My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (28 page)

He sold mostly speed and weed and hash. I wasn’t really taking too many hard drugs yet. This was the time when me, Mark Morrissey and that Geordie Tim were a little pack of ne’er-do-wells, living above that pub the Queens Arms. I stole a guitar from one of the students at Drama Centre to swap for drugs once, giving it to Lucky Benny, then feeling awful about it and trying to get it back, but not being able to.

They had a pet snake—some kind of python it was, not a massive one—and they lost it. It got loose, and then six months later, it came back. What had it been eating? I guess there was an ecosystem in that house which could sustain it. I went round there once and the house was all full of wreaths, because one of their kids—a fifteen-year- old girl—had had a baby, and it had died. I remember them all going, “Yeah, it’s terrible really, but 218

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you know . . .” like they came from a time when infant mortality was normal.

Lucy—one of Benny’s surviving granddaughters—had some terrible respiratory illness which meant she had to spend a lot of time at the Royal Free. Even when she came home, she still had a drip up her nose, going into her stomach, and she was only meant to be fed through that until she got better. Th eir one

concession to the medical needs of this child—who they did really love—was that they’d leave the door open while they were smoking. I saw her eating a pack of Frazzles once—this little tottering thing with a drip up her nose, poisoning herself with illicit corn snacks. “Oh Benny,” I called out anxiously, “Lucy is eating some crisps, look.” “Oh yeah,” he replied, “she likes them.”

Amazing characters would accumulate in that flat, and I’d sit round there smoking draw for ages when I was supposed to be doing ballet. There was this one woman called Sue—again one of these washed-out, almost transparent people. I was just round there for a sixteenth of dope—about £7.50 worth—and she goes, “Oh Benny, I’m really depressed, I was thinking about killing myself last night.” He just said, “Okay, I’ll come round and do it for you.” There was no sense of this as a cry for help: he just briskly outlined different ways of doing the job quickly and painlessly (through the eye socket was one that stuck in my mind, for some reason).

There was this other bloke Brian, who spoke like Henry’s Cat and was intermittently addicted to heroin but was actually really wise. I used to get all stoned and talk about my problems and feelings with him, and one day he goes, “Well, you know Russell, it’s a hard life, down here among the have-nots.”

That really resonated with me, “the have-nots.” Later on, when I started hanging out with homeless people in the West 219

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End, scoring heroin with them, I realized that there’s this secret culture of people going up and down Oxford Street, whistling and yelping to each other in a kind of tropical slang—men on BMX bikes delivering £10 bags of heroin to be purchased with grubby fists full of 50p and 10p and 2p coins; West Indian housewife–type women perambulating past Topshop, cheeks wedged with packets of smack.

You don’t see this bustling underworld until you need to.

There have been occasions, thrilling to me, when I went off to score, cutting a purposeful stride down past Tottenham Court Road tube station in the company of three or four homeless people, their sleeping bags worn about their shoulders, like the cloaks of Roman legionaries. I must have cut a ridiculous figure, dressed in my MTV presenter attire—skintight white jeans, graffitied tops, Ray-Ban sunglasses—jostling along with them, as they set off in search of a bag in Covent Garden. In the midst of Oxford Street, with its perpetual, glum buzz, the constant dull throb of the buses, the normal people busily skittering to work, this homeless sub set exists—in the margins, along the curbs—scarcely noticed by anyone. Who else do you think it is that uses phone boxes? They’re only there for prostitutes’ cards and homeless people to call heroin dealers—no one else bothers with ’em, we’ve all got mobiles.

Until quite

recently—when I gratefully gave up public

transport—I would still see people I’d scored drugs with begging in tube stations. There was one bloke—I don’t know if he’s still around—whose eyes were missing. First he lost his wife then his house then his shoes, then his eyes; heroin is a greedy drug, robbing you by increments first of your clothing, then of your skin; finally when it comes for your life it must be a relief.

They’re not present those people: if you talk to them, they just look beyond you, they’re not really there. That’s why the invisi-220

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bility of the homeless scoring drugs on Oxford Street is almost by mutual consent: they don’t want to be seen, and no one else wants to see them.

