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Umbilical Noose
My relationship with conventional masculinity has always been much more problematic. I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was growing up, but I did still encounter a few of my friends’
dads. When I did, I didn’t much care for these “Dad” chaps.
Great, oafish, hairy boors they were—working nights and belching. “Quiet! My dad’s on nights,” people would say, interrupting one of my eloquently bellowed soliloquies. “Dad? Nights?” I’d inquire. Then the beast would awaken from a musty, darkened cave and come Fee-Fi-Fo-ing out, sniffing the air. “Perhaps we ought to play at mine,” I’d suggest, “your house seems to be inhabited by refugees from Roald Dahl’s jotter.” Th en off we’d
scramble back to the comfort of my doting mum.
My own father was only discussed in hushed tones. “You don’t want to grow up like him,” people would say, all grave. But whenever I saw him he seemed to me a kind of Essex Cavalier—every week a different woman and a new scheme for riches. “I would like to grow up like him,” I’d think.
Even though there were times when he had loads of money, he never met the £25-a-week maintenance payments that he was required to make, and this exacerbated the impoverishment of the house hold I grew up in. Mum once showed me the agreement which said how much he was meant to send, and when I saw him, it was my duty to try to get it off him.
My mum did numerous jobs—taking me with her until I began playschool, where I was frequently in trouble, having daily tantrums when she left me behind. Ridicu-larse to get in trouble at playschool really. How bad could it be? “We must talk to you about Russell. There’s been another stabbing in the sandpit.” I do remember inspecting the spittle-flecked faces of senselessly enraged adults, looming like ogres, thinking,
“Well, this all seems like a bit of a storm in a teacup.” I was 21
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awake as a child. I knew it was nonsense. I don’t regard my childhood as some foreign country. I still feel myself within the same vessel—my flesh a rocket of which I am the captain and chief cosmo- naughty.
Is this something to be proud of? That I’ve not grown up? I don’t wanna get all Holden Caulfield about it, but I do see the passage into adulthood as a betrayal of the innocent values of childhood. Even the most savage monsters that history or red-top tabloids can parade were once just soppy tots, and before that snug lil’ fetuses—and I’ve never met a fetus that I didn’t like yet.
My mum sustained us through a variety of dead-end jobs: she sold dishwashers to pubs; she was a cocktail waitress in a London club for a bit; and she’d drive up to the Commercial Road in east London, buy black sacks of wholesale clothes and then sell them at “Clothes Parties.” What I recall of this is the Asian folks I’d meet in the shops and the attention I’d get. Then all the women coming round to the parties at ours, trying on clothes and smoking Silk Cuts but smelling all nice. I liked women.
My dad had been a brilliant footballer in his youth. When he was sixteen or seventeen, he was invited to go for a trial at West Ham. He didn’t actually end up going, because he was too nervous and afraid of rejection. But my nan kept clippings from the local paper of games he’d played for Dagenham Boys, which was a team people like Terry Venables had turned out for. He played against “Chopper” Harris once.
My dad was an angry man, yet he had an amazing energy about him too. I always wanted to emulate his enthusiasm and eff ervescence.
These were the kind of capers he made money from: he had a market stall in Romford selling these prints—laser prints, they were called—which were just vivid photographs. Double-glazing, 22
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that was another one. Then it was water filters. And when I was a small child, he worked as a photographer. He wasn’t trained in any way, but he still used to do people’s wedding photos; some lad at my school complained that the photos of his mum’s wedding had been done in an alarmingly shoddy fashion and that his aunt’s legs had been retrospectively added in pencil.
I think that largely because of growing up just with my mum for the first seven years of my life, and thinking of my dad as sort of heroic, but absent (and maybe even abstract), I found it very difficult to consort with other children. I would often behave flamboyantly—jumping around and hurting myself, or doing disgusting things just to get attention. I did a lovely line in ant-eating, for example. “Wanna see me eat some ants?” I’d ask some nittish prig of a kid. They’d, of course, be well into the scheme—this was well before Xboxes and people were glad of any entertainment. My mum seems to have spent her entire childhood playing with something called a “Button Box,” which alarmingly is not a euphemism but simply a stinking, lousy box of buttons—what a lot of tosh. So in the early ’80s to see live ant-eating was pretty much akin to some of the more ostenta-tious hoopla peddled by that goon David Copperfi eld (magician, not eponymous Dickens hero). But I only did it for the amusement of others—I never, ever ate ants alone. I was a social ant- eater, never an ant- wanker.
I ain’t never really had much fun. I particularly dislike pre-ordained happy occasions. I don’t mind Christmas so much, because everyone’s involved, as long as they’re Christians or lazy atheists, or Muslim but into tinsel. But I’ve never had a good New Year’s Eve, and I don’t like birthdays, or any other time when you’re meant to be happy. I’m against the prescription of, say, “Ooh, it’s Christmas o’clock. Smile everyone!” For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, 23
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where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it’s enough that there are trees in the world. I don’t like New Year’s Eve. I don’t think bliss could ever be preceded by a countdown and the chiming of a pompous clock, unless that’s what death’s like. My mum worked hard to make my birthdays jolly but they were always a right stomach-churning drag.
