My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (19 page)

I was especially stunned by it because—as may already have become clear—I prefer not to work on anything where I’m not being looked at and there’s no chance of getting applauded at the end. I didn’t like doing electrics. I’ll do magic tricks. I’ll do card tricks. I’ll do sex tricks, tricks of the mind, tricks of the heart and soul, but electrics—that’s no job for me.

At three o’clock in the morning, all tired and pissed and stoned, doing everything I could to avoid work on trying to get 150

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theatrical flats erected—I shouldn’t have to write a sentence like that, I’m not saying it’s beneath me, it’s above me. It makes me confused and emotional. Putting hinges on planks, trying to work out angles, banging my thumb like Tom out of Tom and Jerry—why did he have to do so much carpentry?

Mark Morrissey looked like Humphrey Bogart and Rodney Bewes (the dark one from The Likely Lads). He stood in overalls smoking roll-up fags like Sid the Sexist, with his eye-rolling, factory- floor sense of humor—and his “Oh Christ, what’s the point?” attitude to life. He looked at my shoddy work, tutted, shook his head and said, “I dunno. [pause] Men on the moon?”

I loved that. That’s the sort of thing people said in the ’70s when lunar travel was a big deal. It implied my workmanship was so poor that it was detrimental to mankind as a species. He also, on one occasion, when I passed on the accurate accusation that he’d nicked a mate’s textbook, charged me with “listening to the ravings of a madman.”

It was a mark of how successfully Christopher Fettes had created this environment where we were all constantly clamoring to impress him with our vocational devotion that Mark—a natural rebel—piped up in class with the incredibly insincere statement, “I went down to the National Gallery the other day and just stood in front of Van Gogh’s Sunfl owers . . . And I’m not ashamed to admit this: I wept.”

“Ooh Mark, you’re so fucking sensitive,” I sneered afterward; jealous of the attention Morrissey’s outrageous gambit had gar-nered him. “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”

For most of that first year at Drama Centre, I lived like the Hulk, or the Littlest Hobo, peripatetically drifting from one girls’ flat or halls of residence to another. Simone Nylander—the girl in Grange Hill who was always going “I want to help you 151

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Ro-land”—was one of them. She wasn’t like she was in the program, though. She was sexy by then. She was a Ghanaian princess.

A lot of Ghanaian people seem to be royal, in my experience.

I think their royal family is badly structured, because about eighty percent of the Ghanaians I know claim royal lineage. I don’t wish to cast aspersions on their socioeconomic system, but it is, I imagine, pretty grim for the other twenty percent if four-fifths of them are kings, guzzling pearls.

I stayed round at Simone’s house for a while. She had very good manners and was really well brought up. I was a little thug.

I once spat in her wastepaper bin. She thought that was bad. In fact, she reacted to this lapse in etiquette by throwing all of my stuff out of the window in bin bags. That was always happening.

I’ve squandered the best years of my life watching bin bags arcing out of the windows of disillusioned women. I shouldn’t bother to unpack, I should just leave my stuff outside by the bins.

Once I moved into the Queens Arms in Queens Crescent with Mark and Tim, life got ridiculous. It was a problem pub that no one could ever run properly. We had to do three shifts a week behind the bar in lieu of rent. I had all the worst possible traits you could have as a barman: I gave drinks away for free, stole from the till and got drunk at work. I couldn’t pull pints, I didn’t know how to change a barrel and I was an alcoholic. Th ey

had moody twenty-pound notes stuck up on the wall, and I’d take them down and spend them. They were free money those notes. Me and Mark Morrissey, every morning on the way to school, would pour a tumbler of vodka or gin, or on Friday, cocktail day, both, then go in to Drama Centre and recklessly do ballet drunk.

One night me, Mark and the landlord—this Scouse feller 152

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called Alan—were downstairs having a drink after hours.* Mark wandered over to the piano, announcing that he was better than Liberace—and I didn’t see him again till the next day. Th e

piano was only six yards away. God knows what happened to him.

I noticed two women outside—Norwegian—and we invited them in, gave them booze and chatted them up. As is always the case when there’s two or more women, it was a question of working out which of them was most likely to have it off . Th at’s

always a difficult call to make, which is why one of the fundamental tenets of womanizing is “two birds is worse than none.”

