One Train Later: A Memoir (42 page)

Afterward as we sign autographs there are a lot of signs of the cross being made and murmurings about vampires. "Vampira, vampira," they say in shocked whispers as they proffer small floral autograph books and ticket stubs. "Welcome to the pampas," says one slightly less rural journalist type, grinning over the bobbing heads. It occurs to me that we should make the bat a permanent feature, give the show a nice Ozzy Osbourne touch; does it have an agent?

This Nosferatu theme is echoed a couple of years later when I turn up in Slovenia for a gig. In my imagination before going to Slovenia, I see a beautiful old Eastern European town with a lovely old art deco theater, food, wine, and adoring women. We drive over the border from Trieste in Italy. Immediately the sky seems to darken, and the trees, like in a spooky children's story appear to grasp at us with long, sinister claws. We pull over to a building that's like something out of a sixties Hammer film and discover with an inward grimace that this is our hotel. It is Gothic, to say the least, and might be better described as a Transylvanian flophouse. The rooms are dark and tawdry, with filthy sheets on the beds, and I wonder if by morning I will have metamorphosed into a giant cockroach. Should I hang garlic over the door? Wear a crucifix? Michael Shrieve and Jerry Watts leave before I do to check bass and drums, respectively, and then about an hour later I get picked up for the drive to the venue-wherever it is. The two guys who collect me are tall and gaunt with stringy shoulder-length hair and speak almost no English. I climb into the back of what might he a Russian car, and we hit the road like a bat out of hell.

The roads are unlit; the towns are dark menacing shapes with no sign of the living; and the fields are black but probably full of black demonic troglodytes. "Highway to Hell" plays on the car stereo at stomach-wrenching volume, and I think that I will almost certainly go to the grave with the sounds of AC/DC ringing in my ears. I feel very sick. Amazingly, we make it-that is, we pull up in a field that has a small concrete building and a neon sign on the side blinking intermittently with the word KLUB. This is it: gone the beautiful old Transylvanian theater, gone the red wine of the Baltic States, gone the adoring women and the encores between plush red velvet curtains.

I step out of the car into about nine inches of mud and drag myself to the mouth of this hellhole. It is dark and icy with a small stage at one end, no salon des artistes, no genial promoter. Jerry and Michael are on the stage, looking desperate and defeated. I make one or two ironic remarks about showbiz and then spot the bar-there is only one way to put up with this. I order not one but two lemon vodkas and drink them fast. This takes the edge off, and suddenly it seems like just another amusing moment in the ever changing tableau. "As long as we don't get killed," I say encouragingly to the boys, but there seems to be a good chance that we will. The few youths around the place are looking at us in an ugly sort of way; only the blood-heating vodka gives me the strength to smile wanly in their direction. One of the tall-and-gaunts manages to garble out something about food, and we follow him back out into the field and around to the other side of the building, where there is a garishly lit room with a bar. "Sit," we are told. "Food come." The war with Bosnia is just a few miles down the road, and my smiling drunk-and-happy falling about does not go down too well with the locals crowded in the bunker; there is a vibe.

We sit at our table and all eyes are on us as we quaff the red wine that appears-I would like to say brought by the landlord's buxom daughter, but instead it is a brutish-looking thing with a scrappy beard and a mouthful of broken teeth who surely must answer to the name of Igor. The food is a huge pile of red meat on a tray; there is nothing else-no vegetables, no sauce, no condiments, nothing-and it's dumped down before us as if in challenge. But like vampires, we lean forward and suck it up.

Now we have to entertain. We go back to the stage, burping and belching, and clamber up onto the wooden boards, where we have to change on a set of stairs at the side of the stage in full view of the audience. It is all pointless but we do it anyway, turning it into a sort of strip show. They are not amused. The crowd in the dark below us is 90 percent male, with a haunted look of extreme discontent, the look of the undead. The music coming over the PA is of the furious death-metal kind and is what they are expecting; this feels like a suicide mission. We get out on the stage and I open with "Hackensack" by Monk. This doesn't go over too well. Someone yells out, "Metal!" and I briefly consider doing "Wade in the Water" but think better of it and carry on with something of my own. It is a grim moment in which I have never felt so unwanted. We churn on for a while, hoping we will break through, but they want metal and that's it. Their country is at war, they are depressed, it's a bleak moment, they need a soundtrack to mirror the rage they are feeling-and I am not providing it. I cut the set short, sign no autographs, and head back through the black night to the inn of misery, which features a very raunchy live porno show until six A.M.

