Nico (17 page)

That night as we slept on crisp cotton sheets, white as a starched dirndl, Demetrius had the first of a number of fits that were to plague him throughout the tour. He said he could only think of Julius Streicher, Hitler's Whipmaster General, stalking the town with his bullwhip, clearing it of Jews, like the medieval falconers who prepared the Emperor's progress, flushing out the rats from his path.

Nico was as sympathetic as ever: ‘Why don't you just go home?'

‘And rid the sacred German soil of the Eternal Jew?'

Nico shook her head. He always had to drag it down to the grudge level of national stereotypes.

‘Give me a child till the age of seven – I quote Ignatius Loyola – and he is mine for life,' said Demetrius. ‘Hitler also employed that motto, Nico … when were you born? 1938?
Let me see … forty-five minus thirty-eight why, that makes seven. Interesting.'

Demetrius decided he could do without Nico for a day and hired a Merc. Toby and I joined him. We fancied following him on his private tour of provincial cakeshops. Within ten minutes he'd damaged the car, his nerves were so bad. The bonnet wouldn't close. We chugged off at the nearest Ausfahrt and found a cakeshop. For half an hour we sat there cakeless while the Goyim stared us out.

Back at the car rental Toby and I sat on the bonnet while Demetrius went to the office to hand them the keys. As soon as he came out we all ran for it, the bonnet yawning wide open:
Deutschland Erwache
! ‘Tabla player?' said Raincoat. ‘Table tapper, more like … is there anybody there? I can't fookin' 'ear'im.'

Pit-a-pat-pat and Toby's Big Bang.

‘Why can't we have a bass player?' I asked Demetrius.

‘Nico likes him … he looks good.'

Immediately we got into Yugoslavia, Nico and Random started fretting about the drugs.

‘Not my problem,' said Demetrius. ‘Adventure ahead … Conquistadors of the open road!'

‘We come in search of cakes,' said Raincoat.

We pulled up for fuel. The bus took diesel. Demetrius jumped out and shoved the nozzle into the tank and left it to feed from the bottle while he walked off … to find some cakes. Raincoat opened the sliding door, shouted to Demetrius to come and keep hold of it. Demetrius immediately self-inflated to bursting point. Raincoat was a mere minion.

‘Don't talk to me about filling up, I know all about filling up, when you've been on the road as long as I have then …'

The nozzle sprang out of the tank, a writhing spitting snake of diesel. Demetrius tried to catch it but the thing was alive and wriggling furiously out of his reach. He grabbed it but stumbled, the head flipped round in his hands, and so it was that Dr Demetrius went down on the diesel. The spouting beast pumped into his mouth. Demetrius gagged and pulled away, throwing the engorged head blindly across the forecourt and into the open bus, soaking Wadada. Motorists ran for cover, grabbing their children. People were screaming. All except Nico, who just sat there staring fixedly at the empty road ahead and lit up another Marlboro.

The Yugoslavian gigs invited the truly exotic. For instance, a girl came to the Zagreb concert who'd been kicked out of her village for being a witch. Her best friend had committed suicide and they'd blamed it on her. She had the looks of a heartbreaker. Demetrius and Wadada immediately started fighting over her. Her complete indifference to them sent them into frenzies of credit-card lust.

At dinner Demetrius tried to impress Esmeralda with his knowledge of fine wines. His fingers ran up and down the list until he spotted a word he recognised. ‘I think we'll have the Riesling.' The girl threw a black glance at him with her dark eyes as he was about to taste it. He coughed, choked and spat it out.

‘'E prefers diesel,' said Raincoat to the waiter. ‘Yer wouldn't 'ave any Château Esso, by any chance?'

The little witch wanted to return with us to the West, but we
were going east, to Belgrade and then up into Hungary. She'd have to hitch a ride on another broomstick.

To rid the bus of the smell of diesel we drove with the sliding door open. This irritated Nico as she couldn't relight her dimps properly. The temperature was in the 80s as we drove to Belgrade. Demetrius was sweating it out in the thermal underwear his mother had given him and which out of duty he had to wear under his worsted three-piece and trilby. It was harvest time and the corn was being hung up to dry. The main roads were empty, but we'd still get stuck behind corn-carrying tractors. I suggested we take a side road as nothing could be as slow as these tractors – until we got stuck behind a corn-carrying horse and cart.

