My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (7 page)

“This is unusual,” I thought. I wondered if perhaps I might’ve encouraged him, because I’d said something I’d heard on Only Fools and Horses.* To describe my bafflement at a mathematical

* Only Fools and Horses was a hugely successful sitcom chronicling the adventures of an affable, criminal family. The alpha male, Del Boy Trotter, perpetually dreams of becoming a millionaire. His brother, Rodney, is an artistic dreamer and Granddad is a burden. Th e

show epitomizes the phenomena of working-class aspiration under Thatcher. It was a mainstream show, beloved by young and old, and I used to literally dream they were my family.

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problem, I’d employed a phrase which Del Boy used—“Rodney, I’ve been looking for you like a tit in a trance”—only changing

“tit,” which I knew was rude, to “clown.”

“But it’s not ‘clown’ in a trance, is it?” he responded, lascivi-ously. By referring to this lewd colloquialism, it seemed I’d sig-naled my complicity in the world of adult sexuality. Just a few moments later, he was copping a feel, and besmirching the purity of what would later become popularly known as my ball-bags.

As a currency for rewarding academic achievement, I think it’s unlikely to supersede the gold star. Although I thought it odd, I wasn’t particularly cheesed off. What most aggrieved me about the whole sorry business was that soon after it happened, I told my mum, she in turn told my dad who didn’t go to the police, because he said he’d deal with it. But he never did anything.

Later in life, when he would sometimes drunkenly allude to parenting errors in a “Sorry I wasn’t a good dad” kind of way, I often felt this was what he was referring to. And if he’d beaten the poor old sod up or something, I would have seen that as an act of heroism. I didn’t see that tutor again, one hopes on account of his bizarre antics.

My brief foray into the world of private tuition was not, however, entirely disastrous. I should say at this point that, when I think about what tribe I belong to, where my loyalties lie and what my affiliations are, stories about going to see a tutor on a Saturday seem very much out of sync, both with how I regard myself, and how I want to be regarded by others. Th at aside,

there was something about this new tutor woman I went to see which was far from compromising to my identity. In fact, it’s something I still crave in women now.

The first time I went round to her house, she said, “Okay Russell, what are we gonna do today?” I replied that I didn’t 48

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want to do anything and had a big tantrum, insisting, “I can’t be bothered: all I’m going to do is scribble on this bit of paper.”

Instead of being upset by this, she just said, “Oh, alright.” So I got on with that for a while, until it got boring. And then she asked if I wanted to do any more of that or would I prefer to do something else. And I said, “I’ll do something else.” Retrospectively, I realize that this must’ve been a rare encounter with someone who knew how to deal with me. The form of parenting I was used to was very much damage limitation. I’d have got myself into some awful situation and my mum would arrive all flustered—“Russell’s done this thing!”—then I would be molly-coddled and assuaged.

In this woman’s house, there was a conservatory area with a lot of light in it. It seemed a very comfortable place, and she made me feel really at ease. She had one of those little organ things where, when you press the key, a little toy will open its mouth. I still feel a sense of technicolor comfort when thinking about that. Sitting in her house was a kind of sanctuary. I never went back there again. V

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I went to that Gidea Park College in the end. I had to get a new uniform for it—a cap and stuff like that. I tolerated it, even though I’d naturally been opposed to all institutions, from playschool onward.

I used to travel to school with these kids whose parents ran a pub called The Old Shant, which my mum always said looked like a public toilet, because its exterior was decorated with ce-ramics. Some days their parents used to take us and other days my mum would. One of the kids was a girl called Maxine. Her name stuck in my mind because my mum’s car—a capacious vehicle—was an Austin Maxi. Maxine told me the first joke that I can still remember.

“There’s two men who were going to go to a pub, so they met outside The King’s Head, but it was shut, so they went to Th e

King’s Arms, and that was shut as well. They went to Th e Queen’s

Legs and that was shut, but they decided to wait outside. Th en

their mate walks past and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ And one of them replies, ‘Oh, we’re waiting for The Queen’s Legs to open, so we can have a drink.’ ”

“Well that’s just brilliant,” I thought. “It sounds like they’re going to drink the queen’s wee, these men. That’s what’s implicit 50

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in their response. God bless’em, these two—I’m right behind them.”

