My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (3 page)

It’s extraordinary how quickly you get institutionalized in that kind of environment. You start wearing, not pajamas exactly, as you do get dressed, but certainly indoorsy sorts of 13

RUSSELL BRAND

clothes. They have meetings every morning and afternoon. Th e

rituals are astonishing. You have to go round the room introducing yourself—“Hello, I’m Russell”—and then admitting to your recent transgressions. These aren’t really wrongdoings as we would normally understand them, more everyday actions which have developed a sexual component.

“I had an erotic thought.” Or “I did some eroticized humor earlier today.” (I liked the phrase “eroticized humor” very much—it seemed like such a perfect description of what I do for a living, that a few months later I made it the title of a live show which I took to the Edinburgh Festival.) Or “I experienced eroticized rage.” Then you’d round the whole thing off by saying, “My goal for today is to get through the KeyStone experience and just live it as best I can.”

People began to customize this closing declaration, I suppose as a way of emphasizing their own particular characters. But far from lessening the institutional feel of the whole proceedings, it kind of exacerbated it. Soon enough, each person seemed to have their own slogan: “Hello, I’m Stuart, and I’m gonna swim like a KeyStone dolphin.” These customized slogans would often be drawn from the totemic cuddly toy that we were each obliged to select from the mantelpiece. I had a camel. He was forced upon me and I loathed and resented him. Or someone else would say, “I’m gonna ride the KeyStone Express,” and all the others would make supportive train noises—“Wooh! Wooh!”

And I’d be sat there in the middle thinking, “Oh great, I’m in a nut house.”

I’ve never felt more En glish in my life than when I was sat in that American cliché swap shop. They’d say, “I hear your pain, it’s good that you shared.” And I’d be thinking “Oh do fuck off. For Christ’s sake, someone put EastEnders on the fucking 14

April Fool

telly and get me a glass of Beefeater gin and a toasted crumpet.”*

In that situation, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realized that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you’ll find you’ve become a butcher. And if you don’t want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you’re going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts. V

* EastEnders is a drab soap opera set in the East End of London. It concerns the humdrum lives of a group of working-class families and is largely defined by its glumness and ongoing popularity. The show covers contemporary issues, such as AIDS, abortion and rape.

It’s on in the early evening and is consumed as family entertainment. It is an interesting indication of our national identity that we happily consume such saddening fare, preferring depressing realism to Technicolor fantasy.

15

2

Umbilical Noose

Now for the old formative years, which traditionally in autobiographies are a bit boring—not in this one, however. My childhood is so jam-packed with melodrama and sentimentality (described as “the unearned emotion”) that you’ll doubtless use these very pages to mop up your abundant tears.

Once, for a TV program—which has been my motivation and justification for a good many personal atrocities—I had regression therapy, where a therapist hypno-regresses you back to past lives you didn’t have. In the car there my mate Matt Morgan (writing partner, Radio 2 cohost, companion and creative soul mate) kept murmuring facts about Anne Frank at a subtle, almost sub-liminal volume in the vain hope that I’d spend my session complaining about Nazis in the stairwell. As it transpired, my past lives all coincided with historical periods covered by Blackadder.

“I’m in a medieval courtyard, I’m beating up that idiot Baldrick, I can hear the theme tune from Blackadder . . .” “I’m in Regency London at the court of the glutinous Prince George—played by Hugh Laurie—and I can hear the theme tune to . . . Blackadder . . .

Christ, I’d better run, I think that’s the SS at the door!”*

* Blackadder is a sitcom in which the protagonist, Edmund Blackadder, exists in four different historical periods across four seasons. In Season Two, he was a courtier and 16

Umbilical Noose

Before the past lives were accessed, I had to be regressed through my childhood. As I rendered the bleak, joyless depiction of my infancy, the therapist remarked, “Can you not see anything positive?” “No,” was my response. “This is depressing—let’s just fast-forward to Blackadder Goes Forth, not the last episode though.”

So that’s what you’ve let yourself in for. Fortunately, both for you and me, I grew up to become a comedian and will make it as jolly as possible. In the words of Morrissey—“I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.”