You’ve got to divide in order to seduce. Obviously the rules change when you’re famous. In that case two is often better than either none or one.

“Now, you’re both very attractive, but would you be so kind as to tell me which one is likely to have sex with the least fuss?”

That’s what you want to say but many people, squares I call them, consider that to be impolite. “Do you want to come back with us?” they asked. “We only live over the road. You’ll have to be quiet, though, because of our landlord.” So we went over the road and carefully did the drunken creep up the stairs, where we carried on the evening, with me endlessly skinning up and chopping out lines because booze was no longer accessible.

After hours of fruitless living Alan, the gutless coward—like most men, not as committed to the womanizing cause as I—said, “I think I’ll turn in now,” and went back to the pub. I thought, “No, I’m sticking this out to the bitter end.” By that stage I’d selected the more suitable target, Petra, the brunette;

* “Scousers” are inhabitants of Liverpool. The city was originally built around the docks, which were once more destroyed when Thatcher crushed the unions. They take the name

“scouser” from a regional dish, and are famous for their two great football teams, the Beatles and their sense of humor.

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the other one had mentioned religion and that’s always a bad sign unless it’s paganism.

We got into bed. I was a bit delirious by this stage, but we got off with each other for a bit, and then I fell asleep. The kind of sleep you have when you’re pissed and on drugs, where sleep mugs you at the end of the night. Not a gentle, consensual dropping- off, where you think, “Right, I’ll just have a read of my book.” Sleep loutishly koshes you off to nod as if its true intention were to put you in the grave.

I lay contented. The day’s triumphs and disasters all nonsense now as half-baked dreams cavorted through my bonce, showing off like toddlers. I felt a shove on my shoulder, my dream weaver worked to incorporate it into his script. “Ooooh, you’re in a meadow, but instead of corn, it’s a field of eels, growing in slithery acres . . .” SHOVE HAPPENS. “Erm, don’t worry about that shove, it’s all part of this brilliant dream I’m weaving . . . one of the eels has shoved you . . .” There was another shove. Th e dream

weaver frantically tried to hold his narrative together. “Oh what’s this? An eagle is swooping down to eat the eels and has accidentally shoved you on the shoulder . . .” At the third shove the dream weaver gave up. “Alright I admit it, there is no eel field, no eagle. I was making it up. You might wanna look at your relationship with sex though, I was trying to tell you through symbols but it’s bloody difficult with all this shoving.” “Yeah,” I thought. “What is all this shoving?”

I concluded that I might need to open my eyes if any closure on the shoving were to be reached. When I did, I was greeted with a sight that was as ridiculous as the dream eel fi eld. Directly in front of me, at the opposite end of the bed, was an old woman, beige and alarmed. Toothless with a shawl, it’s diffi cult

not to think of her as a crone. If you see the words “refugee woman,” an image will come into your mind. That image is 154

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what I was looking at. To her left were two huddled, baffl ed

children. To her right were two more huddled children. “I don’t remember going to bed with all these children,” I thought. “Perhaps if I continue looking round the room an explanation will appear.”

To my left, children. To my right, more children. “Well this is a turnup, there’s certainly no shortage of huddled, refugee children in here.” Finally, and with due trepidation, I glanced in the direction of the shove, and there, standing next to the pale and embarrassed Petra, was a man.

Upside-down he was, or I was because I’d not yet moved.

Mustachioed and saronged, shouting and angry like a baddie from Indiana Jones or that bloke in the Territorial Army advert before the soldier takes off his sunglasses granting eye contact and delivering the advert’s core message: “In the TA you learn stuff.” Obvious stuff, like if you’re taking over a village don’t strut around in shades like George Michael.

“Well, this is unusual,” I thought. “Perhaps I’ll go somewhere else now where this isn’t happening.” I tried to think of a facial expression that would make everything alright but there wasn’t one. There is no facial expression that says, “Sorry, I drunkenly, nakedly got into bed with your children and your mother. No hard feelings. Jesus, no hard anything, there are children present. Oh by the way, I think that there oughtn’t be such rigid laws on immigration—as far as I’m concerned the earth is one place and we should all travel with impunity. One love.” So I just done a sort of grin, cupped my nuts and walked out of the room.

