Post by anniemal on Apr 11, 2011 17:17:24 GMT -4
*CHARLIE LINDHOLM,
“I’m not living. I’m just killing time”
“I’m not living. I’m just killing time”
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[/color][/center]*step into the spotlight,
» FULL NAME: Charles Oscar Lindholm
» NICKNAMES: Charlie
» AGE/BIRTHDAY: Eighteen (17th September)
» GENDER: Male
» ORIENTATION: None of your business
» CANON OR ORIGINAL: Original
» GROUP/GRADE: Senior
*let them see who you are,
» HAIR: In colour it rests dissatisfyingly, to his mind, somewhere between light brown and blonde. It’s particularly annoying as he struggles to decide which he prefers – blonde seems prettier, but brown more sophisticated – so he alternates between lightening and darkening it as his opinion changes. It’s a little wavy, particularly if he hasn’t cut it recently.
» EYES: Blue, with a feline slant and short, light eyelashes.
» HEIGHT/WEIGHT: Quite tall, but not extraordinarily so – around 5’11”, although he describes himself as six foot. Wiry and skinny with lean, fairly undefined muscle
» DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: He has a scar on his left cheek, just below his cheekbone.
» STYLE: He dresses like every other guy you see hanging around second hand bookshops and coffee shops – skinny jeans or chinos, boat shoes or brogues, no socks, vintage jumpers, checked shirts, scarves, wayfarers. You know the type.
» OVERALL: Charlie is beautiful, in a sort of skinny, fragile way that people tend to appreciate but not actually find that attractive. A bit too androgynous, a bit too haughty, with high cheekbones, long neck and limbs and pale skin. Naturally skinny, he helps it along by largely living on cigarettes, coffee and alcohol, and an absolute refusal to exercise stops any troublesome muscle bulking him up. He went to the gym once and didn’t think much of it, so he hasn’t bothered again.
*shine through the darkness,
» LIKES: Reading poetry; writing poetry; Denmark; fish; swimming; men; going for walks; experimental music; cigarettes; alcohol; vintage clothes shops; coffee; storms; flying dreams; philosophy.
» DISLIKES: City living; lying in bed thinking of the scariest things he possibly can, although he does it anyway; confined spaces; religion;
» STRENGTHS: Writing, particularly poetry; quite a strong singing voice; sociable and charming; an excellent liar; good at manipulating others; natural aptitude for art.
» WEAKNESSES: not very resilient, takes a long time to recover from setbacks or grief; highly strung and easily stressed; not particularly academic, particularly in terms of maths or science; lazy, incredibly lazy, he has perfected the art of doing precisely nothing and probably puts more effort into avoiding work than it would take to just get it done; very self obsessed and can be quite vain.
» SECRETS: He’s gay – this isn’t a secret amongst his old friends and it isn’t really something he’s ashamed of, but he can’t quite find the strength to come out in his new school. There are too many strangers.
Mick. This is the biggie. On absolutely no account can anyone know about Mick. They wouldn’t understand, and it’s sort of embarrassing to admit to having your heart and body trampled over by one person.
He wants Mick back. He won’t tell anyone this. He’s still madly, humiliatingly in love and would give anything to see him again. Worst of all he’s still at the stage where he leaves tearful, barely coherent voicemail messages on Mick’s phone whenever he gets drunk.
» GOALS: Leave home, get a small flat in Denmark, and write beautiful poetry.
Get Mick back.
Stay beautiful.
» OVERALL PERSONALITY: Charlie is on the whole easy to get along with and friendly, although he’ll go through intensely antisocial periods and close off until he’s ready to talk to people again. Despite his social nature he is quite a private person and doesn’t like people knowing much about him, although he finds it frustrating not knowing everyone else’s secrets. Essentially he is disgustingly, unashamedly, hypocritically nosy.
In spite of his New York accent, American mother and English name Charlie identifies himself as Danish and he does his best to think in Danish, or at least think his most secret ideas and thoughts in Danish, hugging them to himself and protecting them. It’s not like it matters much in the end what language he thinks in, but it means a lot to him.
