My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (27 page)

Amanda and me, second day of abortive “cluck.”

Coming off smack in the Cotswolds, eyeing a reptile.

Matt, the neurotic

Howard Hughes-

style nit that he is,

was panicking

about those flowers.

“I’ve got hay fever

Russell, put them

down.”

Thin from drugs

and angry.

Me and Martino

acting like Wham.

Flatteringly large censorial box.

Russell, Matt, Nicola and Sharon backstage at the Brits. Look at us—four London/estuary punks. We were running the Brits that year and there were hardly any complaints, except from the Queen, the f lirty cow.

Top row from left to right: Gareth Roy, Ian Coburn, John Rogers, Nik Linnen, Matt Morgan, Jack Bayles.

Bottom row from left to right: Lynn Penrose, Nicola Schuller, Mr. G, Hannah Linnen, Barbara Brand, Me, Sharon Smith, Nic Philps, Craig Young.

I love Morrissey.

Me and my lovely Mum. Aah. Aaaaaah.

Aaaaaaaaaah. I could go on.

Firing Minors

feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need.

My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who—not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words—said, “I want something.” He didn’t know what it was. Not “I want sweets,” or “a can of Coke,” or “to watch Th

e Tweenies,” or whatever it is they’re into now (I liked Bagpuss), but “I want something.” All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

It makes you feel lovely and warm and cozy. It gives you a great, big, smacky cuddle, and from then on the idea of need is no longer an abstract thing, but a longing in your belly and a kicking in your legs and a shivering in your arms and sweat on your forehead and a dull pallor on your face. At this point, you’re no longer under any misapprehension about what it is that you need: you don’t think, “Nice to have a girlfriend, read a poem, or ride a bike,” you think, “Fuck, I need heroin.” V

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Down Among the Have- Nots

MTV’s studios are in Camden—a vibrant, thriving, diverse sort of place, very sexy and self-consciously cool. Drug dealers lurk down by the canal and up on the bridge, amid the punks. How do punks know to sit there? I wonder who was the first punk who sent out leaflets saying, “Hello, I’m a punk and I’d like to meet similar—why not come to the bridge over Camden Lock, and we’ll sit around punking it up and drinking a bit of cider?”

Drugs, specifically heroin, were everywhere in Camden: little blue bags the size of, I suppose usually, two peas. That’s how big a £10 bag of heroin is—half the size of a Malteser, twice the size of a pea; just in case you ever become a junkie and you need to score in Camden, you can take this book with you as a guide to weights and measures.* “That’s not ten pounds-worth, you scumbag, look at this Malteser.” Possibly that’ll be the last sentence you utter before being fl ung into a canal, to drown to the sound of giggling punks.

The dealers keep the bags in their mouths. Then when you buy one they spit it into their hand and you have to put it directly into your mouth. Even though you obviously want the heroin, a little bit of you is thinking, “Eeugh! He’s had it in his

* “Maltesers” are like “Whoppers,” but in my view a bit nicer and with a better name.

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Down Among the Have- Nots

mouth.” After a while, though, you stop thinking that. It’s a bleak day when that happens. You know that’s another little boundary that you’ve crossed, another principle chalked off to experience, another thing you’ve put behind you, because there’s so little in front of you.

“All my days are empty and the pages of my diary are all silver foil, with naught but an inky black snake carving its way through the days,” I once wrote. Probably to impress a girl.

I became preoccupied with London’s Hogarthian underbelly when I was still at Drama Centre—befriending poor, doomed Homeless Jim, who died on the steps of the school and spoke using only three phrases. “You know me,” “Right or wrong” and

“Not being rude.” He could communicate everything he needed to say with that palette. And scoring off Lucky Benny. Lucky Benny were an amazing character—sat behind his great giant glasses, with his wiry, Iggy Pop–fit body and his endless kids.

For someone who had failed so spectacularly in socioeconomic terms, this man’s genes were powerful: his kids’ faces—even the girls’—were identikit versions of his.

These are the main things that I remember about Lucky Benny. He lived on a North London council-estate, and his wife was called Pearl. You know the one of the Muppets who’s got hair that’s made out of spaghetti? The woman Muppet, that was in the band? Well, Pearl looked a bit like her. It felt like gravity was pulling her downward. You could see this struggle reflected in every movement she made—as if she couldn’t blink or turn her head without doing battle with Newton’s implacable adversary.

There was a picture of Pearl which they had on their wall. A charcoal drawing, I suspect from Leicester Square—not a cari-cature, a realistic one. The street artist had really captured the tragedy of Pearl as a character, so this thing that was meant to be 217

RUSSELL BRAND

a memento of a happy trip to the Trocadero was actually a haunting reminder of the family’s terminal dilemma.

One time Benny compromised both me and dear Pearl by showing me a photograph of Pearl’s vagina—taken up her skirt.

I was sitting politely taking drugs in their house demonstrating that I enjoyed their company as well as their wares when Benny, beaming, thrust a photo into my eyeline and asked, “What do you think of that?” I thought, “How do you answer this question without offending anyone? What is the correct answer? What would it say in Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette?” “It’s nice”—is that the right answer? “It isn’t nice?” It’s just an impossible social quandary. I think in the end I went “mmm,” thinking, “If I just make a noise, that could be judged either way.”

I’ve never encountered poverty like it—and haven’t since, as a matter of fact, other than among those who are actually homeless. But there were still structures and hierarchy and charm and dignity and codes and protocols. Benny was a proud man, and I really liked him.