Upside-down he was, or I was because I’d not yet moved.
Mustachioed and saronged, shouting and angry like a baddie from Indiana Jones or that bloke in the Territorial Army advert before the soldier takes off his sunglasses granting eye contact and delivering the advert’s core message: “In the TA you learn stuff.” Obvious stuff, like if you’re taking over a village don’t strut around in shades like George Michael.
“Well, this is unusual,” I thought. “Perhaps I’ll go somewhere else now where this isn’t happening.” I tried to think of a facial expression that would make everything alright but there wasn’t one. There is no facial expression that says, “Sorry, I drunkenly, nakedly got into bed with your children and your mother. No hard feelings. Jesus, no hard anything, there are children present. Oh by the way, I think that there oughtn’t be such rigid laws on immigration—as far as I’m concerned the earth is one place and we should all travel with impunity. One love.” So I just done a sort of grin, cupped my nuts and walked out of the room.
I went upstairs, got back into her bed and went back to sleep again, confident that the dream weaver would have nothing to match the lunacy that reality was churning out. What I suppose must’ve happened was that I’d got up in the night to vomit or wee-wee, and on the way back I’d just wandered into the 155
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nearest room—which happened to be harboring scores of refugees.
What fascinates me about this incident is that there must be a moment in the “black box” of my brain, when I just walked into that room, found that bed full of people, got into it, naked, and went to sleep. Then all the kids and the old crone would’ve had to have dealt with the admin, fetching the sarong man and Petra, all confused.
When I left the house, having slept for a few more hours, I walked down the stairs, and all them little children were milling around in the stairwells. Two of them looked at each other, and one pointed and said, “The stranger! The stranger!” I was the stranger. I liked being the stranger. And I skipped off to drama school, still drunk, secure in the knowledge that this was one role I could cope with.
A few days later, when I was going to sign on for my housing benefit at Kentish Town job center, I bumped into sarong man.
We had a moment. He went “aah” and pointed, I went “aah”
and pointed back. He smiled. I smiled back. We nodded at each other, and I shrugged apologetically and gestured tipping a drink into my mouth. He in return made the gesture where you put your two hands together as if in prayer, and then make a pillow. After this wordless yet eloquent communion, we forgave each other and all was right with the world. Except not for those two girls who were, quite rightly, evicted.
Over the road from the Queens Arms there was a quite rough estate which a load of Irish travelers had, for some reason, been forced to live on. They were cheesed off about it, and they used to come in the pub to eat, drink and be angry.
The children were really naughty. They’d come in, throw ice around and cause all sorts of bother. I like children, and natu-156
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rally empathize with that kind of insubordinate behavior, so I’d just go, “Oh, come on you lot,” and play with them. Mark and Tim would throw them out, they were good barmen, they looked alright behind the bar. I looked like I was wearing a big wooden tutu and the wind had changed.
Tommy “The King of the Gypsies” used to pop in, which was nice. He was said to have reduced pubs to matchwood when irked so I tried not to irk him; I could never be entirely sure what would irk him so I just gave him booze without charging him and laid off my brilliant Ian Paisley impression.*
One afternoon, Tommy’s brother, having paid his debt to society, came to the pub. “I’m Tommy’s brother Eddie,” he said, menacingly, and demanded to be able to drink for free all day. I used to give people free drink regardless of whether a threat of violence hung heavy in the air or not, but he wasn’t to know that, he was just out of nick, wearing a suit from the ’80s all peeved about decimalization.
He was obviously a gifted fighter; all his stories reached thrillingly gruesome climaxes, at which I’d smile encouragingly and politely applaud. I was getting a bit tipsy myself, what with all the booze we were drinking, so I popped round to the lavvy to dispense with some winky-water. “You’ll have to excuse me old bean,” I said and ambled off .
Eddie came after me—“That’s sweet,” I thought, “we really are becoming the best of chums”—and I began to imagine a sitcom where Eddie and I lived together and, in spite of our diff erences, somehow made things work.
* Ian Paisley was a leader of the unionist, Protestant movement during the troubles in Northern Ireland. A great belligerent orator, he became the symbol of resistance to a united Ireland.
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“You’re a good-lookin’ boy,” said Eddie in his beautiful Irish lilt.
“Well thank you very much, and you too are of peculiarly noble bearing,” I replied.
He craned his head round to peek at my privates.
“I’d like to kiss you,” said the King of the Gypsies’ brother; I suppose that makes him the Duke of Edinburgh of the Gypsies.
“Well, that’s very flattering, Your Highness, but I much prefer the company of a woman,” I demurred, “but know this, dear Eddie, if I were gay I’d be lobbying for conjugal visits for your next stretch.” That dealt with I zipped up my adorable penis and went back to the bar. Eddie seemed to be taking this turn of events badly, if the death threats were anything to go by. “You’ve got forty-eight hours to get out of Kentish Town,” he screamed.
Now I know the Northern Line can be unreliable, but even on foot I could get to Camden in fi ve minutes.
