My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Read online

  A Memoir of Sex, Drugs,

  and Stand-Up

  Russell Brand

  For my mum,

  the most important woman in my life,

  this book is dedicated to you.

  Now for God’s sake don’t read it.

  “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between po liti cal parties either, but through every human heart”

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

  The Gulag Archipelago

  “Mary: Tell me, Edmund: Do you have someone special in your life?

  Edmund: Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.

  Mary: Who?

  Edmund: Me.

  Mary: No, I mean someone you love, cherish and want to keep safe from all the horror and the hurt.

  Edmund: Erm . . . Still me, really”

  Richard Curtis and Ben Elton,

  Blackadder Goes Forth

  Contents

  Epigraph iii

  Author’s Note

  vii

  Part I

  1 April Fool

  3

  2 Umbilical Noose 16

  3 Shame Innit?

  27

  4 Fledgling Hospice 38

  5 “Diddle- Di- Diddle- Di”

  50

  6 How Christmas Should Feel 57

  7 One McAvennie

  65

  8 I’ve Got a Bone to Pick with You 72

  9 Teacher’s Whiskey 81

  10 “Boobaloo”

  86

  11 Say Hello to the Bad Guy 94

  Part II

  12 The Eternal Dilemma 105

  13 Body Mist

  111

  Photographic Insert I

  14 Ying Yang

  122

  15 Click, Clack, Click, Clack 131

  16 “Wop Out a Bit of Acting”

  138

  17 Th

  e Stranger

  146

  v

  Contents

  18 Is This a Cash Card I See before Me?

  159

  19 “Do You Want a Drama?”

  166

  Part III

  20 Dagenham Is Not Damascus 179

  21 Don’t Die of Ignorance 189

  22 Firing Minors 201

  Photographic Insert II

  23 Down Among the Have-Nots 216

  24 First-Class Twit 224

  25 Let’s Not Tell Our Mums 239

  26 You’re a Diamond 261

  27 Call Me Ishmael. Or Isimir. Or Something . . .

  267

  Part IV

  28 Mustafa Skagfix 283

  29 A Gentleman with a Bike 295

  30 Out of the Game 310

  31 Hare Krishna Morrissey 322

  32 And Th

  en Three Come at Once

  336

  Ac know ledg ments

  351

  Photographic Acknowledgments

  353

  About the Author

  355

  Other Books by Russell Brand

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  vi

  Author’s Note

  Dear American reader,

  Jolly well done, you have purchased this book in spite of: 1. Its seemingly childish title, and 2. The photo of me on the cover, thus proving that you are: 1. Prepared to take risks, and 2. A sexy, adventurous outsider. Congratulations, you are in for a giddy, wild ride through language, hedonism and amusing despair. Unless you bought the book(y wook) for a relative, and are now perusing it only to ascertain its suitability, or worse still, you are a shoplifter pretending to read before committing your crime.

  If either scenario is true, then, be assured, it is suitable for your relative—unless they are crushingly naive or small-minded. And if you are a shoplifter, I’m in no position to complain as I, myself, have stolen many books. I’m not con-doning it, I just understand that you must be desperate, and at least you’re stealing a good book(y wook). Good luck.

  Now, assuming that all who remain are good, honest consumers, I’d like to thank you. This book is mine, it’s all true, I wrote it, and while I’m proud of the book(y wook), I’m not proud of some of the chaos within. I am an En glishman and, as such, reserve the right to talk, and write, in a manner that vii

  Author’s Note

  may strike you as macabre or bonkers or crackers, nuts or weird; to avoid possible confusion, I have included a glossary so that you can understand what I have written. I only pray you can understand why I wrote it.

  Long live the Queen, God Bless America.

  Ta ta.

  Russell

  viii

  Part I

  “And that I walk thus proudly crowned withal

  Is that ’tis my distinction; if I fall,

  I shall not weep out of the vital day,

  To-morrow dust, nor wear a dull decay”

  Percy Bysshe Shelley,

  “And That I Walk Th

  us

  Proudly Crowned Withal”

  “When I was small and fi ve

  I found a pencil sharpener alive!

  He lay in lonely grasses

  Looking for work.

  I bought a pencil for him.

  He ate and ate until all that was

  Left was a pile of wood dust.

  It was the happiest pencil sharpener

  I ever had”

  Spike Milligan, “2B or not 2B”

  1

  April Fool

  On the morning of April Fools’ Day, 2005, I woke up in a sexual addiction treatment center in a suburb of Philadelphia. As I limped out of the drab dog’s bed in which I was expected to sleep for the next thirty wankless nights, I observed the previous incumbent had left a thread of unravelled dental floss by the pillow—most likely as a noose for his poor, famished dinkle.

  When I’d arrived the day before, the counselors had taken away my copy of the Guardian, as there was a depiction of the Venus de Milo on the front page of the Culture section, but let me keep the Sun, which obviously had a Page 3 lovely.

