Nico (8 page)

We had to curl up somewhere for the night. We tried motel after motel – they all wanted paying up front. Until we found Gino's Place. Gino couldn't care less. He only had one room vacant, every other freeloader loose in America must have been passing through. He scooped the key off the wall and slapped it down on the counter.

‘Take it or leave it … all the same to me, pal.'

We took it. Nico decided she'd rather sleep in the car. That left six of us in one room. We pulled the double bed apart, mattress and base – three on each half. Echo and I declined. Spider Mike and Smiler on one, Bags and his dream companion Axel on the other. Echo and I huddled in a corner, smoking and despairing.

By midsummer the American cockroach is well into early adulthood and in search of a soulmate. And when the lights go out, he loves to dance
La Cucaracha.
Echo and I weren't sleeping alone after all. I woke to find my blanket and his covered in hideous brown bodies. Insect legs had definitely crawled across my face and woken me up.

‘Jesus!' Echo screamed, quietly, as he would. We threw off our blankets and headed for the car. Nico was laid out on the back seat, her arms placed in a funereal cross upon her chest.

‘What is it?' she said, annoyed at having her place of rest disturbed.

‘A plague upon our 'ouse,' said Echo.

Nico tutted. He was talking in sign language again. ‘Weell … I'm staying here.'

‘OK,' we agreed, and sat in the front.

When she was asleep, Echo dipped her bag for the methadone, barely a cupful left. He took a sip, then replaced it. I still had some duty-free Silk Cut. I handed him one, he snapped off the filter and lit up. Nico snored.

Outside the cicadas were singing. The sky was wide open. As far as the eye could see, constellation upon constellation. A silent chorale of stars (the sort of stuff Irish rock groups wax lyrical about).

‘I think Tom favours the Tex-Mex style with the side buckles and silver tips. I'm more yer Italian calfskin with elasticated leather vents. Odd as'ow Cath'lic countries make the best shoes int it?'

‘Are you going to talk aaall night through?' asked Nico from behind. ‘What with the graaasshoppers … and everything …'

Echo jumped out and slammed the door behind him. ‘Look! We're in the middle of fookin' nowhere, yer've necked all me methadone, so we can do without Germany callin' all night long – right?'

‘Shit, you two wouldn't be here without me.'

‘An' we're
very
grateful,' Echo hissed through the gaps in his teeth. Nico didn't notice the insincerity.

‘OK … well, just don't forget it, that's all.'

‘We won't, don't you fookin' worry,' said Echo.

Denver

We had big hopes of Denver. Big black-and-yellow butterflies the size of your hand would fly by as you walked down the street, and it wasn't the drugs. Quite why Denver had so many giant butterflies and so many different varieties of drugs, I didn't know, but Echo was chopping out all kinds of curious powders. It seemed to preoccupy his whole attention, choppity-chop-chop, then he'd shovel it with the blade into a neat little square, then choppity-chop-chop again. ‘Shall I carve?' Then he'd square up again and divide it into equal halves.

‘There yer go, Jim, get summathat down yer.' He swept out a line for me.

‘I don't know,' I said nervously. ‘It looks a very strange colour to me.'

The sensation was something like having red-hot slivers of glass shoved up your nostrils. ‘I can't conceive of the pleasure one might derive from this,' I said to Echo, tears in my eyes and a bitter chemical taste at the back of my throat. I'd been given an original blend of heroin and sulphate: a speedball.

‘It might'elp yer stop bein' such a prick,' he said.

Echo was keen to shove anything up his nose or into his veins, even when obtained from someone more desperate than himself.

Nico was in the toilet with The Monster From Planet Weird circa'68. They were sharing a shot. It was probably a proud moment for him … The Queen of the Junkies in his home town. Maybe he'd have the needle framed. It was not inconceivable. People, kids especially, used to ask for her old syringes. Every toilet tells a story.

We did all the favourite turns for the faithful old punters. The people who were so crazy they'd been kicked out of Haight Ashbury fifteen years before. Their brains had burst in the Summer of Love. They'd been shunted further and further inland, and out of sight.

