My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (31 page)

I’m not getting off the roof of this van.”

Will ambled up the ladder. “Come on Russell, get down mate, stop being silly.” I think I was sort of in a panic, really. I could see Duncan thinking, “This isn’t looking good. We’re meant to be embarking on a month-long voyage, and ten minutes in, he’s already up on top of the van refusing to come down.” When he climbed up the little ladder to try and talk to me, things got worse. I started shouting, “You make me sick! You make me sick!” Then I stuck my fingers down my throat, and dry-retched gin fumes into his face in a sort of bilious gray cloud.

Duncan started to cry. One by one, a series of other people came to visit me on the roof, like I was some kind of bonkers sage, a lunatic guru or berserk swami—on top of a mountain, rather than a van. But in this case people would come not to seek advice, but to try and talk me down.

Sometimes I flick into this mentality where I think, “I’m just gonna carry on saying or doing this thing now, to find out what 243

RUSSELL BRAND

happens as a result.” Like on that plane, or wanking before I could cum, or drinking booze as a lad. At these moments, it’s almost like I’m observing my own life happening—not in a conscious way, but with the sense of detachment that I imagine I learned at an early age, as a way of coping with stress and trauma.

I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I just refuse to get down, and stay up here for as long as possible.” First Martino came and pleaded with me. Duncan didn’t make another attempt because he was frightened by the gin fumes. But Matt came up, sort of chuckling but trying to take it seriously, “Stop it, you’re being a dickhead.” Then Elaine from Vera called up.

They gave me the phone and she said, “Russell, what the hell is going on? We’ve got a schedule. We’ve paid for everything and you’re not going to be able to do it.”

I was calm and reasonable. “Look, there’s nothing to worry about, there really isn’t a problem. I’m completely able to fulfill my obligations to Vera, and to you.” But even as I was saying this, I sort of giggled to myself at the realization that I was delivering this soothing message from the top of a van.

At that point, they canceled the shoot and took the camper back to the depot, and we all went back to Vera’s offi ces. Me and

Matt sat in the pub while other people just sorted through the debris and I said, “This is bad, isn’t it? What have we done?”

Matt resented the “we.” “Let’s just not tell our mums,” I said, like when you’re in trouble at school.

The upshot was that Matt was suspended, and poor, dear Martino was sacked. Geoff said, “We expect Russell to do things like that, but we also expect you to be able to control him.” Martino, who’d always encouraged and protected me, just drifted around after that—he’d rented a new house on the basis of the money he was earning from the show, and he had to leave it and go back to Italy. Everyone was really traumatized by this 244

Let ’s Not Tell Our Mums

barmy incident—Matt had to move back to his parents’ and sign on the dole—and for a while it looked like the whole thing was falling apart.

Eventually, I was able to get Matt back on the payroll because at this stage I was incapable of doing anything on TV without him, and they kept Will on as well. They wouldn’t have Martino back though, as they were determined to give us a “proper” producer. We ended up with this ridiculous character called Sean Grundy. He was actually from Bolton or somewhere, but he looked like a portrait of an Irish leprechaun hung in a theme-park haunted house, with little brass buckles on his dolly shoes.

Sean was a little, pale, ginger-haired man, always whispering and pessimistic. The people at Vera teamed him up with one of Elaine’s friends—this woman called Trish—so the pair of them could be like our pretend parents. Stung by the indignity, it was at this point that me and Matt finally made a sensible decision.

“Right,” we said, “let’s just do things that are mental.”

From this moment, the idea behind RE:Brand ended up being basically, “Let’s challenge diff erent social taboos. Let’s look at things that confuse and confound people, and I’ll embrace them.”

It was an extraordinary experience making that series. Each episode was such a psychological strain that, had I not already been a heroin addict, I would very likely have become one to cope with this silly show. I still stand by the actual programs, though. They’re painful and poignant and laden with pathos—not only because of the emotionally extreme subject matter, but also because I was in such a damaged place, psychologically. At this point I had absolutely no concern for my own physical or emotional well-being and was basically out of control. But while this made day-to-day life virtually unbearable for me, it also made for pretty good TV.

