Booky Wook 2: This Time It's Personal

by Russell Brand

  Me and Matt continued to bicker our way across the States, many of which were as indiscriminate and angular as they appear on a map, like Thelma and Louise the night before their synchronised blob dropped. We were heading to San Francisco to the City Lights bookstore – a Beat Mecca – to shoot a conclusion to our trip in front of an audience. Stephanie, the Denver boot girl, had flown out to save me from myself and was in the hotel waiting for me when I arrived watching Girls steadily growing Wild.

  Naturally after the performance I was so jazzed up on pomp that I ricocheted out of the store and into bars and started womanising. Know this: I want love not just physical but spiritual, I craved these women like insulin. I met an Australian girl who seemed like the solution and, through the weave of need over my irises, she was beautiful. I smoked her out of the bar with my fumigating charm and the two of us led a merry dance through the trams and the damned, saluting street sweepers and making token gestures to hunched sentries slumped forgotten in doorways. It all seemed so right, like the moon was nodding on from the night.

  “Come back to the room,” I bartered, but my work was done, she was mine.

  I had however in all the cloying romance and zippedee doo-da joy of it all forgotten that there was already a girl in my hotel room who’d been waiting for some time. Curses! Foiled again by my own brilliance, I thought. I’d picked up from Stephanie and my Antipodean companion a little too much Christian resolve to gamble on the obvious solution of a three-some, so I had to do some tricky admin. The hotel I was in was, as Elvis Presley almost said, “All booked up”, so I had to find another inn like a randy midnight Jesus. American hotels for some pain in the arse reason won’t let you check in without a passport – which I had left in my room. So I had to explain to the Australian girl that I was off back to my room to get my ID and she should wait in the lobby, after which I had to slink into my room and explain to the saintly Stephanie that I’d only popped back to get my passport for some implausible reason, then off I went, swallowed back into the night, the city night, the only place dark enough for me to hide.

  What kind of a man was I? Treating women in this way? If this is what I’m telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out? The hot-tub parties with one male guest, the coaches loaded up after gigs and taken back to my hotel, the backstage corridors of arenas with room after room filled with women. Appetite and opportunity clashed like a sequel to the Big Bang.

  Often I’d try to mould these chance encounters into love, flying strangers around the world in an attempt to make the night last longer, but it never worked. I could never make sense of these women out of context. Like a jungle explorer enchanted by a glorious parrot, only to find that once home in the suburbs, away from the tropical glow, it just claws and shrieks and shits on your net curtains.

  San Francisco was the end of the road. The end of the On the Road. Me and Matt left the exhausted crew and each other and headed home. Having journeyed so far together we had never been further apart.

  †

  Chapter 13

  Hey Pluto!

  By virtue of its lure America began to baptise me. I was becoming, like the planet itself, American. If not ideologically, then practically, because that’s where movies are made. My second Hollywood movie Bedtime Stories was to be shot in LA, which meant we’d have to find a residence, so me, Nik, Sharon and Nicola searched the Hills like prospectors or some cross between the Manson family and the Partridge family looking for somewhere to live. We found a beautiful place off Sunset Boulevard. Can there be a more grandiose word for road than boulevard? Can you be sick on a boulevard? Can there be boulevard crime? Could alley cats saunter on boulevards with grubby disdain or would the location make ’em glam?

  Up there in the Hills the four of us, my beloved barmy quibbling siblings – Sharon, who once rode a horse through the streets of south London when she was meant to be at school, Nicola, who kipped beside me with a baby in her belly, and Nik, who skied with a broken ankle – searched for a home. We found a phenomenal place. A glass-walled house where Bette Davis had once lived, where Motown mogul Berry Gordy had Rapunzelled Diana Ross when she was still supreme, and where Gabby, the cleaner and our new surrogate mother, told us that Arnold Schwarzenegger had once taken tea.

  It was a romantic and perfect first Hollywood home and will stand as the Camelot of an all-too-short era where, once the lost boys came, I’d be a courtly jester-king laying waste to countless LA women. The fire always burned brightly in the hearth, and by night the city danced in tangerine light interrupted only by the ocean, the mountains and the dawn.