The crazies were the best, though. You'd give them as much high-frequency juice as they could handle. Only the nutters liked us. You began to look forward to them being there. As a unit we were a genetic freak, a hideously deformed, doomed to extinction, limping mongrel of styles. A Happy Hour cocktail drummer. A leaping Guitar Hero. A Penitent Pilgrim of the Poppy. A Fastidious Phony. And King Ludwig's Crazy Sister.

Nico did her famous impersonation of an Alpine foghorn. Smiler just shuffled away with those brushes, dreaming she was Ella Fitzgerald.

‘I want to drive … I want to drive.' Nico was back on her favourite riff. ‘The Velvets used to let me drive,' she said.

‘Yeh, but yer used t' drive over people's gardens … it's a bit attention-seekin',' said Echo.

‘I think I should drive … It's not fair, just because I'm … you know … a gerrl.'

‘No it's not,' said Bags from somewhere deep inside his sweltering parka. ‘It's because you're a junkie.' The big boy didn't beat about the bush. Bags kept everything on him, there was no point in trying to bust his suitcase – he didn't have one. It was all in that bulging parka. You just knew he had it all stashed – the odd $20 here, the occasional $50 there, creamed off the gigs. They were no-payers but there's always a bit of loose change around. It could add up nicely at the end of twenty dates. Enough to pay for a serious blowout in New York and get photographed with Andy. Bags had decided, one day in the middle of third-year history, that there were the schnorrers at the back drawing naked girls on each other's exercise books, there were the clean-limbed slaves of learning at the front taking down the dates, and there was him in the middle, putting two and two together and waiting for the dinner bell.

We pulled up for gas.

‘Can everyone just stay in the goddam car?' said Axel. ‘Just sit tight. Every time we fill up you guys shoot off in all directions.'

He went to pay. Everyone got out. Echo went to look for friends that lived under stones. He came back with a small lizard. Nico was sitting behind the wheel.

‘It's my turn to drive.'

‘We don't take turns,' said Echo. ‘We've got a driver, you're the singer, remember?'

‘I don't see why I shouldn't drive a little of the way …' She was sweating and trembling. The methadone was gone.

‘C'mon Nico,' said Bags. ‘We've got the Rockies ahead – some dangerous curves and bends.'

She wouldn't let go of the wheel. Echo put the lizard on her shoulder. It ran down her front. She screamed and leapt out of the car. Everyone dived for their regular seats. Business as usual.

We had to put Nico on a flight to L.A. She had friends there who could take care of her habit while we made the big Steinbeck schlepp in our Model T across Nevada, through Death Valley, to the orange groves and the blue Pacific.

Bags briefly removed the parka to reveal a T-shirt that would never be white again. It wasn't just his feet that stank – the whole of him reeked. The parka had merely absorbed the smell. Now we had a big fat cheese in the front seat, sweating and ripening as we drove through one of the hottest places on earth.

We filled up with enough gas to make our crossing of Death Valley, and six plastic packs of ice – the ice cost as much as the petrol. Echo was sweating it out in his crib. He hadn't said a word all day. Spider Mike's face looked meaner than ever – his enormous nose distending into some grotesque baboon-like proboscis. Axel had ripped off all his clothing except for his jockey shorts and combat boots. Bags was already smacking his parched lips at the shimmering mirage of an Olympic-size pool – filled with Italian ice cream. And I could tell Smiler was about to flip – his brains were already scrambled with the heat and the hate from Nico. His smile was now a tight, inflexible grimace that stretched across his face.

Axel thundered on, foot stretched out, the pedal down hard, knuckles white on the wheel. This would be his finest hour.

‘Do or die!' He screamed a Rebel Yell.

It was Bags's turn on the radio. But there was nothing to pick up. He tweaked and twitched through the wave-bands; finally he touched on a station. In the distance you could hear it through the crackle of white noise: ‘Physical – I wanna get physical/Let me hear your body talk, body talk.'

