Nico

by James Young

  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 away 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 sulphurous yellow light, barely illuminating empty and dusty streets. Fear. Everyone in uniform. Our conspicuousness increased our latent paranoia.

  It felt good, though. It might seem a gratuitous reflection on other people’s suffering, but there was a tension here that was missing in the West. For a start, the people had strong faces, they looked like individuals, which is another thing we don’t see much of in the West. Telly and Pop sugar us up so much we still look like babies.

  It was a pleasure to find my hotel room rather amateurishly bugged. And the patched sheets, cold radiators and smell of cheap disinfectant gave it that authentic penitential feel, not unlike, I imagine, an English public school.

  Demetrius tried to contact our promoter in Prague, Miloscz, who every day had a different office number. ‘Nico needs something, or we can’t do the tour.’

  ‘What does she need?’ Miloscz didn’t know.

  ‘Fuel. Nico needs special fuel to keep her wheels rolling.’

  Miloscz understood. We had to meet him third traffic-light after the interchange coming into Prague from the Brno road.

  True to his promise, Miloscz was waiting at the appointed spot. We pulled into the hard shoulder. He beckoned a couple of us to get out. Behind a hedge he’d hidden a cache of petrol cans. Nico’s ‘fuel’. He’d interpreted Demetrius’s coded message literally and assumed Nico wanted paying in petrol.

  What she needed was heroin, Demetrius explained.

  ‘Heroin?? My God!’ Miloscz didn’t know what to say. Why had we asked for fuel? Heroin? He didn’t want to, couldn’t possibly, have anything to do with heroin.

  We took the petrol anyway, as Miloscz said we could exchange it later for diesel.

  Demetrius asked which hotel we were booked in.

  Hotel? Miloscz could help us find one, maybe, but hadn’t Nico’s agency already fixed that?

  We followed his car into the centre of Prague while Demetrius explained the situation to Nico. My heart went out to him as he told her that the petrol cans sloshing around her feet represented her performance fee and that the heroin would not be forthcoming. As the bus rolled into Wenceslas Square Nico was at her wits’ end. She had nothing left and no one cared.

  We parked up outside the elegant Hotel Europa and watched the Russian soldiers’ dismal foot patrol, followed by the occasional rusty armoured car. They were square-bashing the Czechs into submission. The oppression wasn’t so much hostile as omnivorously boring. The spotty toy soldiers didn’t want to be there, and the people didn’t want them there. For the heart of a city it sure was quiet. There were a couple of stalls selling pickled slices of some indeterminate grey fish. Apart from occasional pairs of old ladies with empty shopping bags, everyone seemed to be somehow alone. I realised when we’d all climbed out of the van that we were, in the eyes of a totalitarian régime, what constituted a crowd.

  As we were directly in front of the Europa, Nico assumed i
t must be our hotel, and began lugging her bag towards the entrance. When Demetrius pointed out that we weren’t actually staying there, that we didn’t, in fact, have any place to stay, she gave him a mighty kick in the balls, a steel-capped castrating avenger. When the heroin was out, Nico always seemed to get sudden bursts of energy.

  Demetrius doubled up, gasping for breath, his hands cupping what was left of his retracted testicles. Miloscz immediately disappeared. Passers-by smirked, but didn’t stop. The soldiers expressed a slight consternation as they goosestepped past, but they didn’t stop either. Nothing could alter the mechanical rhythm of the city’s artificial heart.

  ‘This is my tour,’ screamed Demetrius, emptying a bottle of Valium into his hand. ‘… Mine. She can go!’

  What Nico had done, in her tantrum of self-absorption, was to inject a small shot of human emotion into the bloodstream of that tragic paralysed city.

  *

  Miloscz was a bag of nerves. A Czech version of Paolo Bendini. Same lack of a haircut, same TopoGigio mouse expression. A fan, with no previous experience of the wrong end of Nico’s boot, he helped us to find a couple of hotels. The East Germans were having a public holiday and they’d all flooded into Prague; most places were full, so we’d have to split up. Nico on her own – quarantined and caged; the rest of us divided around the square.

  Demetrius asked Miloscz where the venue was.

  Venue? Maybe it was at a colliery about twenty kilometres east of the city … he’d have to check.