It did seem a posh sort of school to me, though my dad insisted that all the other pupils were children of stallholders from Romford market, but it still felt really alien. I disliked the teachers. One really stern, vicious spinster—I can’t recall her real name, but if she turned up in Dickens, she would be called Miss Snickersnatch—was what I can only describe as a lady-bastard.

Maybe I adapted this story in childhood to get sympathy from my mother, but as I remember it, she took this pencil sharpener thing that I had, with an eraser attached, and threw it in the bin, then tore up my work. Why would a teacher do such a thing? That, surely, must be a lie. But it feels like t’were true.

Chief among my accomplishments at Gidea Park was the ant-eating. It seemed a very small investment of discomfort for the amount of attention you received. Ants don’t really taste of anything. I mean, there’s the indignity of picking them up off the fl oor, of course, but once an ant’s in your mouth, it’s very much like any other bit of detritus you might pick from between your teeth. It has no specifically ant-like qualities. You can’t feel it serve its queen or lay eggs.

Another dubious attention-seeking device that I invented at this school was the game “genital- grabbing,” which is very simple and easy to play but fraught with dreadful connotations for its participants and severe vilification for its unwitting inven-tor. Still, it really caught on among my fellow students, rapidly becoming a deviant craze. This act of violation would be accompanied by a comedic noise, a tinkling bell sound—“diddle-di-diddle-di”—which one would now liken to a mobile-phone ringtone. At that time, I didn’t think of this activity as sexual, 51

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but it does seem a little odd that this would be the kind of social tool that I would manufacture—going up to people and grabbing their winkies or vaginas (it is disgrace that in these enlightened times we still haven’t reached consensus on an in-offensive word to describe prepubescent female sex organs.

Male is a synonym Mardi Gras—“willy,” “winky,” “dinkle,”

“tassel?” Female—“moo moo” and “noony” and all sorts of crap I’ve heard; damn it, what are we afraid of?) It was only through their clothes, though—I wasn’t a pervert.

There was a girl called Lucy who I quite liked and had expressed my affection toward through the left-field ritual of the ol’ “diddle-di-diddle-di” game. My mum had to go up the school about that. I’ve always been a “your parents have got to come up the school” type of person. Even now, when I do something wrong—if I say something inappropriate on a live TV show, for example—I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: “Please come up to Channel 4 head offi ce,

Russell’s done something despicable.” The teachers had to tell my mum all about my embarrassing exploits: “He’s been grabbing children’s genitals. Of course, he is a child himself, and that makes it just about bearable. If he were doing this in a decade’s time, crikey! That really would be a problem.” Th e problem may have been worse but for the fact that it only took my dad a term to squander his nouveaux riches, so he didn’t pay the school fees, and so I had to leave and go back to the normal state primary school I’d been at twelve weeks previously. But by then, of course, everything had moved on and it was all different—like how your house looks when you come back off your holiday.

What mattered at Little Thurrock primary school was being good at football (and I weren’t good at football). If you weren’t 52

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good at either football or, failing that, fighting (or ideally, both), you might just as well have come to school wearing a pair of your mum’s tights, with your balls and cock looking like disgruntled, tiny burglars on a dreadful bank raid. “You’re on a hiding to nothing—you’ll end up serving ten to twenty down the front of your mum’s tights with no chance of a reprieve, I tells ya!”

I think it berserk that I still feel embarrassed about things I did when I was a child. De cades have now passed; I should be able to remember a faux pas from when I was eight without feeling ashamed. There was this teacher at that school, Miss Savage, not in a Dickens way, younger than I am now, probably, fizzing with the enthusiasm of a recently graduated teacher. She started a school cricket team in addition to her dinosaur and painting lessons; she said that I was good at bowling. I thought,

“Oh my God! I might be in that team.” When she announced the team, in the traditional and casually cruel way they do in schools, seemingly designed to exact as much tension as possible, very much akin to the reality shows of today, throughout the list, I thought “the next one will be me,” but it never was.

