My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (9 page)

RUSSELL BRAND

drained of defiance and broken. As she left me, my mum sobbed with a grief so profound it was hard to imagine that the tears would ever stop. That night in the dormitory I wet the bed. I was on the top bunk, so the piss drizzled through the mattress.

The boy below, deposed by the acrid shower, remained magnanimous and sweet. My pajamas were all sticky-legged. Strip lighting graffitied over the protective darkness and a cliché of a matron made me change the sheets. Even Tony Cottee and Frank McAvennie, the hastily Blu-tacked saints upon the wall, could do nothing to alleviate my fluorescently lit nocturnal shame. V

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Hockerill allowed pets, so I had my filthy clan of murderous, sex-crazed gerbils and a General Woundwort–style rabbit (that arsehole from Watership Down) that I picked up at a rural auction I had attended with one of my aunts. The rabbit was being sold by the pound for meat but I saw in the still-live creature the possibility for a better outcome for both of us and bought him off a farmer, saving him from the pot, dragging out his life long enough for him to bite me on the arm, delivering a scar that remains to this day along with the self-harming scars that I angrily etched a few years later. Being gored by a rabbit is embarrassing; if someone survives a shark attack you think them a hero, people strain to marvel at their scars. If you bear the mark of a brutal encounter with a rabbit, people assume you’re somehow to blame.

They still have teeth, it still hurts—perhaps more, because a shark attack would necessarily take place in salt water which is an anesthetic; there you have it, rabbit bites are worse than a shark’s. Peter Cook disliked rabbits solely on the basis that they have no pads on their paws, their claws reach uninterrupted right up their dirty little wrists.

I spent all my spare time at Hockerill playing Subbuteo—against myself. First I’d be the attackers and then the defense.

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I would compete against me in a complex series of leagues, while a new poster of Alan Devonshire cut out from Shoot peered down, befuddled by all the pointless cheating. Subbuteo is more manageable than actual football. You can play it while lying on your stomach, and you can control all twenty-two players. Th e

position of footballing deity—hovering astride the table like a mighty colossus, deciding the outcomes of all the games in a world where West Ham topped every league and won every cup—was one I felt myself quite well suited to. By now I’d taken residence in my imagination, preferring it to the real world. I used to make my own match-day programs, and I painted Frank McAvennie’s head blond. Georgie Parris, West Ham’s number three, he were a black lad, so I painted up his face and hands all nice. There weren’t so many black players in them days, but them that there were—Tony Daley of Villa, John Barnes at Liverpool, Viv Anderson at United—were just some of the players keenly represented by me. It’s quite difficult not to get paint on the kit and as I was quite obsessive I didn’t like to field players in tarnished shirts, so this initially “right on” attitude often led to black players being left on the bench, which seems a bit racist.

Actually so was the blond Chelsea striker Kerry Dixon because the yellow paint ran down the back of his neck like a punctured soft-boiled egg. Plus Frank McAvennie felt undermined by the presence of another blond and I had to placate him.

My interaction with small plastic replica sports figures went much better than my interaction with living things. The pets at school were kept in a stable. When I was cleaning the gerbils’

cage, I’d balance it precariously on the edge of a workbench and they’d do a bit of scurrying around and sniffi ng the air while I

was changing their bedding. Eventually, one stupid day, the cage toppled over. As it fell, the world slowed down and I watched in horror as it landed across two of their twitching little bodies.

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One of them was Barney, the originator—my gerbil Adam and Eve. She lay on the floor, kicking and dying her trivial vermin death, and my world became naught but a huge, shrill noise like a sharp red line through a Kandinsky painting. How ghastly it was—looking at Barney’s pointless corpse thinking, “Fuck!

She’s dead.” But after some silence and staring I thought, “It’s dead, and that’s that.”

Perhaps due to the feelings of impotence which beset me in all other areas of my life at Hockerill, I was glad to discover that I was able to make people laugh. “Make people laugh”: I even love the idiom—there’s no choice. The person making them do it has the power. And while I’d always seemed to have that capacity to an extent, it became much more pronounced in that boarding-school environment.