  Now his myriad phone numbers and addresses began to divulge their secret meaning. Miloscz was a man on the move, one step ahead of the secret police. The police were secret, so everything else in Czech life had to be. The venue was a closely guarded secret that even Miloscz would only know at the last minute.

  We drove out to the colliery, down mud tracks, past smoking slagheaps. Miloscz was waiting outside, waving at us to stop. The gig had been relocated to the university, but he had some more diesel for us if we wanted to swap the petrol.

  Nico was groaning and sweating, spitting a constant bile of hate, mostly in Demetrius’s direction. He accused her of Jew-baiting.

  ‘I am not your whipping-boy,’ he kept repeating.

  We drove up to the campus. Miloscz stopped us by a wall. He urged us to be quick. We had to haul our instruments over the wall and into the nearest lecture theatre.

  The place was full to bursting, the audience banked up vertically on desks so that we were nose to nose. We had to set up in front of them. There was no stage, no P.A. system, no lights other than the overhead striplighting, and no time to indulge ourselves in a soundcheck. We just plugged in and began.

  The audience seemed to plug in immediately as well. They didn’t need warming up, they weren’t going to be coy with us. Nico let fly with pure screams, shredding her lyrics to pieces. We’d played for maybe twenty-five minutes when Miloscz gave us the sign to quit. The audience stamped their feet, yelled and applauded, thanked us, shaking our hands as they left. I think in that twenty-five minutes we’d all probably concentrated the best we had in us.

  We hurriedly packed our instruments. The students kindly carried them down the corridor to the waiting bus for us. I got delayed talking to someone, hungry to pick my brains on some musical point or other. I’d never experienced, before or since, such interest and enthusiasm, such belief in the redemptive power of music.

  As I was catching up with the rest, I cast a glance into one of the classrooms. A guy in a shiny grey suit had a hold of Miloscz by the hair and was banging his head against the blackboard. I stopped in my tracks. The door slammed shut in my face. Someone grabbed my arm – it was the student I’d just been talking to. He bundled me off to the safety of the bus.

  We debated what to do – stay or go? Raincoat and Nico would remain in the bus while the rest of us went back to see what, if anything, we could do. A large crowd had gathered in the foyer, buzzing about the gig. We pushed abruptly past them to try and find Miloscz, but he was gone.

  Next day, as we were drinking tea and eating ersatz cream cakes in the Europa’s café, Miloscz walked in with two cans of diesel. His face was half hanging off. One of his eyes completely closed, the other cut and blackened.

  He explained that the concert had been illegal from the start. The police had been following him continuously for days – the coalmine had been a detour to try and throw them off. He was sorry for the deception, but he hadn’t wanted to alarm us or discourage us from playing. He was sorry too that Nico was unwell, but he didn’t know anything about heroin or where to get it. He hoped she/all of us would accept his apologies for the apparent disorganisation. If he’d booked hotels in advance for us that would have alerted the police sooner and we wouldn’t have even got into the country.

  ‘This music – dark music – is not popular with Authorities.’

  We stuffed him full of tea and cakes and asked him if he wanted to come with us for a drive (we were getting insecure away from the bus). Nico was staying in her hotel, she was too sick.

  ‘Fuck her,’ said Demetrius. Miloscz looked surprised.

  ‘Nico is difficult artist to work with?’ he asked.

  ‘First of all, let’s get our lexical definitions straight, Miloscz,’ said Demetrius, still wounded by Nico’s castration attempt. ‘I think we can safely subtract the noun “artist” and the verb “work” from that sentence. Nico is an ar-sehole rather than an ar-tist, and she’s never done an honest day’s work in her life.’

  ‘Yeh, but,’ Raincoat intervened on behalf of his patroness, ‘she’s never pulled a gig yet.’

  True, true, everyone nodded.

  ‘OK, then,’ said Demetrius to Miloscz, ‘let’s just say … Nico is a difficult arsehole to work with, and leave it at that.’

  As we set off with Miloscz in the bus, we noticed a rather grand fifties black saloon quite blatantly pull out behind us. Miloscz informed us that it was the cops in the shiny suits who’d ‘interviewed’ him the previous evening.

