Apparently, some adolescents go through a “gay phase” where they want children to wank them off . That was a bit of a misun-derstanding on the part of the people of Grays—about the difference between homosexuality and asking a child to wank you off. “Both of these activities belong in a box of things we think are disgusting: put them in with animal abuse and racial tolerance.”
Cross about my loose lips, the moment we were reunited he uttered the ominous words, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
“I remember that bone,” I might have replied, had I been feeling a little more sure of myself in this tricky social situation. “I remember you picking it till it sprayed cum on the back of the toilet with a plastic splat.”
Nothing bad happened on his second babysitting assignment, evidently it was a phase and aside from the wanking incident he were a lovely lad, but a pattern of me taking extreme action in a quest to be heard was beginning to emerge. When I eventually started cutting myself—aged thirteen or fourteen—it was frustration and anger that led to it. My response to being trapped or thwarted was to slash myself with a knife or some broken glass—a mode of sanguinary melodrama to which I would periodically return, right up into my twenties.
I also began to dabble with bulimia. It seemed a very practical procedure at the time. I’d got all fat; when I started to get bullied at school as a result, I thought there must be a simple solution, and it turned out there was—eat loads and then puke it out. I’d always been a really fussy child, growing up. As a kid, 78
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I only liked to eat beef burgers, sausages, fi sh fi ngers, waffl es—
lumps of things, food that had been in the Beano.* “This is from Birds Eye, we can trust those guys—look at that smiling old Captain, he’s just like Uncle Albert.”
In an ideal world, I preferred food that was sealed individually—Weetabix, Penguins, Wagon Wheels—and I was very suspicious of anything that’d been mixed. Sausages stuck in a mound of mash was about as sophisticated as my tastes got.
(Even now, when I find something I like eating, I’ll eat it all the time. In my twenties, I spent years living on Weetabix in the morning, with SuperNoodles and a can of tuna later on.) Colin was annoyed by the bulimia fad. “Did you puke up in the sink again? Don’t. It’s clogging the drain up.”
I became a vegetarian at fourteen. There was a lad at our school called Daniel Zahl, whose father was a socialist with
†
a beard, like the “Modern Parents” in Viz. Daniel took me and Sam Crooks to a Vegetarian Society meeting, where they showed us videos of factory farming. I made a commitment in that room that would one day lead to me becoming crowned the World’s Sexiest Vegetarian, a title you’re ineligible for, no matter how sexy you are, unless you don’t eat meat. Morrissey perpetually steeled my resolve, and the probability that my principled dietary stand would annoy Colin was the deciding factor.
“Vindictive vegetarianism,” I like to call it. I’ve never regretted
* Th
e Beano is a beloved children’s comic, which is about sixty years old and centers on naughty, destructive children. It has a good, rebellious spirit, which has been eroded by the passage of time. I read it recently and everyone seemed a bit square. That might be because I am now an adult, not a silly boy.
† Viz is an adult comic book in which the characters, mostly northern, working-class ne’er-do-wells, tell each other to fuck off. When I first saw it as a child it was like seeing the Dead Sea scrolls. Swearing, actual swearing. It was the cartoon equivalent of porn or crack.
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it. I’m incredibly sentimental about animals. It’s the only opportunity I get to occupy the moral high ground: when I got clean, after chatting to some Krishna conscious devotees, I gave up fish as well. They said if you put death into your body you will emit death, but I’m in it mostly for the high ground. “You’re vegetarian?” comes the inquiry. “Yes.” Then the inevitable, “Do you eat fi sh?” This is where they catch a lot of people out: the inquisitor is already at this stage anticipating a “Yes” and loading up with,
“Ah, well, you’re not a proper vegetarian then are you because fish are incredibly sensitive and some of them write haikus.”
That’s why I have to stifle a smug grin when I reply, “No. No, I don’t eat fish because it’s cruel to them, the lovely little things.”
