Nico (19 page)

Next morning, still woozy from the Valium and with my broken heart tied to a ball and chain behind me, I dragged myself on to the Oslo-Stockholm train with Nico and Demetrius. This is one of the world's great train rides, over the mountains, looking out across the fjords. The carriages are laid out like drawing-rooms with sofas and armchairs and magazines to read. ‘Go away!' said Nico to a friendly steward offering her a complimentary newspaper. Then she scowled at me and turned on Demetrius. ‘What's the matter with him, blubbering away like that? Pay more attention to
me
!
Jesus … I need a
shot
!'

‘You certainly do, my dear,' whispered Demetrius as the other passengers turned round, ‘right between the eyes. Can't you see the boy's upset?'

‘Over some silly little whore …'

Later, when she'd got herself straight, Nico sluiced her syringe clean, squirting a needle jet of bloody water into her mouth. ‘Jim … why do you get so upset? You know women
are
inferior.'

We rolled off the boat into the grim and sullen port of Gdansk. As we drove to Warsaw through a unique topography of puddles, empty dirt roads, cabbage fields and extinct Nazi deathcamps, a perpetual grey fog, like battle smoke, never lifted. The war was still on in Poland.

(We'd come the hard way from Malmö, Sweden, in a decrepit tub – incredibly called the
Vulva
–
stinking of ship-grease, oil and disinfectant. There was a bar on the boat, the Sky Bar, that sold only vodka and took only hard currency. It had a disco, about six foot square. Apart from the magnificent seven of us, there were just a couple of other people in the bar, both of them hookers. The moment we sat down one of them got up from her stool and started a hideous fertility dance alone in the disco spotlight. A massive, treetrunk-legged escapee from an agricultural collective, she'd clearly received her sexual education bending over in the fields, planting potatoes, boared like a sow from behind. Her cheeks were ruddy with broken veins, her mouth thin and mean like a peasant. She looked like she knew how to wring a chicken's neck. She stomped about to an Abba song while we looked on. Demetrius fancied a go, just to outrage Nico. ‘It'll be like fuckin' a bucket,' said Raincoat.)

Wadada had a cassette of Fauré's
Requiem
, for which he was working out a Dub version. Demetrius was less than enraptured.

‘Has somebody died?' he asked Wadada. Demetrius had a very honest and pragmatic approach to music – meaning was derived from context, everything had its place. Requiems did not belong in a Talbot tour bus. He proposed Country & Western, which was made for the road. No one wanted it. Random offered to put on a tabla exposition, recorded live in Benares. Nope. We sat in silence.

Nico was still exiled in her special seat in the bus, ashtray overflowing, wrapped up in a patchwork sheepskin jacket, silent and withdrawn. The fog rolled by. We'd wipe the condensation from the windows, but there was nothing to see and nowhere to stop and eat, just grey fading into black.

Then lights started to appear in the blackness, figures, more lights. We'd drive on. The gathering of lights increased, we could begin to distinguish people, faces illuminated by candlelight, gravestones. We reasoned, as it was November 2, that it must be All Souls' Night. In Poland, perhaps, the dead have more significance than the living. We drove on through dark and empty villages, to find, on the outskirts, the graveyards alight with humanity. It continued for a couple of hours, and even when the friends of the dead had dispersed the candles were left burning on the graves. Then it was black night again.

Suddenly Nico leapt from her seat. ‘Look! It's Jim!' She peered into the rolling fog. ‘I can see him …'

‘Jim's 'ere, in the back,' said Toby. ‘Aren't yer, Jim?'

I reassured Nico I was there.

‘No-o-o. No-o-o … not
you,
Jim.' Nico continued staring into the night. ‘Jim
Morrison
… I can see him … there … loook!' She pointed out into the empty fog.

We all strained to see.

‘Where?' asked Toby.

‘Can't see fook,' said Raincoat.

We carried on trying to discern the lead singer of the Doors out there in the nothingness.

‘'Ang on,' said Wadada, squinting through his bifocals. ‘I think I might'ave clocked a visage …'

Sure enough, it was the Lizard King himself, a-writhin' around in his black leathers, sucking off the mike, dancing us all into an early grave. Like him, we'd all died and been sent to Poland for our purple sins.