  Bedtime Stories was a Disney movie. That is a world within a world. Disney has its own ethics, aesthetics and laws. Never fuck with the mouse, they say. Someone should tell Neil Tennant. The only reason one such as I had been able to nab the cheese without springing the trap was that Adam Sandler, the star and producer of the movie, had cast me himself. In a brilliant stroke of life-changing luck, Adam Sandler likes me, and in a way that I like to be liked. He calls me “kid” and gives me advice and looks at me like he knows what I’m up to. Like a lot of married men, he and his partner Jack Giarraputo like to listen to the postcards I send from hedonism’s heart. Adam, I gather, was no slouch in the sperm distribution leagues but now has a lovely wife and two beautiful kids and would watch in wonder as I’d report my adventures, a bit like the other Fraggles watching Uncle Travelling Matt but with more orgies. Jack G, the other half of the sketch, is a big-shot movie producer. He knows Hollywood. Between the two of them billions of dollars have been accrued and dozens of hit films have been made. They’ve worked together since Sandler’s first hit movie, Billy Madison, and me and Nik study them like apprentices. Not like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, who is literally a wizard’s apprentice, though, because that would lead to copyright issues. Plus he went nuts with all them brooms if I remember rightly and fucked it up royally while the wizard was out shopping. I can’t remember what happened, I watched that film on acid – which, if you ask me, is the only way to watch it.

  An additional quirk in my unlikely participation in the children’s film was that my character was called “Mickey”. I was Sandler’s foil and best mate, a room-service waiter to his hotel handyman. It wasn’t a huge part, but all my scenes were with Adam, so it was a great opportunity for me to learn. For example, in the DNA of my pompous personal mythos is the fetishisation of the artist, the belief that art hurts to make, that it’s somehow sublime and torturous. So when performing, particularly live, I go into a kind of shamanic state, meditating, chanting and asking for supernatural guidance. It’s all about being in the moment. On set Sandler may or may not be in the moment, I don’t know, one thing I can tell you is he’s certainly in the edit. He’s cutting the film while making it. His intention is in the future, that’s important. There’s no point losing yourself in some heightened revelry only to discover in post-production you don’t have enough close-ups.

  Being a kids’ film, Bedtime Stories had kids in it. What a lot of tosh. Them film kids are a peculiar breed, there’s no getting around it. Being in a film is a job, so if you’re a child in a film the tendency is to become uncannily adult. It freaked me out. There were two children in it and they were, as you’d expect from a Disney film, adorable. The day you walk into a multiplex to see a Disney movie and are confronted by a malformed brat mewling and gurgling up grey bum-junk will be the day Walt puts his frozen head back on his shoulders and starts kicking some mouse-arse.

  Obviously children can’t work as many hours as us adults. This not being Victorian London, there are rules and regulations to protect the diminutive divas. As a consequence the kids have doubles, so when the camera is not on their impossibly cute little faces they can use the back of some chump kid’s head while the star child unwinds in their trailer with a bubble pipe and Playboy cartoons. If you on some level pity child stars and their inevitable descent into drug addiction, then spare a thought for those unsung future junkies, the child-star-
stand-in. I overheard this piece of dialogue between one of the stand-in kids and her boss, who also on some previous less financially rewarding day had fired the brat from her vagina.

  INT. DAY.

  The little girl dashes towards her mother, heart full of glee, stomach craving the nourishment of maternal approval

  LITTLE GIRL

  Did you see me, Mummy? Did you see me ... Mother?

  MOTHER

  Yes, yes, I did see you.

  LITTLE GIRL

  Was I good?

  MOTHER

  Yes, you were very good.

  And here an agonising pause …

  LITTLE GIRL

  Did you see my face?

  MOTHER

  (With brutality bordering on contempt)

  No. Just the back of your head.

  Welcome to Hollywood, kid. Where dreams become reality and reality becomes a nightmare.

