My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (32 page)

Of course I was a junkie then as well, so I was using with them the whole time we were making the program. Th e hypoc-risy of it was ridiculous, really. There were bits where on camera I’d be going, “Stopping using heroin is the hardest thing in the world, but you’ve gotta do it mate—you guys have got to look after yourselves.” Then the camera would be turned off, and I’d say, “Right, OK, let’s go,” and we’d all have a big use-up.

Ali

seemed—quite

understandably—somewhat scatter-

brained and absent, just as a way of coping with the situation.

Her hands were like chorizo bound with twine. Th e brother

was quite an interesting character, always looking off into the distance—where things were more bearable. And I became quite close with Pete, the dad—this pinched man, this mobile corpse.

I had this one chat with him in the garden—which was all on tape—where he was talking about his addiction. He started to break down and he was just sobbing, “I hate myself, I hate myself,” when his daughter came running out and zipped his fleece up around her, as if this coat was the toxic swaddling of their common problem, from which they both peered out desperately.

At the end, we took them out on a boat to film the final scenes on the Norfolk Broads—which was obviously where Matt and I had been when we first came across Ali. Everything was cool, and we got some beautiful footage of them having quite a nice day out. Then I took Ali and Pete into my room, and explained the idea of the show, and the fact that I was now going to offer him extra money for me to have sex with Ali.

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Pete just started crying. It was agonizing, and made me feel terrible, but I still thought, “This is what you’re doing every day, it’s just that you’ve got to know me.” Of course, if he’d have gone,

“Oh fi ne, yeah, thanks for the money,” it would have put me in an incredibly difficult situation; it was bloody lucky that they didn’t want to go through with it, really.

When Elaine and Geoff at Vera saw the footage, they thought it was amazing. I suppose it’s not normal to see this sort of thing happening on camera, because “the talent” doesn’t generally behave like that.

In the next program, “Wanky-Wanky,” we addressed the subject of sexuality. As the title suggests, this episode was a little more juvenile than its immediate pre deces sors, but still interesting nonetheless. The question was, “Is your sexuality constructed by environment and experience, or is it innate?” I examined this issue by wanking off a man in a toilet. In conclusion, your sexuality is innate.

I had this friend called Cyprian. He was a gay Jamaican who spoke a bit like Eartha Kitt—“Oh Russell,” he’d purr, “you are a very attractive boy.” I’d met him in a club in South London where he’d given me some Ketamine. (Ketamine is an unusual drug—this was the only time I took it, actually. It situates you in a kind of pulse, creating an effect in your head like the high-pitched noise tele visions used to make after closedown: “Shash,”

I think it’s called. Mind-shash, brain-shash: that’s what Ketamine gives you; it’s like going into a tunnel of shrill sound.) I thought Cyprian seemed like a good person to give us access to the gay community. We explained the idea of the program to him, and he agreed to help us out with it. Th ere are

some daft bits at the beginning where we wander about and he teaches me blow-job techniques on a sausage, even though I was 252

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a vegetarian at the time (that was my main concern, rather than the fact that I was practicing fellatio on a West End street).

Then we started hanging around outside this gay gym in Covent Garden, trying to pick up men without very much success.

But as soon as we went into a gay pub—the King William on Poland Street, it was—our luck changed.

This pub was for bears—gay lads that are big and burly—and the fi rst bloke we spoke to was Gary. I strolled up to him with the cameras and said, “We’re making a TV program where we examine and explore homosexuality—can I wank you off in the toilet?” And he went “Yeah, okay.”

Me, Will and Gary went to the men’s toilets and arranged ourselves in the cubicle and got on with making the show.

The first thing that struck me was the unfamiliarity of male genitals—they looked somehow ridiculous to me.

Of course, there is an element of aesthetics involved. Had Gary been an Adonis or had he been like David Beckham or Leonardo DiCaprio, things might have been different, but as it was, he was too strewn with quirks. My own genitalia were well- groomed, neat and delectable. Gary’s genitals, on the other hand . . .

