Who is Charlie Conti? (3 page)

It was a crazy book – a collection of early anthropological texts accompanied by faded full-page albumen prints, published in London in 1868. The best print was of two Gambian hunters, framed against the broad Gambia River. The hunters wore loincloths made from some plaited material and their naked bodies were wiry and strong. Around their necks hung necklaces of curved fangs. Both men’s faces were round, their brows beetled and low. They were both grinning ferociously, and I mean ferociously; their teeth had been filed down until they tapered to points as thin and as vicious as rose thorns. It made them appear savage beyond belief. My own infrequent visits to the dentist paled in comparison to what I imagined those men going through, endlessly filing away, maybe striking the nerve. What if they accidentally bit their lips, or crunched down on a piece of bone? Printed beneath the image it said:
fig. 12, Two Gambian Hunters. The attenuated points of their filed teeth indicate seniority within the tribe.

There were other pictures that fascinated me – tiny pygmies in the Ituri forest of Zaire, or Nigerian women whose backs were decorated with thousands of minute bumps made by rubbing poisonous plants into little knife cuts; the smooth black skin was 
left looking like some kind of human brail. There was a picture of a head-hunter from Papua New Guinea whose nose was pierced by a large curved tooth which looked like a moustache, and pictures of tattooed warriors from the South Sea Islands. But I was always drawn back to the pointed teeth of the Gambian hunters; they were the first to entrance me and I remained faithful to them.

I told Mikey Katzounnis about the book. Mikey was more into sports than I was – he worshipped the New York Yankees – and books in general held less appeal for him. But, like all schoolboys, he was fascinated by the macabre. I took him up to the old library and showed him the print of the Gambian hunters. He was sucked in at first but then got bored and wandered off, pulling out odd books here and there, until he discovered a whole shelf of texts about African Witchcraft, Yoruba, Jamaican Obeah, Cuban Santería and the different strains of Voodoo. C. Arthur Allen had obviously also had a taste for the occult.

We spent many afternoons trying to make sense of those old texts. A whole shelf of them were in French, mostly published in Port-au-Prince around the turn of the century. For a month or two both Mikey and I began to pay much more attention in French class. The most promising book was a slim, leather-bound English volume which had been hidden from view, pressed flat against the wall at the back of the shelf by the noses of the other books. The pages were thick, almost like parchment, and the text was written in a small, spidery hand. The book was called
Advice to Fishermen from Black River to Alligator Pond,
and the first three chapters provided a load of information about the tides and the seasons, where to find grouper and when to stay inside the reef
because of the sharks on the outside. However, the more we read, the more the book moved away from the practical advice of the opening chapters and began to discuss occult practices – lists of charms and ‘gris-gris’ that a fisherman should carry with him to avoid ‘the fate of Jonah’, incantations to protect oneself from a watery death, sacrificial observances to ensure a good catch and rituals to cast a ‘ju-ju’ on another boat. The last chapter was again harmless – advice on how best to open up the shell of a sea turtle. It was as if the meat of the book had been enclosed within the deceptive shell of a practical fishing guide, possibly to deceive the cursory eye of a lazy censor. At least, that was our theory. And it was the second to last chapter that excited my imagination the most; it contained instructions on to how to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

Looking back now it sounds ridiculous, but at the time I really thought it might work, or at least that it was a possibility. If you want something enough it’s amazing what you can believe, and also what you can choose not to believe. And in fact it’s not so crazy; I read a leaflet recently about solvent abuse and how a lot of homeless people do it because it makes them hallucinate their loved ones back to life. Of course I didn’t know that at the time, but I guess I had a sense that, when the mind really wants something, then it is capable of much more than we think. When I was fifteen and by myself up in the old library at Belmont, what I really wanted was to communicate with my dead mother, so I decided that I would try to summon her spirit from beyond the grave.

