It started in Hong Kong when his dad introduced him to his first prostitute. It ended on a spongy mattress in rehab with a convicted paedophile as a room mate. In the first of three extracts from his shockingly frank autobiography, Russell Brand talks about the sexual addiction that threatened to ruin his career
Monday November 12, 2007
The Guardian
On the morning of April Fools' Day 2005, I woke up in a sexual addiction treatment centre in a suburb of Philadelphia. As I limped out of the drab dog's bed in which I was expected to sleep for the next 30 wankless nights, I observed the previous incumbent had left a thread of dental floss by the pillow - most likely as a noose for his poor, famished dinkle.
When I'd arrived the day before, the counsellors had taken away my copy of the Guardian, as there was a depiction of the Venus de Milo in the arts section, but let me keep the Sun, which obviously had a page 3 lovely. What kind of pervert police force censors a truncated sculpture but lets Keeley Hazell pass without question? "Blimey, this devious swine's got a picture of a concrete bird with no arms - hanging's too good for him!" If they were to censor London town, they would ignore Soho but think that the statue of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square had been commissioned by Caligula.
Being all holed up in the aptly named KeyStone clinic (while the facility did not have its own uniformed police force, the suggestion of bungling silent film cops is appropriate) was an all too familiar drag. Not that I'd ever been incarcerated in sex chokey before, Lord no, but it was the umpteenth time that I'd been confronted with the galling reality that there are things over which I have no control and people who can force their will upon you. Teachers, sex police, actual police, drug counsellors: people who can make you sit in a drugless, sexless cell either real or metaphorical and ponder the actuality of life's solitary essence. In the end it's just you. Alone.
The necessity for harsh self-assessment wasn't the only thing I hated about that KeyStone place. No, that vied for supremacy with multitudinous bastard truths. I hated my bed: the mattress was sponge, and you had to stretch your own sheet over this miserable little single divan in the corner of the room. And I hated the room itself where the strangled urges of onanism clung to the walls like mildew. I particularly hated the American grey squirrels that were running around outside - just free, like idiots, giggling and touching each other in the early spring sunshine. The triumph of these little divs over our noble red British squirrel had become a searing metaphor for my own subjugation at the hands of the anti-fuck Yanks. To make my surrender to conformity more official, I had been obliged to sign a contract promising that I would refrain from masturbation, porn, "seductive behaviour" and "sexual contact with another person". I should have been photographed signing it, like when a footballer joins a new team.
Sex is recreational for me, as well as a way of accruing status and validation (even before I attained the unique accolade of "Shagger of the Year" from the Sun. We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings, but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.
And this is what sex provides for me - a breathing space, when you're outside of yourself and your own head. Especially in the actual moment of climax, where you literally go, "Ah, there's that, then. I've unwound. I've let go." Not without good reason do the French describe an orgasm as a "little death". That's exactly what it is for me (in a good way, obviously) - a little moment away, a holiday from my head.
So why would a fella who plainly enjoys how's yer father as much as I do go to a so-called "sex camp"? Many people are sceptical about the idea of what I like to call "sexy addiction", thinking it a spurious notion, invented primarily to help Hollywood film stars evade responsibility for their priapic excesses. But I reckon there is such a thing. Addiction, by definition, is a compulsive behaviour that you cannot control or relinquish, in spite of its destructive consequences. And if my life proves nothing else, it demonstrates that this formula can be applied to sex just as easily as it can be to drugs or alcohol, both of which I know more than a bit about.
At one point, about five years ago, I had a harem of about 10 women, whom I would rotate in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters. But shagging - incessant as it was - no longer seemed to have the required calming effect. I was on the brink of becoming sufficiently well known for my carnal overindulgences - with lapdancers and prostitutes, to say nothing of all the women who didn't sell sex for a living - to cause me professional difficulties. There's nothing especially peculiar or odd about my erotic predilections. It's the scale of my sexual endeavours that causes the problems, not the nature of them. I just like girls, all different ones, in an unsophisticated, unevolved way, like a Sun reader or a yobbo at a bus stop in Basildon, perhaps because, at my core, that's what I am. I'm a bloke from Grays with a good job and a terrific haircut who's been given a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory 'cos of the ol' fame, and while Augustus Gloop drowns and Veruca Salt goes blue, I'm cleaning up, I'm rinsin' it baby!
