impotent—the pedants cry). How many cards? Ooh, let me count . . . a big fat zero. Still, you don’t get bitter, do you? You’ve got to laugh at life. Look at all the cruelty, injustice, propaganda and terror and laugh. HA HA HA HA HA HA.
[four more hearts follow]
I will find her . . .
Terrifying.
Jackie, a very astute counselor woman who was a nice version of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (I’m being R. P. McMurphy) once said to me, “Russell, I think you’re really not taking this seriously: in your mind, you’re just taking notes for your stand-up comedy.” This is something they said at the KeyStone place as well . . . ’cos I fucking was, and always have been, because that’s all life is to me—raw material for comedy.
People tell you “Life’s not a rehearsal.” Well, mine is—it’s a rehearsal for when I get onstage and do the real performance.
My whole time in rehab is a bit of a blur really, ’cos I was just getting my brain back, but quite a lot of rubbish did go on with the locals. I do remember going to visit Chip once—who kindly gave me a lot of personal attention, and is now my sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous. Chip lived above this jeweler’s, and for some reason I had to climb over an iron gate to get in. Th e second I started to do that, the jeweler came out with a rubber glove on one hand and clutching some sort of mop as a make-shift weapon, and we had this ridiculous exchange where I said,
“What are you going to do with that—stick it up my arse?”
I am still immensely grateful to that Focus place, though (I’ve subsequently gone back for reunions and become a patron), and I do feel that between them John Noel and Chip Somers saved my life. Had I not gone into treatment, I do honestly feel 316
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that I would either be dead now, or living a life so close to death that it would be difficult not to take the final step. I don’t think that’s melodramatic, that’s just the way I was going. But John wouldn’t let it happen, and Chip had the ability to see me through the process till I came out the other side.
I cried when I left Focus. When you graduate, they go round the room and people say what they think of you, and it’s lovely.
Chip came to mine. I’d written something I wanted to read out, but when the time came to do it, I couldn’t speak. Everyone was dead proud of me.
I was determined not to relapse, but there were powerful forces pulling me back. My whole identity was built around being this kind of crazed, swashbuckling, intoxicated man. I remember Karen—my first girlfriend after going in treatment—saying that when she spoke to people who’d known me before, “Th ey talked
about you like you were a monster.”
It wasn’t just me who had to adjust to a new idea of the kind of person I was; everyone else did as well. Not long after John had brought me that dope as a present, when I was still in Focus, I got a couple of days off and went back to Essex for a little break, where I soon found myself chopping out lines of coke for people while they said, “Go on, Russell, have a bit of a toke—it’s just heroin that’s the problem.”
I was very nervous about the idea of sobriety. Again, quite early on in my time in rehab, they took us to this huge New Year’s Eve show that Eric Clapton was playing at Guildford Leisure Centre. The idea was that the gig was completely dry, and I fucking detested it. I suppose it was probably one of the first social functions I’d ever been to as an adult where I wasn’t on drugs, and it was like being in hell. I was wearing this jacket with all these zips on it, that still had loads of tinfoil left in the pockets, which made me feel really strange, and I said to the girl I was with, 317
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“This ain’t for me. If this is what it means to be saved or redeemed, I ain’t gonna be a happy ending.”
In order to distance themselves from temptation, and draw a line under their previous misdemeanors, a lot of people become very puritanical once they’ve been through the rehab process.
But in contrast with a lot of recovering addicts, I’ve never felt the need to gloss over what it was about drinking or taking drugs that I liked so much. Apart from anything else, I think doing that puts up a barrier between you and those people who have had the self-restraint to keep their indulgence in those pleasures within socially acceptable limits.
The fact that I had a drug problem meant that wherever I went in the world, from Havana to Ibiza to the mean streets of the Edinburgh Festival, I always had to seek out the poor and the dispossessed, as they are the people who generally know where the drugs are. The thing about being an addict is—as you’ll find from the poetry of Charles Bukowski or the novels of William Burroughs or Henry Miller—it forces you into unusual places: “Down among the have-nots,” as Lucky Benny’s accomplice put it.
George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, wrote (on the first page, thank God, otherwise I wouldn’t know about it) of the immediate recognition of shared humanity.
When he was signing up for POUM—the rebel socialist army fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War—there was a red-haired Italian soldier who was just in front of him in the queue where you signed up to fight. Orwell said he instantly liked him, and could tell he would get on with him and could love him, though he was only in his company for a minute, and barely any words were spoken.
Down among the have-nots, the drunks and the junkies, fleeting moments of mutual connection happen quite frequently.
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With Barry, fine brown hair, concave chest, sad, sad eyes, the Queens Arms pub; “ ’Ello me old mucker, put one in the pipe for us, I’m brassick.”* With his handler Pats, who looked like Mike Reid crossed with an ox; they did house clearances—taking all the stuff out of old people’s homes after they’d died. Pats told me that the first thing Barry would do was go straight to the medicine cabinet, rifl e through all the pill packets and bottles, and neck the lot. It made no difference what they were for—rheumatism, athlete’s foot, piles.