I would like to be able to say it was my sense of professional duty that kept me in that pub till the end of my shift, but that instinct was not in my repertoire. My motivation actually came from a more familiar source: this was one of the first times I’d met this beautiful doctor girl, Kerry, who lived over the road, and I was about to fall in love with her. So throughout the rest of the evening I was busy trying to flirt with her while ignoring the fuming duke drinking free Guinness at the end of the bar. V
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I went very quickly from living in the Queens Arms and working behind the bar, to moving in with Kerry and doing no job at all. I’d not known her long but I was sure I loved her and I was certainly sure that I didn’t love working in the pub and getting death threats. Even though she only lived across the street, her house was in Chalk Farm as the Crescent formed the boundary, so I’d obeyed Eddie’s banishment—although it took a week, so wasn’t within the recommended forty-eight hours. I kept the keys to the pub though, and we’d go over there at night to get crisps and booze. Kerry was a junior doctor at the Royal Free Hospital, and she was my fi rst love. She’d been to Cambridge University, like Peter Cook.* I think I fell in love with her a bit, because she seemed to come from another world.
She went parachute jumping and broke her leg; the plane hadn’t taken off but she fell over boarding it and landed badly. I liked that she was a bit clumsy. I had to push her up the hill to
* Peter Cook, regarded by many as the funniest man ever to have lived, was erudite, sophisticated, glamorous, charming and lightning fast. Incredibly precocious, he had shows, a club, a magazine and more prestige than one man should ever be allowed in his early twenties. He is thought to have been an alcoholic, but throughout his life he remained one of the most loved and brilliant men in comedy. A hero, he made comedy cool.
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the Royal Free Hospital where she worked in a wheelchair every day. I think there’s a certain type of pervert who gets off on going out with people in wheelchairs because they want to look after them; I became one of those for a while, it was alright. After I’d got her into work, I’d eat some hospital food (Oy, do you
like hospital food or something? I do when I’m in love, thanks), walk down the hill and go to Drama Centre. It was romantic.
I liked it.
One day, when I was up at the hospital, Kerry showed me a room with shelves all stacked up with these formaldehyde-filled jars, containing hands, fingers, genitals and malformed fetuses.
It was brilliant. I told Mark Morrissey about it; he reflected then said, “Let’s steal a fetus, leave it in the park, then phone the Sun and tell them we’ve found an alien.” “Good idea Mark,” I said.
“We should definitely do that.”
We took some drugs to relax us and waited for nightfall before embarking on our flawless plan. It’s quite easy to get into a hospital—just sidle in through the casualty department and then use elevators and your imagination to get right into its core. Wisely we’d taken a couple of Kerry’s white doctor coats and blue scrubs so we looked exactly like normal doctors and not like scarecrows on their way to surgery, on drugs. It was much harder to find those fetuses than we had envisaged because the Royal Free is quite big, fetuses are small and it’s hard to concentrate when you’re on acid. It was fun walking endlessly round and round that hospital till four o’clock in the morning, past wards full of ill people sometimes stopping to practice our bedside manner or do one of them red zigzag mountain drawings at the end of someone’s bed. We couldn’t find those bloody babies though so we contented ourselves with some boxes of rubber gloves, sample jars and syringes. Our shift at an end, we 160
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trickled off back into the world like a couple of woozy Doogie Howsers.
To get my hands on some money for drugs I took part in clinical trials once—like the one where people got horribly ill at North-wick Park Hospital; Kerry got me on it.
They said they’d give you a grand, but you couldn’t drink or take drugs for the duration of the trial. That was ridiculous. I couldn’t not drink or take drugs for the duration of the conversation where they told me that I couldn’t drink or take drugs. I had to pop to the toilet for a line while they told me it was im-perative the conditions were observed. “How will they know if I’ve taken drugs or not?” I thought. “These rules are unenforce-able. It’s like taking candy from a baby. Or a baby in a jar from a hospital. By which I mean easy.”
The trial worked thusly: you’d take the drug the whole time, then one night a week you’d go and sleep at the hospital with a tube up your nose taking samples out of your gutty-wuts. I didn’t like that at all. I did it once—sleeping over—and then thought, “I can’t do this any more.” They said, “Hold on, you’re one of our guinea pigs, you can’t go—it’ll ruin the test,” but I didn’t care. I just wandered off—away from that situation and into a new one.
I don’t know exactly how long I was with Kerry for, but it felt like a long time; I was stood on the balcony of her beautiful flat enjoying the spectacular view south to St. Paul ’s Cathedral and thought, “Wow. Life’s actually okay, I’m with this doctor, who went to Peter Cook college, I’m doing well at Drama Centre, they all think I’m great at acting. Don’t fuck it up.”
It was around this time that I was in a play by Pirandello called Six Characters In Search of an Author. Even though it’s quite old, 162
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this play is postmodern as well—they all know they’re characters in a play and they’re trying to look for someone to write it, but there’s some lurking tragedy hanging above their heads.
Because I was not deemed to have done very much work, I got given this little part as a stagehand.
I was onstage all the time, but had hardly any lines.
I lay in bed, spurned, and vengefully decided to work hard.
