Nico (10 page)

Chikka chikka chikka chikka

--- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chugga chugga chugga chugga

. . . . . – / ------- / – / my

Chikka chikka chikka chikka

---- / . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chugga chugga chugga chugga

. . . . . . . . . . . . .26 dollars? . . . . . . . . . . You must be kidding!

Chikka chikka chikka chikka

[Permission to reproduce lyrics refused]

She stopped singing, clipped the mike back on to the stand, and turned to the four of us. She was clapping her hands and stomping her heels, like a flamenco Brünnhilde. And laughing, laughing, laughing.

Outside in the street lay a Viking burial. Axel had literally torn the car apart with his hands and then set fire to the remains, releasing the handbrake as it rolled off into SoHo.

We gazed silently at the smouldering wreckage for a few minutes, said our respects, and split. We couldn't wait to get away from each other.

Nico disappeared into the arms of the past, Lower East Side cronies who'd share a bit of stuff with her just for the anecdote value.

Echo headed straight for the shooting galleries of the Bronx. ‘Yer walk in … it's pitch black … yer shout yer order … they lower a bucket … yer drop in the ackers … the bucket comes back a minute later with an'alf g wrap … convenience shoppin' I s'pose, takes the waitin' out of wantin' … Tho' I've never been much of what yer might call a shop-a-'olic.'

Bags bought himself a brand new pair of Big Boy jeans with six-inch turnups and then whirled away on a helicopter tour of the Manhattan skyline. Once he'd sized the place up, he took his meat on down the street … a cruise missile in 42” Levis. Like his idol, his art was his life. But still Andy wouldn't pick up the phone.

Spider Mike took the first available flight back to Manchester, disillusioned with the American Way. Now no one back home at the Old Cock would stand him a pint as he traded anecdotes about the legendary meeting between Spider Mike and the only man on the planet he'd ever buy a drink – Lonesome Bob.

Smiler? We asked around next day. No one was sure … we heard later he'd gone to New Orleans with a beautiful dancer and was ripping up the rhythm every night, playing drums in a swing outfit, earning ‘best brass'. I had a feeling he might come out ahead – he didn't take drugs and wore a clean and pressed pair of slacks every day.

‘It's funny,' said Echo on the return flight, ‘'ow yer think that someone's just a phase in your life – when yer might just be a phase in theirs.'

‘ZE CARNEGIE 'ALL'

I never earned a cent from the American tour. Demetrius deferred all responsibility to ‘our mutual patroness, Frau Christa Paffgen', who, of course, pointed me straight back to Demetrius. He explained that I should be satisfied with getting such interesting ‘trips out'.

It transpired that the promoter had actually tried to be decent and had sent some of our back pay to England. The good doctor had immediately spent it on whores and roulette.

We were back on Echo's sofa. Cheese and pickle sandwiches. Endless brews of PG Tips, percolating grievances. The goldfish had died and been replaced by a tank of pondwater and some black snails. More significantly, the Venus of the Fireplace had been removed and in its place was a picture of the Virgin of Fatima, swathed in rosary beads.

Nico had a piece of opium the size of a Hershey Bar. She was now on first-name terms with every witchdoctor in town. They were happy to do business with her … and Demetrius loved to indulge her. To gain the affections of one so wicked and heartless was reward in itself. Nico, of course, continued to abuse him behind his back.

‘Thinks he's the big impresario, strutting around like that, while I play provincial toilets.'

Le Kid chirped in, ‘Yezz … my muzzerre should play ze Carnegie'All.'

We had Germany and France united once more against the Common Enemy. Le Kid had innate pedigree and, after all, he'd grown up in the company of the Beautiful People – he could do without humiliating handouts.

‘'Ee is so voolguerre – really.'

Demetrius and the children returned with some friends for the snails. Each of them carried a plastic bag of water with a fish in it. They were like fancy finned goldfish, but black.

‘More dependants,' lamented Echo wearily.

Ari went into flip city. ‘Zat you spend all ze time in frivolité and my muzerre'as no monnaie.'

Demetrius pointed out that if Nico chose to spend her income on drugs instead of food and rent like normal people, that was her choice – and not his responsibility.

‘The Miseries – why don't you just damn well cheer up? Ask yourselves what spiritual and moral right you have to sit around all day denigrating the efforts of people who at least try to do
something.'

