Who is Charlie Conti? (7 page)

The rest of the dance was mechanical, perfunctory, and mercifully short. I felt the hot glow of embarrassment on my face and a prickling on the back of my neck. Stella didn’t look at me again and I think we were both glad when the dance was over and she moved on to the table of raucous fratboys next to us.

Pete and I were both out of cash and so we left soon after. We were pretty drunk, I guess. I drove Pete home, turning off the interstate onto a dirt track a couple of miles beyond the diner. As far as I could tell, Pete’s ‘demons’ were nothing other than his love of strippers and, perhaps, the extreme affection which had emerged with his drunkeness. When I stopped the car outside his painted wooden farmhouse he insisted that I stay the night. I lied and said I already had a room in a motel. I liked Pete, I really did, but I realized how different things would feel in the morning, around the family breakfast table. We said goodbye in the car and Pete hugged me for a long time. When he drew back I saw that he was glassy-eyed.

‘You’re a great guy, Charlie. Promise me you’ll come visit.’

‘I promise,’ I said.

Then Pete got out and closed the door and a little of the cold desert air got closed in too. And I realized with a stab of regret that I’d lied.

Next morning I woke pretty cramped on the back seat of the Buick in the parking lot behind the diner. It was cold and clammy in the car and the windows were all fogged up. I got out and walked around a bit, rubbing my eyes and stretching my legs. I wasn’t feeling too bad but boy was I thirsty. It must’ve been very early – the sun was only just risen – but I could hear noises inside the diner, though I couldn’t see in because there weren’t any windows in the back. I walked round to the front. The sign in the window said ‘Open’ but it was hard to read on account of the brightness of the shiny aluminum reflecting the flat morning sun. I walked up the steps to the door feeling both fearful and hopeful of seeing Stella.

I guess she’d seen me through the window because when I came in she didn’t even look up, although she was sitting at the cash register opposite the door. I looked around; there were a couple of other customers – fat, stubbly men in plastic netted baseball caps who looked like long-distance truckers. I sat down next to the window at the table I’d sat at the day before. Then I realized I wasn’t feeling as well as I’d thought and moved to a table across
the aisle which wasn’t so sunny. Stella slouched over to the table with a kind of existential boredom. She leant against the partition between the tables, her hand resting on her hip which jutted out sharply. She didn’t look at me; instead she slid the Dictaphone across the table towards me. I picked it up and pressed record.

‘Can I get a glass of water, no ice, a coffee and a few napkins. And a pen. Please.’ Then I passed the Dictaphone back across the table towards her. She picked it up and walked back to the register, listening to it on the way. I admired her style, I really did. The message was clear: I’m not ashamed and you mean nothing to me. And I guess I liked her all the more for it.

Stella brought over the glass of water. I removed the ice and put it in the ash tray; there wasn’t a lot of water left afterwards. Then I picked up the pen and wrote on the top of the napkin, ‘
Ray Celador
.’

I
ARRIVED IN
LA a few days before classes started at the Hollywood School. I checked into the Chateau Marmont; I’d just come into full possession of my mother’s estate so money was not a big deal. The first week was mostly orientation and introductory lectures and so on. I skipped a load of them and spent my time looking for a house to rent. I had a pretty clear idea in my head of what I wanted and there was nothing very unusual about it – I was in the market for something big and slick with a lot of glass and great views and a big pool. The only thing that was unusual was that I was an eighteen-year-old kid and not a big-shot movie producer.

I found a place pretty fast. It was in the Hollywood Hills and had its own private driveway and a big pool with an end wall that just fell away so that when you were in the pool with your eyes at
water level you could see in an uninterrupted line to the horizon. Then I bought the Buick. I guess a European sports car would have gone better with the house but I thought it might be kind of corny, and anyway it would have reminded me of old Hartfelder. The Buick was a better choice, and speed didn’t matter – I could drive from my house to the Hollywood School in less than twenty minutes, even going slowly.

I started going to classes but I used to be pretty quiet. Like I said, I never wanted to be an actor, but I was happy to be there and I found the other students really interesting. We started off doing Stanislavski and a lot of them really liked him but I have to say, I never really got it. Why does anyone want to be all those different people? I mean, I know it’s not supposed to be about pretending to be different people but rather about finding different people in yourself, but I never saw the point of that. Strikes me that it’s more important to find out who you really are than all the different people you could be. But anyway, I got to know a load of pretty confused, pretty wacky people who liked nothing more than having the opportunity to dress up and be someone else – and that’s how the parties started.