  And if you think the Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse kids had it tough, then what remains of pity’s dregs for the dwarves who stepped up to the plate when that subhuman child slime couldn’t be relied upon to flash the back of their heads for money? Yep. That’s right, when the real kids were all spent and their seconds were all spent, dwarves – little people – were drafted in to pick up the slack. One day, mid scene, I popped off to the lavvy having caffeinated myself into a stupor, leaving Sandler and the kids bantering while they did a re-light. When I returned to set I thought little had changed but the tension in my bladder. As I returned to my mark I made to recite my lines into the beaming faces of the fetal fat cats but found instead that I was looking into the adult faces of the dwarf doubles. It was like a lazy episode of The Twilight Zone – “Shy Height Zone”?

  The cast was awash with interesting faces. The villain was played by the brilliant Guy Pearce, who never once, in spite of his brilliant Hollywood career, objected to me referring to him as “Mike from Neighbours”, even going so far as to deliver the line “What’s that supposed to mean, Scott?” which, he assured me, he was required to say at least once per episode when he came on the radio show which I was doing trans Atlantic with Matt. Richard Griffiths – Uncle Monty from Withnail and I – played the hotel manager and was a wonderful on-set presence with never-ending theatrical yarns and booming soliloquies. Although, naturally, all I wanted to hear about was Withnail. Then there was Lucy Lawless, whose actual name is probably as absurd as her most famous character Xena: Warrior Princess. She was a strong and spirited woman, another of those whom I eyed with wonder, pondering if ever I might have such a one to call me in from the tit-blizzard.

  Of more interest, though, than the kids and the icons and ironic superheroes was the lead actress. Teresa Palmer is pretty. So pretty in fact that she could probably spend the rest of her life sat passive in a market square being pelted with money by desperate men. So beautiful that it seems like no one should be allowed to have sex with her; that her hymen should remain for alien archeologists to peruse in the year 5000, when maybe they can quantify such beauty. Like an action figure remaining untroubled behind cellophane, too perfect to be tampered with. Not a toy. Her hair seamlessly fell in honey rivers from her golden skin, each feature a monument to its ideal, the perfect nose, the perfect mouth, the teeth too good to eat. Ah, and the eyes? The eyes! A new colour, blue like Krishna’s skin, blue like the hallucinogenic sunrises of my youth. Blue. So blue that the word blue is rinsed and refreshed by their beauty. Eyes that shame my mortal eyes, that make even the miracle of light and sight secondary to their ornamental dominance. Plus she was a nice bird. Australian, down to earth – what choice do they have? They’re all crooks and the price of a no-class system is no class. Christian too she was, and all bound up in moral swaddling. I watched her from the periphery as I picked off extras like Shere Khan and amused Jack and Adam with the tales.

  Of course everyone’s equal, I’m not picking up a gauntlet cast by Christ and Marx simply to justify worshipping women, but sometimes they’re like angels, aren’t they? Is this my buckled childhood that allows me only Madonnas and whores? Not to have a partner who’s a friend and an equal? To strain to hear the lark within the dirge? It seemed to me that Teresa could not just be hurled into the furnace, perhaps not due to any objective quality she had but because of what she provoked in me. She made me want to get down on to my pagan knees and worship Mother Earth.

  I was enjoying the extras, of course I was – I’m only human. But this Teresa situation was getting to me. We’d spoken a bit, notably on the day when I was made up as a golden robot, a kind of Rasta C-3PO – literally every bit of my body lacquered in gold paint and plastic, a gum shield of gold, golden eyelids – like Midas had tried to reach out and touch me. Actually my willy remained pink. It looked daft when I went to the lavvy, a single piece of organic matter stuck to a giant ingot. I began to charm Teresa as I best I could whilst squinting through the radiance. The day it came to a head was when we were shooting a big scene in which Adam had to impress Uncle Monty while Mike from Neighbours and Xena tried to scupper his plans. It was set at a Hawaiian barbecue (what is it with that place and my film career?) shot on location in a giant mansion. There were hundreds of gorgeous extras and it took place over three nights. In the scene I was wearing the exact costume Baloo wears in The Jungle Book when he tries to seduce “King of the Swingers” Louie into releasing Mowgli. Literally exactly. I mean I was wearing a coconut bra. Why a monkey would want to fuck a bear in a coconut bra is a mystery to me but I’ll tell you what – they’re fuckin’ itchy. And grass skirts are no picnic either. Unless you’re a cow.

