My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (22 page)

Dagenham Is Not Damascus

day: turning on the TV to watch Richard and Judy, eating Weetabix, reading the odd chapter of Camus, Kierkegaard or Chomsky for beginners, acquiring references, watching films, being ambitious.

A lot of the administrative and financial burden of mine and Karl’s low-bud get artistic endeavors inevitably fell on our two girlfriends at the time. I was still going out with Elia, who I’d met at Drama Centre. She was Spanish and took me to meet her family in El Escorial in Madrid. It used to kill me, that sort of stuff—going to stay with people’s families, pretending to be nice. She left me in the end, because I was a right little twerp and slept with one of her friends.

Before Finsbury Park we lived at my nan’s house in Dagenham. It was an impecunious period and I had to make my own entertainment, mostly through psychological cruelty; I was trying to make Elia smoke a joint or drink some booze or sum-mink, and she was going, “No Russell, I don’t want to, please don’t make me, Russ.” It was quite lighthearted, not proper torture.

“Nan,” I said. “If Elia don’t drink this wine, I’m going to turn the telly off so you won’t be able to watch Corrie.” My nan, instead of saying, “What? Don’t be ridiculous that’s not a proper rule,” looked at Elia and with a sympathetic smile said, “Just drink it darlin.” Like my ridiculous game had been sanctioned by FIFA. I loved her so much for that. She used to give me her pension book so I could sign for her money and spend it on drugs—“Bring me back a bit though eh, Russ?”

I used to love winding her up more than anything—she was such a laugh. I’d pretend to turn on her telly, pause and somberly announce, “Nan, I think the telly’s broken.” “Don’t say that Russell, my program’s gonna start.” I’d say, “It’s definitely broken, Nan, you’ll have to adapt to life without it, don’t make a scene,”

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then turn it on and she’d be all happy. She accepted me unques-tioningly, my nan. I was always skinning up in the front room; eventually she yielded to curiosity, “Russell—is that drugs?” “No, it’s not drugs, Nan—it’s marijuana, and it opens your mind, you square.” “Well, you wanna be careful with that Russell, ’cos I’ve seen it on Kilroy: it leads to worse things.”*

“Oh Nan,” I muttered, “you’re so parochial.” But it turns out my dear ol’ nan was right. My nan’s “Kilroy drugs ladder” led inexorably from marijuana to amphetamines, to LSD to ecstasy to cocaine and then crack to—cue fanfare—heroin: the drug addict’s jackpot. I should have listened to her. My drug addiction was a cliché that could’ve been avoided by listening to Robert Kilroy- Silk.

Stoned, and in the mood to wind her up, I once naughtily crept from the kitchen, the smell of which will remain forever with me—chips, chops, chocolate—to the living room and was about to burst in and tell her there was a fire or a ghost or a murderer, when I spied her through the open door, sat in her chair, the TV off, just staring. I realized that she spent a lot of time alone, that she existed when I wasn’t with her, that her body was tired. She looked ready to die.

The last time I saw my nan she said two things to me. One that she’d said every time I’d seen her from the time I’d had the facility for language, the other she said only once. “You got any money?” as an offer, not a request, and “Look after your dad Russell.” She’d never said that before. That’s all she said from where she lay in Lillechurch Road, her bed having become her

* Kilroy was a sub–Jerry Springer daytime audience participation talk show where Kilroy would simplify complex social issues for the consumption of stoned or bored viewers.

Once he did a show on bullying, during which he got a person who’d been bullied to aggressively confront a non-related, nonspecific bully without acknowledging the tragic past of the poor bully, who’d suffered all sorts of nasty sex abuse. It was mental telly.

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deathbed without anyone having been informed. I owe her.

Sometimes I wish she’d lived to see me succeed and get famous but it would’ve made no difference, to her I was famous already.

I phoned my dad the next day and asked him, “Is Nan alright?” He goes “No, she died.” “Oh right, OK then.” Th e phone

went dead—he later said that he was in the car, and drove into a tunnel. I was in a call box in Elephant and Castle. I went to a pub and cried and drank loads, I wrote a poem for my nan that I read at her funeral. I scribbled it out longhand in ballpoint pen on a series of little scraps of paper, while tears fell on it. It’s the only poem I’ve ever written that is about someone else. Not meant to prove how deep and clever I am, it’s just a simple thing that I meant.

I didn’t cry when I read it at the funeral—I just recounted it blankly, almost phonetically. And after the funeral, my cousin Gaynor copied it out, and made it into a card, which she sent to everyone. I remember glancing at the photograph—a black-and-white picture of my nan looking joyful and beautiful with my cousin’s little boy, Sam, who’s all gorgeous with his curly hair.

“Ah, that’s so beautiful,” I exclaimed to myself, “she’s done it so tastefully, on that parchment paper.”

At that moment, my eye caught a crucial couplet early on in the poem, where “Damascus” should rhyme with “ask us,” but Gaynor had inadvertently left off the “us.” It wasn’t just the rhyme scheme this messed up, but all the stresses as well. Of course I had no option but to fly into a blind fury of artistic perfectionism—“Fuck! That’s wrong, that’s not my poem. How many copies of this have you sent out?”

Silly really.

On the day of the funeral, though, there were no such lapses in decorum on my part. In fact, it felt at the time like my transition to adulthood. In the poem I mention every member of 183

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Nan’s bloodline, which was a plea for them all to stick together,

’cos the family was falling apart.

We had to carry that fucking coffin through this huge grave-yard by a fl yover off the A13. I’ve never been back there since, but I’d like to. All that throwing dirt and stuff, so full of bleak pageantry. I gave my cousin James my jacket because he was cold, but I didn’t really feel the chill of the midwinter air, because my senses were overwhelmed by things that were much more powerful—like duty and family, and other pressing issues that I wouldn’t normally think about.

