My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up

by Russell Brand

  I won’t lapse into saying that it did exactly what it said on the tin, because I despise advert-authorized idioms, but heroin delivered. LSD kind of does a bit, especially when all the things that are familiar to you peel away and you suddenly realize the fragility of how you normally see the world. Marijuana kind of doesn’t really, although it’s a laugh for a while (I say that having smoked it constantly for a decade). Alcohol makes you sick and gives you a headache. Crack is like inhaling plastic, but so brief and flimsy and brittle as a high. Normal cocaine just makes you nervous, amphetamines are even worse and ecstasy never really agreed with me. But heroin gets the job done.

  What it mainly does is take you right out of reality, and plant you somewhere more manageable. In short, it contextualizes everything else as meaningless.

  All of us, I think, have a vague idea that we’re missing something. Some say that thing is God; that all the longing we feel—be it for a lover, or a football team, or a drug—is merely an inappropriate substitute for the longing we’re supposed to 214

  Photographic Insert II

  Haircuts must be high.

  I persevered with that

  haircut for longer than

  my dad persevered

  with his marriage.

  Dagenham Park, elfin,

  porcine, oddly Puerto

  Rican; this look has it

  all. I loved that shirt.

  This is the first time I performed. I found the best light on that stage and I lost my virginity to one of those girls.

  Actor cake.

  Callan Language School, with my beloved

  students. I slept with none of these ones.

  Me, doing acting in The B lil.

  Me and Karl in Ilford Park, scrabbling around for fame.

  I will pose nude for work.

  Amanda and me, second day of abortive “cluck.”

  Coming off smack in the Cotswolds, eyeing a reptile.

  Matt, the neurotic

  Howard Hughes-

  style nit that he is,

  was panicking

  about those flowers.

  “I’ve got hay fever

  Russell, put them

  down.”

  Thin from drugs

  and angry.

  Me and Martino

  acting like Wham.

  Flatteringly large censorial box.

  Russell, Matt, Nicola and Sharon backstage at the Brits. Look at us—four London/estuary punks. We were running the Brits that year and there were hardly any complaints, except from the Queen, the f lirty cow.

  Top row from left to right: Gareth Roy, Ian Coburn, John Rogers, Nik Linnen, Matt Morgan, Jack Bayles.

  Bottom row from left to right: Lynn Penrose, Nicola Schuller, Mr. G, Hannah Linnen, Barbara Brand, Me, Sharon Smith, Nic Philps, Craig Young.

  I love Morrissey.

  Me and my lovely Mum. Aah. Aaaaaah.

  Aaaaaaaaaah. I could go on.

  Firing Minors

  feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need.

  My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who—not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words—said, “I want something.” He didn’t know what it was. Not “I want sweets,” or “a can of Coke,” or “to watch Th

  e Tweenies,” or whatever it is they’re into now (I liked Bagpuss), but “I want something.” All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

  It makes you feel lovely and warm and cozy. It gives you a great, big, smacky cuddle, and from then on the idea of need is no longer an abstract thing, but a longing in your belly and a kicking in your legs and a shivering in your arms and sweat on your forehead and a dull pallor on your face. At this point, you’re no longer under any misapprehension about what it is that you need: you don’t think, “Nice to have a girlfriend, read a poem, or ride a bike,” you think, “Fuck, I need heroin.” V

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  Down Among the Have- Nots

  MTV’s studios are in Camden—a vibrant, thriving, diverse sort of place, very sexy and self-consciously cool. Drug dealers lurk down by the canal and up on the bridge, amid the punks. How do punks know to sit there? I wonder who was the first punk who sent out leaflets saying, “Hello, I’m a punk and I’d like to meet similar—why not come to the bridge over Camden Lock, and we’ll sit around punking it up and drinking a bit of cider?”

