Mrs McGrabe down the corridor to the visitors’ room and watched her big ass swinging self-importantly in front of me. I was pretty pissed. I mean, there were a lot of things I was confused about, but one thing I did know was that I was Izzy’s brother and guardian, and just because I couldn’t prove it didn’t make it untrue.

  ‘I’m sure you understand the precautions we have to take,’ she said, turning around suddenly and eyeing me meaningfully.

  I was starting to feel like I wanted to break something. It was a bit like the feeling I get when I lose something although I’m sure I know where I left it but I just can’t find it anywhere, except a million times worse. It makes you hot and knots your stomach and you can’t shake it off.

  *

  Mrs McGrabe showed me into the visitors’ room. It was very brown: brown wallpaper, brown carpet and brown armchairs. Even the once-white paint of the door had faded to brown. She closed the door and I sat down and took a few deep breaths which seemed to work because I started to feel less angry. Then I picked up a well-thumbed copy of GQ magazine from the brown coffee table and began to read. Or rather, I looked at pictures of bronzed models and advertisements for aftershaves for the first ten or fifteen pages. I’m kind of fascinated by aftershave and perfume and all. I mean, the advertisements are pretty cool-looking, you have to admit. There was one in this magazine for an aftershave called Savannah and it really looked great. In the photo there was a bronzed, tough-looking guy in some dusty yellow place holding a tawny lion cub under one arm; a girl with tousled sun-bleached hair was whispering into his ear. She was very hot. I mean, the photo just made you want to be that guy. In the foreground there was a picture of a Savannah aftershave bottle; I recognized it immediately because old Hartfelder had once given me one, back when I was way too young to need it. The bottle looked pretty cool though. It looked like cut glass with a thick band of crocodile skin around the middle and a burnished aluminum screw cap, very manly. But if you picked it up it was surprisingly light and you realized that in fact it was just made of different types of plastic, cheap as hell. And I guess scent itself is kind of like that too. I mean, you have all these poetic sounding names – Romance and Pure and stuff like that – but in fact they’re just a few chemicals in alcohol. I once saw a film about perfume production; some of the stuff they put in is really shocking. Like musk, for example. There’s one kind of musk that comes from the Abbysininan civet, which is a type of mongoose. The musk gets scraped from the civet’s anal sacs every few days, then dissolved in alcohol and used as a fixer in perfumes. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. And Russian and Chinese musk deer get killed for their musk glands, which are internal. And then all this musk is used to make scents like Romance and Pure. The world’s crazy, I swear.

  I skipped the next few pages about perfect abs, then I read an article saying that most men are bad at cunnilingus. There were a lot of stats, stuff like – ‘eighty percent of women have never reached orgasm through oral caress’, ‘forty-five percent of men don’t know where the clitoris is’, that kind of thing. I leafed through the rest of that month’s magazine then started looking at the next one, which was for the month after. Ten pages of aftershave ads, then the first article: How to give Great Head. Second article: The Vagina: a user’s guide. I have to hand it to them, it’s pretty clever. One month you freak guys out that they’re bad lovers, next month you pretend to provide the solutions. Neat. And kind of fucked up.

  I put down the magazine and leafed through a couple of the pamphlets on the coffee table. They were the kind that you get in doctors’ surgeries, about STDs and contraception and drugs and solvent abuse and so on. By now the light was seeping out of the room; the sun’s last rays were concentrated in the far corner where they reflected off the glass front of a framed poem that hung on the back of the door. The poem was printed in a precious italicized font, the kind they use for the covers of slushy romances. Illustrations of pink flowers were all intertwined around the outside of the poem, occasionally nuzzling against the generous arcs and swirls of the writing. Tired of the pamphlets, I got up to have a closer look.

  Heaven’s Very Special Child

  This special child will need much love,

  His progress may seem very slow,

  Accomplishments he may not show,

  And he’ll require extra care,

  From the folks he meets down there.