Back in Argentina, the tour ends in the city of Cordoba, somewhere in the middle of the country. After the final concert we have a day to pack up and then catch the evening flight out of there. In the afternoon everyone but me disappears to the airport to check on the flight and make sure that the gear gets on, etc. My passport has been taken to show that we are who we say we are. I decide to walk around the depressing little town and take photographs with my Leica, a habit I have practiced for several years. I spend about two or three hours shooting and am finally returning to the hotel when a window catches my eye: the sunlight is falling on it in an interesting way, illuminating a piece of rolled-up paper with flies all over it. I bend down, raise the Leica, begin photographing from several oblique angles, until I feel a tap on my shoulder.

Thinking it's a fan or something, I ignore it. "Senor,"conies the voice again, this time with more urgency, "identification, por favor. " I turn around and, horror of horrors, it's the bloody cop again-or if it isn't him, it's his twin brother. My gut turns to ice. Now what? 'Identification, identification, "he demands, holding out five sausages and a steak masquerading as his hand. I feel stupid-I have nothing except a driver's license and a couple of credit cards, which I proffer with a hopeful smile. He is not impressed by American Express and asks again for ID. I gulp and try a few feeble attempts in Spanish, to no avail-he isn't budging. "Viene," he barks, and gripping me by the arm, we march off down the street. Estacion,"he grunts, and grips me tighter. I get the idea that he taking me to the police station and feel the familiar hollow in my stomach again-now bloody what? We pace across a dusty yard off the street and into a set of bleak concrete buildings that apparently constitute the station.

Inside Hermann Goring (or his double) is sitting at a desk. The cop says something in rapid-fire Spanish to Hermann, and I am shuffled off into an adjacent office and motioned to sit down. I desperately think about making a run for it and then also imagine the spray of bullets penetrating my body as I pitch headlong into the hot dust, which no doubt would make for good rock legend. But how am I going to explain it to my building society manager?

I am in the shit again-it doesn't feel very good-the ceiling fan turns like a dying pulse above my head, flies buzz around the room, the temperature pushes over a hundred. A feeling of panic begins to fill me as I realize that this is deadly serious: I have no identification, no one here speaks English, and I am alone. The guys will return from the airport and I will simply have vanished, become one of los desaparecidos. A tall man with cropped hair enters the room, his piercing blue eyes staring at me through steel-rim spectacles. Whoever the costume designer is for this lot is doing a splendid job. He proceeds to interrogate me. "Soy musico, concierto anoche. " I even resort to using "The Police, Sting," in the vain hope that it might bring a vague hint of recognition, but no, it means nothing to him-nada. A butterfly suddenly flutters into view through a small window high up on the wall; its dancing down like an alien creature in this office seems to me a small beacon of hope. It flutters low and in front of Goring's facie; without taking his eyes off me, he lashes out, grabs the butterfly and crushes it with one hand, and then says, "Claro,"picks up the phone, barks into it, and motions for me to get up-I am being moved. I get the idea that I am to be taken somewhere else. I start to write my obituarydead in an Argentinian jail, disappeared in South America, lost to the world, gone-it would be a glamorous ending to a misspent life and would look good on the front page of the Guardian, but I don't feel quite ready for it.