Storms make him happy. He’ll lie in bed during storms, flat on his back with his fingers spread, pulling in all the noise and electricity until he feels like he’s crackling and vibrating with energy. But he’s happiest when he’s in love. Then he sleeps through storms instead.
*dive into your past,
» PARENTS: Rachel Auden and Saul Lindholm
» SIBLINGS: none
» PETS: An African Grey Parrot called Cortez
» SIGNIFICANT OTHER: none
» OTHER IMPORTANT PEOPLE: Mick Reynolds, his ex
» HISTORY: Charlie’s childhood was blissful, whole summers spent in Denmark, where his father came from, at his grandparents summer house by the coast, learning to dive and rowing out to small islands to swim and sunbathe and picnic on pancakes and fish. He grew up speaking a mishmash of English and Danish and he is still bilingual, speaking both languages at home.
Rachel and Saul still aren’t quite sure when their little Charlie became the closed off, irritable teenager who ghosted around their house, a pained expression on his face every time they spoke to him. He’d just drifted slowly away, carefully locking the door behind himself and swallowing the key. He stopped being the hard working, topoftheclasschoirboy he once was – in fact he barely bothered with going to school, doing just enough work to avoid being thrown out and spending more and more time with his friends who were all older and didn’t have to worry about homework and detention and double chemistry on a Friday afternoon. Charlie became convinced he was living the ultimate bohemian lifestyle, smoking roll ups outside coffee shops and writing poetry. He’d leave the city for days at a time, walking aimlessly around any stretch of countryside he could reach by bus or train, sometimes alone sometimes with a boy or girl to keep him warm in the tent at night. The irony of a self styled bohemian returning after a few days away to the smart, middle class town house where he lived with his parents was completely lost on him.
Mick was the final straw really. It started when Charlie was sixteen, although his parents didn’t find out for almost a year. They met at a poetry night in a trendy wine bar. Mick was a tall, broad man with more salt than pepper in his hair, a softness around his middle that many men who had once been quite muscular got when they reached their forties. he stood like he owned the earth as he read his verse aloud. When he smiled he showed more teeth than looked entirely natural. Charlie sat alone, with an empty wine glass in front of him, gaze turned downwards demurely whenever those grey eyes looked towards him. The man bought him a drink, more than one, and took him back to his flat.
Charlie expanded and glowed, in love with being in love, in love with the man’s poetry. In love enough that he didn’t leave when Mick slept with his friend Carla, or any of the other girls and boys whose beds he found his way in to. Even when, if Charlie got angry, Mick got angrier and knocked him around, he accepted it. His friends didn’t understand why he stayed and, not liking to hear Mick criticised, Charlie drifted from them, so wrapped up in the dizzying passion and excitement of a new relationship. It was better, he told himself, to have this than to be alone. It would be naïve to expect every relationship to be perfect.
Things started to go downhill when Charlie’s PE teacher noticed bruises as he got changed. Black and purple blossoms across his back and hips, and on his wrists smaller bruises in a row like someone with blue ink on their fingertips had grabbed him.
It didn’t stay secret for long after that. His mother cried when she found out and his father went sort of grey. Their immediate reaction was to get Charlie away from the corrupting influence of his friends and, of course, Mick. They refused to believe he would have done this of his own accord; he must have been lead astray. Initially there was talk of moving to Denmark but to Charlie’s intense relief they decided to move to a different part of New York, so Charlie could go to Belmont Academy in the hope it would straighten him out. In all senses of the word. Charlie smugly decided he could carry on seeing Mick in secret. This plan shattered and fell to pieces around his ears in August when Mick broke up with him by casually introducing him to Marguerite, a twenty year old Parisian who worked in an art gallery and whose interests included cocaine, leather and handcuffs.