I’d been kicking around for exactly five years when the occasion were inappropriately marked by an act of festive arson. My mum had made me a big teddy bear cake with a ribbon round its neck. The ribbon caught fire off the candles. All the other children thought it was really exciting that this had happened, but I saw it for what it was—a grim portent for the forthcoming year. While them other twits grinned out merry drips of piss, I thought, “Well, if this happened in a Ted Hughes poem, the protagonist wouldn’t see six.”
Then my dad burst in all silly string and cheap charisma.
He’d always turn up on birthdays—in archetypal bad-parent fashion—with things you shouldn’t give kids; stuff you could set fire to. “Wa-hey! I’ve bought you this big thing. It’s a gun.”
“Thanks Dad . . . Bye.” My mum would be all upset, there’d be silly string on the settee, excited children and their wee everywhere and my father gone, just a little cloud of smoke left behind in the place where he’d been.
The cake was horribly maimed. It was during the Falklands War and images of Simon Weston were abundant, so this lent the fire-ravaged teddy another potent layer. “Would you like a piece of Belgrano gateau, young man?”* People could still eat it, but the damage had been done.
* Simon Weston was a hero of the Falklands conflict with Argentina. He incurred terrible facial burns, and when he valiantly bore this he became a celebrity. Triumph over adversity and bravery were the watchwords. Obviously schoolchildren, utterly lacking in empathy, used his name as an insult, the bastards.
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Umbilical Noose
It was also in relatively early childhood that the first stirrings of the wild man junkie persona, which would later occupy my life for a decade or more, can retrospectively be divined. It was at this lad Ben Nicholson’s birthday party. I went round there and was all crazy and off the hook—jumping in his paddling pool and knocking things over and being all mental. If it had been an office party, I’d have photocopied my arse or eff ed some temp in the stock cupboard but, as it wasn’t, I simply did the ch
ildish equivalent. Which meant, I think, I stood on the edge of a plastic paddling pool making it hemorrhage into the lawn, and taunted the children’s entertainer with a balloon sausage dog that I held between my legs as a humorously misshapen phallus.
When I saw Ben at school the next Monday, I was expecting him to say, “Hey, Russell, great party man. You’re wild!
Listen, I’m thinking of going to Vegas next week—wanna come?” But instead he sobbed, “You’re the bad boy who ruined my birthday,” and ran off crying. “Jeez, what a downer—that kid totally killed my buzz. I was the life and soul of that poxy little shindig—man what a square.” Thus another friendship was dashed on the cruel rocks amid the storm of my self-destruction.
You’ll see later that I made no great leaps forward in the ensuing decades, either with regards to my conduct at parties or my perception of my own conduct. Many’s the time I’d strut off stage at some dingy comedy pit thinking, “There! Feel the magic!” as the audience queued for refunds.
From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities—“This is how you are with your mum, and this is how you are with your dad”—so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And this image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even 25
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further. I had a sense of formulating a papier-mâché version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some snug suburban barracks. When I used to watch TV
as a tot, I’d sit really close to the screen: just trying to get into that box. V
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3
Shame Innit?
Over the road from where I grew up there was a disused chalkpit and an overgrown and abandoned army barracks. I would go there—losing days at a time—to retrieve newts: these quick, sharp, darting slivers of energy. I’d liberate them from the slav-ery of nature—trees and ponds and that—knowing that they craved the freedom of a tiny death in my bedroom opposite.
It was amazing, that bit of wasteground. Obviously now, through the nostalgic haze of my adult perspective, it seems impossible that this place could ever have existed. Th ere were
these concrete bunkers—utterly featureless, like Stonehenge, but all overgrown with brambles and moss. They were linked together by underground tunnels, in which you’d have to completely trust yourself—walking into absolute, terrifying darkness, within which anything could lurk.
There was a strong stink of damp, the occasional crisp-packet, discarded solvents and evidence of sexual congress. There was a burned- out car, and a pervasive sense that tramps might have been there. The whole place had a mythical air about it and—informed as I was by reading C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton at a very early age—it felt like a fantastic kingdom. I was lucky to have a place where my fantasy life could manifest itself.
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There was one bit that was all red sands, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet. And, with all the lakes and chalk mountains, it wouldn’t have surprised me to look up and see two moons. It just seemed extraordinary that you could be in gray, desolate, suburban Essex, and there would be something so exotic so nearby.
Apart from the wilderness over the road, the psycho-geography of Grays was basically irrelevant to me. There’s not a particular cultural identity to growing up in industrial Essex, and southern suburbia in general: it’s just very banal. And I didn’t really feel safe in that place. I didn’t really like it. It felt closed to me.
As a child, the idea of class would obviously not have been a reference point that I would have had (even now, I don’t feel like I am enmeshed in any particular identity in that area. Whenever I’m in any kind of social group, I always tend to think I won’t fit in, and gravitate toward an identity that will stand out).
But, looking back, by the late ’70s and early ’80s, that old-fashioned sense of a monolithic working-class community had largely broken down. Where my nan on my dad’s side lived, at Lillechurch Road in Dagenham, everyone still worked at Ford’s.