I haven't always treated women well - more than one relationship has collapsed because of my infidelity - but to this day I feel a fierce warmth for women who have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.
My manager, John Noel - think of a big, kind, lovely, vicious bastard, like a Darth Vader from Manchester running a school for disadvantaged children - who had previously successfully forced me into drug rehabilitation, thought a little stretch in winky-nick would do me the power of good, and used threats, bullying, love and blackmail to make me go. I eventually agreed for the same reason that I had given up drink and drugs - because my ambition is the most powerful force within me.
While some celebrities have "yes men" surrounding them, I have "fuck-off" men. And so John spitefully decided not to send me to some sort of celebrity treatment centre, like the world-renowned Meadows Clinic in Arizona, but a facility where not all the places were private, where a certain proportion of people were there on judicial programmes - "jail-swerves", they call them, when you're a drug addict and you're offered a choice of prison or rehab. The same option exists for the terminally saucy - get treatment or go to prison; in prison there'll be much more sex but it could err on the side of coercive.
I had no idea of what to expect when I arrived at KeyStone, although I'd spoken to one of the counsellors several times on the phone - the reassuringly named Travis Flowers. I told Travis about the lack of control I was exercising over who I was having sex with. I was pursuing hanky-panky like it was a job, like there was a league table that I had to be at the summit of. And as I explained how I toiled each day with the diligence of Bobby Moore and the grit of Julian Dicks, humming slave songs to keep my spirits up, Travis reassured me that I was just the sort of person who needed KeyStone's help.
The clinic was in the middle of this square in some quiet Philadelphia suburb. The house looked like a normal American family home does - you know, where they've got the sloping roof to the porch bit and gardens around it, a bit like where the Waltons lived, all pastoral and sweet, but with John-Boy chained up in the mop cupboard scrabbling around trying to fiddle with his goolies through a mask of tears. Over the road there was a church: a modern grey building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.
I was greeted on the steps of the clinic by one of the counsellors. I can't remember her name, but she was wearing a T-shirt with frogs on. It turned out she was obsessed with 'em, and when I asked her why she said, "When I was a kid, there was a pond near my house which all the frogs would try to get back to, and they'd get killed crossing over the road, so I used to try and help them across."
"Fucking hell," I thought. "D'ya wanna have a clearer analogy etched on your T-shirt? How troublingly apposite that your mission in life should now be to save people from destruction as they pursue their natural instinct to spawn."
At this point, the frog-lady introduced me to a subdued and pinch-faced individual. "Arthur will show you around," she said cheerfully. "He's gonna be your roommate." (In the film, Arthur would be played by Rick Moranis or William H Macy.) Arthur showed me round the kitchen with its horrible meaty American meals. Meals which I, as a vegetarian, couldn't eat, so I would have to live on fruit for the month, like a little ape.
One by one, I began to meet more of my fellow clients, or patients, or inmates, or perverts - whatever you want to call them, including an intimidating Puerto Rican cove who looked like a hybrid of Colin Farrell's "Bullseye" character from the film Daredevil and Bill Sykes's dog in Oliver Twist (whose name was also Bullseye, strangely enough), who kept calling me "London" - "Hey, London!" I resented being called "London". There are eight million people living in London, and my identity, I hope, is quite specific. He addressed me the same way he would've Ken Livingstone or Danny Baker - God knows what they'd be doing there. I'm not even from London; I'm from Essex. (Though I suppose "Essex" would have been even less appropriate - it has, after all, got the three letters "s-e-x" in it and that's what caused all this bother.)
This demeaning and geographically inaccurate mode of address was just one aspect of what soon began to seem like a concerted campaign to dismantle every element of my persona. It was not just my copy of the Guardian that had been confiscated on my arrival, but also my Richard Pryor CDs and my William Burroughs novel. And I'd not been at KeyStone long before my attire began to attract complaints. Apparently, the way my excess belt hung in front of my crotch was confusing and enticing to the pervert fraternity as it suggested a phallus. So they censored me. I was like Elvis "the Pelvis" Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy.