I transformed. I stuffed my hair into a hat, I padded out my cheeks with tissue, and wore a fake mustache, a boiler suit and hobnailed boots. I had a utility belt with tools in it. During the performance, which was just for teachers and the students from other years, I bent over to pick something up, my pockets emptied and twenty or thirty screwdrivers and a hammer fell out, stealing the scene.
When we had to sit around afterward for “crits” (an annoying abbreviation but that’s what they call it), Christopher and Yat described the performance as “flawless” and “genius.” “I should think so too,” I mused. “A hat, a mustache, I’m the new Dustin Hoff man.”
Christopher Fettes taught us of the narrative line—from biblical times to the modern era, from Ancient Greek theater, through the Spanish golden age, to German expressionism, the significance of ritual within religion, and the way theater grew out of that; while I was learning all that, my life was swinging between comedy and tragedy, triumph and disaster.
I was fêted and condemned over the course of a lesson.
I was also in a production of Macbeth soon after, and it was a typical fuckup on my part. I decided that the best way to prepare for playing Macbeth was to snort loads of cheap speed, that I was supposed to be selling for a friend, and drink half a bottle of Scotch.
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myself sick, and cut my hands smashing things with a hammer.
What better way to establish a connection with an overreaching Scottish thane? “I think what Macbeth would’ve done was be sick and smash things up with a hammer.”
We rehearsed for the play with a guest director; during the first session I did coke off my cash card so I didn’t get bored or shy. I hid behind a piece of scenery to keep things secret, just popping my head out, nodding at his directions, then hoovering up more confidence, until he asked, “What are you actually doing?”
I thought, “If he finds out I’ve been taking drugs while he’s been talking, he’ll be all sad.” He started walking toward me to find out what I was up to; there was still a bit of coke on the card. A wiser man would’ve thrown it on the floor to prevent an altercation. I just tried to hold the card out of his line of vision.
But he moved his neck, and there it was, a card with a tiny amount of drugs, right at the extremity of my fully extended arm as if I was reaching out to pinch a faraway arse. He told people at the school and their response was, “Oh yes, Russell does do drugs—we’ve all noticed it.”
I was “a right skanking little cunt.” I used to get coke, put it on the toilet seat, take away my half and cut the remainder with crunched up Rennie indigestion tablets (I always had indigestion for some reason), then sell it to my close friends. After Kerry threw me out, bin bags crossing the border back into Kentish Town, I used keys I’d had cut for such an eventuality to return to the flat and steal things. I was a total cad. V
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Christopher Fettes was into teaching us about tribal societies and the importance of ritual; this filtered through into the culture of the students. Every twelve months, when a new year joined, the third years would hold an initiation party for them.
There was nothing sinister about it: just a little revue-style play where the teachers at the school would be parodied in a jocular fashion and we’d all have a bit of a drink. The whole of the school would come, and maybe even some ex-students (tragic characters, lurking around, still not famous yet).
When we had ours it was a great night, and I ended up getting off with some girl called Chloe who I told a ridiculous pack of lies to. She came up to me, brown-eyed and Joplin-y-fied and said, “Are you Native American?” The answer she obviously wanted was “Yes” and the truth was “No”—I had less than a second to respond. “Yes. Yes I am a Native American.” “Wow, what tribe?” Okay, don’t panic, come on brain. She was beautiful, bohemian, she was the sort of girlfriend Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s Th
e Doors would have. “Th
e one
from Dances With Wolves, I’m out of that tribe. I don’t like talking about it because of the hardship my people h
ave suff ered under the tyranny of the Americans, the bastards.” Brilliant.
That was enough to get me through the night. I could do some 166
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research some other time. I kept that charade going for weeks, putting my ear to the ground when I was nervous, crying when I saw litter, smoking um peace pipe. She didn’t suspect a thing.
Two years later, though, this function ended in carnage for Lies Without Shame. We held it above a pub called Th e Enterprise on Chalk Farm Road, from which I’ve been barred three times; I still drink there. This is how I got barred the first time.
The function of the party was to welcome the first years—
“Yeah, wahoo! We’re at drama school. Let’s be happy, everybody.
Remember my name—Fame!” That kind of caper. People were doing impressions of Christopher Fettes as if he was Hannibal Lecter and Yat Malmgren as if he was Yoda. Everyone was having the time of their lives.
I was to be a lovely teacher called Jenny Litman who sort of . . . spoke . . . very . . . slowly—as if language were made of Hubba Bubba and she had to chew and pop every word. Th e
place you entered from before doing your little turn was the corridor running into the kitchen. They stored the booze up there, cheap filthy Chekov vodka, my brand, before decanting it into the Smirnoff bottle above the bar. There were all these boxes piled up. And as we were all getting ready, me and Mark Morrissey and this other lad Olly nicked a couple for ourselves. I then took a liter bottle of vodka and drank it down all nice in my tum.
When you do that you get a ten-minute grace period before your body realizes what an idiot it’s housing. One moment you’re thinking, “Wow, I’m Oliver Reed. This hasn’t touched me, pass another bottle.” Then it hits you—like a vodka lorry smashing into your cerebellum. Your mind and body split in two, head in opposite directions and agree to meet up the next day.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 14