But there was no sense of cultural identity other than that. My granddad Bert had worked there too (my nan had remarried, some years after my dad’s father’s early death). But there was no cohesion. Nothing felt right. Everything seemed broken and ugly, boring and vacant.
My paternal grandmother was fantastic, though. In terms of how she spoke, the obvious comparison would be Catherine Tate’s “Nan” character, but not hard.* My nan was kind and
* Catherine Tate is an excellent character comedian, like Tracey Ullman. Her Nan character 28
Shame Innit ?
gentle, yet also very strong, and even dominant, in a non-aggressive way. I spent a lot of time in that house in Dagenham, growing up. My nan was an utterly benign presence in my life.
And throughout my early years—until her death, when I was in my mid-twenties—my nan would fix me with a sympathetic stare, cock her head and say, “Aaah, shame, innit?,” as if my whole existence was vaguely regrettable. This was a sentiment with which I often concurred.
One of the fi rst facilities I developed to keep some distance between me and adversity was showing off . When I was quite young, I did a Frank Spencer impression for my maternal grandmother—the one I didn’t much get on with.* (My friend Matt Morgan says it’s wrong to have Nan league tables, but I think that element of competition brings out the best in them.) My mum—who was my first audience, and an indulgent one at that—said, “He does a really good Frank Spencer—go on, do it.” So I did it, and everyone really laughed.
“Do it again, do it again,” they cried. So I did. And they all agreed it wasn’t as good the second time. “No, you’ve lost it. You’ve lost that uncanny knack of impersonating Michael Crawford”—this precious window of opportunity had slammed shut almost as soon as it had opened.
While the thrill of receiving consistent acclaim for my hilarious impressions was to be denied me for a little while longer, an additional source of dangerous nourishment was my dad’s resis a foulmouthed, working-class, sentimental cow.
* Frank Spencer is a hapless clown who stars in the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, in which he, weekly, fucks up a new job opportunity with his camp buff oonery, pratfalls and japes while maintaining a relationship with his inexplicably attractive wife, Betty. Th is
character infiltrated me quite deeply, and has caused me to fuse fruity ineptitude with my inherent heterosexuality.
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ervoir of porn. I think I always had a premature awareness of sexuality, but Ron Brand’s penchant for leaving me to occupy my infant mind with his cache of girlie magazines certainly did nothing to stem the erotic tide.
I adored the cartoons in Playboy. Either they’d be one page, or sometimes a story drifting toward a climax where someone got their boobs out. There was something quite eerie and perverted about them. I suppose because they were cartoons and porn at the same time, and these are not two things you expect to see together. You kind of feel—especially as a four-year-old child—that cartoons should just be of rabbits, but even the rabbits had erotic connotations in that beloved filthy rag. All these magazines were always clear about the market they were catering for. They were called things like Jugs and Big Ones.
“And what exactly is our target demographic? What were you hoping to capture at Jugs magazine?” “Well, if we had to put our manifesto into one word, it would be ‘Jugs’; if it were three it would be ‘Great Big Tits.’ ” Brilliant, those magazines were. I don’t know whether I was already genetically predes-tined to like women with massive boobs, but, as it turns out, I do.
My dad can’t have had much money then, because when we went on holiday, he took me to Pontin’s. I don’t know exactly where, but I suppose the beauty of Pontin’s lies in its uniformity. (They’ve found a winning formula and they’re sticking to it—the same as McDonald’s: you’ll never turn up at a Pontin’s and discover it
’s been hijacked by a Colonel Kurtz–type figure who dresses the Redcoats as wizards and insists that the Lovely Legs competition is replaced by necromancy.)
We went to Pontin’s a few times. I didn’t like that “Crocodile Club” much, though. It was too much pressure, the demands 30
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too great; it was like being in the Hitler Youth. Th e children
were co- opted off and coerced into being in a gang, with this abominable crocodile mascot as their leader. Well, I didn’t share any of his beliefs. In fact, I felt that he was a despot. “Do you think we could usurp this crocodile guy? I mean what are his policies exactly? I think it would be easy enough to overthrow him—I’ll just say he tried to wank me off in the Punch & Judy booth. Surely that would be grounds for dismissal?” I felt all unpopular, lurching about doing some supposedly upbeat holiday activity. I was probably in the adventure playground. I don’t know how adventurous a few metal poles roped together with a pallet on top can really be—scaffolding that’s been painted red ain’t my idea of adventure. Amid the banality a little girl approached me and said, “Your dad’s in bed with my mum—do you want to come and have a look?” I paused. “Yeah, alright.”
The chalet window was open, and there was a net curtain being delicately teased by the summer breeze. It were like a French film noir, but set in Pontin’s. Actually, my dad wasn’t in bed with the woman at that point—he was in the bed on his own, and she was in the bathroom. I said, “Alright dad, can I have fifty pee for the arcade?”* At that point, the woman walked out of the bathroom naked, and shrieked. She tried to cover herself up—all knockers and skin everywhere almost independently trying to escape her—like she was a vet’s assistant bungling her way through her first day, mishandling a litter of recalcitrant piglets. I watched her and pressed record on the ol’ brain box.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 3