And on particularly smarmy days, “If you put death into your body you emit death.” Even as a junkie I stayed true—“I shall have heroin, but I shan’t have a hamburger.” What a sexy little paradox. V
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9
Teacher’s Whiskey
The first time I’d ever tasted alcohol had been in the staff - room at Little Thurrock primary school, when I was probably nine or ten years old. There was a rota of jobs you had to do at that school, and one of them was cleaning the staff -room. Th is seems
nuts. Why on earth were children entrusted with the task of cleaning the staff-room? Especially as the place was awash with booze. This incident seems so daft and unlikely that my better judgment is trying to insist that it didn’t occur—but it did; they got the pupils to work at the school like it was a nineteenth-century Lancashire mill. It wasn’t hard graft—they never made me tarmac the playground for example—but this isn’t something for which I feel I ought to express gratitude; I should’ve just been listening to stories about ducks and coloring in. And while we’re on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story “The Ugly Duckling” ought be banned as the central character wasn’t a duckling or he wouldn’t have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet. He shouldn’t have been allowed to hang round with them other little ducks either; the whole thing is a filthy, corrupt mess. Nonetheless I’d rather sit pie-eyed and agog being brainwashed by that stinking propaganda than apply Mr. Sheen to the staff - room cupboard.
It was Martin Phillips and me toiling that day; he was a funny 81
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little character, tightly curled hair and NHS specs. Him and me had to clean the staff-room, and in the cupboard we found a little half-bottle of Teacher’s whiskey, which seemed an appropriate brand, for it was, after all, teachers’ whiskey.
I sipped a little bit of the naughty water and treacherously reassured my reluctant accomplice—“Martin, this is delicious”—and passed the bottle. He really committed to it, and drank with such beautiful, unblinking faith. With an almighty glug he tipped the bottle upright into his own little Martin Phillips face, and the liquid filled his cheeks with this foul, medicinal, despicable taste, and the surging heat poured into him. It was a lovely thing to watch, and the whole episode was happily consequence- free.
The first time I got drunk was at my auntie’s house one Christmas. On this occasion, I got really pissed, and gave an early indication of the seemingly infinite capacity I have to adapt instantly to new circumstances. This was the fi rst time I’d ever got properly inebriated, and yet I straight away became a pitiful, lachrymose drunk, saying to my younger cousin Sam—who was about three years old—“Don’t you ever get like this, son.” But I’d only just got like it, that day, for a half-hour. It wasn’t like alcohol had been the ruin of me—my whole empire in ruins, and all the fault of the demon drink.
I was fourteen or fifteen and it was six glasses of white wine that did the trick. As I was drinking them, I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I just keep on doing this?” The need to find out what will happen if I don’t relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.
It was the same with prepubescent masturbation. I remember being on the bathroom floor and thinking, “What happens if I just keep on wanking?” (I’ve had a lot of great moments on bath-82
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room fl oors. The first time I took heroin, I remember being in a similar situation.) Lying in a state of pre-opiated innocence on my mum’s
bathroom floor. (Oh that is the telling adjective—or pronoun, or whatever it is—my mum’s bathroom fl oor. She wasn’t there, of course. It was the floor that she owned, but from which she was at this point absent. And I was lying upon the bath rug—which was pink, with a fringe.)
Normally at that stage of sexual immaturity, you’d get an erection, carry on wanking for a while, and then stop. But I started wondering what would happen if you persisted beyond that barrier. The answer was a kind of dry orgasm, which set my leg twitching against the pink artifi cial fibers, and left me with an embarrassed, awkward feeling, reminiscent of how I would later feel when receiving oral sex from a vacuum cleaner. (Of course, it’s not really oral sex in that instance, it’s pipe sex—an oft-overlooked category of erotic endeavor.)
Growing up in Grays, there were two main landmarks looming above you. One was the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge across the Thames (little did I know that lurking on the other side of this, in Dartford, just south of the river, was the infant Matt Morgan). The other was Thurrock Lakeside shopping center—a huge, great, hovering spaceship of consumerism. I did shoplift quite a bit from there. But newsagents in Grays were not safe from my wandering hands either.