I went to the bathroom to escape for a minute and clear my head. There were three fish in the sink. I closed the toilet seat, sat down and lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. Nico started to bang on the door.

‘Hurry up, Jim, pleeeease.'

I let her in. She immediately got out her toolbox and arranged her works – all the refinements, the lemon, the candle. It was a genteel diversion for a middle-aged spinster lady, a bit like needlepoint.

I picked something up … Echo's methadone bottle. On the label was a warning: ‘Keep In A Safe Place Away From Children.'

May '84:

A TUESDAY NIGHT IN PARADISE

Nico was listening to Chopin and eating chocolate. Candle burning in a saucer, coloured scarf draped over bedside lamp. Smell of paraffin wax, Marlboro smoke and cooked heroin.

‘You want some chocolate?' she asked.

‘No thanks … it gives me spots.'

‘Good … then I can squeeze them for you.'

She tutted away to herself: ‘Look, he keeps giving me poems.' She nodded in the direction of the next room. Demetrius's room. ‘Look …' She handed me a piece of hotel stationery; on it was written in manic, spiky handwriting:

Museum Hotel, Amsterdam

Omega

I, who, neurasthenic, trembling,

Yarmulka atop my prematurely bald adolescent crown,

Convey Mrs Rabinowitz and Aunty Rene

In auto-erotic Escortina

To Cousin Naomi for tea,

Am the same He

Who stands before thee, erect,

Upon this wild and foaming shore,

Where spermatozoic dolphins crest the libidinous

waves

That repeat and repeat evermore:

Omega. Omega.

I gave it back to her.

‘What do you think?' she asked.

‘From a literary point of view?'

‘No, no, no,' she tutted again, ‘What do you think, that he should do such a thing? That he puts this stuff under the door?' She threw the sheet of paper contemptuously across the bed. ‘You know he calls to me like a
wiiild aanimal
from his bedroom.' She imitated him, her voice booming even lower: ‘Neee-co! Neee-co! I don't answer him. He asks me what I think of his poems, but I know what he
reeeally
wants … it drives me craaaazy! Pestering me like some teenager.'

‘I think he's got a crush on you,' I said.

‘Jesus, you're not kidding. D'you know what he does? In the middle of the night?'

‘No.' But I could guess.

‘Slap. Slap. Slap … I can hear everything, these walls are like paper.' She turned up the Chopin.

I noticed a pile of used disposable hypodermics on the bedside cabinet. She went through them fast. It's hard to imagine that sharp metal bursting through the thin walls of a vein could become blunt so quickly. She didn't have many accessible veins left. They were becoming harder to find, collapsing (or cowering) beneath the surface of the skin. Now she was injecting into her hands – a very conspicuous act for a celebrity junkie. She would cover up her scars with bits of rag, especially if the audience was close to the stage. When you're the wrong side of forty you want to be left alone to get on with it, your habits are your own. They pay to hear the songs, that's enough, surely?

‘Don't you ever get lonely?' I asked her suddenly. She didn't seem disconcerted, but thought for a moment.

‘Sometimes, when there's not enough youknowwhat,' she laughed. ‘But even before that things start coming back at you.'

‘Like what?'

‘Oh … all the
bad
things you've done, all the bad things that happened
to
you. It comes back … like a riot … the heroin calms me down.'

‘Maybe if you had someone, someone special? Perhaps you wouldn't need it so much?'

‘I'm OK.' She stopped, thought about it. ‘We-ell, maybe a rich doctor who could get me the hundred per cent pure stuff.' She turned over the tape. ‘Have you ever been to the desert?' she asked. ‘Oh, sure, I forgot, you were in Death Valley. I wish I'd been there with you.'

‘You say that now …'

‘I was in the Sa-haaara, making a film. Loneliness is not so bad when you expect it … but when there's lots of people around you don't want, that's lo-onely.'

‘I know, there's nothing more depressing than watching other people having fun.'

‘And the silence … You could shout and shout and no one would bother you, because no one could hear you … woooonderful! D'you know how good it feels just to
shout
?'

‘You do that on stage, every night.'

‘I guess so … but the desert … shouting to the emptiness … singing the void …'

Transmission was fading. ‘Don't s'pose you fancy a beer with me and Echo?' I was dry with all that sand. She didn't … too tired … not so young any more.

I left her to the candlelight, the Chopin and the slap-slap of the ‘libidinous waves'.