  Drugs, specifically heroin, were everywhere in Camden: little blue bags the size of, I suppose usually, two peas. That’s how big a £10 bag of heroin is—half the size of a Malteser, twice the size of a pea; just in case you ever become a junkie and you need to score in Camden, you can take this book with you as a guide to weights and measures.* “That’s not ten pounds-worth, you scumbag, look at this Malteser.” Possibly that’ll be the last sentence you utter before being fl ung into a canal, to drown to the sound of giggling punks.

  The dealers keep the bags in their mouths. Then when you buy one they spit it into their hand and you have to put it directly into your mouth. Even though you obviously want the heroin, a little bit of you is thinking, “Eeugh! He’s had it in his

  * “Maltesers” are like “Whoppers,” but in my view a bit nicer and with a better name.

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  mouth.” After a while, though, you stop thinking that. It’s a bleak day when that happens. You know that’s another little boundary that you’ve crossed, another principle chalked off to experience, another thing you’ve put behind you, because there’s so little in front of you.

  “All my days are empty and the pages of my diary are all silver foil, with naught but an inky black snake carving its way through the days,” I once wrote. Probably to impress a girl.

  I became preoccupied with London’s Hogarthian underbelly when I was still at Drama Centre—befriending poor, doomed Homeless Jim, who died on the steps of the school and spoke using only three phrases. “You know me,” “Right or wrong” and

  “Not being rude.” He could communicate everything he needed to say with that palette. And scoring off Lucky Benny. Lucky Benny were an amazing character—sat behind his great giant glasses, with his wiry, Iggy Pop–fit body and his endless kids.

  For someone who had failed so spectacularly in socioeconomic terms, this man’s genes were powerful: his kids’ faces—even the girls’—were identikit versions of his.

  These are the main things that I remember about Lucky Benny. He lived on a North London council-estate, and his wife was called Pearl. You know the one of the Muppets who’s got hair that’s made out of spaghetti? The woman Muppet, that was in the band? Well, Pearl looked a bit like her. It felt like gravity was pulling her downward. You could see this struggle reflected in every movement she made—as if she couldn’t blink or turn her head without doing battle with Newton’s implacable adversary.

  There was a picture of Pearl which they had on their wall. A charcoal drawing, I suspect from Leicester Square—not a cari-cature, a realistic one. The street artist had really captured the tragedy of Pearl as a character, so this thing that was meant to be 217

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  a memento of a happy trip to the Trocadero was actually a haunting reminder of the family’s terminal dilemma.

  One time Benny compromised both me and dear Pearl by showing me a photograph of Pearl’s vagina—taken up her skirt.

  I was sitting politely taking drugs in their house demonstrating that I enjoyed their company as well as their wares when Benny, beaming, thrust a photo into my eyeline and asked, “What do you think of that?” I thought, “How do you answer this question without offending anyone? What is the correct answer? What would it say in Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette?” “It’s nice”—is that the right answer? “It isn’t nice?” It’s just an impossible social quandary. I think in the end I went “
mmm,” thinking, “If I just make a noise, that could be judged either way.”

  I’ve never encountered poverty like it—and haven’t since, as a matter of fact, other than among those who are actually homeless. But there were still structures and hierarchy and charm and dignity and codes and protocols. Benny was a proud man, and I really liked him.

  He sold mostly speed and weed and hash. I wasn’t really taking too many hard drugs yet. This was the time when me, Mark Morrissey and that Geordie Tim were a little pack of ne’er-do-wells, living above that pub the Queens Arms. I stole a guitar from one of the students at Drama Centre to swap for drugs once, giving it to Lucky Benny, then feeling awful about it and trying to get it back, but not being able to.

  They had a pet snake—some kind of python it was, not a massive one—and they lost it. It got loose, and then six months later, it came back. What had it been eating? I guess there was an ecosystem in that house which could sustain it. I went round there once and the house was all full of wreaths, because one of their kids—a fifteen-year- old girl—had had a baby, and it had died. I remember them all going, “Yeah, it’s terrible really, but 218

  Down Among the Have- Nots

  you know . . .” like they came from a time when infant mortality was normal.