As the days went on, I started to learn why other people were in there. I found out that Arthur was a paedophile who had eloped with his 13-year-old foster daughter. If he went back to Arizona to face the charges, he'd be in line for either lifetime imprisonment or execution. Peter, a well groomed, silver-bearded Christopher Lee figure, had had sex with his wife's sister when she was 12. These revelations came as a bit of a blow and made me question the rationale of the whole dashed trip. "OK," I thought, "I've a bit of an eye for the ladies, now as a kind of punishment I'm rooming with a paedophile. Is that gonna be helpful?" Like them lads that get sent down for nicking a car radio and end up sharing a cell with a diligent bank robber mentor who schools them in criminality. I went down to the office and started making frantic phone-calls home, saying, "Get me out of this place." If I'd been less terrified I might've paused to dream up a new reality show format, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of This Demented Sex Centre", where minor faces off the box are forced to doss down with, say, Peter Sutcliffe for the amusement of an apathetic nation.
John was on holiday, and no one I spoke to was prepared to sanction my departure so, out of fear, desperation and a kind of morbid curiosity, I decided to stay.
It's extraordinary how quickly you get institutionalised in that kind of environment. You start wearing, not pyjamas exactly, as you do get dressed, but certainly indoorsy sorts of clothes. They have meetings every morning and afternoon. The rituals are astonishing. You have to go round the room introducing yourself - "Hello, I'm Russell" - and then admitting to your recent transgressions. These aren't really wrongdoings as we would normally understand them, more everyday actions that have developed a sexual component: "I had an erotic thought"; "I experienced eroticised rage"; or "I did some eroticised humour". Then you'd round the whole thing off by saying, "My goal for today is to get through the KeyStone experience and just live it as best I can."
People began to customise this closing declaration, I suppose as a way of emphasising their own particular characters. But far from lessening the institutional feel of the whole proceedings, it kind of exacerbated it. Soon enough, each person seemed to have their own slogan: "Hello, I'm Stuart, and I'm gonna swim like a KeyStone dolphin." These customised slogans would often be drawn from the totemic cuddly toy that we were each obliged to select from the mantelpiece. I had a camel. Or someone else would say, "I'm gonna ride the KeyStone Express," and all the others would make supportive train-noises - "Wooh! Wooh!" And I'd be sat there in the middle thinking, "Oh great, I'm in a nuthouse."
In that situation, however, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realised that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you'll find you've become a butcher. And if you don't want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you're going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.
Perhaps you're wondering what formulated my peculiar sexuality? It ain't that peculiar. I'm a bloke from Essex who likes birds with big bottoms and big boobs, lovely dolly birds. I don't mean to be dismissive - they might be incredibly dark, fretful Sylvia Plath-style heroines for all I know - but if they are, I'd rather not find out because life's difficult enough.
The episode that defined my relations with women - and with myself - occurred in Hong Kong with my dad. I was 17. His third marriage had just broken up, so he needed someone to go on holiday with. I was unemployed, penniless, birdless and desperate for his approval; we were the perfect holiday companions. On the plane home he said, "I went away with a boy and came back with a man." Both of those people were me, so what happened to induce such a significant transition?
In addition to Hong Kong we visited Bali, Singapore and Thailand, and in all those places we saw incredible things. There was only one sight I was interested in seeing. Or rather one thing I was inerested in doing, repeatedly. One thing that chewed its way into my barren little soul and gave me, at long last, a physical pursuit that I was good at. Sex. Disposable sex, sex as leisure, sex for pleasure, sex you sordid little treasure, drag me from monotony and give me kicks too hot to measure.
On day one in Hong Kong we went to some sleazy dive hidden behind a thick black drape where women from the east traipsed louchely along the mirrored promenade in garish beachwear. That promenade was a conveyor belt from which produce could be selected; I didn't know that then but my cock did, twitching, preparing frantically, trying to recall correct procedure. "This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill." My dad sat there next to me, familiar with this glistening and foreign terrain.