Barry, perpetually upbeat, had never got over the death of his father, who was a boxer. I once went round to the place where he’d lived with his dad. It was quite a big terraced house—and there was hardly any furniture in it. I sat in there with just this electric bar heater for comfort, smoking dope and taking daft prescription drugs.
We’d induced a comfortable silence and I glanced at Barry; orange in the three-bar glow, he just looked lost and sad, like my nan when I recognized that she was ready to die, but he was in his twenties—just a man in an empty house, lit by a bar fire, on drugs he’d found in a dead man’s cupboard. A beautiful soul who fell through life.
Once in Soho, drunk and alone, coping with the spiteful light of an Old Compton Street off license, I tumbled into the nocturnal camaraderie that only penniless drunks can purchase. My fleeting companion, my soul mate for that moment, was a Scottish lad, young and reeking. I told him how I missed Amanda, he told me how he missed his home. “My love is like a red, red rose,” he said, all wistful about Burns. “Th at’s newly
sprung in June,” I said knowingly, thinking about her. Th en
* “Mucker” is a Cockney word meaning “friend.” “Brassick” is rhyming slang, “brassick lint”—skint—penniless—poor. Jesus, it’s like Latin.
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together: “My love is like a melody, that’s sweetly played in tune.” We defiantly recited Rabbie Burns’s poem, entangled arms kept us from falling. “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” Just two more drunks sere-nading an indifferent world. The poem and our Brotherhood ended simultaneously and we carried on alone into the night.
“And I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands of life shall run.” V
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Hare Krishna Morrissey
I graduated from Focus in the early spring of 2003 and moved into a small flat on the fringes of Hampstead in North London, where I lived for
the next four years. In the early stages of recovery, I lived a quiet life of AA and NA meetings and seeing friends, as I struggled to adjust to a drug-free existence. I’d taken up yoga, and for eight weeks I didn’t have sex or masturbate as an experiment. My life was held together by my beautiful friends, my lovely mum and my cat Morrissey, who was an irresponsible Christmas gift from a girl I was seeing for about a week. Morrissey remains my constant companion, sauntering and judging, eating and attacking life with a sense of entitlement that makes the Duchess of Kent look like Saint Francis of Assisi.
I became enchanted by the Hare Krishna devotees; I went to the mansion in Watford that George Harrison bought them. I met a swami who radiated the truth from his eyes, he was clearly living by principles that, though I can understand, I find it difficult to apply. He understood that life is transient and that material attachments bring suffering. Not the way I understand it, which is by sagely nodding when it’s brought up in conversation then sneaking home to marvel at my glorious skull-emblazoned boots. Radanat swami would not politely greet me, wisely dis-322
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cuss the Bhagavad- Gita, then after I’d left frantically buttonhole some luckless assistant yawping, “you better get me some of those fucking cowboy boots,” before collapsing into desperate tears.
He knows the boots are a temporary distraction from mortality and lives his life accordingly. Looking at the boots now in all their holy glory, it’s difficult not to write to him saying, “Come on mate, you must want these boots really.” If I did he’d just laugh; he had a terrific sense of fun.
Th
e first year or so after I came out of rehab was mainly fla-vored by continuing John Noel–funded escapades into the world of TV. Graham Norton’s company, SO television, agreed to make a Comedy Lab, a broadcast pilot for Channel 4, with us, so we thought we’d get some footage to show them what we were into.
Me and Matt said, “Let’s make a film about them adult baby perverts.” We found one on the Internet—this woman who looked a bit like the housekeeper out of Tom & Jerry—I know you don’t ever see her face, but if you close your eyes and imagine it you get the face of this adult baby woman which is stored in a Jungian brain library we all have access to.
We went to Folkestone to meet her. That woman was no more a provider of an “adult baby service” than I am of trouble-free holidays. What she was can only be described with the words “vicious dominatrix.” Having got hopelessly drunk, she thrashed me with a carpet beater, a shoe and a belt before stripping me naked and attaching clothes pegs to my nipples and prize winning genitals. I don’t know of a baby the world over that would require that service. Then she gleefully poured piping hot wax onto my penis and looked at me as if I was a kill-joy Calvinist when I refused to let her repeat the trick up my anus.
While I received this agonizing treatment, all in the hope that “it’ll be funny,” I caught sight of my beloved Matt, who was 323
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the entire crew that day, in the mirrored wardrobes that flanked the fl oral fleapit where goolies came to die. Far from diligently observing another soon to be “smash-hit TV show” with compassion and concern, he was pointing the camera with one hand while with the other he was boredly texting a chum—utterly desensitized to the constant mayhem that our work comprised.
I’ve dragged that lad through brothels and hellholes across the globe and he’s never once said “thank you”: is that too much to ask?
I’d never before seen the attraction in sadomasochism—“I don’t want to pay money to get sexually tortured, I get enough of that at home”—but after that woman had administered her painful medicine I had to diddle her just to set the record straight.
Kindly she agreed to let us spend the night in her “work flat”
while she cleared off home with her husband, whose mind must be so broad that John Merrick’s cap would perch on his head like a thimble. Matt has always been obsessed with hygiene and mi-croscopic viruses and such, so was rather anxious about dossing down in a bed where a prostitute tortured perverts. I assured him that he was being insufferable and nimbly leaped between the stiff sheets while he neurotically swathed himself in towels like an Egyptian Rain Man.
