by James Young
Eric Random
Da-Ga-Di-Di Da-Ga-Dum
Da-Ga-Di-Di Da-Ga-Dum
Do Da De Ge
Do Da De Ge
RIPPPP!
Demetrius flung the cassette to the back of the bus.
‘That stuff’s dangerous!’
We had a new recruit, a tabla player from Manchester, called Eric Random. Eric had been part of the early eighties Manchester Scene. First hanging out with Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, who wrote a song about him called ‘What do I Get?’; then as one of Shelley’s Tiller Boys; and latterly forming his own punkadelic group, Eric Random and the Bedlamites.
Eric had swung this way and that. Shelley had tried to grab his pendulum, but the little fella was hard to catch. Slippery as a tube of KY, petite, with shiny black hair and a bone structure that Vogue models would kill for, Eric would provide an essential element missing since Echo’s departure – Cool. He didn’t actually ‘play’ those tablas, nothing so crude, he seduced them as they sat coyly on a riser above the stage. First he’d remove the heavy black silk drape that protected them, then he’d shower their skins with baby talc. He’d sit cross-legged, in his own spotlight, Tantric medallion gleaming on his neck. An instant harem of adoring females would gather around his corner of the stage.
Random had spent some time in the Himalayas, smoking bongs, climbing personal mountains. He’d put himself in touch with some of the higher experiences but now he was ready to come down and get shagged.
Though Random had been talent-spotted by Demetrius, the Doctor’s new protégé drove him crazy with the Indian music. He genuinely found it psychologically distressing – too linear, abstract, he liked words that you could sing along to, stuff rooted in the common clay. Great clouds of marijuana smoke would come wafting from the back of the bus as Random puffed massive lungfuls from a chillum improvised out of a Coke tin. He’d drink the Coke (breakfast), then immediately get to work bending and shaping the tin into a pipe, scraping away the paint and piercing little holes in the aluminium to accommodate the hash. One day archaeologists will be digging up Random’s tins and reinterpreting them as unique counter-cultural artefacts.
Nico thought he was cute.
‘Oh, Eric,’ she’d say, in a singsong voice, ‘have you got a little bit of haash?’
He’d give her a piece to roll one of her individual-size joints.
‘You see,’ she’d pointedly tell Demetrius, ‘Eric knows what I need to be happy.’
We decided to decorate the new bus in a manner suited to kings of the road. We bought some stick-on girlie pinups from a French gas station, a dangling Saint Christopher and a luminous madonna, and a great Fire Eagle to stick on the bonnet. We got to the van next morning – Nico had been so incensed that for the first time in years she’d got up early and taken them all down, except for the Eagle, which couldn’t be removed. Within twenty-four hours, though, she made her own contribution to the bus decor by setting her ashtray alight and burning the upholstery.
Demetrius the commander, Raincoat the driver, plus passengers Nico, me, Toby, Random and a sound engineer from Ashton-under-Lyne called Wadada. Wadada had spent a lot of time mushroom-picking up on the Saddleworth Moors. He believed that all phenomena could be divided into two categories of good and evil: ‘Devil’ and ‘Righteous’. Meat was ‘devil-food’ and Nico’s act was ‘devil-music’. Demetrius had also taken him on as a reserve driver, but he was too shortsighted to see the road clearly. Wadada had recently been in Kingston, Jamaica, producing the great Prince Far-I, but had to return to Babylon after Prince Far-I was murdered.
En route to Yugoslavia we did a couple of warm-ups, spaced out just far enough to pay the gas, hotels and smack. The gigs were nothing special, but:
Paris
Demetrius had gone off to buy some cakes. He hated this kind of thing. Nico pressed the buzzer. The lobby door opened. Nico, Random and I entered the handsome marble foyer of an apartment block in one of the more fashionable arrondissements. There was a bowl of glacé mints on a smoked-glass table. Nico stubbed out her cigarette.
Mirrored lift. Bach Double Violin Concerto serenading us to the top floor.
We stood in the hallway. The fish-eye spyglass darkened for a second. Then the unlocking began. First the mortice, the bolt, then the door creaked open a couple of inches on a chain. Nico peeked her nose into the crack.
‘It’s me, Nico.’
The door opened on to a scene of pure devastation. What had once been a chic pied-à-terre for the discreet lunchtime affairs of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie had been reduced to a microcosm of Beirut. The walls were smoke-blackened. The curtains eaten by fire. The sofa and chairs charred and disembowelled. The kitchen was piled high with the solidified remains of a hundred spaghetti dinners. The sweet, pungent reek of lactic acid and stale parmesan vomit cut through the all-pervading smell of burning.