Devil Shit

We had Gregory Corso along for the ride. Somehow the good Doc
t
or had lassooed him into his care. And Jackie Genova, the Black Crow, Cockney trouble-shooter, who always kept two loaded syringes at the ready in his jacket pocket while driving, so he could shoot at the wheel, eat on the hoof, had come along as Nico's personal dealer. (In the eighties it was the hip thing to bring your own macrobiotic chef on tour with you – Nico always did things differently.)

Jackie made his living by secreting small torpedoes of heroin sealed in condoms in his rectum. He performed a flying doctor service for stricken junkies, forced to make a crash landing in alien territory. When he was a kid, Jackie had worked down the London sewers. Maybe that's why he'd never grown above five foot … tender young shoots need plenty of light.

‘Awwroyt cocker?' He pulled on the butt end of a Capstan and slapped me on the back. ‘Oym your original cheeky Cockney chappie.' He laughed: ‘Eeeugh.' It was a kind of reverse laugh, achieved by an inhalation at the back of the throat. It sounded like the dry hinge on a Borstal gate. ‘Yore Jim aarncha? Where's the pyshunt?'

He looked like a crow, long beak, black eyes, slicked-back hair. He took me to one side. ‘Watch yerself, mate. Ev'ryone of'em's a cant. Don't let'em give it and don't you take it. Knowwhamean? Eeeugh.' He creaked his hideous laugh again.

The first thing Corso did was try and get Jackie to take a bag through customs for him: ‘Shay,' he lisped through his broken dentures, ‘wanchadado me a favour, son, and carry this fer me … Bad arthritish … Okay?'

Jackie immediately passed the bag on to Raincoat, who just put it down on the floor.

‘Is this someone's bag?' shouted Demetrius. Everyone shrugged.

‘So you carry Gregory's bags now,' said Nico, affronted, as they ran the usual gauntlet of customs men.

We played the Lukewarmia type of clubs. The Dutch are the most rock'n'roll-saturated people in Europe. Amsterdam is one big shopping mall on water for druggists and porno-junkies. Groups can't get enough of the brain-scrambling, eye-popping treats on offer. So everyone plays Holland, all the time.

The guys munch gum. The girls zip and unzip their designer flying jackets … vampettes with blonde hair and red lips, bored to the back teeth with life at twenty. Their entire aesthetic was built upon a thumb-flick through some style magazine and the first Joy Division album. Only if you set yourself on fire, naked, could you expect even an arched eyebrow. The guys would carry on chewing, occasionally mentioning who they'd seen the night before that was better, who they were going to see at the Milkweig on Saturday that would be better still. We were just Tuesday night at the Paradiso.

Corso came on first. He decided he was going to out-bore them. He half-recited and half-improvised insults, spraying them with spittle. He'd look over his pince-nez to see if they were wondering who the weird fucker was Jackson-Pollocking them with splatter-verse. I played a bit of free ‘plinkety-plonk', as Echo called it, on the piano, which pissed them off even more.

The club in Rotterdam was a true eighties Neo-Constructivist experience, lots of flat colour planes, grey upon grey, with few functional details like people. It was an art-house as doll's house view of culture. Upstairs was an exhibition area. There were lots of things to touch. (As in ‘touching is a necessary precondition to cognitive awareness'.) We were going to be taken back to our aquatic foetal past. Art-house as uterus.

Jackie Genova was ahead of me up the stairs. A disembodied voice at the top told him to stop and turn round. He did so. In front of him was a door. ‘Come closer,' the anonymous voice said. There were two peep-holes in the door. Jackie hopped forward, the way crows do. ‘A little closer,' insisted the voice. He hopped another step. A squirt of yellow piss-coloured liquid shot out at what would ordinarily have been crotch-level but in Jackie's case streaked right across his brand-new La Rocka shirt. A present from his girl.

‘
Fackin' cant
!' he screamed. ‘Nadine'll go
maaaad
!' He lunged forward with his two index fingers at the peepholes. A pathetic yelping scream came from behind the door, then some crashing and banging as arty Oedipus on the other side was subjected to the severest aesthetic criticism. Exit minus eyes.

