My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (25 page)

Part of the special affection I felt for Matt is because he’s a couple of years younger than me. When I first met him, Matt was like Rodney in Only Fools and Horses, and prior to that I’d always been the Rodney. Not just in my own family—where my dad was a bit like Del Boy, a sort of upbeat Thatcherite go- getter, and my nan was like granddad, sentimental, lachrymose and lovely, and I was kind of gawky and aspirational, trailing along behind—but in other relationships too.

Karl Theobald was older than me and senior. Whereas while Matt is very clever and funny, he was the fi rst person I’d really been friends with in adult life who was demonstrably my junior.

Because I was a TV presenter and he was an intern, that meant I had status in the relationship. This just made him more sulky and adolescent, which I found very entertaining.

Matt would never go and get drinks for me, ’cos he was too lazy, but I did make him score heroin for me a couple of times 205

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later on (he refused initially, but I bullied him into it, saying,

“I’ll still get it, Matthew, you’ll just inconvenience me. I’m not going to give up heroin because you don’t go and get me some now”). When he wrote an article called “10 Th ings Russell

Should Be Ashamed Of ” in my tour program, this incident was one of the ten.

Meeting Matt was the beginning of a period which in retrospect feels like quite good fun. There’s an episode of the MTV

show Jackass where Johnny Knoxville and the lads re-create a stunt from the film Cool Hand Luke, to see if they could eat a load of hard-boiled eggs without vomiting, like Luke does.

To promote Jackass in the UK, MTV restaged this all around the country, which meant I had to go to every major British city—Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds—hyping up Jackass through a microphone in shopping centers, doing this competition, and posing for pictures in local papers, while trying to avoid streams of egg-strewn vomit. Even quite recently, when I was back at MTV doing One Leicester Square, I would bump into the people that were my PR handlers on that trip. One lass reminded me that I put lap dances and prostitutes on her gold card, and got the hotel to give me cash on her account without her prior knowledge. Looming larger than any of these misdemeanors, though, was the saga of the aforementioned giant African snails.

I bought them at Brixton market, took them on tour with me for a bit, and then grew a little tired of them. They were good for a while, but once you’ve grown used to the fact that they’re bigger than normal snails, they get a bit boring. After a couple of weeks the novelty has all but worn away: it’s just like they’re normal snails and you’re closer to ’em. I had to order them room service; spinach they liked, though “not with Hollandaise sauce—any kind of salt will kill them.”

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In the end, I left them behind at the Leeds Hilton. I was at some shopping center—normally they’re called the Corn Exchange, so let us assume that was the name—with all these Leeds yobbo lads scoffing eggs and puking them up all over a tarpaulin on the floor, when the MTV PR girl comes up to me with a phone and goes, “Erm Russell, it’s the North Yorkshire police on the phone—they’ve had a call from the RSPCA about you leaving giant African snails in your room at the Hilton, do you want to speak to them?” North Yorkshire police? RSPCA?

Hilton? “Sounds like a lot of aggro,” I thought.

“You take it, you’re in PR.” But later on, the story got out, and I had to talk to some syndicated press people about it—it was only ever picked up by local papers and the Irish press, for some reason. They asked, “What do you say to these charges from the RSPCA that it was gross neglect of a rare and endangered animal?”

This was ridiculous, because they’re normally food—you buy them at the market either alive or frozen, and you’re meant to put them in a stew, so effectively I had saved them from certain death and taken them on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. So I said, “I miss them pets—Sebastian and Jake, they were called [I gave them different names every time someone asked me], they meant the world to me, and I’ll do what ever it takes to get ’em back. They lived like proper little toffs with me—Burlington Berties they were, accustomed to the finer things of life.”

I once read this Irish newspaper and saw that they’d put this load of rubbish in it verbatim. I suppose that was my first taste of a form of public notoriety with which I have subsequently become all too familiar. Seeing that clipping stuck to Andy Milligan’s desk at MTV made me think, “This is good.”

