When I fi rst went to Conti’s there were so many beautiful girls there that I fell in love incessantly. Kéllé, Rachel, Louise and Penny—she was particularly rewarding as she looked like Meg Ryan in Th
e Doors and was a bit of a hippy; I saw her a couple of years ago in Camden and I think she may’ve gone religious, for which I might be to blame. I was so helplessly infatuated with her that I followed her to her home in Wigan at the end of term.
She was heading home for the holidays, and I had nowhere to go, nothing to do and no money. She didn’t want me to come to Wigan—I was just supposed to walk her to Euston Station as part of my tireless campaign to make her love me. It took longer than anticipated so I got on the train with her—without a ticket, but with my brilliant technique. “I might as well come with you,”
I said, and stayed on the train.
When we got to Liverpool Lime Street, the police arrested me, and I gave them the name and address of an old school enemy. That’s another of my techniques, I really should have an item on Th
is Morning, I’m gonna phone Fern Britton, plus I fancy her. So, Fare-evasion Tip 2:
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Actual school report
Photographic Insert I
I’d just arrived on the planet when this was taken. Lazy really to sleep when I can’t have achieved anything.
Babs and Ron looking to an imagined future. Attractive, aren’t they?
An early gig—looks
like it’s going well.
On holiday in Clacton with
Mum, inexplicably blond.
I’m in my aunt and uncle
Janet and Jimmy’s garden.
Ferrets were nearby—
that’s why I’m confused.
Dr. Dolittle.
Disgusted by the shoddy quality of St. Nick,
I contemplate atheism.
My beloved Nan.
Topsy. My mad hound imagin-
ing scoffing dosh, the twit.
Oddly, the ICF refused me entry.
An imaginative haircut,
which I still regret.
I’m suspicious of Baden-
Powell—these clothes
suck. I never
got any badges either.
If you look into that rabbit’s eyes you can see it’s planning a Woundwart-style attack. I cut my own fringe.
This is the exact
moment when I
decided to act gay
to attract girls. It
took fifteen years
to produce results.
Cleverly doctored report for subsequent drama school auditions
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• Just get on the train without a ticket
• Avoid the inspector by remaining mobile
• When eventually you are apprehended by an inspector or the police, confidently give the name and address of someone you know but don’t like. IMPORTANT, it must be a corresponding name and address, don’t make one up, also don’t give away that it is an enemy’s address by saying, “That bastard Stephen Reynolds, number two Wallace Road”—you’ll arouse suspicion.
You may as well have these tips an’ all, Tip 3:
• Pretend to be Spanish—“No tengo un ticket, lo’siento.”
Tip 4:
• Pretend to be mentally ill—“The ticket offi ce was shut
and when I tried to use the machine my willy done a burp.”
Tip 5:
• Pretend to be dead—just lie there.
This time I used good old Tip 2, the police wired the info through and it all checked out, so I was released and that arsehole Stephen Reynolds got another ten-pound fine.
Penny didn’t want me to come to her house but I used charm and relentless pigheaded per sis tence to persuade her. I’d pursued her with poetry and promises, neither of which were original or true, for months. I tackled the nobstacle course with such dogged aplomb that when night fell I was allowed to sleep in her 120
Body Mist
bed top to toe. I spun gags and yarns till she let me turn round, I painted verbal pictures and begged until she kissed me, I lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till reluctantly she removed her bra, I used tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers. We were naked, and cautiously I went down on her. She whispered, “Russell, put a condom on,”
and—this is how much of an idiot I was—I bellowed, “YES!
Thank God Dean and Jimmy made me take one.” This, I suppose, indicated that 1. My pursuit of her was a topic of conversation, which it was. They thought I was like Adrian Mole in his ineffectual wooing of Pandora, and 2. That I was a bit imma-ture. It was romance though that compelled me, not lust; I wanted to lose myself in a woman, to have an ally, a partner, a girlfriend. This sweet and touching perspective on women was about to be challenged. V
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Perhaps it was in seeking to cope with this sudden upturn in my sexual economy—this huge shift in the quality and quantity of available women—that I developed my “cloak of love” identity.
“How did you do that?” I hear you ask, all aquiver. Well, first I got myself this cloak. It stretched from the top of my head to the tips of my tiny toes, like a curtain, and I used it to veil myself and my true intentions, right in it, as I stalked the corridors of Italia Conti.
It were very helpful, that cloak of love. What I liked about it, and what I love in general about inventing catchphrases or jargon or nomenclature is that sometimes other people are forced to say the ludicrous words you’ve come up with. There was a teacher who used to do an impression of me. Adam his name was. “Ooh, c’mon girls, get into my cloak of love.” (Instigating a trend that continues—of making me indistinguishable from Janet Street-Porter. Good, I like her.)*
Most of the girls at Italia Conti had graduated from the school course (for those aged up to sixteen), which meant they’d
* Janet Street-Porter was an innovative youth TV producer and performer whose London accent and large teeth made her a target for misogynists and anti- dentite bastards (Sein-feld).