  Lucy—one of Benny’s surviving granddaughters—had some terrible respiratory illness which meant she had to spend a lot of time at the Royal Free. Even when she came home, she still had a drip up her nose, going into her stomach, and she was only meant to be fed through that until she got better. Th eir one

  concession to the medical needs of this child—who they did really love—was that they’d leave the door open while they were smoking. I saw her eating a pack of Frazzles once—this little tottering thing with a drip up her nose, poisoning herself with illicit corn snacks. “Oh Benny,” I called out anxiously, “Lucy is eating some crisps, look.” “Oh yeah,” he replied, “she likes them.”

  Amazing characters would accumulate in that flat, and I’d sit round there smoking draw for ages when I was supposed to be doing ballet. There was this one woman called Sue—again one of these washed-out, almost transparent people. I was just round there for a sixteenth of dope—about £7.50 worth—and she goes, “Oh Benny, I’m really depressed, I was thinking about killing myself last night.” He just said, “Okay, I’ll come round and do it for you.” There was no sense of this as a cry for help: he just briskly outlined different ways of doing the job quickly and painlessly (through the eye socket was one that stuck in my mind, for some reason).

  There was this other bloke Brian, who spoke like Henry’s Cat and was intermittently addicted to heroin but was actually really wise. I used to get all stoned and talk about my problems and feelings with him, and one day he goes, “Well, you know Russell, it’s a hard life, down here among the have-nots.”

  That really resonated with me, “the have-nots.” Later on, when I started hanging out with homeless people in the West 219

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  End, scoring heroin with them, I realized that there’s this secret culture of people going up and down Oxford Street, whistling and yelping to each other in a kind of tropical slang—men on BMX bikes delivering £10 bags of heroin to be purchased with grubby fists full of 50p and 10p and 2p coins; West Indian housewife–type women perambulating past Topshop, cheeks wedged with packets of smack.

  You don’t see this bustling underworld until you need to.

  There have been occasions, thrilling to me, when I went off to score, cutting a purposeful stride down past Tottenham Court Road tube station in the company of three or four homeless people, their sleeping bags worn about their shoulders, like the cloaks of Roman legionaries. I must have cut a ridiculous figure, dressed in my MTV presenter attire—skintight white jeans, graffitied tops, Ray-Ban sunglasses—jostling along with them, as they set off in search of a bag in Covent Garden. In the midst of Oxford Street, with its perpetual, glum buzz, the constant dull throb of the buses, the normal people busily skittering to work, this homeless sub set exists—in the margins, along the curbs—scarcely noticed by anyone. Who else do you think it is that uses phone boxes? They’re only there for prostitutes’ cards and homeless people to call heroin dealers—no one else bothers with ’em, we’ve all got mobiles.

  Until quite

  recently—when I gratefully gave up public

  transport—I would still see people I’d scored drugs with begging in tube stations. There was one bloke—I don’t know if he’s still around—whose eyes were missing. First he lost his wife then his house then his shoes, then his eyes; heroin is a greedy drug, robbing you by increments first of your clothing, then of your skin; finally when it comes for your life it must be a relief.

  They’re not present those people: if you talk to them, they just look beyond you, they’re not really there. That’s why the invisi-220

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  bility of the homeless scoring drugs on Oxford Street is almost by mutual consent: they don’t want to be seen, and no one else wants to see them.

  I was a tourist in that world. I’ve never been homeless—I’ve got too many safety nets, too many people that have seen my frailty and vulnerability and are determined not to let me slip through. People like my mum and my nan, that have just gone,

  “Oh bloody hell, he’s always gonna be a child to some extent—we’ll just have to keep an eye on him.”