Worzel Gummidge never bared his genitals, but had he one day got drunk on moonshine and savaged the world with his nudity the sight that would have greeted the astonished Crow-man and a frightened Aunt Sally would have been very much like what I had to contend with—an angry thicket of pubic hair, clutching skyward like furious Shredded Wheat, as if to escape Gary, sentiments I was beginning to understand.

With trepidation I reached down toward the nub, which was draped in a film of scum—before you balk, remember these are just anecdotes to you, not mucky little memories.

Midway through, the still flaccid Gary requested, “Can I 253

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touch yours, Russell, it’ll be easier for me to get turned on.” No reflection required, no erection desired. “Fucking hell, mate, do me a favor.” Then Will, from behind the camera: “Go on Russell, it’ll be funny.” Many times in my life I have allowed that sentence—“Go on Russell, it’ll be funny”—to direct me into the jaws of trouble, danger, harm and sackings, and once more I was helpless to resist its siren lure.

At that time, it was my custom to wear colorful Y-fronts emblazoned with icons. I believe on the day in question the honor had fallen to Che Guevara (Elvis and David Bowie were safe at home in my underwear drawer). Gary reached over and peeled my pants down. As he began to stroke my genitalia, I realized they looked like something found in a butcher’s shop.

It was a sparse ration that Gary contented himself with that day, plucking at my indiff erent cock. But then one of my great gifts and worst curses kicked in: ego. For, in spite of the fact that I happen not to be gay, and found the whole experience quite unpleasant, I’m so vain and egotistical that, somewhere inside of me, I really wanted to be good at giving Gary a wank.

So I pretended it was my own beloved winky. Triumph! Gray sperm ribbons decorated the lavvy, a ticker-tape parade for the unknown soldier. I fled immediately from the cubicle and washed my alien hand with hot water and soap.

Watching the tapes, you can see that I was in a proper state after that. Ironically of course, due to broadcasting law, the bit where I wanked him off couldn’t be shown. We could only use audio. The whole thing was a really disturbing and unsettling thing to do—and I immediately got in touch with some lap dancers to do some heterosexuality. Me and two lap dancers, one American, one Australian, went out in a limousine and filmed that as some sort of denouement to the episode.

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There were a lot of loopy ideas flying around at that time. “Cut off your thumb, have it frozen for a week, and then we’ll sew it on again,” that was one of them. Then, “Why don’t we chop off your foreskin, cook it, and eat it?” This latter stroke of programming genius came from that Trish woman—she’d started to go a bit mad. In truth, everyone was feeling the pressure.

Especially Sean Grundy: he was a hilarious character. Morrissey is a living sign, he was a living sigh. Once, driving into Soho to buy sex toys for the “Wanky-Wanky” episode, me, Matt, Sean and Cyprian were in the back of a cab, and Sean was on the phone complaining about some dud microphones.

He was just being so undynamic that I got irritated. “Tell them to replace the mics. PRODUCE the show.” “Fuck you,” he blurted. We then embarked on a physical conflict that was so in effective and wet that the cab driver had to stifle laughter as he ejected us from his car. I clutched Sean’s hand, he clutched mine, and we tussled for a bit; nothing really happened, because we were in a peeved clinch. In a bid to break the stalemate, I used some of my sexy fi ghting talk, which would lift the whole tone of the most basic brawl. “Oh yeah baby boy? You wanna sniff Pappa’s poo pipe”—if not exactly that, it was certainly from that stable. Then, I hissed at him like a goose. Th e goose

hiss is only called upon when a fight really hots up; it’s more of a deterrent, but I was cross so I did a hiss Hiroshima.

“HiiSSssssS,” I went.

Cyprian had bought me a lovely bunch of tulips, and he was a little disturbed because his flowers were all buckled up by this ludicrously eff ete altercation.

We spent so long making RE:Brand that we seemed to pass every major landmark in the calendar while we were doing it—

Halley’s Comet went by a few times, there were three or four 255

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World Cups. So when May Day came round, I dragged Matt and Will down to the West End for the antiglobalization protests.

Neither of those two are particularly politically minded people, but I was determined to rope them into my plan to “start a revolution, and then film that.” I’d been to quite a few May Day protests by then, and had a Zelig-like ability to be present at flashpoints. I was there when Winston Churchill had a turf mohawk placed on his head by anarchists, and that time when they smashed up that McDonald’s on Whitehall.