I used to skip the performance classes. No one really cared about attendance since it was assumed that because you were lucky to be at the Hollywood School, and because you were paying a lot to be there, you wouldn’t ditch classes. I remember I was reading
On the Road
at the time and I was really into it, so I used to drive home and read by the pool during the classes I didn’t like. But there was one performance class which I didn’t mind and that was ‘Dress and Make-Up’ on a Friday afternoon. All the queens got
pretty excited but no one took it too seriously and it was kind of fun. You were put into pairs and the class – all thirty-five of us – was given a theme, usually something open-ended like ‘My Worst Nightmare’, and then you could do pretty much what you wanted using the school’s massive dress resources. Just to give you an idea, in the ‘My Worst Nightmare’ class there was a gay couple who’d recently hooked up and who used a few old wigs and some body paint to turn themselves into two huge walking vaginas.

At the end of that class there were a lot of funny looking people. I’d been made up to look like Alex from
A Clockwork Orange
by James, a British student who was obsessed with the film. I was wearing a small bowler hat and a striped t-shirt. Spikes of mascara exploded from my right eye but I still looked pretty tame compared to the others. It seemed a shame to undo all that work, especially since there weren’t any more classes that day. So I asked Sammy, the guy who taught the class – he was the biggest queen of them all – whether it would be ok to keep the clothes until Monday because I wanted to invite the class, including him of course, to a pool party at my house that afternoon. Sammy thought for a moment then agreed so long as all the clothes were left at my house and I personally returned them on Monday. That was impressive foresight on his part, not only because it meant that not a single article of the school’s clothing ever got lost, but also because the drunken removal of dress in my house was the catalyst for numerous liaisons that might not have happened otherwise.

Sammy was not a professor at the school. He was a professional make-up artist who ran his own business and had worked on a few big movies. He was also really good at organising stuff. He
announced the party to the class – not publicly, which would have been embarrassing, but individually. He also booked taxis, repeatedly reminded everyone to bring their normal clothes because on no account would they be allowed to leave wearing what they were wearing, and he even put through a call to a friend of his who dealt blow, though I didn’t find that out until much later.

I drove home in the Buick and arrived twenty minutes or so before the first taxi. I opened all the sliding glass doors and put cushions on the sunbeds around the pool. Then I opened the cupboard in the sitting room which housed the rows of switches that controlled the sound system around the house. I flicked the switch and set the volume for the speakers in the poolhouse, and also the switch for the underwater speakers set into the sides of the pool. These had been intended for playing whale song but later that night I played dance music through them.

I schlepped the crates of rum and fruit juices from the garage over to the pool – I’d bought the alcohol online because that way you didn’t have to show an ID. The afternoon was getting humid – there were dark clouds coming in from the ocean – and rushing around was making me sweat. Mascara was running into my eye where it started to sting. I tried to dry my forehead with a paper towel but just ended up smudging everything even more. I made a huge bowl of punch, pouring in more or less everything sweet or fruity that I could find, and a lot of rum. I really didn’t have any kind of recipe, so I just kept tasting it and adding more. By the time the first guests arrived I was pretty drunk and, like I said, my face was kind of smudged all over. I guess that pretty much set the tone; not just for that party, but for the ones that followed too.

Even when all my class had arrived the pool area was pretty empty, so I told people to invite other friends they had in LA. Someone passed me a joint and from then on things just kind of moved along by themselves. The dark clouds from out over the ocean were gradually blown towards us. They seemed to stop at a certain point so that the red sun became visible for the last five or ten minutes before it sank below the horizon. The evening rays caught the underside of the malevolent clouds above and colored them a vicious purple. The quality of the light seemed pretty weird, though I guess that could have been the joint. A few minutes later the rain storm broke. But the rainwater was warm and the wind was still and the music was pumping and people started to dance in and around the pool and on the terraced area, facing the faint glow in the west.

Like I said, the students at the Hollywood School of Dramatic Arts were uninhibited at the best of times. But now, drunk and half-naked in the pouring rain, scarcely distinguishable because of the make-up streaking their faces, they appeared as wild as pagan tribesmen in a raindance. I sat watching for a while. Despite or perhaps because of my own drunkeness I began to feel goose bumps on my arms. I felt that I was witnessing something mythic. The painted dancers, the pouring rain, the pounding rhythms – it was primeval.

I felt a movement on the sunbed beside me. Looking across I saw that a large bearded man, probably in his forties, had sat down at the other end. He was not in costume, or not unless he was pretending to be a lumberjack. He wore a red checked flannel shirt, now soaked but still tucked into his jeans. His beard was
full and dark and his hair fell wildly to his shoulders. His hands rested on his knees as if he were ready to get up at any moment. They were huge hands and even from my vantage point I could see that the skin was hard and horny. He could certainly have been a lumberjack had it not been for his shoes: he wore a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots inscribed with two intertwining letters on the ankle, an ‘R’ and a ‘C’.

He looked across at me. His eyes were blue and very clear, the sort of eyes you’d imagine a visionary to have. In a rich, deep rumble he said, ‘Do you feel it?’

I was not exactly sure what he was referring to, but already I sensed that he was not the kind of man who liked to be asked questions, so I said, ‘I think so.’