When we proudly showed the film to John Noel he said, “We’re not giving that to Channel 4—it should be impounded by the fucking police.”
Nik concurred. “Yeah, it’s true mate, you’ve lost sight of what’s normal.” The fools. Me and Matt insisted that we were ahead of our time and began to wait for conventional morality to catch up with our depraved pilot. I used this time to relearn my craft as a stand-up comedian—tentatively doing material into Dicta-phones, going back to The Enterprise pub, then taking on fi ve-324
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and ten-minute open spots in the same sort of places I’d started off in when I left Drama Centre.
Some of the stand-ups, among my contemporaries, who I particularly admire are Daniel Kitson, Ross Noble and Paul Foot (who I did a double act with for about six months), and Andrew Maxwell, he’s very good too. Simon Munnery and Stewart Lee I like because they both slip you information like Rohypnol then touch you up with the chuckles. On telly I love The Mighty Boosh: Noel Fielding is an angelic dream weaver and Julian Barratt a
world-weary connoisseur. And Garth
Marenghi.
Billy Connolly was the first stand-up I really got into, as a teenager—particularly that special he did on LWT. I love his enthusiasm and spontaneity. He and Richard Pryor (alongside Bill Hicks, of course) were probably the two stand-ups I was keenest to emulate at this stage in my career. Pryor has that anecdotal element too, and I’d always loved the way he acted out different parts to bring the whole thing to life. But the most important thing about him, for me, was the way you could tell so many of the things he talked about were backbreakingly painful—real traumas from his life—that he somehow alche-mized into comedy.
Throughout this period, as I was gradually feeling my way toward a stand-up persona that would work for me, John Noel was not just a patriarch, but a kind of staunch, ever-present, dominating figure in my life. For the first eighteen months after I came out of rehab, he paid my rent and gave me a generous allowance of about a thousand pounds a month, so I could write some new stuff without having to get a job. He nagged me about paying my bills, though.
One morning I was just in my flat, lazing around in my pants, when the doorbell rang. I went and opened it, and there stood a 325
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burly bailiff character in a woolly hat, and some kind of smartly dressed handler; they claimed they were there due to nonpayment of council tax, and they’d have to take either £500, or goods of equivalent value. I nodded politely before slamming the door in their faces; I dislike bailiffs as I remember them turning up when I was busy being a toddler, troubling my mum for money. I called John, who was the barrier between me and problems of this nature. He said, “I fookin’ told you to pay your bills.” Th en
there was another moment when the one who was there for carrying and fighting put his foot in the door and was quite pug-nacious when I tried to shut it. John told me to let him speak to them. I was relieved because he uses willpower to change facts as part of his job.
“You’re gonna have to let them take your TV.” “Oh no, I love that telly, my programs, my precious programs.” They oafed their way in and yobbishly unplugged it from the Sky Box, the Play-Station and the video, knocking loads of things over in the process. I called the council and haughtily said, “I’m sure I’ve paid my council tax, I don’t know what’s going on.”
After they louted out with my TV set, I fought back the tears and rage and went to John Noel’s offices. I phoned the council incessantly, each time more puffed up with rage. “I’ve paid my tax, you better resolve this, I play golf with the mayor.”
I waited while they found my fi le and, when I told them about the company the bailiffs were from—“Camden
Reclaim”—they said they’d never heard of it.
I unleashed a decade of distilled fury, desperately trying to get my TV back. Then John called me and Nik into his offi ce, sat me
down in front of a portable TV, pressed play on his VCR and, to my astonishment, the image that appeared first was my face—opening the blue front door of my flat in my underpants—then the boorish hateful TV-stealing bastard bailiff s.
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“Well this doesn’t make sense,” I thought, trying frantically to reconfigure my understanding ontology. Then, looking at the smirking Northern faces of John and Nik, the pointless truth began to dawn. Not only had John employed these two actors to come round my house and wind me up, he had also hired three cameras, so he could capture my humiliation from a number of diff erent angles. There was one concealed in the bailiff ’s woolly hat, one in their van and one in the house opposite. He had done this for two reasons: first and foremost for a laugh. He does stuff for a laugh all the time. Nik is a sensitive man and I later learned he’d been against this vindictive and unnecessarily expensive prank, which had employed, in addition to the actors, a producer, a researcher, a runner and several of my neighbors. And a distant second to remind me to control my finances.
I didn’t take this lesson well, my surly response prompting,
“Fookin’ hell Russell, where’s your sense of humor? You’re supposed to be a fookin’ comedian.” I swore revenge. “I’ll get you John, I’ll use my cunning and my talent and I’ll avenge this affront.” John got onto his hindquarters like a bear would. “I’ll use all my resources and power to destroy you.” “ ’Ere you two, pack it in.” Nik, the voice of reason. I’ve yet to get revenge and, since then, John has tried to get that tape broadcast as part of every TV show I’ve done—“Russell, you could put that on Big Mouth, it’d be fookin’ hilarious.”
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 28
