My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (2 page)

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

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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.

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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

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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 the 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.

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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

* Worzel Gummidge is a children’s television scarecrow who comes to life. A deeply anarchic character who changes his head depending on his mood, and is much too scary to be on kids’ television. He has mice living in his chest, he’s obsessed with cake and he’s forever trying to seduce a shop mannequin called Aunt Sally, with whom he is in love. Th e whole

show is macabre, unsettling and inappropriate.

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who I was having sex with. It was a right lot of nonsense going on. I was pursuing hanky-panky like it was a job, like there was a league table that I had to be at the summit of. And as I explained how I toiled each day with the diligence of Bobby Moore and the grit of Julian Dicks, humming slave songs to keep my spirits up, Travis reassured me that I was just the sort of person who needed KeyStone’s help.*

The clinic, when we found it, was in the middle of this square in some quiet Philadelphia suburb. The house looked like a normal American family home does—you know, where they’ve got the sloping roof to the porch bit and gardens around it, a bit like where the Waltons lived, all pastoral and sweet, but with John-Boy chained up in the mop cupboard scrabbling around trying to fiddle with his goolies through a mask of tears. Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.

I was greeted on the steps of the clinic by one of the counselors. I can’t remember her name, but she was wearing a t-shirt with frogs on. It turned out she was obsessed with ’em, and when I asked her why she said, “When I was a kid, there was a pond near my house which all the frogs would try to get back to, and they’d get killed crossing over the road, so I used to try and help them across.”

“Fucking hell,” I thought. “D’ya wanna have a clearer analogy

* Julian Dicks and Bobby Moore are West Ham footballers. Dicks was a real hard man defender, beloved by the fans for his spirit and commitment. He played in the early to mid-

’90s. Moore is regarded by many as the greatest ever English footballer. He captained England to our only World Cup win, in the ’60s, and he played with class, grace and finesse.

He is a sporting saint, an untouchable.

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etched on your t-shirt? How troublingly apposite that your mission in life should now be to save people from destruction as they pursue their natural instinct to spawn.”

At this point, the frog lady introduced me to a subdued and pinch-faced individual. “Arthur will show you around,” she said cheerfully. “He’s gonna be your roommate.” (In the film, Arthur would be played by Rick Moranis or William H. Macy.) Arthur showed me round the kitchen with its horrible meaty American meals. Meals which I, as a vegetarian, couldn’t eat, so I would have to live on fruit for the whole month, like a little ape.

One by one, I began to meet more of my fellow clients, or patients, or inmates, or perverts—whatever you want to call them, including an intimidating Puerto Rican cove who looked like a hybrid of Colin Farrell’s “Bullseye” character from the fi lm Daredev il and Bill Sykes’s dog in Oliver Twist (whose name was also “Bullseye,” strangely enough), who kept calling me

“London”—“Hey, London!”

I resented being called “London.” There are eight million people living in London, and my identity, I hope, is quite specific. He addressed me the same way he would’ve Ken Living-stone or Danny Baker—God knows what they’d be doing there.

I’m not even from London; I’m from Essex. (Though I suppose

“Essex” would have been even less appropriate—it has, after all, got the three letters “s-e-x” in it and that’s what caused all this bother.)

This demeaning and geo graphically inaccurate mode of address was just one aspect of what soon began to seem like a concerted campaign to dismantle every element of my persona.

It was not just my copy of the Guardian that had been confiscated on my arrival, but also my Richard Pryor CDs and my William Burroughs novel. And I’d not been at KeyStone long before my attire began to attract complaints. Apparently, the 12

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way my excess belt hung in front of my crotch was confusing and enticing to the pervert fraternity as it suggested a phallus.

So they censored me. I was like Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy. (Him on the telly, me in a dingy sex center . . . any analogy will break down under scrutiny.)

As the days went on, I started to learn why other people were in there. I quickly found out that Arthur was a pedophile who had eloped with his thirteen-year- old foster daughter. If he went back to Arizona to face the charges, he’d be in line for either lifetime imprisonment or execution. Th is revelation

came as a bit of a blow and made me question the rationale of the whole dashed trip. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ve a bit of an eye for the ladies, now as a kind of punishment I’m rooming with a pedophile, is that gonna be helpful?” Like them lads that get sent down for nicking a car radio and end up sharing a cell with a diligent, bank robber mentor who schools them in criminality. I went down to the office and started making frantic phone calls home, saying, “Get me out of this place.” If I’d been less terrified I might’ve paused to dream up a new reality show format, I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of This Demented Sex Center, where minor faces off the box are forced to doss down with, say, Peter Sutcliffe for the amusement of an apathetic nation.

John was on holiday—he’d gone skiing or something—so I was trying in vain to get through to other people and tell them I was reluctant to share a room with this pedophile chap. No one I spoke to was prepared to sanction my departure so, out of fear, desperation and a kind of morbid curiosity, I decided to stay.