I didn't understand what I was witnessing, but by jingo, I knew I liked it. Dumbstruck, I sat looking at the women, their hair, each strand identifiable as it responded to a fan that had been placed there to elicit exactly the reaction I felt in my pantaloons, their toenails, painted and perfect, each solitary toe a match for me. They didn't seem enslaved or exploited - to me they weren't; they were mistresses, goddesses, salvation.
"I can't wait to tell my mates that I saw these women in swimsuits," I said to myself. Before long, I was sat on a barstool with a Filipino girl called Mary-Lou, or something similarly unlikely. I thought, "I can't wait to tell my mates I was sat talking to Mary-Lou." That quickly became, "I can't wait to tell my mates I was kissing her." Then we were leaving, a street, a cab, perfume, hairspray, the three Asian prostitutes that my dad was drunkenly herding - Mary-Lou, another girl and the madam of the club, who had come along just for sport (when I learned that she'd come along without payment, I thought that a testimony to my dad's powers). Back at our hotel room, my dad set about unwrapping his two prostitutes, like pass-the-parcel where the music never stopped, and I sat nervously on the edge of the other twin bed with Mary-Lou, kissing her and thinking she was beautiful and falling in love. I'd only had anything close to sex once before - a week before my 16th birthday. I'd been careful to cultivate an image of myself as an aristocratic sex-pert, but she must have known I was a virgin as soon as the bungling encounter commenced.
In Hong Kong, I was naked and shy about my body. I had trouble getting hard, and the blow job seemed daft, not sexual, just giggly and intrusive.
After the un-sex, I carried Mary-Lou in my weedy arms out on to the balcony to look at the view of a great, looming skyscraper, disapprovingly observing. Mary-Lou didn't make me feel embarrassed, and was incredibly romantic really, given the context. I stroked Mary-Lou's hair and kissed her cheek and traced my finger down her perfect nose, scored by the cacophony from the adjacent bedlam, "Yeah, come on!" and "Phwooar, you're juicy!"
As she was about to go, she said expertly, "Russell, I must leave now before I fall in love with you." My heart skipped, and I heard, "Oh, fucking hell, I'm gonna be sick" - a disapproving announcement from dear old Ron.
The next morning, my dad, concealed behind a newspaper, folded down the top right-hand corner. "Did you wear a condom with that bird last night?" "Oh, no I didn't, Dad." He sniffed, "You should've." Then the corner of the page flicked up once again, and he was gone.
In the course of the rest of that holiday, I had sex with loads more prostitutes; always got a hard on, never wore a condom, and never fell in love. In Bangkok, when bar girls in Patpong left their posts to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair, I felt that I had my dad's unequivocal approval.
When I came back from Asia, I was much more comfortable around women, and my sexuality had morphed forever from bewildered innocence into something more complex and rapacious. Once my career as a comedian and TV presenter started to pick up, I began to have loads of encounters after gigs. As my sexual appetite grew, I found myself engaged in an increasingly desperate quest to satisfy it. I became so open to suggestion that when someone asked me if I'd like to go to an orgy, I didn't think twice before accepting this invitation.
The word "orgy" is undeniably an evocative one. It conjures up sumptuous images of delicate muslin drapes being teased by a breeze, Turkish music playing everywhere (in fact my whole orgy scenario seems to have been lifted pretty much wholesale from a Turkish Delight advert), nubile Nubian women entwined about each other like a Henry Moore statue, people decadently devouring grapes. I thought there'd probably be a sort of Swiss bloke with no irises or pupils in his eyes as well, just kind of staring. But what I got in a tower block in Hackney was people who looked like they were made out of Ready Brek, swathed in clingfilm, waddling back and forth with towels about their waists. And everywhere there was this intangible sadness, as if the orgy was being directed by Mike Leigh. I remember this woman came bustling out of a doorway when I first got there - she reminded me of my mum, which didn't help - and said, "Just done my second . . . better go and rinse my mouth out." Then a washing-machine repair man turned up - not as a guest, but to repair the washing-machine.
It was to rescue me from these kinds of grisly scenarios that John Noel sent me to KeyStone. And I'm glad he did. One day I had to write a victims' list - a litany of the women I'd wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I felt like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds.