We drove along dirt roads, through villages with small squat houses, wooden roofs and white plaster walls with corn hanging up to dry. Oxen would stray into our path. Our progress was so slow that people started coming out of their houses to greet us. Women in headscarves, little boys in short trousers and girls in white communion dresses. They'd rush up to give us sweetmeats, candied fruit, sugared pieces of orange and plums. I didn't know if they thought we were something special or whether they were just kinder than we were.

I wanted to get away from the bus for a few minutes, just to touch another reality for a moment. At the next gas station I legged it across the road to a wayside cafe. I ordered a beer and a slivovitz. There was only one other guy at the bar. His Lada was parked alongside the window in full view. There was a coffin in the back. I asked him who it was. He couldn't speak English so I pointed. ‘Mama,' he said.

Away from the hermetically sealed, artificial climate of the tour bus, life (and death) gently slapped you in the face to remind you of their omnipresence.

In Ljubljana we picked up a gypsy. At least she said she was a gypsy, and that was good enough for Toby. He had it all mapped out: the caravan, the fortune-telling booth. All she wanted was a ride to Austria. We'd already tried to cross into Hungary from Yugoslavia but they'd turned us back. (We only had holiday visas … so why, then, did we have a drum kit in the back?)

‘She's sitting in my seat,' said Nico, offended by the gypsy's free and easy air. Nico wouldn't actually address the girl directly but complained instead to Toby. ‘Come on – get her out!' (Nico's Central European peasant blood made her afraid of gypsies; plus, of course, there were the health warnings from Dr Goebbels.)

The gypsy had never heard of Nico, she'd just come along to the club to see a Western act play, tag along, and fuck her way west. Have cunt will travel.

Toby pulled her into the back seat with him, but she couldn't keep still and started wandering up and down the bus.

‘Tell her to fucking sit down, or I'll kill her,' shouted Nico. The girl couldn't hear Nico as she was listening to Wadada's Prince Far-I tape on a Walkman and chewing gum.

‘Fer a pair of nylons she'll suck yer dick all the way back ter Wythenshawe,' said Raincoat.

We tried the cheap places in Vienna, but Demetrius scorned them. Nico didn't give a shit, she just wanted somewhere warm with a bed, now that the nights were getting cold and the dealers hiding in their nests. Demetrius booked us into the Regina on his American Express card. The gypsy danced with joy. What the fuck was
this
? A little piece of heaven on the ground. She wanted to try everything. As soon as she got into Toby's room she called room service. Toby just waved the flunkeys in, champagne buckets, plates of smoked salmon,
petits fours
on silver platters. A couple of hours later there was a frenzied knocking at my door. I was taking a shower, dripping in my towel when I answered. It was the gypsy. She waltzed in, wearing a Nico T-shirt and nothing else.

‘I can do deep throat,' she said, and whisked away the towel. Within seconds she was into her party piece. ‘This isn't such a good idea.' She couldn't answer. I suggested she should go back to Toby's room.

‘Should I get another girl?' she asked. ‘I can do that …
I
can make girls do anything I want.'

Next day as she waved goodbye to us on the hotel steps, Nico asked Toby, ‘Did you make her cry? You should make
all
the girls cry.'

‘Did you make her cry?' became a running epigraph to such brief liaisons. ‘If Nico had been a male she'd have made the girls cry,' pontificated Demetrius. She loved the idea of the punishment fuck. The warm, hugging stuff wasn't really to her taste. It was all a memory now anyway.

‘Of course it's her own sexuality she's denying,' he continued. Did I know that she'd been raped as a teenager in Berlin?

I didn't.

Nico was working as a temp for the U.S. Air Force. A black American sergeant had raped not only her but other girls under his employ. She'd kept quiet about it, but he was found out and court-martialled. She had to testify for the prosecution at his trial. He was sentenced to death and shot. Nico was fifteen.

‘Not only does she have to carry the horror of the rape but the secret guilt of somehow being complicit, by her testimony, in his execution. Sex, for Nico,' said Demetrius as we left Bergasse Strasse, ‘is irrevocably associated with punishment.'

