John’s not ever really succumbed to the glitz and glamour of showbiz—he’s always stayed true to his roots. (Frankly, I find that a little disappointing, because I personally like the glitz and glamour—that’s why I got into this damned industry in the first place. Well, that and my cursed talent.)
Low-rent location notwithstanding, the 2002 John Noel Management Christmas Party was attended by such luminaries as Davina McCall, Tess Daly and Dermot O’Leary. My escort for the evening was a homeless gentleman called Harmonica Matt, who couldn’t speak without stammering, but could sing the blues perfectly when he picked up his harmonica. He told me once that he’d taken a load of acid some years before, and had “never come back.”
Making that “Homeless James” episode of RE:Brand had done nothing to diminish my interest in down-and-outs. I just used to get fascinated by them. I know that’s the sort of thing people say, and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, “You don’t mean that. You just think it sounds good.” Like Big Brother contestants insisting they want people “to get to know the real them” before they’ve even been on the show.
“But I don’t know the unreal you. I don’t know any aspect of your personality. I have no opinion of you at all. I don’t want to see the real you, or an artificial you, or some you that you’ve made out of Twiglets—give us further oblivion, you nit.” But, aware as I am of the contrivances of compassionate language, I do tend to identify with those who watch life from the periphery. Harmonica Matt. I can’t remember exactly where I found him—he’d have been at the bottom of some escalator somewhere, playing his mouth organ.
He used to haunt the Central Line at Liverpool Street, singing a 289
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haunting melody to a baby doll in a pram he pushed: “Th ere’s
something wrong with my baby, there’s something wrong with me.” There was; he was eccentric. “Even Nostradamus couldn’t’ve predicted that” was another of his hits. I befriended him, and in the spirit of “Hey, yeah man, it’s the sixties,” invited him to John Noel’s party.
I’d always found Harmonica Matt to be a charming fella, and I was aware of many of his idiosyncrasies, but one that had escaped my attention until the night of that party was that he had something of an eye for the ladies. I always tend to feel a bit on edge in those kind of supposedly convivial situations, and the sight of Harmonica Matt looming over assorted permatanned digital TV starlets, breathing his vomity-Wotsit breath over ’em (“I like him,” I used to tell people, “he smells of Wotsits”: “Th at’s
not Wotsits,” Matt would reply, “it’s his own sick”) did nothing to put me at ease.
The resulting social anxiety prompted my customary response. I disappeared off to the lavatory to see if my brain was so committed to thinking its thoughts that it would be prepared to do battle with its nemesis and savior, Auntie Heroin. I drizzled some in and it were, like, real horror show. Nik ambled in.
“Fookin’ hell mate,” he exclaimed, “is that heroin?” I admitted that it was (I had mentioned to John before that I had a drugs problem, but I think he just took this to mean that I smoked a bit too much grass). “You need to do something about that, mate,” Nik insisted, with a sense of urgency that I had not yet learned to recognize. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I really should,” I said, distractedly, not expecting anything to come of it. But before I knew it, I found myself embroiled in a series of brief but life- changing meetings.
Meeting One was in the Lansdowne pub and involved John 290
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Noel buying me and my mum pizzas and saying, “Russell’s got a problem; we need to sort it out.” My mum had the same air that she’s had at countless previous meetings with headmasters and counselors and policemen—that kind of bruised and battered love for me. On this occasion though, she seemed a little more confident—perhaps because there was an alpha male off ering to help.
As he spoke, John was characteristically and confi dently interfering with the fireplace. John could never leave an open grate alone. Nik’s the same—they have to put wood on it, or stir up the ashes with a poker. I’m not like that. I might play with a fire if I’m on my own, but not in a pub—it’s not my job. But John’s straight in there, meddling with the fire, that’s how primal he is: it wouldn’t surprise me if one day he fashioned a wheel out of granite.
John said that he was going to introduce me to a man called Chip Somers, who it turned out had been instrumental in Davina McCall’s recovery from addiction. Intrigued though I was, I broke off from the conversation at this point to go and meet Gritty and score some heroin—just to get through the rest of the meeting about how I had to give it up. It was easier to have that discussion once I’d taken some (in fact, the impact of that specifi c inhalation still gives me a nostalgic pang of comfort, the sort of warm glow one might get from remembering a beloved Christmas gift—
Batman costume aged seven). Once you’ve had some heroin, the idea of stopping taking it is bearable; it’s when you’ve not had any that it becomes fucking terrifying.
Meeting Two, the next day, was with Chip Somers, at John Noel’s offices. In the blink of an eye I’d gone from scoring drugs from Gritty—“Oh Gritty!”—to applying for salvation via the ridiculously joyfully named Chip Somers: a man who sounded like a Mamas and Papas song title.
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Chip turned out to be a distinguished, bespectacled gent, warm and forceful, like good sodomy; he’d been to Radley College, so perhaps that’s where he got it from. He carries himself with dignity and has incredible insight. You wouldn’t know that he’s served four years in prison for armed robbery and was an intravenous junkie five times longer than that if I hadn’t just blithely told you. He wouldn’t mind because now he is a living monument to the possibility of redemption and change. He founded and runs a treatment center in Bury St. Edmunds called Focus 12.