I suppose you want to know how it was that I came to be on this dirty little circle we call “world?” Well, I was born at midnight on 4 June 1975. My parents, Barbara and Ron, had fought fiercely throughout the pregnancy. There was one incident which Alf Garnett creator Johnny Speight would have rejected as absurdly chauvinistic—“People will lose sympathy for Alf,”

he might have told himself, “don’t put that in”—where my father, in a bizarre reversal of the dynamic one would expect, made my heavily pregnant mother push his broken- down van, while he steered and swore.*

It was a rapid yet complicated birth. I was born with my mouth open, and my umbilical cord wrapped around my throat, as if I was thinking, “Well, if this is all there is, I’m off . Check please.”

suitor of Elizabeth I. It was a brilliant show, which revolved around the relationship between the witty and sardonic Edmund and his idiot sidekick Baldrick. Evidently I enjoyed this period comedy so much that, when regressed, I’d co- opted it as a former life.

* Alf Garnett is a sitcom character who is a vitriolic, chauvinist, racist, and was in-tended to be ironic, but became beloved by the very people he was parodying. He called his wife a stupid cow, disgracefully abused his black, gay social worker and adored West Ham.

17

RUSSELL BRAND

My parents separated when I was about six months old. My mother, who had been told she could never have children, adored me and was doting and protective. My father, himself fatherless (his own dad had died when he was seven), was a sporadic presence, affording me cyclonic visits at the weekends. He would invariably arrive late, to find me ready and waiting for him, all dressed up and mummified in my duffel coat—toddlers can’t move properly in winter coats, they’re like little trussed-up Hannibal Lecters scanning the world with their eyes . . . Then a huge argument would ensue, which would generally end with both my mother and myself in tears.

Some of my earliest recollections are of seeing Dad on Saturdays—him leaving me watching the TV at his flat in Brentwood, while he read the papers or diddled birds in the room next door. I would mainly watch comedy videos, Elvis films and porn. Another very early memory is of our dog Sam being put down. I was only about two or three at the time, but I loved that dog. I remember him not wanting to get into the car to be taken to the vet’s, and me saying through a mist of tears,

“Come on, Mum, let’s go down the pub.”

My very first utterance in life was not a single word, but a sentence. It was, “Don’t do that.” Why is that the first thing I said?

What kind of infancy was I having that before I learned “mum,”

or “dad,” I learned, “Could you stop? Whatever it is that’s going on, just pack it in . . .” On reflection, it was probably because I’d just been told not to do something that I made this my debut proclamation, rather than because I had the pressing need to bring some unpleasant incident to a conclusion. More normal words like “bird,” “clock” and “mum” did follow fairly soon after, and ’tis good that I’ve got a mum who remembers all them things.

In fact, my childhood can’t have been that bad if someone loved me enough to document my fi rst words.

18

Umbilical Noose

That person—my mum—still lives in the house I grew up in, in the small town of Grays in Essex, on the northern side of the Th

ames estuary.

I trained, as I suppose all children do, to practice seduction and manipulation on my mother, but the particular nature of our circumstances inclined me to focus on this strand of my development to the exclusion of all others—to the extent that I simply didn’t feel equipped for other activities or human relationships. First I hated playschool, then I hated infant school—just as I’ve subsequently hated every institution that I’ve ever been forced to try and fit into.

The outside world was fearsome. But I was safe with my mum, and at least once—when I was really young—raised the possibility of matrimony. I remember saying to her, “Why don’t we just get married? That seems like a sensible solution to all this fuss and bother.” I hadn’t foreseen the diffi culties that could

subsequently arise with such an arrangement. Although it’s not that long ago, there was much more stigma attached to being a single-parent family when I was growing up than there is now.

My friends’ parents were all still married, and the fact that my mum and dad were divorced was regarded quite sympatheti-cally at school.

My mum had lots of female friends, so I had a kind of matriarchal upbringing—surrounded by women. As well as my dad’s sisters, Janet and Joan, who gave me picture books which I would later get extra use out of by changing the words to make them offensive and rude, there were lots of other aunties who were not actually blood relations. There was Auntie Brenda—who drove my mum to the hospital to have me (because my mum was out walking the dog when I decided to get all nice and born)—and Auntie Pat. She used to give me books as well.