He turned to look at the people dancing and then, after a full minute or so, he said, ‘In his theory of the dramatic, Nietzsche divides the springs of human action into two, the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. The Apollonian is cerebral and balanced and pure. The Dionysiac is physical and base and visceral. Thus we are both animals and angels.’ He paused again before continuing, ‘What is of interest is which side gains the upper hand.’ He looked across at me for a moment and then said, ‘You’re drunk. Come and do some blow.’

He gave me no time to reply but seized my arm in his powerful grip and marched me towards the house. As we stepped indoors we crossed paths with Sammy who appeared unstable on his feet but had a big grin on his face.

‘Hey Charlie, hey Ray, so I see you guys have already met?’

I guess I looked kind of blank because he went on, ‘Charlie
Conti, Ray Celador. Ray’s a friend of mine, we worked together on a movie. Charlie’s our host and this is his house, isn’t it divine?’

Ray didn’t respond so, to break the silence, I asked, ‘What movie?’

Ray thought for a moment then replied, ‘A Dionysiac one,’ and grunted, which was his way of laughing. Then we continued through to the kitchen where I snorted my first ever line of cocaine from the stainless steel counter.

Ray and I talked for a long time that night. That’s to say, mostly Ray did the talking and I listened. Boy could he talk. The effects of alcohol and cocaine made his speech free-flowing and at times lyrical in a way I had never heard before. He told me he’d done a Masters at a foreign university and then got a grant to research a doctoral thesis – something about ‘dualism’ – but the grant was withdrawn after a year when his faculty advisors lost patience with his lack of progress. Since then he’d done a number of jobs, mostly labouring in the hills. He said he liked being outside; libraries sapped his strength. I enjoyed listening to Ray talk because, although he was unusual, there was something very solid about him. He seemed real and grounded in a way that most people I knew weren’t. And it seemed like the things he thought about really mattered.

That first night Ray said to me, ‘Tell me Charlie, what are you doing here? You’re not a performer.’

‘I guess I came hear to learn about acting more than to be an actor. My mother was an Italian actress.’ I found myself telling him all about her. I don’t think I’d ever done that before with anybody. I told him about Italy and Izzy, about the actor who was maybe my dad. All all the time the rain was falling and people were dancing.

‘So, you want to discover who you are by understanding what your mother tried to be?’ Ray grunted. ‘It seems to me you are chasing ghosts, Charlie. To learn more about yourself – and I suspect that’s the real reason why you are here – you must embrace life, Charlie. Embrace life. If you seek roots, then seek roots that are living; brush aside the kindling wood of memory. Discover your land and your people; that’s how you’ll begin to discover yourself.’

I thought about that for a moment. I wasn’t really sure I had a land and a people. I mean, I no longer felt Italian the same way I did when I was a kid, but I didn’t feel American either. So I said, ‘But I’m not even sure what my land and my people are.’

‘Then perhaps you have a longer journey than others. See as much as you can, meet as many people as you can, find those with whom you have a affinity and those with whom you don’t.’

It seemed that Ray really believed that I had a land and a people, and that I just had to find them. That was an attractive thought to someone like me. Looking back now, I guess that was the moment when the idea of travel was first planted in my head.

Periodically we returned to the kitchen to do more blow. Other people bought wraps from Ray but neither then nor at any later stage in our relationship did he ever ask me for any money. It was interesting to watch these transactions. With other people Ray could be curt to the point of rudeness. But even so, it seemed like everyone wanted to be his friend. I mean, I guess we were all young and impressionable, but there was something about him that made you want him to like you. It wasn’t just the fact that he had a load of blow or that people respected him because of his size or because he was older than the rest of us. It was simpler than that; people just wanted to be his friend. Handsome, talented twenty-year-old actors who were accustomed to having audiences fawning over them were like schoolboys in his company, desperate to please. Beautiful, cynical young actresses who were learning how to ignore the attentions of all but Hollywood’s most influential producers seemed irresistibly drawn to him. I can’t say whether it was his voice, or his visionary’s eyes, or just the fact that he seemed to care so little for what other people thought of him, but for one reason or another people were drawn to him and he spurned them. I was the exception. Ray had befriended me; I guess that kind of went to my head.

People danced or made out until dawn began to bleed into the night sky. I lay on a sun bed until midday, unable to sleep. A huge pile of the school’s soaking clothes was left in my entrance hall. The water seeped down to the bottom of the pile and then formed small rivulets which neatly followed the line of the grout between the grey marble floor tiles, eventually trickling down the three steps to the kitchen area. When I returned the clothes on Monday morning they were still wet, but Sammy was happy to
launder it all since he’d made out with the most handsome queen in the class. The following Friday the same thing happened, though it didn’t rain. And so from one week to the next a tradition was born.

Ray came to every party and never dressed up once. I used to wonder about that. I thought that maybe he didn’t like the idea of pretending to be someone he was not, and maybe that’s what he liked about me. Now I’m not so sure what to think. Maybe some people act on the stage and other people act in life.