  As we pottered about the countryside north of Prague (the black saloon sulking close behind) we couldn’t figure out why there were fields of vegetables yet none in the restaurants and shops. (Nico’s vegetarianism meant she’d been subsisting on a wartime ration of carob chocolate and Europa cakes.)

  ‘All exported to Germany and Nederlands,’ said Miloscz.

  ‘Doesn’t seem right, some’ow,’ said Toby.

  ‘Perhaps is for the best,’ said Miloscz. ‘All vegetables contain double permitted levels of cadmium, lead and mercury. It’s better you eat only cakes.’ He chuckled, wincing with the pain in his jaw.

  In the evening we went to a hotel disco – the shiny suits followed us. It was the kind of place where you get fat sausage-eating German tourists and hookers with Kathy Kirby makeup, as well as the straightforward package tourists. Demetrius perked up.

  ‘Have you noticed how much happier we all are when Nico isn’t around?’ he asked. We half-heartedly agreed, but the truth was we all loved to watch the fights. They were like a bad marriage – compellingly awful.

  Demetrius and Raincoat fancied a spin on the dance-floor with the ‘ladies’. Raincoat sidled up to one. He pointed at her.

  ‘Are you …’ then he pointed to himself ‘… fer me?’

  The girl smiled sweetly. Raincoat shouted over the music. ‘Right then … ’ow much?’ He wanted to get down to business quickly. The girl didn’t quite understand. He pointed at her again. ‘For you … ’ow much? … dollaris? … monneta?’ Deeply offended and hurt, she gave Raincoat a slap across the face. She was just an East German student on a cultural trip to Prague, definitely not on the game. Her parents came up looking worried, the shiny suits were agitatedly conferring amongst themselves. Miloscz slipped out. Without Nico’s sweetly civilising influence we were just English yobs abroad.

  On our last morning in Prague we had nothing to spend our Czech koruna on, so we bought up lots of ‘authentic Bohemian black glass’ jewel
lery made from King Wenceslas’s glass eye.

  Miloscz turned up with goodbye gifts of diesel for us. Hugs and kisses and useless addresses. The shiny suits looked on as we packed the van with yet more cans of fuel. There was nowhere to put our feet, so our knees were up near our chins. Nico was deeply miserable. She’d developed a suppurating abscess on her leg and spent most of her time swabbing and dressing it.

  We rolled off slowly down the square, the diesel glugging ominously with every bump and lurch along the unsurfaced road. A bomb on wheels.

  The black saloon followed us dutifully a few paces behind. Raincoat clocked them in the mirror.

  ‘’Ave they got nothin’ better ter do?’ He scrambled around in the glove compartment for a cassette, whipping through the selections, and finally settling on one. Then, joining up with the slow patrol of military, secret police and German tourist coaches, he took us on a final circuit of Wenceslas Square. The windows down, he turned Ol’ Blue Eyes up full. Russian would be a crime –’cos Nice ’n’ Easy did it every time.

  *

  We briefly interrupted the Eastern Bloc tour to play a few dates in Scandinavia. The gigs were a dispiriting flop, after the enthusiasm we’d encountered in the East. Nico had hit them the year before – once was enough.

  While we were in Oslo I looked up my own Nordic goddess, Eva. I had a lot of hopes pinned on the meeting, despite the ‘Dear Bjorn’ letter I’d received a couple of months back. She didn’t show up at the gig, as it hadn’t been advertised, so the next day I stayed behind with Demetrius and Nico (who was sick). I went to Eva’s apartment block (where Edvard Munch once had a small studio – it had retained that tortured vibe) in the old Christiania part of Oslo. The place was being rebuilt. I asked a guy downstairs if he knew where Eva was. He showed me to another dungeonesque wing of the old grey building. I knocked – no one there. So I left a note.

  ‘Hello, bastard,’ she said as we met outside a pink-and-white American ice-cream parlour in the Karl Johan square. We found a corner in a nearby bar. Over brandy at £10 a shot, she fixed those ice-blue eyes on me and spelt out in block capitals how, while working at the strip joint in Stockholm, she’d got close to the other girls there. VERY CLOSE. She thought women were better to be with, more understanding. ‘Anyway. What is it you men want from us? It’s just a hole – no?’