My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (11 page)

Normally at that stage of sexual immaturity, you’d get an erection, carry on wanking for a while, and then stop. But I started wondering what would happen if you persisted beyond that barrier. The answer was a kind of dry orgasm, which set my leg twitching against the pink artifi cial fibers, and left me with an embarrassed, awkward feeling, reminiscent of how I would later feel when receiving oral sex from a vacuum cleaner. (Of course, it’s not really oral sex in that instance, it’s pipe sex—an oft-overlooked category of erotic endeavor.)

Growing up in Grays, there were two main landmarks looming above you. One was the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge across the Thames (little did I know that lurking on the other side of this, in Dartford, just south of the river, was the infant Matt Morgan). The other was Thurrock Lakeside shopping center—a huge, great, hovering spaceship of consumerism. I did shoplift quite a bit from there. But newsagents in Grays were not safe from my wandering hands either.

For reasons that may have had something to do with my in-cipient dishonesty, but could equally have been rooted in the lunchtime porn video club I had enterprisingly set up with a few like-minded friends, Mum and Colin did not trust me with a key to the house. They didn’t like me to go home in the middle of the day, but they’d leave a key out for me to let myself in with after school.

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One time, I’d tried to sneak home at lunchtime, but there was no key there. So when I got back later on and the stone in the garden where the key usually was hadn’t moved, I just put my sleeve over my hand and punched through the glass panel in the door to get in.

“Good,” I thought. “That’ll show ’em.” My mum got home a couple of minutes after I did. “You alright, Russell?” she asked, slightly nervously. I explained that I’d had to let myself in because there was no key. A short while after that, Colin returned.

He asked what had gone on, and when I said there was no key left out, I could see him whitening with fury.

The hostility between us was mostly unspoken. It was a silent war, constantly in motion. Colin went into the back garden—wearing the blue overalls that he had for work. He looked under the stone, and came back, full of terrifying adult man-rage. My mum was all panicked—“Oh Colin, Colin.” As he dragged me out into the back garden, I fell over and pissed myself. I was at an age when it was horrible to have done that—school trousers clad about my thighs. He threw me on the ground, screaming,

“There it is!” with an incandescent rage that had to be about more than broken glass.

It turned out that at some point between my two attempts to gain entry to the house, he had returned home and replaced the key.

There’s a theme that runs throughout my childhood of adults taking me to one side to utter these unbelievable things. I’m not sure if it was on this or one of the other five or six occasions when things between Colin and me got really out of hand—but I distinctly remember him taking me into a vestibule and hissing, “Why don’t you fuck off and leave us alone?” And me just thinking, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” and having to hold myself to-84

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gether. “Why are these people saying these things?” I would ask myself. “This can’t be right.”

There have been times over the last couple of years—as things have started to work out for me in career terms—when I’ve stopped to reflect on what the legacy of all this formative unhappiness has been, in terms of the ultimate goals of my ambition. When would I stop? I’ve realized that my ambition is actually beyond the designs of the Th

ird Reich.

When I used to sit in the front seat on car journeys with my dad, he always listened to motivational tapes: Anthony Robbins, people like that. The one thing I got from them—something my dad endowed me with himself, as well as through these self-help brainwashing cassettes—was that you can do what ever you want.

Now if I want something—whether it’s a job or a woman—I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way, until I possess the object of my desire.

My dad’s philosophy was (and I think still is) that life is a malevolent force, which seeks to destroy you, and you have to struggle with it. Only those who are hard enough will succeed. Most people get crushed, but if you fight, in the end life will go, “Fucking hell. This one’s serious. Let him through.” V

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“ Boobaloo”

Until I encountered the Grays School drama teacher, Colin Hill, I had no intention of being a performer. I’d always hoped my dad would be my way out: in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lenny’s dopey gaze is forever fixed on an imaginary horizon where he’ll finally get his rabbits and alfalfa plants; I dreamed of an unlikely Brand and Son enterprise, like Open All Hours but more sexy; perhaps we’d have a casino or a brothel or be guns for hire. I’d not developed a business plan, but the name I liked.

Colin Hill was a big, bovine man with a deeply creviced face and ashen hair. He was also the fi rst teacher I thought of as human, the type of teacher who ushers you across the wobbly, Indiana Jones rope bridge into adulthood. I imagine he may have been a teacher that you could address by his Christian name or smoke a fag with. Before that, when you find out a teacher’s first name it’s like you’ve seen them on the lavvy wanking, a glimpse of a world so terribly private that while they rattle on about Wilfred Owen or geological stratification you can think nothing but, “Well, I can’t accept all this from a Derek.”

Colin Hill said I was good in drama classes. “It’s just showing off,” I thought, “sanctioned showing off . . . Oh my God, I’ve found a loophole.” “Erm, Colin, you like this showing off , do 86

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you? You say I’m doing it well? I can also torment dogs and masturbate, do you have any classes for those?” “No, I don’t usually do them simultaneously, but if there’s a GCSE in it . . .”