Pecs, Hungary

Nico and Random were whingeing and wheedling, winding down the spiral staircase into pre-withdrawal panic tantrums. They weren't actually out of dope, but they only had crumbs left and they were a thousand miles from home.

People say you can't become addicted to marijuana. Random proved himself to be an exception to this rule. He'd smoked it every day for the past ten years, since he was fourteen. He'd never been so far awa
y from a source.

Nico was threatening to call off the tour if she didn't get more stuff soon.

I was consulting with Demetrius in his room about the best course of action. The phone would ring – alternately Nico and Random, each with a new and even more valid reason for not going on. With Nico it always came down to the smack, we knew it, she knew it, and she was utterly straight about it. Gear = go. With pot-heads, though, I've found they always try to think up some other justification outside themselves for doing nothing. (Coke-users, on the other hand, are game for anything – they just have to go to the toilet first.) There's a self-fulfilling honesty, though, about heroin-users. They can't pretend so easily as their habit is so obvious. The junkie's dishonesty comes in always trying to find someone else to blame for their habit.

Demetrius and I wanted to continue the tour. So did Raincoat and Toby and Wadada. The shows had been interesting, audiences were curious. At first they weren't so sure about what was going on. As ever they expected the living ghosts of the Velvet Underground. Piano, drums and tabla were an unusual combination of instruments for them, as well as for me. But perhaps Nico's harmonium-centred wailing struck deeper ancestral chords and by the end of the performances they'd warmed up a bit. (If anyone can actually warm to a Nico song.)

Demetrius and I formed a delegation to Nico's room. Raincoat was reluctant to join us. Although he wanted to stay on the tour, he'd also been ‘knockin' on Nico's door' and had thus partially contributed to her depleted circumstances. He did, however, assure us that he'd do his utmost to sniff something out as soon as we got to Budapest.

Demetrius told Nico she had to continue. He made all sorts of thinly veiled threats concerning broken contracts. The more he threatened the more stubborn she became. When the legal stuff failed, he tried to get her to reconsider on moral and professional grounds. The only way to her, though, was to worm in with some sort of flattery, build her up, make her feel the fans' disappointment. She agreed to stick it out a bit longer. She had three or four shots left, which she could eke out further with some of Demetrius's Valium, and then there were her cottons. Random's calls for mutiny went silent when he heard that the Good Ship Nico would steam on.

As soon as we got to Budapest the poor promoter was hammered into a corner by Nico and Random. Could he get this, could he get that? He was only a young operator, called Chabbi, still a student, he thought it was a BYO party, he hadn't realised he had to supply the refreshments as well. He came back with a few tabs of codeine and some pal's straggly dope plant, still in its pot. Nico necked the pills, Random grabbed the plant, stripped it down to its sad little stalks, and within seconds he was puffing away on his coke-tin, trying to get high on slow-burning nothing.

Chabbi had booked us into the local hostel, the Citadel, a converted hilltop fortress overlooking the city. The place had a splendid view of the city, but ‘not a fit spot ter feather down,' said Toby. We stayed one night, during which Demetrius went to a private sex show with Chabbi, had another fit, and awoke covered in blood. We never saw Chabbi again.

In the distance Demetrius and I could see the glass-domed roof of the Hotel Gellert. We booked ourselves in. The glass dome opens so that the sun's rays can shine down on an ornate swimming-pool with marble lions spouting water. There were plunges, Turkish baths, massage. For a grooming fetishist, a paradise. Of no interest whatsoever to Nico, for whom it would have been a torture chamber.

I decided Demetrius was my ally for this tour. Our addiction was to adventure and Nico could work it out for herself.

The Road to Romance

We got into Czechoslovakia by the skin of our teeth. The border control saw the instruments and Demetrius nearly blew it for us by saying we were jazz musicians, in the hope that we'd sound more innocent. But the Czech régime didn't dig Miles. It had become their recent policy to ban jazz and imprison its practitioners.

Brno (where they manufactured the Bren gun) conformed much more to preconceived notions of life in the Eastern bloc – a sulp
hurous yellow light, barely illuminating empty and dusty streets. Fear. Everyone in uniform. Our conspicuousness increased our latent paranoia.