Then there was Auntie Josie, the woman from over the way.

19

RUSSELL BRAND

My mum’s still friends with her now. In my early childhood Josie loomed large. She was “brassy.” There was one occasion as a small child when I heard my mum on the phone to her. Josie’s hot water had stopped working and she asked if she could come and have a bath at our house. Knowing that Josie was on her way over, I quickly decamped to the bathroom, taking with me as many of my toys as I could get my hands on. “Oh, Russell’s in there,” my mum warned her. “Don’t worry, I don’t mind,” she replied, “he’s only a little boy.”

“Ha, ha, ha, you fools!” I exulted privately. I knew exactly what I was doing. As a result of my subterfuge, Josie was there in the bath, naked, and I was on the fl oor, innocently playing with cars (and other things I weren’t even that interested in), all the time watching her wash her glorious breasts. “That’s it,” I thought,

“keep washing; after all, I’m only a little boy. What do I know of the pleasures of the fl esh?” I really was quite manipulative, even at that early age. I was already a weary connoisseur of my dad’s pornography and had begun to develop my almost supernatural ability for guessing women’s bra sizes. Just the statistics alone turn me on a bit. 34G. Cor. 36F. Blimey. It’s only a number and a letter but it thrills me. That’s why I could never play the game Battleship. “Thirty-two C—I’ve sunk your battleship.” You may have sunk my battleship but you’ve also decorated my pants.

As a result of this matriarchal upbringing, I have been be-queathed a kind of hotline to capable, working-class women of a certain age. I am truly comfortable in their company. Th at’s

probably why all the women I have surrounded myself with in recent years—Lynne, my housekeeper, Sharon who buys my clothes, and Nicola who does my makeup—all have the same accent. The only exception is Leila, my yoga teacher, who is American, but she’s like the others in that she’s a very strong woman—warm and spiritual.

20

Umbilical Noose

My relationship with conventional masculinity has always been much more problematic. I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was growing up, but I did still encounter a few of my friends’

dads. When I did, I didn’t much care for these “Dad” chaps.

Great, oafish, hairy boors they were—working nights and belching. “Quiet! My dad’s on nights,” people would say, interrupting one of my eloquently bellowed soliloquies. “Dad? Nights?” I’d inquire. Then the beast would awaken from a musty, darkened cave and come Fee-Fi-Fo-ing out, sniffing the air. “Perhaps we ought to play at mine,” I’d suggest, “your house seems to be inhabited by refugees from Roald Dahl’s jotter.” Th en off we’d

scramble back to the comfort of my doting mum.

My own father was only discussed in hushed tones. “You don’t want to grow up like him,” people would say, all grave. But whenever I saw him he seemed to me a kind of Essex Cavalier—every week a different woman and a new scheme for riches. “I would like to grow up like him,” I’d think.

Even though there were times when he had loads of money, he never met the £25-a-week maintenance payments that he was required to make, and this exacerbated the impoverishment of the house hold I grew up in. Mum once showed me the agreement which said how much he was meant to send, and when I saw him, it was my duty to try to get it off him.

My mum did numerous jobs—taking me with her until I began playschool, where I was frequently in trouble, having daily tantrums when she left me behind. Ridicu-larse to get in trouble at playschool really. How bad could it be? “We must talk to you about Russell. There’s been another stabbing in the sandpit.” I do remember inspecting the spittle-flecked faces of senselessly enraged adults, looming like ogres, thinking,

“Well, this all seems like a bit of a storm in a teacup.” I was 21

RUSSELL BRAND

awake as a child. I knew it was nonsense. I don’t regard my childhood as some foreign country. I still feel myself within the same vessel—my flesh a rocket of which I am the captain and chief cosmo- naughty.

Is this something to be proud of? That I’ve not grown up? I don’t wanna get all Holden Caulfield about it, but I do see the passage into adulthood as a betrayal of the innocent values of childhood. Even the most savage monsters that history or red-top tabloids can parade were once just soppy tots, and before that snug lil’ fetuses—and I’ve never met a fetus that I didn’t like yet.