Silence … except for the sound of wheels on hot dust. I turned to check on Echo. He looked dangerously pale, in a foetal crouch, sweating through his shirt. The icepack had melted and fallen from his head. I straightened it for him. His brow felt feverish, his eyes were closed, but his lips were mumbling something. I bent over the seat to listen. Very faintly, from the innermost resources of his trembling lost soul, I could hear the distant trace of The Silver Sweet Siren Song of The Eternal Feminine:

‘Ph-physical … I wanna g-get ph-physical …'

Salvation Sister

Echo was recuperating in the shade of his room at the Tropicana. Every so often he'd peek through the drapes in the hope of spotting Tom Waits, declining to stray outside. After the experience of withdrawals in Death Valley he'd had enough intense experiences for a while. He was fairly straight by now and therefore in low spirits. His guilty past was creeping up on him. Recovering from heroin dependence puts you back in touch with sex. Echo was extremely disconcerted by the unannounced erections he'd begun to experience. He was further mortified by the sudden appearance of four girls cavorting naked in the pool, plus cameraman and director. They were adding the final touches to a searing, post-
noir
exploration into the dark underbelly of Hollywood subculture:
Planet Pussy.

We had a few days to kill before the first show. Needless to say we were penniless and of course there was nowhere to go anyway. Just setting foot out of the lobby dumped you in another reality where limbs were redundant. You even needed a car to cross the street, no concessions whatsoever were made to pedestrianism.

Nico was staying with some long-time-no-see pals from the good old days of Vaudeville up in Beverly Hills. People who weren't obliged to share their pool with porno starlets. Big Boy Bags and his playmate, Axel, had taken the car and gone off to join her for the day. Echo and I just mooched around his room talking about food.

Bags and Axel turned up in the early evening. They looked edgy, feigning politesse, coked-up, struggling to be straight.

‘We guessed you guys might be hungry,' said Axel. ‘So look what we gotya.' He held out a paper carrier. Echo took it. Inside were some folded paper napkins, each containing bits of dead food … a chicken carcass with a few shreds of meat left on it, a few dried and disillusioned curls of smoked salmon, a couple of mange-tout peas, squashed
petits fours
, a disintegrated cake, and a quarter bottle of Californian Sancerre. Echo and I looked down at this decomposing corpse of a dinner party.

‘How can we possibly begin to express our gratitude?' I said. ‘That you should even find time in your busy schedule to consider our needs … it really is a mark of true professionalism.'

‘Hey, Lord Jim. No sweat/We done got all that we could get.'

Nico showed up in a Rolls Royce. A uniformed chauffeur unceremoniously yanked her out, supporting her as she staggered through the lobby. It turned out someone had introduced her to the Big Dipper ride through Hell that is Angel Dust. That stuff has nothing to do with ‘getting high' – instead it transforms the user into an android with a vice-like grip and a mission to search and destroy. Every drug burns off precious and finite psychic energy. Depending on the chemical agent, it can be an hour, a day, or even a week – Angel Dust should be kept in cremation urns.

Nico suddenly looked so old. Her skin hung from her bones. Later she recounted some of the experience to us. ‘It was like being in the Electric Chair.' She'd even broken some of her teeth.

‘Good job yer got a good dinner down yer before'and,' said Echo, nodding towards the debris.

There was a certain kind of person who thought it would be cool to share a drug with Nico. Or introduce her to a new one. It would make a good celebrity story. And Nico was something of a celebrity in narcotic circles. Queen of the Junkies. She was famous within a limited milieu, i.e. heroin users and those who thought self-destruction a romantic vocation.

Porno-pool life continued unabated. Each day the girls would arrive dressed like aerobics instructors, electric-blue spandex leotards and pink tank tops. Half an hour later they'd be leaping around with spurting hose-pipes, dressed in black PVC G-strings and garter belts. Echo still couldn't bear to leave his room, the sexual ‘jiggery-pokery' disturbed him so much.

But he still spent all his time peering out from the corner of his window. He maintained he was actually looking out for Tom Waits. ‘I reckon sex is best left ter the professionals.'

We were to play our first L.A. show at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. It was supposed to be the last night of the club's existence. Perhaps the management thought Nico would provide the appropriate funereal solemnity. It was a decent-sized crowd. Except when I asked around, it turned out most of them had come to see the support act, an all-girl Japanese American beat combo in miniskirts and black and white Rickenbackers. After watching them for five minutes it became clear that our musical styles were incompatible. Not only were they sexier than we were, they had some great tunes and an irresistible beat. Surf City was going to love Neolitha the Moon Goddess and her ancient harmonium wheezing out centuries of middle-European angst.