I went upstairs, got back into her bed and went back to sleep again, confident that the dream weaver would have nothing to match the lunacy that reality was churning out. What I suppose must’ve happened was that I’d got up in the night to vomit or wee-wee, and on the way back I’d just wandered into the 155

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nearest room—which happened to be harboring scores of refugees.

What fascinates me about this incident is that there must be a moment in the “black box” of my brain, when I just walked into that room, found that bed full of people, got into it, naked, and went to sleep. Then all the kids and the old crone would’ve had to have dealt with the admin, fetching the sarong man and Petra, all confused.

When I left the house, having slept for a few more hours, I walked down the stairs, and all them little children were milling around in the stairwells. Two of them looked at each other, and one pointed and said, “The stranger! The stranger!” I was the stranger. I liked being the stranger. And I skipped off to drama school, still drunk, secure in the knowledge that this was one role I could cope with.

A few days later, when I was going to sign on for my housing benefit at Kentish Town job center, I bumped into sarong man.

We had a moment. He went “aah” and pointed, I went “aah”

and pointed back. He smiled. I smiled back. We nodded at each other, and I shrugged apologetically and gestured tipping a drink into my mouth. He in return made the gesture where you put your two hands together as if in prayer, and then make a pillow. After this wordless yet eloquent communion, we forgave each other and all was right with the world. Except not for those two girls who were, quite rightly, evicted.

Over the road from the Queens Arms there was a quite rough estate which a load of Irish travelers had, for some reason, been forced to live on. They were cheesed off about it, and they used to come in the pub to eat, drink and be angry.

The children were really naughty. They’d come in, throw ice around and cause all sorts of bother. I like children, and natu-156

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rally empathize with that kind of insubordinate behavior, so I’d just go, “Oh, come on you lot,” and play with them. Mark and Tim would throw them out, they were good barmen, they looked alright behind the bar. I looked like I was wearing a big wooden tutu and the wind had changed.

Tommy “The King of the Gypsies” used to pop in, which was nice. He was said to have reduced pubs to matchwood when irked so I tried not to irk him; I could never be entirely sure what would irk him so I just gave him booze without charging him and laid off my brilliant Ian Paisley impression.*

One afternoon, Tommy’s brother, having paid his debt to society, came to the pub. “I’m Tommy’s brother Eddie,” he said, menacingly, and demanded to be able to drink for free all day. I used to give people free drink regardless of whether a threat of violence hung heavy in the air or not, but he wasn’t to know that, he was just out of nick, wearing a suit from the ’80s all peeved about decimalization.

He was obviously a gifted fighter; all his stories reached thrillingly gruesome climaxes, at which I’d smile encouragingly and politely applaud. I was getting a bit tipsy myself, what with all the booze we were drinking, so I popped round to the lavvy to dispense with some winky-water. “You’ll have to excuse me old bean,” I said and ambled off .

Eddie came after me—“That’s sweet,” I thought, “we really are becoming the best of chums”—and I began to imagine a sitcom where Eddie and I lived together and, in spite of our diff erences, somehow made things work.

* Ian Paisley was a leader of the unionist, Protestant movement during the troubles in Northern Ireland. A great belligerent orator, he became the symbol of resistance to a united Ireland.

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“You’re a good-lookin’ boy,” said Eddie in his beautiful Irish lilt.

“Well thank you very much, and you too are of peculiarly noble bearing,” I replied.

He craned his head round to peek at my privates.

“I’d like to kiss you,” said the King of the Gypsies’ brother; I suppose that makes him the Duke of Edinburgh of the Gypsies.

“Well, that’s very flattering, Your Highness, but I much prefer the company of a woman,” I demurred, “but know this, dear Eddie, if I were gay I’d be lobbying for conjugal visits for your next stretch.” That dealt with I zipped up my adorable penis and went back to the bar. Eddie seemed to be taking this turn of events badly, if the death threats were anything to go by. “You’ve got forty-eight hours to get out of Kentish Town,” he screamed.