245

RUSSELL BRAND

It was Matt’s idea that I should have a bath with a homeless person. Together we contrived to take on these taboos: have a fight with your dad to examine the idea of the Oedipus complex, have a bath with a homeless person, get to know a member of the BNP* to see what they’re like, seduce an old woman—all these berserk notions which we ended up turning into twisted realities, and ultimately broadcasting to minuscule viewing fi gures, via the schedules of a little-watched satellite TV channel.

I’d first met Homeless James when I saw him being harassed by the police off Oxford Street, while begging by a cash point.

I’d gone over and got involved—on my Che Guevara tip—“Why are you hassling him? Aren’t we all equal? That could be you begging one day. Hey, I pay your wages.” That sort of stuff .

Then I started taking James up to the Vera offices, much to the chagrin of the directors and staff .

They

were quite happy to demonstrate social solidarity through Kit Kats but if you actually bring homeless people into their lives, it makes them uncomfortable. So James was forever in our office with his mate Alan—they were the Batman and Robin of the homeless community. One day, we brought him in for a cup of tea and stuff and asked him, “James, would you like to make a TV program? We’ll give you some money.” Obviously, he said yes. That’s how it is with heroin addicts—they’re very open to suggestion. If you give them money, they’ll agree to do just about anything.

At the time I was still living in that nice flat off Brick Lane.

The driving ideology behind the Homeless James encounter was that no one should really be homeless. With all the unoccupied buildings that there are in the UK, it’s irrational that homelessness should still exist. Presumably the reason it con-

* British National Party—racist political party.

246

Let ’s Not Tell Our Mums

tinues is that we somehow think of the homeless as dirty and unpleasant, so how would it be if I took a homeless person, brought him right into the core of my life—shared my bed and my bath with him—how would that make us both feel?

The intention was to film with James for a one-week period, but the reality was that after two days he decided that he preferred being homeless to living with me. Also, as a junkie, he needed to get out to score drugs. I stayed in touch with James after the show and used with him quite a lot. We only fell out after I gave him £100 to get me some heroin and he fucked off and didn’t come back. It’s obviously difficult to have a genuine friendship when one of you is on MTV and the other is a tramp:

“He’s a homeless person and I’m a glamorous TV presenter—we’re the original odd couple!”

I do have very clear memories of being kept awake by James’s snoring on the night we shared a bed together, but the most significant moment in that particular episode was probably the bit where we had a bath together. We were both naked, and James’s weeping ulcerated leg was sending clouds of pus into the bath-water. But I just got on with washing James’s back and shaving him while he coped with this enormous discomfort by keeping his eye on the ultimate prize of £500, or what ever it was we were paying him.

There were some quite sad and touching moments. I took him out on a double date to a posh restaurant with a couple of birds I was seeing. He’d been scrubbed up and given some clothes that I didn’t want, so that he resembled a small-time drug-dealer. We went to a place called Freddie’s in Islington. As I recall—from watching the tapes as much as anything else—it was quite sort of stifled, until the champagne started flowing, but even then he was uncomfortable.

One of our least successful notions was to take James into the 247

RUSSELL BRAND

radio station XFM, where me and Matt had a Sunday lunchtime show. The item that I’d brilliantly created in honor of this occasion was “Homeless James, your homeless agony uncle—for all your homeless needs.” There was a dearth of callers, on account of the fact that homeless people don’t have radios. To make up for this deficit, I had to look elsewhere for problems to solve, and ended up looking through tabloid newspapers—specifi cally, the Sport.

In my opinion, the letters in the Sunday Sport’s problem page are not real; they are in fact—as most of the paper is—just an excuse to print pornography. The problem I chose to read out in the hope of getting Homeless James to solve it was one where a woman had been having an affair with her husband’s father and had been sodomized by him. She was keen for her husband to start sodomizing her, but didn’t know how to approach the subject. Obviously it didn’t say “sodomize” in the paper, it said

“fucked up the arse.”

