My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (14 page)

cial inquiry.”

It was obvious that drugs were going to disrupt my life. Th e

first time I went round to Jimmy and Justin’s flat, I saw they had a tray full of Rizlas and hash, and the idea of these kind of accoutrements seemed amazing to me.* I loved the paraphernalia—the blowbacks and bottles and bongs—and I got so stoned that I went to bed and was there for three days. I didn’t eat or anything—just lay there bewildered; people came to look at me, someone took a photograph, I refused all food, I just stared and wondered and became a drug addict. From then on, I smoked draw every day without fail or exception until the narcotic ba-ton was passed on to heroin. Whenever I went to school—or, indeed, anywhere—I would have a joint first.

If I had to go on a train journey, for instance, I used to think,

“This’ll be alright. I’ll just skin up and smoke in the toilet.”

Many years later, when I eventually got clean, I was astonished to learn that I actually don’t enjoy my own company. I always thought I loved being on my own, but actually I don’t. It was being on drugs that I liked. Here’s a tip for you. If you don’t have enough money to buy a train ticket but you have to take a train, use this little method I invented:

• Go into the toilet

• Hide

• Smoke weed

* Rizla is a brand of cigarette paper so dominant that its name has become de rigueur, like Kleenex to you folk, or Coca-Cola.

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• Don’t lock the door because the ticket inspector can see that the door is locked and will knock or wait for you to emerge.

But if you can get your hands on one of these “out of order”

signs, then you’re super safe.

There is a risk that smoking soft drugs will lead to harder ones and then any money you saved on the ticket purchase will go on heroin, so economically perhaps my method is flawed.

It’s unlikely to feature on Th

is Morning as a handy financial

hint. “Thank you, Fern. And now we’re going live to Fenchurch Street Station where Russell Brand is crying in the toilet.”

John Bird said of Peter Cook, “You met him one day in a quad in Cambridge and immediately decided you wanted to spend the rest of your life with him.” I felt this kind of sentimental awe for this gang of lost boys. I moved in with Jimmy, Justin, 114

Body Mist

and Justin’s girlfriend (their Wendy) Julie, in a two-bedroom flat in Bermondsey Street, near London Bridge. I was only sixteen but I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I detested Colin, I stayed with my nan a lot and with my dad, but he’d acquired a barmy wife and a few kids and I didn’t feel welcome. Once in the flat my friends treated me like a clothed chimp—sending me on errands—but occasionally they would ruffle my hair and refer to me as “our kid.” I liked that.

I didn’t have keys to the flat. I used to put my arm through the letter box to open the door: the doors of perception were about to be flung open because Dean had acquired some acid, sheets of it; I’d heard tell of its qualities, of how it made you hal-lucinate and readdress your life and I thought, “My God! Th is

sounds extraordinary.” We went over to the YMCA opposite Conti’s after school, took some and went back to his house in New Cross on the tube.

With or without acid, New Cross can be mind-bending, so it’s the ideal venue to have something so fundamental as your perception of reality altered, because it just exposes everything—the world as you see it, even your own psyche—as a construction.

All the things you believe to be true are thrown into doubt.

And what’s so ridiculous is the way that you take this extraordi-narily powerful, potent drug: not in a hospital with someone making you sit down and have a glass of water, but on the way home from school with your daft mate, walking though New Cross all fragile and delicate. It’s difficult to convey the wonder and horror of LSD: most people who’ve taken it have at some time tried to document the events that take place while tripping; fancying themselves all Huxley, only to be confronted the next day with a piece of paper covered with the most frightful balderdash. What I recall is becoming aware that my presumed 115

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objectivity was subjective and arbitrary and that my hands looked like dead chickens.

There were still raves going on in those days, and the walls of Dean’s room were covered with flyers, which I could now see had obviously been expressly designed for people to look at while high. Not as interesting as my hands though. “Th ey look

like dead chickens!”

It’s a stereotypical response to taking acid—to become fascinated with your own hands. But it’s the transformation of things you are utterly familiar with that makes it such a revelatory experience. The quotidian and unquestioned became the source of rigorous inquiry. Dean had a deodorant called “Body Mist.” Th at

consumed what seemed like hours, but time no longer conforms to previously agreed parameters but instead leaps and whirls, pauses and rewinds, whizzes by and slithers back so it could’ve been five seconds. What I am certain of to this day is that “Body Mist” is a stupid name for a deodorant. What? It’s a mist for your body? “Here, I stink. Has anyone got some mist because I’m pretty sure that this stink is coming out of my body?” Mist.

Mist doesn’t smell and is by its nature vague and intangible and Body is too general. “I want to kiss you, I want to kiss you right on the body.” Torso cloud, trunk vapor, corpse fog. It still gets me. Later that night—in the spirit of making the evening as clichéd as possible—I saw the film Th

e Doors and decided “I’m

gonna be like that person.” The flimsy identity that I had constructed was instantaneously swept aside: not by Jim Morrison himself, but by Val Kilmer’s interpretation of Jim Morrison, as viewed through the cinematic prism of Oliver Stone.

The next morning, I went into Conti’s with a dry mouth, some ill-researched but heartfelt views on spirituality, wearing a sheepskin coat, beads and no shirt, with a joint hanging out of 116

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my mouth, asking if everybody was in, because the ceremony was probably going to begin. If not now, then very shortly. At any rate, there certainly would be a ceremony.

There was always a sense of being safe inside Conti’s, which made it the ideal place for that kind of ridiculous posturing. But when you’d hear of students that had left and weren’t famous, it was always a little bit terrifying—“What? They’ve left, and now they’re just living in a flat? Bloody hell! That’s a bit worrying.” It was a reminder of what might become of you. Once you’ve left stage school, you’ve got to be famous, or what the fuck are you doing?

When I fi rst went to Conti’s there were so many beautiful girls there that I fell in love incessantly. Kéllé, Rachel, Louise and Penny—she was particularly rewarding as she looked like Meg Ryan in Th

e Doors and was a bit of a hippy; I saw her a couple of years ago in Camden and I think she may’ve gone religious, for which I might be to blame. I was so helplessly infatuated with her that I followed her to her home in Wigan at the end of term.

She was heading home for the holidays, and I had nowhere to go, nothing to do and no money. She didn’t want me to come to Wigan—I was just supposed to walk her to Euston Station as part of my tireless campaign to make her love me. It took longer than anticipated so I got on the train with her—without a ticket, but with my brilliant technique. “I might as well come with you,”

I said, and stayed on the train.

When we got to Liverpool Lime Street, the police arrested me, and I gave them the name and address of an old school enemy. That’s another of my techniques, I really should have an item on Th

is Morning, I’m gonna phone Fern Britton, plus I fancy her. So, Fare-evasion Tip 2:

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Actual school report

Photographic Insert I

I’d just arrived on the planet when this was taken. Lazy really to sleep when I can’t have achieved anything.

Babs and Ron looking to an imagined future. Attractive, aren’t they?

An early gig—looks

like it’s going well.