My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (37 page)

December 2002. This was the beginning of my life in recovery.

For all the damage it had enabled me to do to myself and my career, heroin had also provided a degree of sanctuary. Marianne Faithfull once said that heroin had saved her, because she was suicidal and it kept her alive.

In Twelve Step recovery programs the personifi cation of drugs and addiction is common. I thought of heroin as a companion. Like “Footprints in the Sand”—that bloody poem that goes on about footprints in the sand. It’s about a person dreaming that one set of footprints is theirs and the other is the Lord’s.

And then noticing that at the times in their life that have been the most difficult, there was only one set of footprints. Th ey

ask: “God, why did you desert me?” And he goes: “That is when I carried you.”

When I hear that, I think, “Come on God, don’t fuck me around. That’s convenient—how come the footprints aren’t deeper then? ’Cos you’d have been carrying my weight. And they’re not deeper, are they? How come one of those footprints has only got three toes? It’s a dinosaur footprint. And that one next to it is a cat’s paw. What’s been going on on this beach?

Why is God at the beach anyway? With all the chaos? And 295

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war? What the fuck is God doing on holiday at a time like this?”

Perhaps heroin had, similarly, held me in times of trouble.

The prospect of relinquishing it was terrifying. The only reason I did so was because I was more afraid of what was going to happen to me if I didn’t.

I’d been forced to go to an AA meeting once, while I was at Drama Centre. There was a tramp getting a cake for not having drunk for twenty years. I thought, “What’s the fucking point of that? One of the few benefits of being a tramp is that you can be pissed all the time.” A couple of years later, a comedian who’d been clean for a few years took me to Narcotics Anonymous a few times.

I sat in a meeting in Notting Hill, just off Portobello Road, and cried. I didn’t know why. They really get to you. While I was tearfully applauding people being given their commemora-tive key rings for eighteen months, or ninety days, or multiple years of clean time, the idea of not taking drugs for a whole day seemed impossible. I took the one-day key ring anyway, but I knew I wasn’t going to give up until the day came where it was imposed upon me. Chip and John impressed upon me that that day was now day.

Chip had specified that the whole treatment pro cess would take about seven weeks, which seemed an insanely long time.

On the train they called me and did an assessment of what drugs I’d been taking (they’d rather rushed me through the induction pro cess, because of the charity work John Noel had done for Focus, and Chip’s association with Davina). And when I arrived in Stowmarket, Chip picked me up in his red car and gave me a lift to the Focus offices in Bury St. Edmunds.

Chip embraced me; I thought, “That’s a bit weird.” But of 296

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course in NA land and rehab world, handshaking is eschewed in favor of the culture of the hug. It’s lovely really, I suppose, because the whole thing is built on solidarity and shared experience, so there’s no reason not to have a bit of a cuddle.

When I got to Focus, everyone was coming back from a trip, which is how I know it was a Friday, because Friday is trip day—where you learn how to readjust to society by going on the kind of jaunt a divorced dad would take you on: bowling, the zoo, the cinema.

The building was two-terraced houses that they’d knocked through, with a garden area and rooms for group and general counseling. It felt a bit like a doctor’s waiting room, but wasn’t madly institutional.

I was feeling very fragile and didn’t really know what was going on, but they took a urine test and prescribed a drug called Subutex, which mildly sedates you and is also an opiate blocker, so if you take any heroin you won’t get a buzz off it. Th ey also

gave me some sleeping pills, which were meant to be taken an hour before going to bed.

If I hadn’t already known I was a drug addict, the way I approached this latter medication would have given me all the evidence I needed. I took them the first night at ten so I could go to bed at eleven, the next night at nine, the next night at eight, then the next at six, ’cos I realized you get a buzz off it. Well, not exactly a buzz. But if you’re trying to stay awake and you’re on a sleeping pill, it at least feels like you’re a bit drugged.

At that stage, Focus was a day center. Now they’ve got two or three flats where residents, patients or clients—they generally call ’em clients—can stay overnight, but at that stage you had to find your own accommodation, the logic being that if you were out there in the community, having to walk past normal people 297

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in pubs, your recovery would have a better chance of enduring than if you’d spent the whole time ensconced in some treatment center.

Initially I had to lodge in a little garrety den in this ram-shackle bed-and-breakfast run by some Quakers. I can still remember the smell of the bathmats—it was like nan’s house.