I persuaded Mikey to help. He was pretty sceptical but he agreed. We noted the strange words of the incantation and the 
items required – ‘personal effects of the departed’, ‘fire-water’ and ‘gallows grass’ which we later discovered was hemp. Since the book said that the gallows grass should be packed into a pipe I guessed it was cannabis. It would have been safer to perform the séance in New York – both Mikey and I were going to be there over the Christmas vacation – but the instructions said that the summoning could only be performed in a place of worship. I thought it would be easier to steal the keys to the school chapel from the groundsman’s hut than to break into some church in the city, so we decided to wait until after the vacation. The book also said you had to fast for two days before the séance; that would have been tricky over Christmas. Mikey said he could get hold of some grass; he’d caught his sister smoking on the fire escape of their building last summer and he was pretty sure he knew where she kept her stash. I was to take care of the rest.

T
HREE DAYS BEFORE
the end of the vacation Mikey called me.

‘Charlie, remember what we were talking about? About the séance and all? Well, the thing is, I can’t find my sister’s stash. I was thinking, maybe we should just call it off.’

‘Shit Mikey, I’ve been waiting all vacation for this.’ That was true. Christmas vacations weren’t much fun with a tutor. One or two of my mom’s friends had called but I could barely remember their names and couldn’t wait to get them off the phone. Mrs Oppenheimer, the old lady who lived in the same building, had dropped by with a Christmas gift for me – a tiny Egyptian scarab wrapped up in tissue paper. It was kind of her, but it didn’t make me find her any less creepy. It was pretty different to the Christmases we used to have back in Rome. Italians are
really good to kids, especially at Christmas. We used to get gifts on the sixth of January which was called
La Befana
. If you’d been bad you got given a piece of coal instead of presents, but even the coal was really just blackened sugar and you’d always get some presents too, so that was ok. I’d been thinking about the sugar coal and my mom and all, and I guess I’d started to believe in the possibility of communicating with her more and more. That’s why I was so disappointed when Mikey wanted to call it off.

‘C’mon Mikey, you’re chicken shit,’ I said. I knew he wouldn’t like that; he had that whole Greek macho thing. ‘Have you even looked for your sister’s grass?’

‘Sure I’ve looked. She used to keep it in a shoebox. I found the shoebox but there wasn’t anything in it.’

It sounded to me like Mikey was holding something back. ‘Nothing at all?’ I asked.

‘There wasn’t any smoke.’

‘So what was there?’

‘Jeez buddy, you don’t give up. If you gotta know, there was a used condom. Nearly made me puke.’

‘Shit, sorry Mikey.’

‘Tell you the truth, it’s not so much about the grass. I mean, I’m sure we could get some down by Tompkins Square Park. But the thing is, I’m just not sure about all this supernatural stuff. I mean, there’s a load of wackos out there. Sometimes normal people turn wacko and I guess something must’ve happened to them to make them like that.’

I was about to reply when Mikey went on, ‘I mean, do you know who Daniel Rakowitz is?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I just saw a film about him. He’s in a mental institution out on Wards Island now, but he used to hang around downtown in the eighties. He was a bum, but he must have had something going for him because he hooked up with this Swiss lap dancer. Anyway, one night he went back to her apartment and knifed her to death, then he boiled her head and chopped her into little pieces and made a stew which he fed to the other bums in Tompkins Square Park.’

‘Jeez Mikey, what the hell? I don’t want to eat my mother, I want to try to communicate with her spirit.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m just saying that you don’t know what you might be getting yourself into. Like that film director, what’s his name… Polanski, Roman Polanski.’

‘What about him?’

‘His wife got murdered by Charles Manson. Actually, not by Charles Manson himself, but by his followers. There was a bit about him in this film too. Anyway, they murdered her, although she was eight months pregnant, and then they wrote “Pig” on the front door. In blood.’

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with us.’

‘Charlie, Polanski made that film about the devil who gets a woman pregnant,
Rosemary’s Baby
. I mean, I guess I’m just saying that I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in that kinda shit.’

‘Alright, I understand that. I don’t want to get mixed up either. But I don’t think that the supernatural has to be evil. I mean, it depends on what you are trying to use it for. What’s so bad about wanting to talk to my mom?’

Mikey was silent for so long, I thought maybe the line had gone dead.

‘Mikey, you still there?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Well, will you do this?’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

Boy was I relieved when he said that. I guess I pressed him pretty hard but, like I said, I had really started to believe that it might work.