So Charlie was thrown into his new school, barely noticing the first week, too busy trying to scrabble together the fragments of his heart and dignity that still remained. It took a while for him to notice the other students surrounding him, and by the time he'd got himself together enough to try and talk to people he'd already been labelled as 'the quiet one, or worse 'the snob'. He's struggling to make friends, especially when it's so much easier to just retreat back into his shell and not talk to anyone.
*behind the scenes,
» NAME/ALIAS: Annie
» AGE: nineteen
» ROLEPLAY EXPERIENCE: Ah… Seven years? I have no idea, really, that’s a total guess. Ages anyway
» HOW YOU FOUND US: advert on another board
» CODE PHRASE: admin edit.
» RP SAMPLE: I have a new laptop, so I only have access to a couple of old intros I had emailed to myself. So this isn’t my best, but it’s the most recent I have. It’s set in the early 60s in London.“Mod is a shorter word for young, beautiful and stupid”
~ Pete Townshend
There they were. A group of the young, the beautiful and the stupid.
Mark was just one of the crowd, but in some ways he was remarkable. He stood out certainly for being the youngest of the group at seventeen, yet having no visible means of support. His mother having died when he was a child and his father working as a lorry driver left him on his own for most of the week. A part time job at a hairdressers was the only regularity in his life. Otherwise the week was his to bend and stretch to his will, extending the days into the nights and telescoping the deadly Sundays into a brief sleep. Glowing with health and soap he managed to stay on his feet for days on end without a trace of fatigue or boredom ever tracing his features.
What was the point, though, to all these sleepless nights? Where is the goal towards which he, and his friends also, were running as fast as their impeccably shod feet could carry them? Nowhere. They were running just to keep still, to stay in the same place, and they refused to accept that by the time they reached their late twenties the exhausting race would be over and they all would have lost. They would have grown up. This was not merely living for the present. This was living in rejection of the future. For Mark the present was so intensely satisfying and terrifyingly short he could not spend even a minute of his time considering the future.
“Nah nah, you want to go to Bilgorri’s.”
“That down in Bishopsgate?”
“Yeah, real haddocky looking place, but he’s a great tailor. Whatever you want doing, he’ll get it right.”
“Where do you want to go tonight?”
“Course I’ll generally get tailoring done at John Stevens. More convenient.”
“Could go to the discotheque in Wardour Street.”
“Oh, he’s good with trousers.”
“I was thinking of the Establishment tonight.”
“I read this book about Beau Brummel the other week...”
It was a fairly small group of young men, leaning on a wall with their scooters beside them, dozens of lights and mirrors reflecting the glow of cigarettes and the last few rays of grey spring evening light. They didn’t let their small number prevent them from keeping up around three conversations at the same time, each person switching between the topics with schizophrenic ease
Mark adjusted his stick pin and patted his carefully backcombed blond hair. “The Establishment’s full of maggots. We should go to the Saddle Room, it’s much m–” He paused as he heard the unmistakeable hum of motorcycle engines, hands paused in the act of twitching his shirt cuffs straighter. He cleared his throat.
It wasn’t that they had that much of an issue with Rockers – even if they were all greasy, leather clad brutes. And even though they all thought Mods were nancy boy effeminate queers. They didn’t fight, not really. Mark got into more scuffles with other Mods than with Rockers. All the same, things were starting to get a bit edgy – hints that things might go beyond name calling and derision. It was reaching the time when you didn’t want to be in a small group faced with the prospect of a gang of grudge bearing Rockers.
If asked later Mark and all his friends would testify they in fact hadn’t run away. They had just collectively remembered they had urgent appointments to be somewhere else. Mark, being lazy and vehicle-less, didn’t get far before veering off into an alley for a peaceful smoke, confident that any passing Rocker looking for trouble wouldn’t notice the flicker of light and coils of smoke.
THIS TEMPLATE WAS MADE BY twilight_princess of CAUTION 2.0 aka CHELS of FOREVER YOUNG. DO NOT STEAL OR REMOVE THIS CREDIT OR I’LL SEND LINK AFTER YOU!