He sat me down and asked about the extent of my drug use. I took him through how it developed, and told him that for the last four years I’d been taking heroin and crack every day, but for a few failed “clucks,” and now had a £50–£100-a-day habit. He told me that I was a “complete garbage head” and needed to come into treatment straightaway. While he was talking I was doing something I often do; I just watch a conversation happening—the real me sat away all snug, thinking, “This will have no consequences: none of these proposals will be implemented.”
Then we went back into John’s office across the corridor, with all its gifts and photographs and newspaper stories concerning his notorious clients, and he said, “Right, so what’s the fookin’
situation?” Chip explained swiftly that if I didn’t stop taking drugs straightaway, I’d be in prison, a mental asylum or a coffin within six months. He said it was vital I come into Focus 12
within the week, and that an integral part of the process would be that I made this decision myself. “There’s no point making him if he doesn’t want to,” Chip counseled gently.
There was a pause while Chip eyed me encouragingly and waited for me to do the right thing. He would’ve had a long wait but for John. “Fook that, he’s going.” And that was the end of the matter.
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In my case, fl ying in the face of rehab convention by not giving me any choice probably was the only way forward. Especially as the best reason I could come up with for not going into treatment straightaway was that I was due to start making a program called Five Go Dating, an E4 reality show that would chart the relationships of five “celebrities.” Not even as the host of it, just as one of the five twerps that was taking part.
Chip left and I stood up and looked out of the offi ce window.
It was a winter day, crisp and clear and bright, and sharp naked trees scarred the sky. The eager moon prematurely looked down.
John said, “I only want what’s best for you, Russell.” He was standing by the
window, all big and solid, and me all empty. I stood there and silently cried. Only my eyes though, the rest of me was frozen. John formed a protective barrier around me, with his arms, and the edifice of his character, and told me everything was going to be alright.
When I went outside, I looked up. “I suppose you don’t have to take drugs every day,” I thought. Since the age of sixteen this had never occurred to me. I was a child, then a drug addict, and then this. Now.
I learned later that a girl I’d been at drama school with—on hearing that I’d stopped drinking and taking
drugs—said,
“Well, what does he do then?” Like there was literally nothing else to me: I was just this thing that drank and took drugs. For the next two days, I didn’t use hard drugs at all, only drank and smoked weed. Then, on the night before I went into treatment, I had a smack and crack wake. I called Gritty for the last time and gave him everything I had, and told him I was off ; he was supportive, he’s a nice bloke. I called my mate Gee, who I’d got close to after John Rogers’s poetry nights and told him I was fucked and that I was going away. He said he’d visit. I went to see Karl and spent most of the night in his toilet dosing myself up. Th en I
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went to my flat and spent my last few hours with heroin, just the two of us like lovers. I took everything I could from heroin and it took everything it could from me; then we fell asleep together. I woke up fucked for the last time on Friday 13 December 2002.
I’d missed my train. V
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I got the next train from Liverpool Street Station on Friday 13
December 2002. This was the beginning of my life in recovery.
For all the damage it had enabled me to do to myself and my career, heroin had also provided a degree of sanctuary. Marianne Faithfull once said that heroin had saved her, because she was suicidal and it kept her alive.
In Twelve Step recovery programs the personifi cation of drugs and addiction is common. I thought of heroin as a companion. Like “Footprints in the Sand”—that bloody poem that goes on about footprints in the sand. It’s about a person dreaming that one set of footprints is theirs and the other is the Lord’s.
And then noticing that at the times in their life that have been the most difficult, there was only one set of footprints. Th ey
ask: “God, why did you desert me?” And he goes: “That is when I carried you.”
When I hear that, I think, “Come on God, don’t fuck me around. That’s convenient—how come the footprints aren’t deeper then? ’Cos you’d have been carrying my weight. And they’re not deeper, are they? How come one of those footprints has only got three toes? It’s a dinosaur footprint. And that one next to it is a cat’s paw. What’s been going on on this beach?
Why is God at the beach anyway? With all the chaos? And 295
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war? What the fuck is God doing on holiday at a time like this?”
Perhaps heroin had, similarly, held me in times of trouble.
The prospect of relinquishing it was terrifying. The only reason I did so was because I was more afraid of what was going to happen to me if I didn’t.
I’d been forced to go to an AA meeting once, while I was at Drama Centre. There was a tramp getting a cake for not having drunk for twenty years. I thought, “What’s the fucking point of that? One of the few benefits of being a tramp is that you can be pissed all the time.” A couple of years later, a comedian who’d been clean for a few years took me to Narcotics Anonymous a few times.
I sat in a meeting in Notting Hill, just off Portobello Road, and cried. I didn’t know why. They really get to you. While I was tearfully applauding people being given their commemora-tive key rings for eighteen months, or ninety days, or multiple years of clean time, the idea of not taking drugs for a whole day seemed impossible. I took the one-day key ring anyway, but I knew I wasn’t going to give up until the day came where it was imposed upon me. Chip and John impressed upon me that that day was now day.
Chip had specified that the whole treatment pro cess would take about seven weeks, which seemed an insanely long time.