I was a tourist in that world. I’ve never been homeless—I’ve got too many safety nets, too many people that have seen my frailty and vulnerability and are determined not to let me slip through. People like my mum and my nan, that have just gone,

“Oh bloody hell, he’s always gonna be a child to some extent—we’ll just have to keep an eye on him.”

One crack house in East London, I used to pop into from time to time, you know, for the atmosphere, where an enormous black woman used to deal drugs from her bed. Like Lady Madonna. People were just nodding out all around the flat—in the bathroom, in the bath. And yet it was just off Bethnal Green Road. Outside, everything was normal and functioning, then you’d walk through a doorway, and be amid all this madness.

Once at Lady Madonna’s crack emporium this pimp was arguing with one of his girls, syringes strewn like confetti at a junkie wedding, and I was using with them and I thought, “I shouldn’t really be here.” I had work and a bit of money and people that loved me. That place exists still waiting for me should I err.

I craved the illicit even as a boy in my mum’s house. I called a prostitute knowing that I had no means of paying her except for my NatWest checkbook that had woodland creatures on it—“Would you like a check for twenty-fi ve quid with an illustration of a squirrel? I don’t know if it’s going to clear.” “What about the badger?”

I’d frequently visit prostitutes in Soho; they have cards dis-played in the doorway saying “model.” I sometimes considered going up with some Italian sun hats and floral dresses and saying,

“Put these on love, it’s for Kays Catalog,” but I usually plumped for joyless sex. I’d cross paths with a guilty stranger on the 221

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stairs, worse on the way in than the way out. Often they were poor old sods in suits.

I especially liked really big women. One lady had boobs like bin bags filled with lard. She wheezed her way to the door, and then when she got onto her back, I thought she’d never get up again. I visited her on my lunch break while working at Vera Productions, a liberal TV production company that makes Rory Bremner’s and Mark Thomas’s shows. Once someone stuck a packet of Kit Kats to the kitchen wall because they were appalled that someone had brought them into the offi ce because

of Nestlé’s irresponsible marketing of baby milk formulas in the Third World. I thought “Bloody hell they’ll be furious if they find out where I go for my lunch.” And I ate those Kit Kats.

I went to Reading once to meet two gorgeous and enormous women; it was like an away match. Huge women, they were.

What I don’t like—and often this’ll happen if you sleep with pairs of prostitutes—is they’ll do this really unerotic kind of pseudo–sex talk that makes you feel like you’re in an Alan Ayck-bourn play. “Ooh, hello there, big boy, I am feeling SoOOoo hot . . . you’re a naughty boy in’t’cha?”—that sort of rhubarb.

Luckily, those two giant Reading women eschewed that grisly euphemistic seaside- postcard routine.

After all the sexy fun, it is nice sometimes all warm and simple; we sat and swapped stories, they told me about encounters they’d had with their clients. Cozy it was, like nattering housewives, I felt young and drowsy. Th

e stuff they said was mucky but to them

it was ordinary: “We’ve got this one client right. One time he came in and put on your underwear, didn’t he, Sue?” “Oh yeah, yeah, he put on my knickers and bra.”

Must’ve been a hefty gent I thought, but I kept quiet as I didn’t want to cause offense or ruin the yarn. “Then he got into 222

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the bath,” Sue continued, “shat himself, and said ‘Ooh nanny, I’ve been a naughty girl, I don’t think I can go to nursery.’ ”

I enjoyed the tale wholeheartedly and assumed others would too. The first time I ever spoke to Ricky Gervais, he called me out of nowhere because he wanted to tell a story on his XFM

show about something that had happened to me and Karl Pilk-ington and he wanted to check I didn’t mind. He was funny as you’d expect and I was excited because we were getting on really well and I liked his TV shows. I thought, “This is great—I’m gonna be lifelong chums with Ricky Gervais.” I remembered that Ricky is from Reading and thought, he’ll love my prostitute story. “Hey, Ricky, you’re from Reading, let me tell you this story about prostitutes in your hometown.” I told him that story, got to the punch line—“Nanny, I’ve been a naughty girl. I’ve just shat myself and now I can’t go to playschool.” And Ricky went, “I’m gonna have to go now.” I just said, “Oh, okay,” put the phone down feeling really deflated, and thought, “Oh no. What did I say?” V

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First- Class Twit

Amanda Alguero Alejos, I still get satisfaction from writing her name, the three As, triple A. A schoolroom endorsement of the woman I came closest to loving. It was a very volatile relationship, but it was fun. I couldn’t speak Spanish properly and she couldn’t really speak En glish. But instead of that creating a situation where we couldn’t communicate, it meant everything became very simple—we didn’t waste time discussing nonsense, we just talked about very simple things. To describe pirates to me without using the word “pirate,” which she did not know (her En glish teacher, me, was on drugs), she said “very bad boys only love for gold.”