Joy awaited Nico in Warsaw in the form of a horse needle and a bottle of ‘kompot'. Kompot, so-called because it resembles a drink made from a compote of mixed fruit, is actually a kind of opium vodka, distilled from poppy heads. Poles (check your local deli) like to eat bread with poppy seeds sprinkled on top, and poppy seed cake (a kind of marble cake with poppy seed veins). Such eating habits support a sub-economy of kompot distillers, all of whom are addicts or ‘narkomanis' themselves.

‘It's the best hit I've ever had,' said Nico, overjoyed to be back in a cultural milieu she recognised … The Living Dead.

The rest of us would have been happy with just a few of the poppy seed cakes, as we still hadn't eaten anything other than a sandwich made from kabanos sausage – ‘devil food,' said Wadada.

We played the same hall they use for the international Chopin competition and I used the same piano. In fact there was a bewildering choice of four Steinway concert grands. It was an absurdly grandiose and formal setting for our small thing and our performance was consequently as reserved as the seats. The audience applauded politely and looked on, serious and subdued. I think the problem was that, for once, Nico was out-doomed. It was a relief to get back to the kompot in the dressing-room, where the promoter was waiting with another kabanos sausage each for us. He was another Miloscz/Bendini type. I had them narrowed down by now. They were the brainy loners – their career opportunities would exist either in serial-killing or pop promotion.

Zbigniev, ‘Ziggy', had a zit problem. Nico offered to squeeze them for him.

‘Wow! My God!! To be hearink zuch think from Nico, Welvet Undergron Warhola Zuperztar.'

Ziggy paid us about ten million zlotys each and then took us to our hotel for a ‘zpecial' hello/goodbye/thankyou zupper.

A crowd was gathered around the bus, and after we were jostled and thanked and shaken and pressed we realised we'd all been dipped. Just little things – Walkmans, cigarettes, Eric Random's hair-gel and eyeliner.

We followed Ziggy and his pals as they drove us through the 1950s time tunnel cold war ambience. You could almost hear the pompous synthesizer music and the brooding po-faced commentary.

Ziggy pulled up about twenty yards from the hotel. He wouldn't be coming in, he wasn't allowed … foreigners and nationals couldn't fraternise in the international hotels. He realised it was the first opportunity we'd had for a decent meal since Sweden, so he'd wait outside for us. We watched Ziggy and his pals hanging around outside smoking while we broke our fillings on pieces of shot from the wild pheasant.

Next morning Demetrius showed up, ashen grey. He'd been wandering the streets since dawn, where the old ghetto had been, talking with ‘the ghosts of my people'.

Nico was trying to be friends again. Happy on the kompot, she'd begun to notice the existence of others and her abscess was beginning to heal. The horse needle had helped her to draw off the pus. ‘Look!' she said to Demetrius, holding up the syringe for his approval, like a kid with her potty, ‘two ccs!'

‘My God, Nico … I think you must inhabit a separate reality from the rest of us.' Demetrius shoved his Vick inhaler up one nostril. ‘I've just spent the morning breathing in the dust of 400,000 murdered innocents.'

She didn't understand. Her leg was getting better. The kompot was great. She'd be in good shape for Berlin … Ghetto?

Berlin, Latin Quarter

‘All Tomorrow's Parties' – a capella.

… -/---------
/------,

-/------------
/----,

--/----/
and
/-----/---
/------- …

---'--/-------/----/--
/-------/------!

[Permission to reproduce lyrics refused]

… ‘You're staring down my fucking throoaat!' Nico broke off mid-song to deal with a vampette who'd been locked on her every move. She had the audience totally intimidated – which is exactly what they'd paid for. (In contrast to the last time we'd played Berlin.) Again it wasn't the music, but the vibe people came to pick up on. If you were a happy, well-adjusted, straight-ahead, thinking, caring sort of person, then you'd probably be satisfied with a sermon and blessing from Sting. If you were totally fucked, you were probably at th
e Latin Quarter.

We had to drive from Berlin to Rotterdam in one day. As all motorists had to observe the speed limit down the corridor it would mean an eight- or ten-hour journey. We were doing OK until we hit a tailback, north of Hanover. The truckers were holding a lightning strike across northern Germany, and were blocking the autobahn lanes.