As we all lay abed at night, I would conjure up pornographic stories from the depths of my own dirty brainbox, and prattle them out to my disciples, an eroticized Christ or a teen Larry Flynt or a chubby, lonely Marquis de Sade. Jugs magazine informed the style of my sexy gospels; all that tireless wanking was finally paying off . There was a chorus of appreciative fiddling, pounding beneath the sheets—a requiem of masturbation for our fast-departing innocence.

One day, for a laugh—which has been the chief motivating factor in many of my worst decisions—I drew a face on my penis. It was on what would technically be termed the bell-end.

I’m not circumcised, so the whole mechanism of the joke is that you show someone your penis, then pull back your foreskin to reveal the punch line—a grinning face.

At first, everyone thought it was very funny, and they were correct. But, some grass ratted me out for this breakthrough, a breakthrough for which I ought to have been given some kind of rosette. Instead I was subjected to a corrupt investigation. Th is

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teacher who didn’t really like me found out about “Helmet Harry,” as it had by then been dubbed. I can’t remember the exact language he used to describe what I’d done. It can’t have been “defaced your penis” because, rather than removing its face, I had innovatively given it one. He found some euphemistic way of asking me if he could see my cockleberry—which was rather a grand term for the half-developed nub I had to off er him. It could be argued, by me, that there was something quite heroic about my determination to give this region of my body such a widespread public airing, what with it being such a lovable titch. I was a showman, even before I knew it; the theater was in my blood. But I didn’t much fancy giving this teacher a butcher’s as he struck me as being a wrong ’un.* He looked to me like a talcy Simon Bates; that’s to say a regular Simon Bates all covered in talcum powder.† So I just said, “No, it’s alright, I’ll be fine.”

He confirmed himself to have not had the most legitimate of motives by the rapidity with which he acquiesced to my demurral. A genuinely concerned teacher who wasn’t out on the nonce would say, “Now come on, boy, this is an important medical matter,” but he just went, “Oh, alright.” And shuffl ed off looking

a bit disappointed. Clearly he was chancing his arm for a glimpse of Helmet Harry, and who can blame him? It were the talk of the school: “If you only see one cock this year, make sure it’s Russell Brand’s ‘Helmet Harry’—buy a ticket, steal a ticket, pose as a concerned teacher, but don’t miss this personifi ed prepubescent penis—it’s got a face.”

News of Helmet Harry quickly got around the school, but it

* “A butcher’s” is Cockney rhyming slang: “butcher’s hook-look.”

† Simon Bates: A radio DJ synonymous with a particular type of good-morning jocundity and famous for a saccharine item where he’d glumly recite an epistle charting the personal tragedy of a listener—“our tune.”

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did not bring me the kind of celebrity I would have wished for.

Instead I was ridiculed in corridors, bullied and victimized. My notoriety followed me everywhere—“Russell Brand? Are you that kid who drew the face on his helmet?” “Yes, I’m afraid I am.

Would you like an autograph, and if so, where would you like it?” This was an ignominious affair that I would be glad to see the back of.

I really hated that place from then on and got in a lot of trouble, getting in bother by spitting and being all rebellious on the ghost train on a trip to Thorpe Park. This bloke emerged with a torch—which is a nice touch on a ghost train—and said,

“We don’t like gobbers.” I thought, “There is more to me than this. I’m not a full-time gobber, I have other abilities. Have you not seen Helmet Harry? The kids love it—it’s the new Rubik’s Cube.”

When they eventually expelled me it was for piffl e. Me and

this lad went to the girls’ dorm. I think he was fucking a thirteen-year- old girl when he was eleven, which sounds awfully rude but they seemed to enjoy it and no one got hurt. Far from being a swashbuckling love rat I was terrified and begged the conjugal kids to accompany me back to the boys’ dorm. Because I was so scared, the girls came back with us. The pre teen sex machine leaped back into bed with his older bird, and her friend got into bed with me for a saucy bout of nothing at all, while I planned out how I’d turn the episode into a pornographic story with which to regale my friends. But then a prefect came along.

The other girl hid under the bedclothes of her schoolboy sweet-heart, but me and the girl I was with tried—in vain—to hide under the bed.