I was with Amanda for six years in the end—on and off —and lived with her again quite recently, but there was never really any prolonged period when we were what you’d call comfortable together.

I’d go over to see her in Ibiza, and we’d just ricochet from argument, to sex, to argument (I chased her down the street in nothing but a towel once, shouting “please come back”). Th en I’d

return home to London, to a life of whores and heroin.

A further complicating factor in what was an already troubling dichotomy was Amanda’s job. In the early part of my time at MTV, she was managing a motel in Ibiza which was affi li-224

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ated with a famously seedy nightclub. It was the most decadent, vile place. I’d go and visit her there and there’d be loads of drugs and fucking going on everywhere you looked.

This was extraordinary to me, because obviously this was the kind of thing that I was generally into, but at that time I was in love with someone. And it seemed oddly in keeping that when I finally found a woman who I felt quite romantic toward, she was ensconced in the kind of de cadent environment that would cause me to constantly balk at the context of this unaccustomed tenderness.

From the day I met her at the language school, I wanted Amanda with me always, but because we spent most of our time apart, I went through a lot of psychological tumult, and I increasingly used heroin to take the edges off those emotional extremes. When things went well, I’d smoke heroin to celebrate, and when they went badly, I’d smoke some more to comfort myself.

Th

e first time I realized I’d become addicted to it, I was staying with Amanda in a risible ’70s-style hotel in Ibiza. It was a horrible beige nightmare of a place, which claimed to provide four-star accommodation. I don’t know where they’d got those stars from—they must have tumbled from the heavens, ’cos the AA certainly couldn’t have seen fit to award them.

Amanda didn’t like me using heroin. She knew I’d been doing it in London, but I’d told her I’d given up, so I had to hide my drug-taking from her. On this occasion, though, there’d been no opportunity for me to smoke it in secret. When I said I thought I might go for a walk, Amanda was (understandably) suspicious and insisted on coming with me. At that point I began to get anxious. I could feel myself heating up and breaking out in a sweat, and then my legs started kicking and jumping.

That’s the worst symptom of heroin withdrawal—I can tolerate 225

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the nausea and the sweating, but I hate it when your legs go all kicky. That’s where the phrase “kicking the habit” comes from.

When I was traveling, I used to smoke heroin in terminal toilets. I’d burn it and then inhale the vapor and hold my breath until there wasn’t a single bit left. When you do eventually breathe, the smell is so beautiful. It tastes like warm, chocolatey tar, sweet ink, saccharin venom. Obviously I knew it was addictive, but prior to this occasion in that appropriately brown Ibiza hotel room, I hadn’t yet realized that this small drawback was relevant to me.

Amanda eventually fell asleep, and I had to go into the bathroom and quietly unfold all the things I needed, which I’d managed to secrete about the place. I got the foil out, sat on the toilet, lit the lighter under the foil, and the tiny lump of heroin started to liquefy and bubble. Then it begins to run along the foil, and as it does so a vapor escapes, and you have to hover above it, sucking it up with a tube.

I was very conscious of the sound of the lighter, then almost as soon as the smoke had hit the back of my throat, that feeling—the kicky leg, the sweating—it just went. It was like turning off a light. Then I could lean back and everything was suddenly all relaxing and beautiful. It was at this point that I knew that I was an addict, though the pain of that realization was greatly mitigated by the impact of the heroin: that’s how it gets you.

We filmed a lot of Dancefl oor Charts in Ibiza, and I got another job there presenting a program for Sky One with dear, lovely Tess Daly. She was very kind to me. She once had to knock on my hotel room door and drag me out of bed to go to work when I was all smacked up.