In the far corner, crouched by the gutted TV, was a woman of about twenty-five pushing forty-five. A curtain of henna’d hair half covered her face, the other half was a mass of scabs and running sores. Her arms were bare and crisscrossed with needle scars. Her legs likewise.
‘Monica?’ said Nico.
The girl made an effort to look up in our direction. Just then a male voice from behind us said in English, ‘If you come for ze stuff zere’s nossing. Ze bitch ’as’ad it.’
A small guy in a leather blouson, with greying hair, stepped from behind the door. He strode across the room and dragged the girl to her feet by her hair. ‘Salope!’ He smacked her across the face. She didn’t flinch.
‘Excuse me …’ I said.
‘You shoot your mouse.’
Random and I made a move towards him. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun, just to show us he was carrying a bit of weight, then replaced it.
‘Listen,’ said Random, ‘we’ve just popped in on the off-chance, like, of a bit o’ business.’
‘You can shoot your fucking mouse too, ass’ole.’
‘But,’ Nico pleaded, ‘I need to get straight … Monica and I will get some stuff and we’ll bring some back for you too, I promise … just don’t do that to her, pleease.’
The guy still had the girl by the hair. He was thinking.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that sounds like the best plan …’
‘I sought I tell you to shoot it,’ the guy snarled at me.
We all stood in silence, except the girl, who was still kneeling, still held up by her hair.
‘OK’ he said, ‘ze chicks can go for ze stuff. You two wet ’ere.’ He shoved Monica’s head into his crotch. ‘Don’t come back empty-’anded, or shiz back on ze strit’ – and threw her away from him.
Nico helped the girl to the door. As soon as they opened it, a well-groomed man in a camel coat burst in, looking around in horror. ‘My God! My apartment! What have you bastards done?’ (He was the landlord and had been hovering around, waiting for someone to open the door.) He ran straight over to the guy and landed him one right in the mouth. We exited with the girl.
The bus was parked on the corner across the street. ‘Go!’ shouted Nico, once we were inside, ‘Just go!’
Raincoat slammed his foot down and we careered off down the blind alleys of backstreet Paris.
Nico and Monica scored off the street and had it cooked and loaded in a jiffy. They were true professionals.
‘Where’s Demetrius?’ I asked.
‘He’s still in the cakeshop,’ said Toby.
We turned back to pick him up. There he was, standing where the bus had been, looking a little lost, holding a prettily wrapped box of cream cakes.
He jumped into the front seat, unaware of all the drama, and opened the cakes.
‘We have a guest,’ I said.
Demetrius turned round, saw the girl, nodding out on Nico’s shoulder.
‘Care for a chocolate éclair?’ he said, offering the open box to her. The girl lifted her head slightly, her eyes rolled up, and a small blob of vomit, like
baby puke, flopped out of her mouth.
Turned out the girl was the daughter of a South American movie star. Like Nico, she’d been taken up by Fellini, appearing in Casanova, and like Nico, she’d been dropped. Under the scabs and scars and the sweat-matted hair were the remnants of a real beauty. Demetrius wanted to save her. ‘Let me take you away from all this.’ But to what? To a corner cupboard in Brixton with Nico, Clarke and Echo? To a death worse than fate?
The next show was in the gingerbread town of Nuremberg in southern Germany. Needless to say we had to go and see the Zeppelinwiese Stadium, Hitler’s biggest gig. It was a huge amphitheatre, once a Zeppelin landing field, redesigned by Albert Speer, that in 1938 could hold a quarter of a million men and seventy thousand spectators. Indeed, the whole town had been one big rallying point, with one and a half million visitors for the Greatest Show on Earth. Hitler would deliver apoplectic rants from the podium (still there) that overlooked the parade ground.
The Nazi insignia have all been torn down, of course, although the impress of huge imperial eagles can still be detected in the pseudo-classicism of the arena, and the great bronze doors out of which the Führer would step to greet the massed multitudes still remain, scratched with graffiti, crude swastikas, ‘Walthamstow Boot Boys’, ‘Adolf loves Eva ’39’, that kind of thing.
Needless to say everyone had their snapshot taken on Hitler’s podium, except for Demetrius who, unable to leave the protective shadow of the bus, stood by the driver’s door in case a sudden Nazi renaissance required a quick Diaspora. Nico just stayed in her seat and whacked up a big one.
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?