Me and Matt just used to fuel each other’s madness when we were doing that Dancefl oor Chart. We’d both be off our heads in 207

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some club somewhere, I’d ask him to think of an image and he’d pause then say, “Worzel Gummidge at the Berlin Olympics lying to Jesse Owens about Teen Wolf ’s dreams,” then I’d go off and present this alternate reality to some hapless sod, and they’d have to come to terms with it. There were a lot of ’80s films involved—it was just my childhood being reconfi gured as jokes—and it was sort of a cult hit.

I thought, “This will be the thing that makes me famous: in a tiny, insular, cable TV way, but still famous.” I was meeting loads of women when we were out in those clubs, and getting a lot of blow jobs in toilets. Amanda had come back into my life, so I was seeing her as well, and it was the first time I’d ever had a bit of cash to spare. I spent it mostly on too-tight t-shirts, which I wore with most of my abdomen visible and highlights in my hair. Matt said I dressed like some kind of swarthy Latino lover. Th at place

above the bank where I lived with Mark and Andy was like the house in Fight Club—dirty plates piled up everywhere, people riding round on BMXs. And after I’d been at MTV a little while, I moved out and got a room with their old next-door neighbor Daniele. He was a juggler, but he had a good job selling commodities or something like that, and he’d got this amazing flat in a converted church in Hackney Road.

This was the first time in my life that I’d lived somewhere nice. There were three or four different flats, attached to a cool bar that held interesting events, leading off a beautiful courtyard, and Daniele’s was on the top floor. It was a really interesting L-shaped space, with a lovely living room, a skylight and wooden fl oors. I had a great little room, and good money coming in from MTV, so I was always able to pay the rent.

When Matt stayed there I used to make him sleep in the corridor, on an old brown duvet that I’d had since I was about nine.

He used to plead with me—“Can’t I sleep in your room?” And 208

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I’d say, “No Matthew, you will be sleeping on ‘the brown.’ ” I’d only been there about a month when Daniele said, “Russell, you’ve made my house feel like a brothel—the whole place smells of drugs, and every time I come in here there are diff erent women.” (It wasn’t Matt he was complaining about: I did have other guests.)

He was right. If anything good came my way, I had to fuck it up. Daniele couldn’t understand why, because he was a gentle person who really knew how to live. He loved cooking, and once he brought all these slippers back from Morocco in all diff erent sizes, and left them by the door for visitors. That would never occur to me, he was from another world. France.

Daniele perhaps found me a difficult flatmate on account of the antics. I was always up to antics. He never learned of the time I was locked out. This anecdote is an almost perfect representation of instant karma: I did something bad, the universe caught me and promptly punished me. When John Lennon sang, “Instant Karma’s gonna get you,” I thought how? It’ll never get me, I’m too smart, too swift, too tricky and quick, but he was right. I met this German lap dancer called Michaela—she was one of a long line of lap dancery–type girls who distracted me from the sadness at this time. “Sisters of Mercy,” Leonard Cohen would’ve called them, offering salvation and redemption. I called them tarts. Karma must’ve been listening. And waiting. I was going to lap-dancing clubs quite a lot at the time, in particular Spearmint Rhino. Cunningly, I used to phone them up and go, “Hey, my name’s Zack Showbiz. I’m the manager of Russell Brand—the hot MTV presenter—and he’s on his way down to your club.

Don’t make him wear shoes and trousers like you do the normal guys. Welcome him with open arms, show him a good time.”

A few minutes later I’d arrive—“Hi, I’m Russell, I think my manager, Zack Showbiz phoned?”—and they’d say reverentially, 209

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“Oh, come in, Mr. Brand, nice trainers.” Some of the dancers recognized me from MTV, and I’d be able to chat ’em up, and kidnap them. You’re not supposed to do that, it’s against policy, like touching and feeling and wistfully reflecting that everything could’ve been so different if only you’d learned how to love. Michaela. She was sexy, in a lap-dancer sort of way, which many might think, incidentally, is the best way to be sexy; other ways include: sexy like a teacher, sexy like a police-woman, a mate’s sister, a biblical character, Cher, Eva Braun, a Brontë sister, a babysitter, Madonna, or The Madonna. I like lap- dancer sexy.