Down in the dressing-room it was a veritable symposium. Nico, Corso and Demetrius were comparing ego sizes. Demetrius was quoting Yeats, the poet as Hero. Neither Nico nor Corso seemed in the least bit interested. At the same time the two of them were having problems communicating. Corso was fast, he talked like a Charlie Parker solo, in a nervous flurry of increasingly complex phrases. Nico, on the other hand, preferred the cryptic monosyllable with which she might preoccupy herself for hours. He was nice and polite to her, though, as they did share a certain predilection, and he'd entertained us all with a wonderful Nico parody in the soundcheck, a rendition of ‘When ze Rett Rett Robin/Goes Bawb Bawb Bawbing alongk.'

She didn't take offence, and laughed along with us, so he must have had some charm. He was always a true gentleman with her, in his own decrepit way, and it was good that he was playing scummy clubs as well as the more tasteful
poetry reading tonight
snores. He was still a naughty boy. Like Nico, he seemed to be a hotel creature. One canvas holdall, full of personal chaos.

‘Demetrius writes poetry too, Gregory,' said Nico.

At the words ‘Demetrius/poetry' Echo's ears pricked up like a sleeping pooch. He looked over at me with the dread anticipation of imminent embarrassment in his eyes. Demetrius stood up, placed his Bullworker on the chair:

‘Yes, Gregory, I do sometimes indulge in the Homeric art, but perhaps Nico is referring to a particular Elysian elegy of mine concerning a subject of a somewhat more
intimate
nature.' He took a sniff of Vick and tried to sidetrack Nico. ‘The downright impertinence of people who inflict their vile cigarette smoke on others appals me, one fears for democracy quite frankly.'

Nico blew her Marlboro smoke in his face. ‘Aren't you going to show it to Gregory?'

‘No need for that! Poetry should be composed on the wing, off the cuff, is that not so, Grégoire,
mon frère?'
He took off his hat, held it against his chest like a Neopolitan tenor, and gave us a telephone voice recitation of
Omega.

But when he got to the last line he seemed to go into a strange body-swerve and free-formed a brand-new verse:

… I ejaculate upon

Your seaweed shore

I emit my silver testament

Upon your golden pagan sands

My Omega!

He synched back into Earth orbit. ‘I think you'll agree that in its central use of the female goddess archetype it resembles somewhat the metaphysical poets, the omnipotent metaphor in particular.' He looked over at Corso.

‘Well … if you ashk moy opinion … at leasht I ashume that'sh what you're doing … In moy opinion it, ah … shucks.'

‘Oh … really?' Demetrius was taken aback. It was the first time in a long while he'd been contradicted by anyone, especially someone who genuinely didn't give a fuck. ‘Well at least I try to confront the nature of the
immortal,
the
eternal,
while you and your kind merely wish to address the
squalid
and the
unimportant,
to rub our noses in the
heathen
slurry.'

‘Don't lay that Devil shit on me, man!' screamed Corso, jumping to his feet and squaring up to Demetrius.

‘How undignified!' Demetrius loomed down at him, Big Telephono. ‘Sit down at once, and don't be silly!'

Corso took a swing at him. He missed by a mile. They both swayed around each other like a couple of hopeless street-corner drunks … a few more shoves and insults. Then they calmed down. Demetrius was the first to offer his hand.

‘Come on, Greg … Give me a hug and let's make up like brothers.'

‘Lemmealone, you goddam faggot!' Corso pushed him away and went aloft to do his routine. After he'd finished, to the usual patter of tiny palms, Demetrius took the stage. With his overcoat buttoned up tight, his trilby and his beard, he looked like a Hassidic Rabbi at a chic Nazi revival meeting:

‘… And that was my good friend Mr G-r-e-g-o-r-y
C-o-r-s-o-o-o
doing some of his bebop poetry for your delectation and amusement … Yes, tonight we have a real Happening for you, boys and girls. In a few moments all the way from Valhalla, Nico and her Magic Trolls (who've just popped in from another Nordic saga). T-shirts and posters are of course available in the foyer … and may I add, at a most reasonable discount for you good people of Amster … er,
Rotter
dam.'

‘Get off, you dirty Jew!' shouted a heckler. Demetrius stopped dead in his tracks. He surveyed the audience.

‘OK, which one of you said that? At least have the guts to show yourself.'

Demetrius peered into the darkness but couldn't discern a face, so he decided to take on the whole audience. Give them a real lamming:

‘I've seen sheep in fields with shit stuck to their arses that possess more individuality than any of you dumbfuckers.'

A member of the audience applauded him.

‘I've seen rollmop herrings that show more signs of
joie de vivre.'