‘Thanks buddy. Don’t worry about the grass, I’ll get it. I’ll go down to Tompkins Square Park. I might get a Swiss lap dancer to go-go while I’m there.’

Mikey didn’t think that was so funny.

To tell the truth, Mikey’s story about the wacko Rakowitz had freaked me out a bit too, so when it came to it I was kind of nervous about heading down to Tompkins Square Park. Also, back in those days it was pretty hard to get away from my tutor. This was years before Martin – some cranky old guy whose name I can’t remember. But at the same time I wanted to go. I guess I was beginning to get a sense that the world that had been created around me – the tutors and cooks and housekeepers – was kind of fake, and that I was deliberately being kept away from the real world. It felt a bit like I was behind glass. So, although I was nervous about heading down to Tompkins square, I was excited about it too.

To escape from my tutor I either had to go early in the morning or late at night, but I figured there’d be more dealers hanging around at night. Not that I knew what a dealer would look like, or how to go about scoring. But anyway, I went to bed early that night and waited for my cranky old tutor to go to bed. That old Park Avenue apartment was on two floors and his bedroom was above mine, so I’d always hear his slow steps climbing the stairs. As soon as I’d heard his door close I got out of bed and pulled on my sneakers. I’d decided to wear sneakers in case I had to run for it, and a hooded sports sweater so I could hide my face if necessary. It was still pretty cold in the city, so I tied a scarf round my neck. Then I remembered a talk given to us at school a couple of years back by a cop. He demonstrated the way that his tie was not a proper tie – when he pulled it just came away from his collar. He said that wearing a real tie was like an invitation to be strangled. I thought that maybe a scarf was like that too, so I took it off again before slipping out of the apartment.

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor on the way down and Mrs Oppenheimer tapped her way in. She was the one who had given me the scarab. She was very old, and kind of wacky, and really rich. She was wearing a white fur coat with markings like a leopard. Maybe it had once been a snow leopard, who knows. In one hand she held a walking stick made of black wood; the top of it was carved into the shape of some wildcat’s head – it looked pretty fierce. It was so intricate, you could make out the individual teeth. In her other hand she held a tiny, hairless dog with a pointed nose. Sometimes Mrs Oppenheimer recognized me, sometimes she didn’t. This time I really hoped she wouldn’t.

‘Good evening Charlie. Isn’t it rather late to be going out?’ she said, straight off.

‘Yes ma’am. Problem is, sometimes I just can’t sleep and my legs get all jumpy, so I go for a run around the block.’ That was true about not being able to sleep and my legs getting jumpy, not about the running. To tell the truth, I hate running.

‘I’m sure you know best.’ She paused for a moment, then she added, ‘You wouldn’t see me out so late except that Anubis is incontinent.’ She gave the hairless dog a little upward push.

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘But I guess we’re really both just waiting to die.’ Mrs Oppenheimer lifted the dog up until it was level with her face. She spoke to the dog: ‘I’ve had a lovely little casket made for you, so there’s no chance that you’ll suffer the fate of Osiris.’ Then, to me: ‘Did you know that Osiris’ body was chopped into fourteen pieces and thrown into the Nile? Only thirteen of those pieces were ever found.’ Like I said, Mrs Oppenheimer was kind of strange.

Once I was outside I flagged a cab and told the bearded driver that I wanted to go to Tompkins Square Park. He seemed pretty bad-tempered so I decided not to give him the packet of cigarettes that I found lying on the back seat. I didn’t use to smoke much but I figured the packet might come in handy if I had to hang around Tompkins Square Park for too long. Then I opened the window and stuck my head out and stared upwards. I like doing that: the tops of the skyscrapers whizz by with the stars above them and you lose track of where you are. You can’t see many stars in New York but the main ones you can. Sometimes it can really get you wondering. I like to stare at the roof of the cab, I mean,
stare really hard, until my eyes hurt, like I’m doing one of those magic eye things. Then I stick my head out the window and stare at the tops of the skyscrapers. Boy, they look high. I guess it’s like dipping your finger into really salty anchovy paste and licking it and then drinking sugary coffee; the coffee tastes much sweeter that way.

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:

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.