I was professional enough to realize that you can’t say that at one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, so I changed it, very cleverly, I thought at the time, to “f ’d up the a-level.” After I finished the item, we put a track on, and the controller—Andy something, his name was—rang up and started using worse language than anything I’d said. The next day, I was fired. Driving home from that show in a cab with James and Matt, I had a terrible nauseous feeling, just thinking “everything is going wrong.”

The next day we took him to the Ideal Home Exhibition, thinking, “Oh that’ll be amusing, as he’s homeless”—some of our ideas were a little stunted—and there was a moment which was actually screened where I said, “Look James, do you feel exploited by this?” And he goes, “Yeah, I do a little bit.” When I asked him why, he said, “You don’t really know me. I could be 248

Let ’s Not Tell Our Mums

anyone. I could be a murderer or something—I’m not—but having me living in your house is still a bit weird, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”

So that was kind of how it ended. It’s strange booking a cab for a homeless person. Where do you say they’re going? We gave him £20 for his fare and they dropped him off in one of his old doorways at C&A (it’s Niketown now).

One discarded RE:Brand idea which it’s probably best we didn’t follow up was: “Let’s get a load of prostitutes, make them live with my mum, and she’ll be their pimp. We’ll change her car into a pimpmobile and make her put adverts in the paper and deal with all the customers!” I remember that phone call very clearly: “Mum, can I have loads of prostitutes come and live round your house for a TV program?” “Oh, alright darling. Yeah, OK,” she replied, in that same soft and gentle voice she always used as she continued resolutely in her mission to love me.

That misguided program idea mutated into me just going to live with an individual prostitute. We picked this woman called Ali, who I’d met on this holiday with Matt on the Norfolk Broads, where we’d had to get this woman we didn’t know to pretend to be my wife because the boatyard owner didn’t want to rent out a boat to two men he’d assumed were gay (but that’s another story).

She was living in terrible poverty. Well, not terrible in a dramatic sense, but just in that way which is tragically quite mun-dane and common. Her living room door had a hole in it, so that her boyfriend Pete could observe what was going on when she took her clients upstairs.

The premise of the program was outlined in my opening monologue. “Hello there, I’m Russell Brand. Now, we all sleep with prostitutes don’t we, but would we still do it if we knew a 249

RUSSELL BRAND

little bit more about their environments?” “Cut! Russell, we don’t all sleep with prostitutes—that’s just something you do.”

The idea was nonetheless a good one—would anyone sleep with prostitutes if they weren’t able to dehumanize them? If they understood that prostitutes were women with lives and families and problems and hopes and dreams, would they still be able to empty themselves soullessly and leave fifty quid on the table?

I know some people would, but it’s partly the surrounding culture of anonymity and exploitation that allows these things to fl ourish. That’s what I wanted to demonstrate by living with Ali and Pete and their daughter for a few days, and then finding out how it would feel at the end of that period to go, “Right, well, it was nice getting to know you, but here’s a hundred quid, let’s fuck!”

The operation they were running up there was crackers. Ali was working to support not only Pete, but also his brother. Th e

two of them pimped her out by putting cards around the Nor-wich area, and then stayed at home to make sure she was OK

while she brought clients in. There was one time when the other two were out delivering cards or scoring gear or something and it was only me and Matt in the house downstairs with the baby.

We could hear her upstairs working.

She told us heartbreaking stories about the stuff that she’d do. She could make more money offering “oral without”—blow jobs with no condom—and she told me about one bloke with a syphilitic, tumor-ridden cock, and her saying, “Oh, you’re gonna have to put a condom on that love,” and then still giving him a blow job.

They were always going to “Cash Converters” to convert their TV into heroin. The sign outside the shop read—“Convert your unwanted goods into cash.” In the window there were things 250

Let ’s Not Tell Our Mums

that obviously had a sentimental value, all steeped in emotions (a sitar seemed especially poignant). The wording is lovely—

“Convert your unwanted goods”: “I don’t want these goods—what I want is heroin.”