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been trapped in that place for years with homosexuals. So when I arrived there, still knowing how to communicate with girls because I was all feminized and everything, but being hysteri-cally heterosexual, it was perfect.
“Hello dear,” I would call them over—and I would have spoken in the same slightly camp voice I do now—“perhaps you might like to join me in my cloak of love?” And they would, the fools. I’d open my cloak of love and . . . It weren’t that bad, it was all quite lighthearted. I didn’t have a hard-on, I’d only kiss
’em a little bit.
Dear Dean Northard once passed me in a stairwell when I was with Julia—she was so beautiful and little, and I was tall, and she was enshrouded in the cloak of love—and he went,
“Russell, you’re like a fucking pedophile with that girl in your fucking cloak of love.” He still called it the cloak of love, like that was its official name, as if there was a protocol that had to be observed. Like when the Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating put his arm round our beloved Queen and we as a nation went “fucking cheek.” Even staunch antimonarchists put aside their principles and thought, “That’s bang out of order, get your dirty Australian armpit off our Queen.” Even as Dean attacked the cloak of love he adhered to the terminology that the cloak demanded. He didn’t just call it what it was when stripped of mystery and tradition: a Burton’s mac.
One of my greatest pleasures in life is coining a mischievous phraseology that other people then have to accept as a linguistic fact. It’s exciting to be able to interrupt and alter language. It’s anarchic and subversive to lay dirty lingo eggs that people are going to have to say, then watch like a voyeuristic cuckoo as they hatch—“There, speak like that. Now, talk all stupid.”
When everything is homogenized and bland, nothing needs to registe
r; if you put things in an unusual fashion—even if it’s 123
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just saying someone’s name in a silly voice, or changing the way it’s pronounced—it always makes people listen more.
When I was doing Big Brother’s Big Mouth, I always used to begin the show by saying two random words, and then my own name. Everyone knew the program was about to start, and I was happy for people to be watching it, it’s obvious. So I’d amuse myself by saying a couple of words that meant nothing. Th e Da-daists, an artistic movement who began dicking about around the time of the First World War, reasoned that if rational thought and logic led to war they ought be dispensed with. I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity’s hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh.
I felt that even as Dean Northard and, later, the Sheward family who ran the school condemned the cloak of love, they too fell under its spell—in a way, they were as much inveigled by the cloak of love as any of its more formal victims.
Part of the justification the Shewards gave for expelling me at the end of my first year was, “He’s always in the corridors in that stupid cloak of love.” “And he’s on drugs all the time and he hardly ever turns up and he can’t sing or dance.” But by then, it was too late, I’d switched off, they’d been forced to say “cloak of love” and I’d won. It was meant to be an introductory course, and the other two students who were on it were accepted for the full three years, but they didn’t want me there for another second. They thought I was a maniac.
After I got chucked out of Conti’s, I got an agent and a series of dead-end jobs. It was during this already turbulent period that my mum got cancer again (of the lymph glands, this time). I was convinced she would die; rather than helping her through 124
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this terrible ordeal, I buried myself in drinking and smoking dope.
I had this friend called Michael Kirsch, who had been at Italia Conti before me. He was the middle son of a Jewish merchant-banker, a talented and volatile young man capable of incredible compassion and insight. He didn’t have a bedroom in their grand Eaton Square house—he slept on the dining-room floor. Although he’d left the school he had remained friends with people still at it. Mike smoked loads of grass—as all of us did—and was quite an intense character; he looked like De Niro in Mean Streets and occasionally behaved like him, once smashing me in the face while we were arguing on an escalator.
During that ridiculous period when I lived in Bermondsey Street with Justin, Jimmy and Julie, he took it upon himself to steward me. It was like being counseled by Keith Moon. We decided to write a play based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The fact that neither of us had ever so much as glanced at Th e
Tibetan Book of the Dead made it much more of a challenge. I’ve still not read it, I don’t think many people have, I believe it’s quite an esoteric religious text aimed mostly at monks, but I’m confident the play Ying Yang will stand the test of time. Even though it ought to have been called Yin Yang. In years to come, scholars will say, “This play really encapsulates the message of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, let’s put it on at the National.”
There was this woman at Pimlico School (a huge comprehensive in central London) who lent us a space to perform in. She was a lovely boho character in her forties—with short, cropped hair and ethnic beads—and she let us use the room to rehearse.
She even paid for an advert to go in Th e Stage saying, “New
Play: If Interested, Please Call . . .”