  I did a pretty good job of chatting up extras for a man dressed as a bear dressed as a monkey dressed as a woman, but I was starting to think I might like a shot at Teresa, and this night she was beautiful like a dagger in the mind.

  In the scene there was a moment where she emerged from a swimming pool in a white bikini like fuckin’ Aphrodite or a bird from Botticelli, so that in the film me and Adam would be dazzled. No. Acting. Required. I wanted to be sick out of my penis. In fact when I improvised the line “I love you” – and this made the cut – I meant it.

  Which worried me, so I did what any normal person would do: I phoned celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna and asked him to hypnotise me out of being in love.

  Paul McKenna has helped me in countless situations. When I am nervous about doing gigs he hypnotises me into being more normal using his brilliant mind-bending NLP techniques. He carries still the vocal tune of an Eighties breakfast DJ, which is what he used to be; a suave nerd rumoured to be the highest paid entertainer in England.

  Paul is funny. Alan Partridge funny. He’s sweet and generous and brilliant, but he says some off-key stuff. When I called him to ask him if he could brainwash away my natural emotions, due to time difference he was out socialising in London and, I think on this occasion it’s safe to say, drinking. I addressed the mechanical lady who answers his phone when he’s out. “Hello? Paul? It’s Russell. I need your help. I’ve fallen in love with a girl who’s on this job I’m doing. It’s gonna balls up everything – I’ll be thinking about her when I’m supposed to be working – or having sex with the extras. HELP!” No need to press 1 to re-record that baby.

  Some time later Paul called back. I picked up and he said these exact words: “Hey, Russell, what’s up? Some bitch twisting your melon?”

  What a wonderful way to start a conversation, a remark first made by Steve McQueen, immortalised by the Happy Mondays and finally said to me down a phone by Paul McKenna.

  “Yes, Paul,” I said. “Some bitch is twisting my melon in so much as my melon has been twisted into loving her by her incandescent beauty.” Paul composed himself.

  “OK, no problem, Russell,” he said, sensing this was an emergency. “It’s just like anything else, we can hypnotise you so that you can deal with these feelings. We need to dilute this senseless love, like orange squash or strong paint, by proposing extreme alternatives to your mind. Or your melon, as we professio
nals call it.”

  He raised his voice above the hubbub of the Kings Road bar I presumed him to be in. I settled into the beige sofa that all movie trailers are contracted to have.

  “Now, Russell, I want you to imagine a worst-case scenario. I want you to imagine her having sex with numerous men in every single position imaginable. She is being degraded; they are doing whatever they want to her. They’re using her body as a theme park for their pricks. Can you imagine that, Russell?”

  I felt the bile rising in my throat at the prospect of these painful transgressions against my imagined beloved. I steeled myself and fought back the tears.

  “Yes I can.”

  “Good,” intoned Paul. “Now, tap yourself on the forehead, tap yourself on the wrist, say ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”, look to the left, look down to the right …”

  This seemingly crazy ritual disorientates the mind, disrupting all your romantic poppycock and replacing it with Paul’s dark art. He continued. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 1-2-3, she is having sex with all these different guys and some of ’em ain’t wearing johnnies – how do you feel about that?”

  “I feel queasy, Paul.”

  “Don’t be weak – it’s just your brain trying to destroy you with love. Now, relax, take a deep breath and imagine the best-case scenario.” I did as I was instructed, relieved that the horror of these pornographic nursery rhymes was at an end.

  “OK. The best-case scenario, Russell. Imagine she is yours …”

  “What a relief!” I thought. After all that degradation finally some romance. Paul continued. “You’ve got her right where you want her – you’re fucking her in the arse, you’re fucking her in the mouth …”