  What kind of pervert police force censors a truncated sculpture but lets Keeley Hazell pass without question?* “Blimey, this devious swine’s got a picture of a concrete bird with no

  * Keeley Hazell is a topless model who appears on Page 3 of the Sun newspaper. Page 3 is a crazy concept whereby for no discernable reason a national newspaper prints a photograph of a young woman showing her tits. I’d object, but I’m too enamored with the boobs.

  Th

  e Sun is a Murdoch-owned right-wing populist paper, which appeals primarily to working-class white men, but has such a strong cultural presence that it is relevant to people who work in media and politics. Amusingly, they often attribute a comment on the day’s events to the Page 3 girl of the day, right next to her lovely, naked body, e.g., “Becky thinks the global recession has been brought on by economic immigrants coming into our country—‘If they come here they have to work and contribute,’ said the twenty-two-year-old from Oldham.” That sort of thing.

  3

  RUSSELL BRAND

  arms—hanging’s too good for him, to the incinerator! Keep that picture of stunner Keeley though.” If they were to censor London Town they would ignore Soho but think that the statue of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square had been commissioned by Caligula.

  Being all holed up in the aptly named KeyStone clinic (while the facility did not have its own uniformed police force, the suggestion of bungling silent film cops is appropriate) was an all too familiar drag. Not that I’d e
ver been incarcerated in sex chokey before, lord no, but it was the umpteenth time that I’d been confronted with the galling reality that there are things over which I have no control and people who can force their will upon you. Teachers, sex police, actual police, drug counselors; people who can make you sit in a drugless, sexless cell either real or metaphorical and ponder the actuality of life’s solitary essence. In the end it’s just you. Alone.

  Who needs that grim reality stuffed into their noggin of a morning? Not me. I couldn’t even distract myself with a wank over that gorgeous slag Venus de Milo; well, she’s asking for it, going out all nude, not even wearing any arms.

  The necessity for harsh self-assessment and ac ceptance of death’s inevitability wasn’t the only thing I hated about that KeyStone place. No, those two troubling factors vied for su-premacy with multitudinous bastard truths. I hated my fucking bed: the mattress was sponge, and you had to stretch your own sheet over this miserable little single divan in the corner of the room. And I hated the fucking room itself where the strangled urges of onanism clung to the walls like mildew. I particularly hated the American gray squirrels that were running around outside—just free, like idiots, giggling and touching each other in the early spring sunshine. The triumph of these little divs over our indigenous, noble, red, British squirrel had become a searing 4

  April Fool

  metaphor for my own subjugation at the hands of the anti-fuck-Yanks. To make my surrender to conformity more offi cial I was

  obliged to sign this thing (see page 6).

  I wish I’d been photographed signing it like when a footballer joins a new team grinning and holding a pen. Or that I’d got an attorney to go through it with a fine-tooth comb: “You’re gonna have to remove that no bumming clause,” I imagine him saying.

  Most likely you’re right curious as to why a fella who plainly enjoys how’s yer father as much as I do would go on a special holiday to “sex camp” (which is a misleading title as the main thrust of their creed is “no fucking”). The short answer is I was forced.

  The long answer is this . . .

  Many people are skeptical about the idea of what I like to call

  “sexy addiction,” thinking it a spurious notion, invented primarily to help Hollywood film stars evade responsibility for their unrestrained priapic excesses. But I reckon there is such a thing.

  Addiction, by definition, is a compulsive behavior that you cannot control or relinquish, in spite of its destructive consequences. And if the story I am about to recount proves nothing else, it demonstrates that this formula can be applied to sex just as easily as it can be to drugs or alcohol.

  Having successfully rid myself, one day at a time, in my twenties, of parallel addictions to the ol’ drugs and drinks—if you pluralize drink to drinks and then discuss it with the trembling reverence that alcoholics tend to, it’s funny, e.g., “My life was destroyed by drinks,” “I valued drinks over my wife and kids.”

  Drinks! I imagine them all lined up in bottles and glasses with malevolent intent, the bastards—I was now, at this time, doing a lot of monkey business.

  I have always accrued status and validation through my indiscretions (even before I attained the unique accolade of “Shagger 5

  April Fool

  of the Year” from the Sun—not perhaps the greatest testimonial to the good work they do at KeyStone), but sex is also recreational for me. We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings, but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.

  And this is what sex provides for me—a breathing space, when you’re outside of yourself and your own head. Especially in the actual moment of climax, where you literally go, “Ah, there’s that, then. I’ve unwound. I’ve let go.” Not without good reason do the French describe an orgasm as a “little death.”

  That’s exactly what it is for me (in a good way though, obviously)—a little moment away, a holiday from my head. I hope death is like a big French orgasm, although meeting Saint Peter will be embarrassing, all smothered in grog and shrouded in post- orgasmic guilt.