We sat, waited and debated. Random jumped out and with his pocket knife tried to stab the tyres of an articulated lorry. It was about as effective as a mosquito biting the leg of an elephant. We waited. Demetrius decided he was going to get us out of this jam and to the gig on time. ‘Don't they realise we're entertainers? We can't disappoint our public, we have a duty to the audience which far exceeds our responsibility to the German economy.' He pulled us off on to the hard shoulder. The other motorists scowled at us, but before long we had a beat-up old white Audi following us full of Turkish
Gast-arbeiter
.
This infuriated the truckers even more, and they blocked off the hard shoulder. A motorist got out of his VW, a slightly hippy type in a lilac duvet coat, and banged on the window. Demetrius wound it down.

‘You vill stop please and svitch off your engine! Ve don't vont your pollution!'

Demetrius looked at him and slowly wound the window up in his face. ‘Even the environmentalists are only obeying orders.' He revved the engine and turned off on to the grass verge. It was now dark, and I prayed Demetrius wouldn't drive us into a ditch. We lumbered on at a tilt for a few kilometres, until the next exit, where we pulled off on to a small road. It was badly lit and we had no idea where we were. We drove around, probably in circles, for about half an hour, until we came to an abrupt halt before a roadsign which read ‘Bergen Belsen'. No one said anything. Demetrius just turned the bus round and we headed back to the autobahn, tucking ourselves discreetly into the mainstream of the body politic.

Amsterdam: Paradise Regained

As ever, you couldn't find anywhere to sit in the dressing-room at the Paradiso. Most of the seats were taken by girlies, queueing up for Eric Random's Tantric Love Juice. There was an anorexic poet called Arnaud who looked like a pierrot in a baggy white suit. He did press-ups in the middle of the floor while reciting his poems in Dutch. Nico and her group were incidental. Demetrius would let anyone he wanted in now, it was his tour. Some kind of turning-point had been reached in Eastern Europe.

‘I give therefore I am,' he would say, and invite strangers to help themselves to our drinks.
His
tour,
his
party,
his
choice of companions. Nico had suddenly become extraneous, a walk-on in her own movie, carrying a hypodermic needle. The music beca
me even more marginalised. If Nico couldn't be congenial towards her host then she could ‘bug off'.

Dr Demetrius seemed to have grown taller and expanded even further in status. His tie was straight again. His hat fitted at last. His fits had abated, his debilitating agoraphobia held at bay. ‘Yes, James,' he would say, ‘a man needs to keep a grip on his own potential, and not become deflected from his higher purpose in life by the mean-spirited and ungenerous, such as Fraulein Christa Paffgen.'

‘I like Nico,' I said, ‘she's OK … she's funny …' It didn't sound like much of a defence, but then I didn't feel that Nico needed defending.

‘A person only begins to become an individual when they cease to be the victim of their own temperament,' said Demetrius. ‘Nico is, ultimately, despite her amusement value, a parasite.'

‘In that case,' I said, ‘we're all parasitising ourselves by working with her.'

‘Wherefore such cynicism, James? Do I not detect in your tone the chaise-longued ennui of the Oxford common-room? You misunderstand me, I also like – love – Nico. But I know what she is.'

‘What's that then? You're hip to her secrets?'

‘Not especially – though occasional confidences have been placed with me, I feel that there are no great disclosures awaiting us that will suddenly reveal a deeply warm and caring human being. With Nico I feel that what you see is what you get.'

‘That's OK by me,' I said. ‘There's a kind of purity in her
…
in that remorseless monomania, that heroic indifference. Nico wouldn't piss on us if we were on fire, so at least we know where we stand. The problem is, you wanted her to love you, and she can't, so you're disappointed.'

‘I wanted love, certainly, but I feel that Nico also needs love, despite herself. I think we all of us need to divest ourselves of who or what we think we are, to risk a certain nakedness.'

‘Perhaps some people look better with their inhibitions on?' I suggested.

Demetrius shook his head. ‘Why is it, James, that you favour the smart riposte at the expense of authentic feeling? Dear God! The great Zero that lies at the heart of every Englishman. It's an emptiness he tries to fill with breeding, an Oxbridge education and the cultivation of influential friends, but none of this can disguise his essential poverty in matters of the heart.'