A former protégé of Colin Hill—though the possibility that he might have exaggerated his role in this man’s rise cannot be ruled out—was Karl Howman, then starring in the BBC sitcom, Brush Strokes, and also the Flash cleaning product adverts where he plays the same character in a more restricted plot that always has to involve him doing some cleaning under pressure from a Mother- in- Law type woman. Actually Brush Stokes wasn’t as well constructed as the Flash ads, but it did have a theme tune by Dexy’s Midnight Runners which was brilliant and puts Brush Strokes alongside Birds of a Feather as shows that have unjustifi -

ably tear-inducing music. “Now on BBC1, some light comedy, but before that why don’t you have a quick listen to this and consider that no matter what you achieve you will die alone.”

“Karl Howman’s one of mine—him out of Brush Strokes,”

Colin Hill used to say. And I used to think, “Hmm, interesting.” And the realization that people who had later become famous had been taught by the same teacher as me parked itself in my nut and gestated.

“We’re doing Bugsy Malone as the school play—you should try for the part of Fat Sam,” said Mr. Hill. That’s as signifi cant a moment in my life as there’s yet been—him asking me to audition for that role.

I was fat already, so the adjective had been taken care of before I’d picked up a script. All I had to work on was the Sam bit.

How hard could that be? I had met people called Sam. In fact, that was my best friend at school’s name.

From the first day I started doing Colin Hill’s drama group, I remember thinking, “This is fucking brilliant—why on earth didn’t I do this before?” There were all these girls, for a start. It 87

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attracts girls, drama. It’s not for boys. Well, there was one lad from the year below me, Jeff Bell. He was really good actually.

He played Bugsy Malone, and then there was me playing Fat Sam and loads of girls.

A consequence of involvement in this drama group was you’d get to see girls in bras—I suppose they were changing into costumes. The sight drilled itself so deeply into my mind that vital faculties had to be removed to allow it to flourish. Dancing and the ability to form intimate bonds were quickly sacrificed so that the “girls in bras” department of my brain could be given extra floors and its own DJ; “Boobaloo” he’d holler whenever he saw some knockers he liked. He’s still in there now, spinning the same discs night after night and keeping me tuned in to the screaming frequency of Libido FM.

I enjoyed the rehearsal process enormously. But on the first night the terror I felt was almost transcendental. Euphoric fear, so vertiginous, awesome and profound that I felt it could only be a prelude to death. I now know that the adrenalized fever is my body’s preparatory method and is responsible for the energy and speed I can produce on stage. Once or twice I’ve sought out a reference or a joke in my mind while on telly and it’s seemed like an age or, perhaps realistically, twelve seconds, at the time, but when I watch it back it’s an imperceptible beat. Everything about the school seemed different that first night. Th e hall,

which had been empty when we were rehearsing, was now full of lines of plastic chairs and the air was neon and flashed with expectation.

All the parents came. I don’t know how many people that would’ve been—I suppose about a hundred. But it seemed to me like a riot in a straitjacket. I locked myself in a lavvy and evacuated liquid dread. “God, what are you doing?” I asked myself. “I don’t have to do it,” I reasoned. Locked in the lavvy, locked in ne-88

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gotiation with myself. “Scared, SCARED. RUN!” sang my unconscious, with backing vocals from my bowels. I had drawn on a mustache with an eyebrow pencil, I had a hat from somewhere, and a big suit of my dad’s with a pillow stuffed up it to make me even fatter. I went behind the curtain on the stage, and listened to the audience on the other side of it.

This is a noise that I’m really familiar with now. It endows me with mingled excitement and glee. I want to grasp it and have that moment. The anticipation and anxiety becomes almost unbearable as it builds and builds—“Oh, fucking hell! All them people. They’re just there living their lives now, talking to each other, but in a minute I’m going to have to go out in front of them and perform.” This was where that first scorched into me. It burned. It got too much so I went up to the stage and put my head through the curtain and looked at the crowd. Mr. Hill saw me, and came round the back. “What the fuck are you doing? Don’t fucking do that.” I’d violated a professional code.

Admirable that he cared so deeply, but it compounded the fear.

There was five minutes more, standing there with the tension, stifling the urge to vomit, already drained—nothing left to give but a performance. And then I walked out onto the stage for the first time in my life. The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It’s like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It’s like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It’s like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn’t who I’d been up till then. I’d never been so far away but I knew I was home. “I know everything,” I thought. I knew I’d never leave and I never have. My first lines were, “It’s okay, everybody. It’s okay.” I was doing a 89

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Jimmy Cagney impression, but with Tommy Cooper hands.

And as soon as I was out there the fear became triumph. I felt enormous and strong.

There was a scene early on with this kid Dennis. He was a funny, scrawny lad who lived just around the corner from me.

All pale and wan he was—like a baby that’s been born too early—and there was a bit where I had to spray him with a soda-siphon. When I did it, his face looked dead funny as he mewled and gawped, and the audience really laughed and I laughed too and improvised. I felt ac ceptance. Being on that stage was the headiest intoxicant I’d yet sampled. I loved it so much that from that moment on I thought, “I’m doing this now, I’ll do whatever it takes.” I’d had my head filled with my dad’s motivation tapes: “You can do what ever you want. Focus on what your goal is, refuse to fail.”