  He may not run or laugh or play,

  His thoughts may seem quite far away,

  In many ways he won’t adapt,

  And he’ll be known as handicapped.

  Let’s be careful where he’s sent,

  We want his life to be content.

  Please Lord find the parents who

  Will do a special job for You.

  They may not realize right away

  The leading role they’re asked to play,

  But with this child sent from above,

  Comes stronger faith and richer love,

  And soon they’ll know the privilege given

  In caring for this gift from heaven.

  Their precious charge so meek and mild

  Is heaven’s very special child.

  Corny as hell, I thought. Corny, and simplistic, and pious. All that Christian stuff about ‘meek and mild’; I mean, meek? Come on, give me a break. But as I was thinking this I had to blink a couple of times, despite myself. Sometimes that corny stuff just gets me, I swear. It may not be sophisticated or original or clever, but it can still come from the heart. I mean, whoever wrote that poem, they didn’t do it to sell anal mongoose gland perfume, and they didn’t do it to make people feel insecure about their ability to pleasure the opposite sex, and they didn’t do it to make money or manipulate people. Stuff like that gets written because people need to believe that the world is a good place and that things happen for a reason. And that comes from the heart. Like I say, it’s not sophisticated or original or clever, but I’m not sure how much that really matters. In fact, sometimes I think sophistication might be the problem. If people were a little less sophisticated, and a little more honest, then maybe the world really would be a better place. Amen.

  As I was thinking this, the door opened and Izzy came in, accompanied by Mrs McGrabe. If Izzy was happy to see me she didn’t show it. Maybe she didn’t like Mrs McGrabe being there; Izzy can be kind of self-conscious like that. I certainly didn’t like Mrs McGrabe being there, although she was doing her best to make herself inconspicuous by taking a seat in the corner of the room. Or maybe Izzy was scared by my black eye and the little twists of thread that were still in my chin. Anyway, I kissed her on the cheek and that seemed to relax her some, then we sat down facing each other on either side of a small desk.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t visited for so long,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  Izzy didn’t reply but nodded and pulled a face which meant what a dumb question.

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ I said. ‘Are you doing any classes? Cooking? I know you like cooking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Fine.’

  I cast around for something else to say. ‘And what about your room here, where is your room?’ I asked.

  ‘By the big tree.’

  ‘That’s nice. Do you like your room?’

  No reply. Like I said, Izzy’s not always so communicative, especially in situations which are awkward. I mean, if we’d been strolling by the river like I’d intended, then I’m sure she’d have talked a lot more, but the way we were sat opposite each other with Mrs McGrabe in the
corner, well, it felt pretty awkward.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything at all?’

  ‘Tony’s scared of the ducks.’ Izzy raised her hand to her mouth to hide her laughter.

  ‘Oh really? Who’s Tony.’ Again that dumb question look.

  ‘Have I met Tony?’ I asked.

  ‘Tony’s a big man.’

  ‘Really? I’m trying to think… I’m not sure I’ve met him. Is he a friend of yours?’

  Judy McGrabe coughed dryly in the corner, then she said: ‘I think Izzy is talking about Tony in The Sopranos. She loves watching The Sopranos.’

  ‘Oh, right, I see.’ I looked back at Izzy. She was keen to pick up the thread.

  ‘Tony’s daughter is mellow,’ she said.

  I smiled. The word reminded me that Izzy had never been able to say ‘yellow’; it was always ‘lellow’.

  ‘Mellow? Well, that’s good. Like mellow lellow?’

  Another cough from the corner. ‘I think she means that Tony Soprano’s daughter is called Meadow,’ said Mrs McGrabe.

  ‘Right. Thanks.’

  ‘Tony’s scared of the ducks,’ repeated Izzy.

  ‘Yes, I know, you just told me.’

  I was starting to feel frustrated. I wish it didn’t happen that way, but invariably it does. That’s the thing, when you want to get close to someone and you realize it’s not happening, it can make you kind of angry. Sometimes it even makes you mean, just to get a reaction, you know. I changed the subject.