On May Day 2002, however, I was to be the main event.

Aside from the ideological principles and the anticorporate sensibilities, the thing you really had to experience that year was me wandering around dangling sex toys through the windows of police vans, trying to arrange a football match like the one with the Germans in the First World War and stripping naked at Piccadilly Circus.

The footage we filmed is ridiculous: I’m jumping over barriers, throwing myself on the floor—mental, I was. Th e statue

of Eros was completely ringed by coppers, and you can feel that atmosphere where at any time it can spill into violence. I find the potential for mayhem exhilarating—society’s only held together by a few ideas. I know those ideas are quite entrenched, and the reason we have a police force and an army is to maintain that status quo, but at moments like this, that whole ap-paratus can suddenly look quite vulnerable, and I find that thrilling.

On this occasion, my tendency to get overexcited manifested itself in a plan to take all my clothes off by the statue of Eros.

The police were saying, “Look, don’t strip naked, or else you’ll get done,” but I was showing off. “I pull down my pants, will you lot overthrow the government?”

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The mob recognized that they were witnessing the dawn of an age of freedom and cheered. Down came the ol’ Che Guevara panty poo-pots, which I’d worn knowing that this was to be as significant a moment in revolutionary history as the taking of Havana or the Paris uprisings of ’68 and I wanted to dress appropriately. The police folded in around me like dough and I disappeared into an angry loaf of casual brutality.

I’d picked up from somewhere that if you’re being bothered by the police pretend to have an epileptic fit, so—naked and lying on the floor, in the middle of Piccadilly Circus—I started to shout “I’m epileptic! I’m epileptic! I’ve lost my bracelet”; a brilliant detail—epileptics wear them, don’t you know. I rolled my eyes back into my head and started throwing myself round on the floor, and the police parted from around me, all freaking out.

A senior policeman, who was a bit older and wiser said,

“Look, come on son, what’s going on?” So I dramatically leaped to me feet and pulled up my freedom knickers. I was escorted into a theater doorway where the Reduced Shakespeare Company play. The step elevated me, and the police looked all small.

This black bloke with dreadlocks and motorbike leathers stood beside me throughout—the police asked him to move on but he never did, he was my guardian angel.

Loads of photographers and press started asking me about the protest, like I was a visiting dignitary; Matt always satirizes the moment I started spouting off quite well—“Oh bloody hell, the government . . . Jesus . . . Nelson Mandela.” I on the other hand prefer to think I devised some quite brilliant policies there, amid the madness.

Perhaps moved by my eloquence, the police said, “We are unarresting you” (an excellent innovation in law enforcement, 257

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which I had hitherto been unaware of). But they should ne’er have unarrested me, for I was an immediate recidivist.

I galloped off to liberty, which was as usual on top of a van—those ones you see at news events, with satellite dishes on top. It was down the bottom of Wardour Street. The sex- workers’

parade had begun—fl ags were waving, bongo drums were beating, and I was again caught up in the exhilaration of the protest atmosphere. The street was flooded with people, and they all cheered when I climbed up on that van.

I thought, “I’d really better do something.” So I began to strip. “People like stripping, and this march is for sex workers, it is a befitting tribute.” A tribute that would not have altered had it been a march for orphans. I received a standing ovation: yes, they were standing before I began, but I detected that they were standing with renewed intent. They were a very generous audience; they were sex workers—to them it just looked like work.

A security guard clambered on top of the van after me, so I legged it. Me and Matt ran into Old Compton Street, which by then was cordoned off by the police, because the protests had started to turn violent. We saw some people escaping up a fire escape, near the Offspring shoe shop, so we climbed up there, into an unseen Soho world of fire doors and air-conditioning vents, and ended up in that cemetery on the corner of Shaftes-bury Avenue.

As we squeezed out through the railings, we were stopped by the police, who asked us a few questions and then let us go. It wasn’t till a couple of weeks later that the police found me and charged me and I had to go to court for indecent exposure—which sounds terrible—and criminal damage, because while on top of that van I’d smashed up that satellite thing a bit for my encore.