“Oh right,” I thought, “the cricket team is not going to be the thing I can cling onto.”

It would not have long served as a raft of salvation; I’m not designed for sport. Since Colin’s coup, I could no longer find solace at home. After school had finished for the day I just used to hang around the buildings of Little Thurrock; I didn’t have anything to do or anywhere else to go where I felt comfortable. I once cornered Miss Savage and another young teacher, Miss Marris; they were all giggly and embarrassed, leafing through a teaching manual in their minds and saying, “Russell, you’re just going to have to go home—school is finished.” I simply remained, doing the odd 53

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voices and catchphrases that I had. “I demand an explanation”; that was one of my favorites—clearly enunciated, and with the same kind of camp twang I’d use now. “That’s unkind!” was another. I know these don’t sound especially hilarious now, but the humor was very much in the delivery.

Both these catchphrases could’ve had practical application in another episode of inappropriate muckiness that occurred at this grubby juncture. I had a babysitter—he was somewhere between fi fteen and seventeen. I still feel odd about this event.

It didn’t seem that bad or horrible at the time, just macabre: a hot, prickly, awkward affair, with me stood, fully clothed, in an empty bath, and the familiar room interrupted by strange smells, pubic hair and an erection.

What I recall of it is giddy and vaguely exhilarating, like the vacuous, vapid thrill of Las Vegas: “This doesn’t seem right.

This is why bin Laden hates America—it’s gone wrong. Th ere

shouldn’t be all this light and oxygen and no clocks and tigers prowling above my head in a Perspex cage.* There shouldn’t be this man beating out a solipsistic rhythm of onanism.” Th e

rhythm concluded with the lash of his sperm hitting the plastic on the back of the toilet, where the mechanism is, the cistern, the bit you have to lift up when you break the toilet at someone else’s house and have to peer into its innards like a junior house doctor. “There’s that ball thing. Oh no, it’s not working.” I’d like never again to conduct open-bog surgery in a stranger’s lavvy.

It’s an incredibly intimate thing, the primal state you go into, just before you ejaculate. Then, afterward, there’s a fug of guilt which descends. I’d imagine that vague sense of regret must be

* Perspex is Plexiglas. In many ways a nicer word, as it is clearly derived from the same root as “perspective.”

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enhanced by the presence of a child: “I would ruffl e your hair,

you little scamp, but I’ve got cum on my fingers.” I felt complicit once more as I’d been inquisitive earlier in the evening, asking,

“What is spunk? What is it like?” He goes, “I’ll show you, if you like”—an improper suggestion that were met with a woozy, vertiginous “Okay.” The next thing I knew he was saying, “You mustn’t tell anyone,” and then closing the bathroom door. He looked over at me from within his pink- cheeked frenzy and said,

“It’d be quicker if you helped.” “Oh I bet it would,” I thought, like a world-weary hooker but, unlike a world-weary hooker, I also thought, “Fuck that for a laugh” and declined. “No, you’re alright mate, I’ll give the ol’ wanking off a man in a toilet a bit of a swerve for a couple of de cades.” When I did eventually get round to wanking off a man (for a TV program, obviously), it transpired it didn’t get any easier with age.

I did have at this unusual and challenging time a friend, a human friend called Sam. I loved Sam. He was my best friend growing up—a lovely, lovely boy. We went to Hampton Court in 1985, when my mum and Colin had decided to try and adopt the pose of normalcy. In our house hold, mundanity were regularly achieved, banality flourished unchecked, but normalcy were seldom seen. We went into that maze. It was a joy to be lost in there—thinking of Henry VIII with his stockings round his knees, chasing after some scullery maid with a hard- on and an axe.

Toward the end of the day a game of “It” was played with my mum, Colin and Sam, with me feeling resentful that Colin was more affable toward Sam than me; and when he tagged me and slapped me round the head in one conveniently vindictive action, I saw it as a manifestation of repressed hatred rather than an accident. “Fuck off!” I shouted. As is often the case when a child swears at an adult, it had incredible resonance and rang 55

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