Because the acting community is peopled by millions of des-peradoes, we were inundated with responses and had to hold a 125
Ying Yang
week of auditions. All day long, me and Mike Kirsch sat in this room, stoned, auditioning people for a play that we hadn’t written, based on a book that we hadn’t read, absolutely confi -
dent that nothing but good could come of it. Not once was the possibility of reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead raised. We assumed it’d be boring. Neither did we fret unduly about writing a script for the actors to perform in the castings or rehearsals.
We simply looked them in the eyes and told them the script was secret. An extraordinary variety of characters came through that door. The ideology we employed was: “Let’s cast people that we’ll be able to manipulate, not people that scare us . . .
and—obviously—good-looking women are in too.”
There were two women that were particularly sexy—Clau-dine and Maria. Maria was an Asian girl with all this tumbling black hair, who turned up in this red dress and looked impressive, and we were just a couple of jerks sat there, high. “OK, right, this play . . . do you want to improvise a scene?” “Will you do kissing? There’s lots of kissing. And bras, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is full of women kissing in their bras. Th at’s what
makes it such a fucking good read.” There was also an Australian bloke called Mitch who I think knew we had no script, and this feller Danny, who looked like a live-action version of Inspector Gadget, and whenever you called up his house, his mum would answer. We gave him the part of “the vicar” and on the cast list for the program we got printed, in spite of never writing the play, he was credited as “Danny Vicar as ‘the vicar.’ ” We’d cast this ensemble of two good-looking women and a couple of nin-compoops, and we just kept on rehearsing this play. For months.
Me and Mike Kirsch had nothing else to live for. We’d both been thrown out of school, he was signing on, and I wasn’t old enough to get benefits. For us, life was a rehearsal.
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Matt Morgan said recently, all the best people get thrown out of art or drama school. They should go, “Right, you’re expelled. Now get out and stay out . . . Pssst. Not really, come round the back, this is the real school for the creative people who can’t be conditioned.”
During the months of pointless rehearsals of nothing, I took a few days off to write the script. It was rubbish. RUBBISH.
This is my interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, without reading it: well, there’s these people in a waiting room, but, get this, it’s purgatory, oh yeah. But, none of them know they’re dead so they just wander into the waiting room, all confused, and a bloke with a clipboard, played by Mitch (we called his character Foster like the beer because he was Australian), evaluates them. Mike played Adam who had raped and murdered Claudine’s character (that scene was rehearsed very responsibly, with Mike saying his erection was proof that he was in character), but because he felt guilty about it in the afterlife he was basically let off. Danny the vicar meanwhile (brilliantly played by Danny Vicar) went to hell because he’d nicked money off the collection plate. So there was quite a powerful message—not all vicars are nice and if you say sorry you can rape and murder as many people as you like. I played a bloke who’d killed himself and spent most of the scenes trying to get Maria to re-suscitate me.
The play and the lunacy surrounding it demonstrate a couple of things: even though I was only seventeen, I was really dynamic and organized; also I was mad. The day before it was meant to open, me and Mike did acid and thought, “Th is play’s
shit—and so are we,” so we sacked everyone and hid. I phoned Danny’s mum—“Is Danny there? Tell him the play’s been canceled.” We didn’t even tell the nice woman from Pimlico School (in fact, I’d like to apologize to her now. Sorry).
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The loss of this last precarious foothold on the show- business ladder was a terrible blow, but drugs made everything softer.
After some time living in Bermondsey Street, I couldn’t aff ord the rent, and went back to my nan’s and eking out a precarious living- out-of-a-bag type of existence, hiding from my mum’s illness.
Strangely, given that I was so much older and should have been better able to deal with it by then,
the third time she got cancer probably had the worst effect on me. I closed myself down and felt dead lost, and no one had any sympathy for me.
Even when she went into remission, and her hair was coming back after the chemotherapy, it was still a really bleak time. Obviously it was good that she was getting better, but Colin was still there, and things between him and me had become totally unbearable.
I was also a right little petty criminal at this time in my life.
Drug-taking, stealing and not paying for bus, train and tube tickets (all of which I considered to be victimless crimes) were fairly integral to my day-to-day life in those days. I used to fare-dodge pretty much everywhere I went. And steal food. I used to go into a supermarket, get a basket, fill it up, eat a sandwich while I was doing it, then put the basket down at the checkout, having eaten the sandwich, and leave the store. I got caught doing this once on the Kings Road, and it was very embarrassing. My life was very disrupted and unsettled. What I really wanted was to escape from the mess I seemed to be making of everything, and to get a girlfriend. But I had no sexual confidence. It was the graphic sexual encounters that took place on the trip I was about to take with my dad to Hong Kong and the Far East which would really begin to instill that. V
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Click, Clack, Click, Clack
Socrates says the male libido is like being chained to a madman, and the links in my chain are these:
1. I love sex, like everyone, because of the ol’ biological program.
2. I enforce my identity and status as a man through sex and the seduction of women.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 11