And as for those whey-faced Quakers, it is beyond my recollection as to whether either of them actually wore half-moon spectacles, but they seemed to be peering at me over the top of something. Bury St. Edmunds is a very old-fashioned, provincial sort of place (I was surprised to find out that Nick Cave had once briefly lived—and written poetry—there). It has a beautiful monastery, and there’s a cathedral as well, so the atmosphere of the whole place has a religious tinge.

The center of town is cobbled. There was a comedy venue called Fat Cat Comedy Club in The Corn Exchange which I’d played a couple of times when I was off my head. And a Caffè

Uno and a Café Rouge, where I would lurk—all bamboozled—between group therapy sessions, intermittently chatting up innocent eighteen-year- olds—quite successfully, I might add. I still had that extra gear, though I’m not sure how pleased their parents were to meet a bruised and raw twenty-seven-year-old recovering heroin addict when I came back to stay the night.

It snowed that Christmas, and I bought a bike to ride around town on, and did my best to establish a newly sober and contemplative identity. It was a mark of how much I changed in that initial period that on one occasion Matt rang up the Quakers and asked to speak to me. There was some confusion about my identity, so he described me as a wild, Dean Moriarty crazy man, an octopus-limbed loon, a human Catherine wheel of vibrancy and excitement. There was a pause, and a Quaker offered, “We do have a gentleman with a bicycle.”

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One night—it was Christmas night actually—my mum came to visit. There was a tribute to Peter Cook on the telly and Jimmy Carr did a turn. He’d been in the same heat as me at Hackney Empire New Act of the Year, and I’d gone through to the final. (He’s a lovely fella actually, Jimmy.) And there he was on the TV, successful, and here I was watching it on a little portable in a B&B room, not two weeks clean, with my mum sat on the end of the bed, looking wounded and fragile. “This is it,” I thought. “Me and my mum the same as when I was born, I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve made things worse.”

I couldn’t go on living like this. I had to become successful. “I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I’m dead, and then more afterward.” And at this juncture I was finally willing to do what ever it was going to take to bring that about—up to and including giving up drugs. From that moment on, I really did take things, in the textbook rehab fashion, one day at a time.

An awful lot of what went on at Focus was incredibly humdrum and utterly without glamour. It wasn’t like what I imagine going to The Priory would be—I think of that as being incredibly stark and white, with all these crisp, clean sheets and orderlies shuffling about with an air of hushed reverence. Focus was a very drab kind of experience. It’s cold, it’s in Suffolk, and all these drug addicts and alcoholics are sitting around, raking over the past.

It was in these sessions that I first came across the “To my shame” technique. This is a secret generally only known to those who have been in AA, or NA, or pretty much any other kind of rehabilitation treatment, which I have impulsively and perhaps somewhat recklessly opted to “share.” That’s what we say, “share”: it just means “say” that you don’t even feel embarrassed about it anymore. Here’s the “to my shame” technique, it’ll blow your 300

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socks off. OK. Here it is. Tell no one, just do half, ride the snake . . . You can get away with any admission, however appalling, so long as it’s preceded by the words “to my shame.” Th at’s

it. If I’ve learned one thing from months of intensive therapy, and I haven’t, it’s that. “TO MY SHAME.”

E.g., (i) “To my shame, I used to, in my darkest times, steal money from my mum’s purse.”

That brave confession would have a very diff erent impact without its first three words. The self-accusatory prefix robs the listener of the right to disapprove.

E.g., (ii) To my shame, when I was drinking, I used to often forget to pick up my kids from school.

CORRECT RESPONSE: Aahh, you poor thing, it must’ve been hell.

Compare this to:

SANS “TO MY SHAME.”

I used to exploit women because I couldn’t cope with being alone . . .

CORRECT RESPONSE: He didn’t say “to my shame!”

You bastard! You vicious selfish bastard.

It’s like “Simon Says” for junkies.

The sessions would be eight to fifteen people sat in a room together, talking through all their worst addiction experiences with a counselor. Many of the staff of Focus had—like Chip—been junkies themselves in the past, but this fact in itself was quite hard to deal with, because they just seemed so straight and normal compared to the rest of us, bruised and (emotionally) naked as we were. Don’t get me wrong, they were really good people—I suppose they’d just calmed down a lot—but at fi rst I found the whole process quite difficult to get to grips with. Gradually, though, you start to hear everyone’s stories, and the whole thing becomes quite tragic and beautiful.

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