I got her delivered to the house in a cab using the MTV Addison Lee cab account, of which I am still the world-record exploiter. I used to hang out in crack dens with a car outside; get my mum brought round, takeaways delivered and my mum’s takeaways delivered; on one crazy occasion I had my mum delivered to a takeaway just to mix things up. I had dealers picked up in Camden, so they could drop me off drugs in Hackney and then get taken home. I just exploited that account from the moment I started working at MTV, till the moment they sacked me. I simply didn’t use public transport from the second an MTV researcher spoke these cherished words: “Russell, as a presenter you get an account number to use at Addison Lee, whenever you need to get to work.” I ignored the “get to work”

bit: every single journey I took from then was in an account cab, and not just my own journeys—sometimes I’d have two or three cars out at a time, ferrying my mum around, or picking people up from airports.

Michaela arrived in her car just as someone else departed in theirs—Daniele was away in Paris. We were watching pornography together and having sex in the living room—“This is the life,” I thought, like a Beano character eating sausage and mash 210

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on a deck chair, as I ejaculated. Michaela hadn’t cum. My policy was—first sexual encounter orgasm comes free, after that be on your toes ’cos I won’t be hanging about. Her orgasm quota had been met earlier in the evening, it was now three in the morning so I strolled off into the flat all nude, to quiet my belligerent mind with a fizzing brown snake of heroin. Michaela began loudly putting her stuff away—in the way the women do when they want you to say, “Oh, don’t put your stuff away.”

I wasn’t going to fall for that one; they teach you that on your first day of womanizing school. Michaela was angered by my well-tutored ignorance: she came out into the corridor—fully clothed and carrying her bag—walked up to me with rage twinkling in her perfect green eyes, and smacked me really hard in the face. I’m very much of the view that it’s wrong to hit a woman, or anyone really, so I had to be innovative when meting out retribution; thankfully the smack had awoken my creativity, I grabbed her shoulders and bum’s rushed her toward the front door. I never know whether to say bum’s rushed or frog marched—let’s call it a frog’s rush or a bum march to keep the mood light; it was the manner in which a bouncer would evict a drunk. As I escorted Michaela through the front door, I felt very strongly that I needed to avenge the slap—“she can’t slap me just because I didn’t make her cum then swanned off leaving porn on the telly while I smoked gear.” Yes, what kind of man would let such a slur pass unaddressed? Not me, so naked and riled and one hundred percent sure that what I was about to do was objectively right and what God would’ve wanted, I spat in her face. Yes that’s right, I spat in the face of a beautiful woman that had made me cum. She had slapped me and I was convinced that it was the only course of action and that there’d be no consequences. Then the front door clicked shut behind me. “Uh oh.”

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I discreetly pushed the door to check it was shut. It was. Michaela hadn’t noticed yet because she was too stunned by the spitting atrocity. “Hmm,” I thought. “This doesn’t look good.

It’s three o’clock in the morning, I’m completely naked, I’ve got no money, and the only person who could possibly help me has got my spit running down her face.” She still hadn’t noticed the door. “Fuck you, I’m going,” she shouted and started to walk off into the cold, Hackney night. “Before you go, Michaela, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize.” She stops and looks back, wiping her face. This will take some charm. “It was a beastly thing to do, even if you did slap me really hard in my face which is my livelihood, I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry.” She hasn’t walked away. Do it, ask, you’ve got no choice. “Erm, Michaela darling, can I borrow your phone please? I seem to have locked myself out.”

Selfishly and with no thought for my feelings she starts laughing, but I manage to win her round to the extent that she’ll let me use her phone to call Talking Pages and get a locksmith.

Unfortunately the first two or three aren’t open twenty-four hours, and when I do finally get through to one, I’ve just started to give them the address when the credit runs out on her phone.

At this point, Michaela decides she’s not going to hang around for my benefit any more and clears off—never to be seen again.

Time moves very slowly when you’re standing naked on Hackney Road at three o’clock in the morning. I can hear music from the bar below, and I realize there must be a party with a late license, but I can’t go down there completely naked. Luckily, there’s an umbrella standing up against the door, so I open it up between my legs, like in a Marx Brothers movie, and use it to shield my genitals. Did I mention that the umbrella is pink?

That’s one detail of this story I often try to forget.

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