I am hustled outside into the yard again, and we frog-march to the front gate. I am being moved to the main station. As I stand flanked by heavies, the ice forming in my heart, another man crosses the yard, someone I haven't seen before. He stares at me in a peculiar way and then tells me that he speaks English and asks what is going on. With a huge sigh of relief, I tell him that I was merely taking photographs like a tourist-just having a good time, I played last night, etc. He asks me if I have any identification, I hand him my driver's license, he takes it and turns his hack to me. I imagine he's having a good laugh at my expense or thinking about which fingernail to rip out first when he turns back to me and asks "Are You Andy Summers of the Police?" My heart sinks-they are going to get me this time, they haven't forgotten the incident a few years ago-but yes, I nod vigorously, yes. His face breaks into a radiant smile. "I am big rock fan-I love Police-nice to meet you." I practically break down and weep but manage to croak out, "Why am I here? What did I do?" "Oh," he says, "you were taking photographs of the bank window; we thought that you were probably part of a gang and were casing the joint." I would have laughed but I felt too distraught-and what is the point of going into a long explanation about art photography and the aesthetics of Cartier-Bresson? He smiles, warns me not to take pictures of the bank in the future, and says, "Alright, you can go." I shake his hand one more time and walk up the street to the hotel like a man reprieved seconds before going to the chair.

Twenty-One

After the Buenos Aires balls-up we hit Rio for a few days and then close out the year with the masterstroke of playing a tent on Tooting Bec Common. Someone has had the bright idea of "playing in a tent for Christmas"-nice for the kids. So, we leave the white sand of Ipanema, Sugarloaf Mountain, the swaying dental-floss bikinis of Rio, the softly throbbing pulse of the bossa nova; get into the Concorde; drop by Senegal; catch another flight in Paris; and end up, ten thousand miles later, in a sea of mud and biting December wind on 'Tooting Bec Common.

I have just enough time to meet and reunite with Kate and Layla before being driven over to Tooting. It is with a wave of emotion that I walk through the door, pick up the baby, and kiss her and Kate together; in the warmth of their embrace, the plane flights, giant crowds, and the fascist regime of Argentina melt away like spring snow. But Kate and I always need a period of readjustment. I return full of adrenaline-having been with the band, having been with men, talking bullshit-and expect everything to bend to my will. Kate returns to the relationship from a soft world of motherhood, having been alone with an infant, and with her own set of ideas about marriage. We reach for each other, but the fabric of our partnership is wearing thin and I have to leave again.

The show is sold out. The gigantic tent holds five thousand, and already there are about ten thousand mud-spattered fans pushing and shoving to get inside. In the Christmas spirit we have had the clever notion to have Tommy Cooper open the show. Tommy is a well-loved TV star in England, an English institution, and we think the crowd will love him. It's a disaster. Most of the kids in the audience have no idea who he is, and they ruin the show by screaming out for the Police all through Tommy's act. As if he has just been stoned, Tommy comes offstage white and shaking, vowing never to do that again. We feel very embarrassed and upset that we have put him, one of our heroes, through such a wringer-good intentions gone wrong.

Finally we get on and it's the usual bloody riot, but this time with dangerous overcrowding and stifling air inside the tent. A large number of fans get carried out by the redoubtable men of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, only now they don't appear to be faking it. Naturally, the next day in the press we get slagged for having the arrogance of putting our fans through such an ordeal and endangering their lives-who do we think we are?-the usual predictable small-minded and boring crap that the English tabloids come up with on a daily basis.

Two nights later, as the capper to the year, we have a big bash at the Holiday Inn Chelsea. This party-our celebration-is the hottest party in London. I sit with Kate at a long table and grin and smile and grip her hand as we display ourselves for the interminable lines of people and paparazzi waiting to meet us. But beneath the hallucinatory party fever I feel the tension of trying to reconnect with Kate and at the same time trying to keep up the requisite rock-and-roll persona. She is a private person-the glaring spotlight of publicity is not to her taste-and beneath the strobe of white light she feels the reality of a relationship that is becoming more difficult despite efforts on both sides. Layla is at home with a babysitter we have never used before, which doesn't help either, and halfway through the evening Kate decides to go home to make sure that everything is okay. I get a car for her and we kiss and she murmurs in my ear, "Do your thing, darlin."

I return to the fray, throw myself into the intoxicating whirl, and after several glasses of champagne decide there is only one thing to do: jump fully clothed into the pool. Someone shoves one of the A&M guys in first, and with cameras flashing in a feeding frenzy, we all follow. The next day it's all over the papers with a tabloidesque "rich and spoiled pop stars cavorting while the world suffers" story line. We have to justify our newfound financial status; we have started a charity organization and are giving all our English earnings away, liking throwing a hone to a rabid dog in the hope that it won't tear your throat out.