“Brand!” the prefect shouted, very formally, “get out from under your bed”; proving that children shouldn’t be given SS-style powers or they’ll play up, without the need for the 69

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Stanford Experiment. And the girl dramatically emerged from beneath the bed. Hoopla ensued. My mum had to come up the school—with an aunt, of course, not Colin. The expulsion was a joy, despite my mum crying and my Auntie Janet, Sam’s mum, looking disappointed. The headmistress trotted out an irrelevant send- off. “You’ve never tried at this school—you’ve constantly been in trouble.” I tuned out and stared. “Fuck you! I’ve won. I’m free. There’s nothing you can do. Just spluttering language. Say things at me. Go on, say what you want—I’m out of here. I’m gone!”

When I got back home in my demob suit, Colin made me get rid of my pets as a punishment. I was only allowed to keep one gerbil. I swallowed this predictable piece of petty cruelty down into the ol’ hate factory. Somehow those boffi ns at Hockerill, who I’d so fastidiously despised, had managed to give me quite a good education. I suppose I was trapped there and forced to learn. From then on, I could defi ne myself as being cleverer than everyone else. When I went back to Grays School—which was just the normal comprehensive that most of the kids I’d known at primary school had gone to—no one seemed to know what the fuck was going on with anything. I thought: “Hang on, these people are idiots.” And this instinctive humility would stand me in good stead throughout the years of academic under-achievement that stretched ahead of me. V

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I’ve Got a Bone to Pick with You

For about three years in my early teens, people were always mistaking me for a girl, because I had long hair and quite a sort of pretty face and was a bit chubby and went through puberty late.

I’d be talking to a young lad for twenty minutes, and then he’d say, “Wanna come down the pictures?” and I’d have to try and indicate that I was male with the limited tools at my disposal.

“Grrr, aren’t girls terrific? Fancy a fight? Isn’t Julian Dicks the absolute limit?”

One of the consequences of this was to make me very aware of my appearance. But however much I tried to adapt how I looked—by getting a new haircut, or changing the kind of clothes I wore—it didn’t really seem to make any diff erence.

As a way of coping with this, I developed a trait that I have maintained to this day when I’m around very masculine men, which is that I go all camp. “Oh hello,” I say, like a cross between Dot Cotton and Frankie Howerd. “You’re a big handsome beef-cake, int’cha?” “ ’Ere—would you like me to dab your nut-sack with a lolly-stick, or lift your balls up with a spoon?”

I was really nervous about my sexuality in my early teens. I always felt kind of outside of things—always getting notes from my mum to get me off games (I hated them showers and that cold thigh-slap bonhomie, me trudging about all pudgy and 72

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unloved on some hard pitch, while other kids excelled, brilliantly occupying their newly masculine bodies)—but I never thought I was gay. I just didn’t have that impulse.

In a worrying template for later sexual activity, my first and second kisses occurred within seconds of each other, with different girls. It was in a classroom at Grays School. Th e teacher

had gone off to do something and I got off with this girl called Louise first, and then another one called Leigh. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time. And although those were my first two proper kisses, no one would have known it at the time, ’cos I paraded around like I were a Vegas pimp—some kind of gun-toting cock- merchant.

I told all them people at Grays School that the reason I was expelled from boarding school was because of getting caught with girls in my dorm—which was, of course, true. But I re-packaged it brilliantly to make myself come across as some kind of George Best/Jimmy Page character, rather than a porcine nit, nervously skittering about in a dressing gown.

My first proper girlfriend was Tracey Boatman, who lived opposite me. I used to hold notes up at my bedroom window to her.

Her dad Jim was a milkman. I can’t remember what her mum did, but she was dead into religion. She liked it. Jesus, Catholicism: any part of that belief system she was wholeheartedly into.

I was aware of Tracey all of my life, but I didn’t go out with her till I was thirteen. She was lovely, actually. She’s still alright as well. I saw her recently when I was back in Grays for the weekend—with her husband and two daughters—and it was sort of sad but gratifying to go back to their kitchen while her mum Sue knocked up Sunday lunch, with her dad trundling around in the background.

At school, I once inadvertently wrote a poem about a milkman called Jim. It weren’t meant to be about Tracey’s dad, but 73