At one point, when I simultaneously ran out of money and girlfriends who were willing to be financially exploited, I even had to go and live back with my mum in Grays again for a while. I signed on with a temping agency, and they told me that there was work over Christmas assisting the postal service. I didn’t realize that the reason they needed assistance was because the postmen were on strike (not that I would probably have cared that much anyway, as my political sensibilities were still very much in their infancy at this stage).

I don’t think there was even an interview—you just went down and said you could do it, and started there and then. You didn’t even have to wear a uniform—which disappointed me a bit to be honest. A uniform might have made it easier for me to cope with the indignities of this form of labor. The first of these was that each morning my mum would drop me off with some sandwiches and a few premade joints in my lunchbox. Th is

made me feel slightly bad, ’cos I don’t think many other postmen in their early twenties were still getting dropped off at work by their mums.

No one ever wanted to have it off with me while I was being a Postie: this infuriated me. Unless the films of Robin Askwith are a complete fabrication (a possibility which I find too horrible 184

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to contemplate), then postmen should fall comfortably within the remit of casual early morning how’s yer father. And yet the entire time I was working for the postal service, not a single wanton housewife propositioned me.

As I tottered round the great big estates of Ockenden, trying not to come a cropper in the frosty ground in my dead slippery shoes, I would make the time pass more quickly by stealing some of the letters and packages. I thought that would lighten the mood.

When I made that confession previously in a brochure for forthcoming Channel 4 shows that was distributed free with the Evening Standard, someone in the Ockenden area tried to press charges saying that I could easily have been their postman. But unless they’re missing a Best of Frank Sinatra CD then it’s unlikely.

Down the end of one of the streets was a recreation ground or a rec as they’re commonly known in the Essex area, and perhaps the world over, for all I know. There was a group of men playing football and so I thought it would be nice to watch them for a moment or two, instead of just trudging onward with my breath freezing in front of my face. I paused, heart as heavy as my sack, laden with resentment and parcels of unfulfilled ambition, to watch their game.

They seemed to be quite good players these men—charging around on that chilly early morning pitch. At one point the ball came bouncing toward me, filling me with that immediate sense of dread which always accompanies this eventuality. If a ball comes in my dad’s direction in a park, he nimbly dances up to it and elegantly, with the side of his foot, sends the ball swooping back to its place of origin, like a footballing Enoch Powell cal-lously repatriating immigrants.*

* Enoch Powell was a potential Conservative Party leader, beloved by the right wing, who is famed for a speech where he said immigration would lead to rivers of blood in the streets 186

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When a football comes toward me, however, I know this precedes a moment of terrible embarrassment. I’ll either hoof it skywards, or step on it, or it’ll go between my legs. When it came toward me in this instance—although on the outside I was simply placing my sack on the ground, trying to act as nonchalant as possible—inside my head I was screaming, “Oh no, that ball is coming toward me, I’m about to be humiliated, here it comes, this is the moment of humiliation . . .”

Sure enough, I swept my foot into the ball with all my might and it skidded about eight inches in front of me. At the same instant as the man who was sprinting to receive a pass saw that he was going to have to come all the way toward me to retrieve the ball, he also noticed that I had a postbag. “Here, what are you doing watching football?” he demanded. “Why don’t you get on with your job? You fucking scab.” The other players, seeing the confrontation, soon began to join in the chorus of condemnation—“Yeah, you scab, get on with your fucking job.”

These men were striking postal workers, playing football to distract themselves from the harsh realities of industrial action, and while they were forgoing payment in a bid to improve their working conditions, I had stepped in to take their wages. I was embarrassed and frightened by my own naïveté. Th is further

reinforced my sense of not belonging to my own culture.

I was never very good at sustaining jobs—it always seemed a bit pointless, ’cos you never seemed to get the money for ages.

My mum was always on at me to get a paper round when I was younger, and I tried it for a bit, but I quickly realized that it was much easier just to throw the papers away. I had a job collecting of Britain. Apparently he’d deny himself a wee-wee to get all worked up before making a speech, then get on the podium and be all passionate and racist—bear this in mind if you ever have to speak at a wedding. Go to the loo before you start, particularly if the couple is from different racial backgrounds.

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for this hospital lottery once as well, but I just used to give them the bare minimum I could get away with and keep the rest of the money. I realize now how disgraceful that is, but I just didn’t have a work ethic, and if anyone ever challenged me on it I’d just quote George Bernard Shaw to the effect that “a true artist would see his family starve, rather than work at anything other than his art.”

My dad was (and is) a confident, masculine, working-class man, and Colin, while somewhat less ebullient, was still very much the embodiment of the big, heavy manual laborer—always working, always drinking. I presume that feeling os-tracized and alienated from them, even within my own home growing up, encoded within me a deep sense of alienation. Th at’s

why in any group dynamic my identity will always be defined as an outsider rather than from within.

This is also the reason why stand-up comedy is the perfect career for me. Not just because I’m constantly scribbling notes inside my own mind to deal with the embarrassment I perpetually feel, but also because I’m always observing, always outside.

It’s a perfectly natural dynamic for me to stand alone in front of thousands of people and tell ’em how I feel. The fact that I’ve managed to make it funny is bloody convenient, because I can’t think how else I would make them listen. V

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21

Don’t Die of Ignorance

I got very close to Karl Theobald in that confused and anxious time after leaving Drama Centre. He comes from a working-class background in Lowestoft. He’s a real autodidact, who always knows loads about books, culture and art, and is very clever, quick and funny. He was my first comedic soul mate. Th ere was