  Part of my problem was that these holidays—incessant as they were—no longer seemed to have the required calming effect. I suppose if you kept frantically scuttling off to Pontin’s every half-hour and ejaculating in the swimming pool then it’d become depressing after a while.* At the time, I was on the brink of becoming sufficiently well known for my carnal over-indulgences to cause me professional diffi

  culties. My manager,

  John Noel, of whom you’ll learn more later but for now think of as a big, kind, lovely, vicious bastard, like a Darth Vader from Manchester running a school for disadvantaged children; John, who had previously successfully forced me into drug Pontin’s/Butlins were pop

  ular British holiday resorts favored by working- and lower-middle- class families. Everything you needed was on site, the pool, the entertainment, the ghetto shacks where you stayed, the stifling sense of ennui and the feeling that somewhere across the sea were joy and sex.

  7

  RUSSELL BRAND

  rehabilitation, thought a little stretch in winky-nick would do me the power of good, and used threats, bullying, love and blackmail to make me go.

  They don’t go in for the pampering of clients at John Noel Management. Even now, with my own TV production company, radio show, parts in films, DVD and stand-up tour, I still don’t have “yes” men surrounding me, I have “fuck off ” men. I suppose I ought to be grateful to have such close relationships with the people I work with—John, Nik, who’s John’s son and brilliant in his own right, and Matt and Gee from the Radio 2

  show. They all seem to be dedicated not only to the fulfillment of professional objectives, but also to anchoring me to a terrain where my ego is manageable.

  And so it was spitefully decided not to send me to some sort of celebrity treatment center, like the world-renowned Meadows Clinic in Arizona, because that’s not the style of John Noel and the other stewards of my well-being. Instead, they insisted I should go to a facility where not all the places were private, where a certain proportion of people were there on judicial programs—“ jail-swerves” they call them, when you’re a drug addict and you’re offered a choice of prison or rehab. Th e same

  option exists for the terminally saucy—get treatment or go to prison; in prison there’ll be much more sex but it could err on the side of coercive.

  The nature of my early sexual encounters, which will be outlined in the pages to follow, had unraveled any mystique or sentimentality around my sexuality, and made it something quite raw and rude. But I’m fortunate in that there’s nothing especially peculiar or odd about my erotic predilections. It’s the scale of my sexual endeavors that causes the problems, not the nature of them.

  I just like girls, all different ones, in an unsophisticated, un-8

  April Fool

  evolved way, like a Sun reader or a yobbo at a bus stop in Basil-don, perhaps because, at my core, that’s what I am. I’m a bloke from Grays with a good job and a terrific haircut who’s been given a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory ’cos of the ol’ fame, and while Augustus Gloop drowns and Veruca Salt goes blue, I’m cleaning up, I’m rinsin’ it baby!*

  To this day, I feel a fierce warmth for women that have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it’s apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.†

  So anyway, I didn’t want to go to that sexual treatment center, but all the do- gooders—and I mean that literally, as they did generally do good (I’ve never really understood why people employ that term pejoratively)—they all insisted, and I sort of, kind of agreed. Just to shut everyone up, really, and for the same reason that I finally gave up drink and drugs—because my ambition is th
e most powerful force within me, so once people convinced me that my sexual behavior might become damaging to my career, I found it easier to think of it as a flaw that needed to be remedied.

  I wasn’t properly famous at this point. But I’d done a couple of Big Brothers, and was starting to become a more recognizable figure. It was just before I started to dress cool (Collins defines cool as “Worzel Gummidge dressed for a bondage party”)—at this stage I was still kitting myself out in tight jeans and t-shirts,

  * I know she’s the wrong girl; it was Violet Beauregarde, but damn it, nobody’s perfect and all them kids had it coming. What a ridiculous way to run a job interview—they should’ve just got the top guy from Cadbury’s or Mars—you can’t trust kids to run a factory. Even Charlie was a bit fishy.

  † A “cupboard” is a closet. Identical, just a nicer word.

  9

  RUSSELL BRAND

  like a kind of urban beach-bum.* And it was in just such casual, relaxed attire that I made my way—on my own—first to Heathrow Airport, then to Philadelphia, and then to the KeyStone Center.

  The physical process of getting there was one of the most ridicu-larse journeys of my life. It felt strange to be chatting up the air hostesses on the American Airlines flight, knowing that I was on my way to a residential treatment center for sexual addiction. I got off the plane at Philadelphia airport, looked around at all the girls in the terminus and thought, “Well, this is weird,” and then got in the back of the cab. They took me to the general hospital fi rst—this terrifying all-American institution (which I was all too soon to revisit under circumstances that’ll bend your bones and shrivel your baby-makers)—before realizing it was this KeyStone place I was meant to be going to.

  I had no idea of what to expect when I arrived. I’d spoken to one of the counselors—the reassuringly named Travis Flowers (counselors, in my experience, seem to be named using the Charles Dickens method, where the character’s name gives a very obvious clue to their nature: Bill Sykes, psycho, Mr. Bumble, bumbling, Fagin, an unforgivable anti-Semitic ste reotype). Th e

  gentleman who saved me from the brown fangs of smack addiction was preposterously called Chip Somers, chipper summers, like an upbeat holiday. I spoke to Travis—whose name indicates trust and growth—several times on the phone before setting out. I told him about the lack of control I was exercising over