For reasons that may have had something to do with my in-cipient dishonesty, but could equally have been rooted in the lunchtime porn video club I had enterprisingly set up with a few like-minded friends, Mum and Colin did not trust me with a key to the house. They didn’t like me to go home in the middle of the day, but they’d leave a key out for me to let myself in with after school.
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One time, I’d tried to sneak home at lunchtime, but there was no key there. So when I got back later on and the stone in the garden where the key usually was hadn’t moved, I just put my sleeve over my hand and punched through the glass panel in the door to get in.
“Good,” I thought. “That’ll show ’em.” My mum got home a couple of minutes after I did. “You alright, Russell?” she asked, slightly nervously. I explained that I’d had to let myself in because there was no key. A short while after that, Colin returned.
He asked what had gone on, and when I said there was no key left out, I could see him whitening with fury.
The hostility between us was mostly unspoken. It was a silent war, constantly in motion. Colin went into the back garden—wearing the blue overalls that he had for work. He looked under the stone, and came back, full of terrifying adult man-rage. My mum was all panicked—“Oh Colin, Colin.” As he dragged me out into the back garden, I fell over and pissed myself. I was at an age when it was horrible to have done that—school trousers clad about my thighs. He threw me on the ground, screaming,
“There it is!” with an incandescent rage that had to be about more than broken glass.
It turned out that at some point between my two attempts to gain entry to the house, he had returned home and replaced the key.
There’s a theme that runs throughout my childhood of adults taking me to one side to utter these unbelievable things. I’m not sure if it was on this or one of the other five or six occasions when things between Colin and me got really out of hand—but I distinctly remember him taking me into a vestibule and hissing, “Why don’t you fuck off and leave us alone?” And me just thinking, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” and having to hold myself to-84
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gether. “Why are these people saying these things?” I would ask myself. “This can’t be right.”
There have been times over the last couple of years—as things have started to work out for me in career terms—when I’ve stopped to reflect on what the legacy of all this formative unhappiness has been, in terms of the ultimate goals of my ambition. When would I stop? I’ve realized that my ambition is actually beyond the designs of the Th
ird Reich.
When I used to sit in the front seat on car journeys with my dad, he always listened to motivational tapes: Anthony Robbins, people like that. The one thing I got from them—something my dad endowed me with himself, as well as through these self-help brainwashing cassettes—was that you can do what ever you want.
Now if I want something—whether it’s a job or a woman—I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way, until I possess the object of my desire.
My dad’s philosophy was (and I think still is) that life is a malevolent force, which seeks to destroy you, and you have to struggle with it. Only those who are hard enough will succeed. Most people get crushed, but if you fight, in the end life will go, “Fucking hell. This one’s serious. Let him through.” V
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10
“ Boobaloo”
Until I encountered the Grays School drama teacher, Colin Hill, I had no intention of being a performer. I’d always hoped my dad would be my way out: in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lenny’s dopey gaze is forever fixed on an imaginary horizon where he’ll finally get his rabbits and alfalfa plants; I dreamed of an unlikely Brand and Son enterprise, like Open All Hours but more sexy; perhaps we’d have a casino or a brothel or be guns for hire. I’d not developed a business plan, but the name I liked.
Colin Hill was a big, bovine man with a deeply creviced face and ashen hair. He was also the fi rst teacher I thought of as human, the type of teacher who ushers you across the wobbly, Indiana Jones rope bridge into adulthood. I imagine he may have been a teacher that you could address by his Christian name or smoke a fag with. Before that, when you find out a teacher’s first name it’s like you’ve seen them on the lavvy wanking, a glimpse of a world so terribly private that while they rattle on about Wilfred Owen or geological stratification you can think nothing but, “Well, I can’t accept all this from a Derek.”
