Free Nico by James Young Page A

with joy.
    A truly loving son understands (and shares) his mother’s needs.
    The world had shrunk once again, to coal fires, TV game shows, tea drinking and cruel parlour games round at Echo’s. Dr Demetrius’s Great Adventure had shrivelled overnight. Nico was sitting tight. With a wallet-load of phony credit cards, and a pocket full of valium, Demetrius was happy to spoil her so long as she behaved herself. But the rest of us needed paid work. We’d do the odd one-off gig at Tiffany’s, Bradford, just to take the instruments for a walk, but it was nothing like enough. Nico and Demetrius paid such a pittance, the only reward was glamour, and we certainly weren’t getting any of that.
    I did a one-night stint as a DJ at a regular Thursday ‘Punk Night’ Demetrius ran at Rotter’s, a vomitorium cellar-club on the Oxford road. I played them one of Demetrius’s records: K-Tel’s The Best of Roy Orbison , ‘as seen on TV’. ‘Blue Bayou’ all night long. It seemed a punk thing to do. Mohicans with spider-web cheeks and ‘cut here’ neck tattoos would come up: ‘This is shite! Fuck off, cunt!’ etc. They got really mad and started turning tables over, throwing bottles. I thought they’d had a good time, but Demetrius wouldn’t let me do it again.
    Then the rumour started. America. Everyone wanted to go, desperately, except for the star act and manager. Nico had really got to like the Iranian smack, she had a very strong reliable connection, she was getting stuff maybe fifty per cent pure – it would take a lot to prise her away from that.
    â€˜The Yank gear’s dreck-powder,’ said Echo. ‘About five per cent kosher, not worth touchin’ unless yer score about twenny grams an’ yer’ve got works the size of a fookin’ stirrup pump.’
    Demetrius wanted to go, but couldn’t. It would mean the neurasthenic’s nightmare of being trapped in an aircraft again. ‘Of course I’m not afraid,’ he’d say, ‘it’s simply an infection of the middle ear that affects my balance. I believe astronauts can get it.’
    Toby would often spend the cocktail hours in that great salon of fin-de-siècle languor Happy Times, a shooting gallery in Wythenshawe. Wythenshawe is one of those classic postwar answers to the perennial question: What Shall We Do With the Working Class? If the poor must be forever with us, then at least let’s keep them out of sight. It takes the best part of half an hour from Manchester city centre to get there.
    â€˜By the time the filth arrive, the entire contents of yer gaff’ave bin nicked, resold, and some swine in Oldham’s watching the Street on your telly,’ said Toby. Toby lived at his mum’s, a traditional Lancashire matriarch, who controlled with an iron grip a household of useless males. Three packs of cigs a day, crippling emphysema, but she’d still give them a good clout round the ear just for the sake of it.
    At Happy Times you paid your fiver and you’d get a shot of smack or speed. Mr Happy Times himself just sat all the time in an armchair, monitoring everything from strategically placed mirrors, a .38 under a cushion on his lap. Purity of a kind.
    America. You could get a good pair of shoes in America.
    â€˜There’s all sorts of tackle in them Thrift Shops,’ dreamed Echo. ‘An’ when we do L.A. we must stay at the Tropicana.’ Echo couldn’t overstress the importance of the Tropicana motel. Tom Waits lived there. Tom was the only man whose sartorial tastes Echo felt were as intriguing as his own. They shared a mutual passion – shoes. Echo had acquired six pairs on the Italian tour. He wondered if Tom also shared his misfortune in having small feet … it meant that certain coveted styles would never be in stock, and it made the hunt for the perfect pair that much more poignant. It was a theme