On the train they called me and did an assessment of what drugs I’d been taking (they’d rather rushed me through the induction pro cess, because of the charity work John Noel had done for Focus, and Chip’s association with Davina). And when I arrived in Stowmarket, Chip picked me up in his red car and gave me a lift to the Focus offices in Bury St. Edmunds.
Chip embraced me; I thought, “That’s a bit weird.” But of 296
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course in NA land and rehab world, handshaking is eschewed in favor of the culture of the hug. It’s lovely really, I suppose, because the whole thing is built on solidarity and shared experience, so there’s no reason not to have a bit of a cuddle.
When I got to Focus, everyone was coming back from a trip, which is how I know it was a Friday, because Friday is trip day—where you learn how to readjust to society by going on the kind of jaunt a divorced dad would take you on: bowling, the zoo, the cinema.
The building was two-terraced houses that they’d knocked through, with a garden area and rooms for group and general counseling. It felt a bit like a doctor’s waiting room, but wasn’t madly institutional.
I was feeling very fragile and didn’t really know what was going on, but they took a urine test and prescribed a drug called Subutex, which mildly sedates you and is also an opiate blocker, so if you take any heroin you won’t get a buzz off it. Th ey also
gave me some sleeping pills, which were meant to be taken an hour before going to bed.
If I hadn’t already known I was a drug addict, the way I approached this latter medication would have given me all the evidence I needed. I took them the first night at ten so I could go to bed at eleven, the next night at nine, the next night at eight, then the next at six, ’cos I realized you get a buzz off it. Well, not exactly a buzz. But if you’re trying to stay awake and you’re on a sleeping pill, it at least feels like you’re a bit drugged.
At that stage, Focus was a day center. Now they’ve got two or three flats where residents, patients or clients—they generally call ’em clients—can stay overnight, but at that stage you had to find your own accommodation, the logic being that if you were out there in the community, having to walk past normal people 297
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in pubs, your recovery would have a better chance of enduring than if you’d spent the whole time ensconced in some treatment center.
Initially I had to lodge in a little garrety den in this ram-shackle bed-and-breakfast run by some Quakers. I can still remember the smell of the bathmats—it was like nan’s house.
And as for those whey-faced Quakers, it is beyond my recollection as to whether either of them actually wore half-moon spectacles, but they seemed to be peering at me over the top of something. Bury St. Edmunds is a very old-fashioned, provincial sort of place (I was surprised to find out that Nick Cave had once briefly lived—and written poetry—there). It has a beautiful monastery, and there’s a cathedral as well, so the atmosphere of the whole place has a religious tinge.
The center of town is cobbled. There was a comedy venue called Fat Cat Comedy Club in The Corn Exchange which I’d played a couple of times when I was off my head. And a Caffè
Uno and a Café Rouge, where I would lurk—all bamboozled—between group therapy sessions, intermittently chatting up innocent eighteen-year- olds—quite successfully, I might add. I still had that extra gear, though I’m not sure how pleased their parents were to meet a bruised and raw twenty-seven-year-old recovering heroin addict when I came back to stay the night.
It snowed that Christmas, and I bought a bike to ride around town on, and did my best to establish a newly sober and contemplative identity. It was a mark of how much I changed in that initial period that on one occasion Matt rang up
the Quakers and asked to speak to me. There was some confusion about my identity, so he described me as a wild, Dean Moriarty crazy man, an octopus-limbed loon, a human Catherine wheel of vibrancy and excitement. There was a pause, and a Quaker offered, “We do have a gentleman with a bicycle.”
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One night—it was Christmas night actually—my mum came to visit. There was a tribute to Peter Cook on the telly and Jimmy Carr did a turn. He’d been in the same heat as me at Hackney Empire New Act of the Year, and I’d gone through to the final. (He’s a lovely fella actually, Jimmy.) And there he was on the TV, successful, and here I was watching it on a little portable in a B&B room, not two weeks clean, with my mum sat on the end of the bed, looking wounded and fragile. “This is it,” I thought. “Me and my mum the same as when I was born, I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve made things worse.”
I couldn’t go on living like this. I had to become successful. “I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I’m dead, and then more afterward.” And at this juncture I was finally willing to do what ever it was going to take to bring that about—up to and including giving up drugs. From that moment on, I really did take things, in the textbook rehab fashion, one day at a time.
An awful lot of what went on at Focus was incredibly humdrum and utterly without glamour. It wasn’t like what I imagine going to The Priory would be—I think of that as being incredibly stark and white, with all these crisp, clean sheets and orderlies shuffling about with an air of hushed reverence. Focus was a very drab kind of experience. It’s cold, it’s in Suffolk, and all these drug addicts and alcoholics are sitting around, raking over the past.
It was in these sessions that I first came across the “To my shame” technique. This is a secret generally only known to those who have been in AA, or NA, or pretty much any other kind of rehabilitation treatment, which I have impulsively and perhaps somewhat recklessly opted to “share.” That’s what we say, “share”: it just means “say” that you don’t even feel embarrassed about it anymore. Here’s the “to my shame” technique, it’ll blow your 300
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 26