  One crack house in East London, I used to pop into from time to time, you know, for the atmosphere, where an enormous black woman used to deal drugs from her bed. Like Lady Madonna. People were just nodding out all around the flat—in the bathroom, in the bath. And yet it was just off Bethnal Green Road. Outside, everything was normal and functioning, then you’d walk through a doorway, and be amid all this madness.

  Once at Lady Madonna’s crack emporium this pimp was arguing with one of his girls, syringes strewn like confetti at a junkie wedding, and I was using with them and I thought, “I shouldn’t really be here.” I had work and a bit of money and people that loved me. That place exists still waiting for me should I err.

  I craved the illicit even as a boy in my mum’s house. I called a prostitute knowing that I had no means of paying her except for my NatWest checkbook that had woodland creatures on it—“Would you like a check for twenty-fi ve quid with an illustration of a squirrel? I don’t know if it’s going to clear.” “What about the badger?”

  I’d frequently visit prostitutes in Soho; they have cards dis-played in the doorway saying “model.” I sometimes considered going up with some Italian sun hats and floral dresses and saying,

  “Put these on love, it’s for Kays Catalog,” but I usually plumped for joyless sex. I’d cross paths with a guilty stranger on the 221

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  stairs, worse on the way in than the way out. Often they were poor old sods in suits.

  I especially liked really big women. One lady had boobs like bin bags filled with lard. She wheezed her way to the door, and then when she got onto her back, I thought she’d never get up again. I visited her on my lunch break while working at Vera Productions, a liberal TV production company that makes Rory Bremner’s and Mark Thomas’s shows. Once someone stuck a packet of Kit Kats to the kitchen wall because they were appalled that someone had brought them into the offi ce because

  of Nestlé’s irresponsible marketing of baby milk formulas in the Third World. I thought “Bloody hell they’ll be furious if they find out where I go for my lunch.” And I ate those Kit Kats.

  I went to Reading once to meet two gorgeous and enormous women; it was like an away match. Huge women, they were.

  What I don’t like—and often this’ll happen if you sleep with pairs of prostitutes—is they’ll do this really unerotic kind of pseudo–sex talk that makes you feel like you’re in an Alan Ayck-bourn play. “Ooh, hello there, big boy, I am feeling SoOOoo hot . . . you’re a naughty boy in’t’cha?”—that sort of rhubarb.


  Luckily, those two giant Reading women eschewed that grisly euphemistic seaside- postcard routine.

  After all the sexy fun, it is nice sometimes all warm and simple; we sat and swapped stories, they told me about encounters they’d had with their clients. Cozy it was, like nattering housewives, I felt young and drowsy. Th

  e stuff they said was mucky but to them

  it was ordinary: “We’ve got this one client right. One time he came in and put on your underwear, didn’t he, Sue?” “Oh yeah, yeah, he put on my knickers and bra.”

  Must’ve been a hefty gent I thought, but I kept quiet as I didn’t want to cause offense or ruin the yarn. “Then he got into 222

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  the bath,” Sue continued, “shat himself, and said ‘Ooh nanny, I’ve been a naughty girl, I don’t think I can go to nursery.’ ”

  I enjoyed the tale wholeheartedly and assumed others would too. The first time I ever spoke to Ricky Gervais, he called me out of nowhere because he wanted to tell a story on his XFM

  show about something that had happened to me and Karl Pilk-ington and he wanted to check I didn’t mind. He was funny as you’d expect and I was excited because we were getting on really well and I liked his TV shows. I thought, “This is great—I’m gonna be lifelong chums with Ricky Gervais.” I remembered that Ricky is from Reading and thought, he’ll love my prostitute story. “Hey, Ricky, you’re from Reading, let me tell you this story about prostitutes in your hometown.” I told him that story, got to the punch line—“Nanny, I’ve been a naughty girl. I’ve just shat myself and now I can’t go to playschool.” And Ricky went, “I’m gonna have to go now.” I just said, “Oh, okay,” put the phone down feeling really deflated, and thought, “Oh no. What did I say?” V