Colin Hill said I was good in drama classes. “It’s just showing off,” I thought, “sanctioned showing off . . . Oh my God, I’ve found a loophole.” “Erm, Colin, you like this showing off , do 86
“ Boobaloo”
you? You say I’m doing it well? I can also torment dogs and masturbate, do you have any classes for those?” “No, I don’t usually do them simultaneously, but if there’s a GCSE in it . . .”
A former protégé of Colin Hill—though the possibility that he might have exaggerated his role in this man’s rise cannot be ruled out—was Karl Howman, then starring in the BBC sitcom, Brush Strokes, and also the Flash cleaning product adverts where he plays the same character in a more restricted plot that always has to involve him doing some cleaning under pressure from a Mother- in- Law type woman. Actually Brush Stokes wasn’t as well constructed as the Flash ads, but it did have a theme tune by Dexy’s Midnight Runners which was brilliant and puts Brush Strokes alongside Birds of a Feather as shows that have unjustifi -
ably tear-inducing music. “Now on BBC1, some light comedy, but before that why don’t you have a quick listen to this and consider that no matter what you achieve you will die alone.”
“Karl Howman’s one of mine—him out of Brush Strokes,”
Colin Hill used to say. And I used to think, “Hmm, interesting.” And the realization that people who had later become famous had been taught by the same teacher as me parked itself in my nut and gestated.
“We’re doing Bugsy Malone as the school play—you should try for the part of Fat Sam,” said Mr. Hill. That’s as signifi cant a moment in my life as there’s yet been—him asking me to audition for that role.
I was fat already, so the adjective had been taken care of before I’d picked up a script. All I had to work on was the Sam bit.
How hard could that be? I had met people called Sam. In fact, that was my best friend at school’s name.
From the first day I started doing Colin Hill’s drama group, I remember thinking, “This is fucking brilliant—why on earth didn’t I do this before?” There were all these girls, for a start. It 87
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attracts girls, drama. It’s not for boys. Well, there was one lad from the year below me, Jeff Bell.
He was really good actually.
He played Bugsy Malone, and then there was me playing Fat Sam and loads of girls.
A consequence of involvement in this drama group was you’d get to see girls in bras—I suppose they were changing into costumes. The sight drilled itself so deeply into my mind that vital faculties had to be removed to allow it to flourish. Dancing and the ability to form intimate bonds were quickly sacrificed so that the “girls in bras” department of my brain could be given extra floors and its own DJ; “Boobaloo” he’d holler whenever he saw some knockers he liked. He’s still in there now, spinning the same discs night after night and keeping me tuned in to the screaming frequency of Libido FM.
I enjoyed the rehearsal process enormously. But on the first night the terror I felt was almost transcendental. Euphoric fear, so vertiginous, awesome and profound that I felt it could only be a prelude to death. I now know that the adrenalized fever is my body’s preparatory method and is responsible for the energy and speed I can produce on stage. Once or twice I’ve sought out a reference or a joke in my mind while on telly and it’s seemed like an age or, perhaps realistically, twelve seconds, at the time, but when I watch it back it’s an imperceptible beat. Everything about the school seemed different that first night. Th e hall,
which had been empty when we were rehearsing, was now full of lines of plastic chairs and the air was neon and flashed with expectation.
All the parents came. I don’t know how many people that would’ve been—I suppose about a hundred. But it seemed to me like a riot in a straitjacket. I locked myself in a lavvy and evacuated liquid dread. “God, what are you doing?” I asked myself. “I don’t have to do it,” I reasoned. Locked in the lavvy, locked in ne-88
“ Boobaloo”
gotiation with myself. “Scared, SCARED. RUN!” sang my unconscious, with backing vocals from my bowels. I had drawn on a mustache with an eyebrow pencil, I had a hat from somewhere, and a big suit of my dad’s with a pillow stuffed up it to make me even fatter. I went behind the curtain on the stage, and listened to the audience on the other side of it.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 8