When I'd arrived the day before, the counsellors had taken away my copy of the Guardian, as there was a depiction of the Venus de Milo in the arts section, but let me keep the Sun, which obviously had a page 3 lovely. What kind of pervert police force censors a truncated sculpture but lets Keeley Hazell pass without question? "Blimey, this devious swine's got a picture of a concrete bird with no arms - hanging's too good for him!" If they were to censor London town, they would ignore Soho but think that the statue of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square had been commissioned by Caligula.
Being all holed up in the aptly named KeyStone clinic (while the facility did not have its own uniformed police force, the suggestion of bungling silent film cops is appropriate) was an all too familiar drag. Not that I'd ever been incarcerated in sex chokey before, Lord no, but it was the umpteenth time that I'd been confronted with the galling reality that there are things over which I have no control and people who can force their will upon you. Teachers, sex police, actual police, drug counsellors: people who can make you sit in a drugless, sexless cell either real or metaphorical and ponder the actuality of life's solitary essence. In the end it's just you. Alone.
The necessity for harsh self-assessment wasn't the only thing I hated about that KeyStone place. No, that vied for supremacy with multitudinous bastard truths. I hated my bed: the mattress was sponge, and you had to stretch your own sheet over this miserable little single divan in the corner of the room. And I hated the room itself where the strangled urges of onanism clung to the walls like mildew. I particularly hated the American grey squirrels that were running around outside - just free, like idiots, giggling and touching each other in the early spring sunshine. The triumph of these little divs over our noble red British squirrel had become a searing metaphor for my own subjugation at the hands of the anti-fuck Yanks. To make my surrender to conformity more official, I had been obliged to sign a contract promising that I would refrain from masturbation, porn, "seductive behaviour" and "sexual contact with another person". I should have been photographed signing it, like when a footballer joins a new team.
Sex is recreational for me, as well as a way of accruing status and validation (even before I attained the unique accolade of "Shagger of the Year" from the Sun. We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings, but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.
And this is what sex provides for me - a breathing space, when you're outside of yourself and your own head. Especially in the actual moment of climax, where you literally go, "Ah, there's that, then. I've unwound. I've let go." Not without good reason do the French describe an orgasm as a "little death". That's exactly what it is for me (in a good way, obviously) - a little moment away, a holiday from my head.
So why would a fella who plainly enjoys how's yer father as much as I do go to a so-called "sex camp"? Many people are sceptical about the idea of what I like to call "sexy addiction", thinking it a spurious notion, invented primarily to help Hollywood film stars evade responsibility for their priapic excesses. But I reckon there is such a thing. Addiction, by definition, is a compulsive behaviour that you cannot control or relinquish, in spite of its destructive consequences. And if my life proves nothing else, it demonstrates that this formula can be applied to sex just as easily as it can be to drugs or alcohol, both of which I know more than a bit about.
At one point, about five years ago, I had a harem of about 10 women, whom I would rotate in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters. But shagging - incessant as it was - no longer seemed to have the required calming effect. I was on the brink of becoming sufficiently well known for my carnal overindulgences - with lapdancers and prostitutes, to say nothing of all the women who didn't sell sex for a living - to cause me professional difficulties. There's nothing especially peculiar or odd about my erotic predilections. It's the scale of my sexual endeavours that causes the problems, not the nature of them. I just like girls, all different ones, in an unsophisticated, unevolved way, like a Sun reader or a yobbo at a bus stop in Basildon, perhaps because, at my core, that's what I am. I'm a bloke from Grays with a good job and a terrific haircut who's been given a Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory 'cos of the ol' fame, and while Augustus Gloop drowns and Veruca Salt goes blue, I'm cleaning up, I'm rinsin' it baby!
I haven't always treated women well - more than one relationship has collapsed because of my infidelity - but to this day I feel a fierce warmth for women who have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.
My manager, John Noel - think of a big, kind, lovely, vicious bastard, like a Darth Vader from Manchester running a school for disadvantaged children - who had previously successfully forced me into drug rehabilitation, thought a little stretch in winky-nick would do me the power of good, and used threats, bullying, love and blackmail to make me go. I eventually agreed for the same reason that I had given up drink and drugs - because my ambition is the most powerful force within me.
While some celebrities have "yes men" surrounding them, I have "fuck-off" men. And so John spitefully decided not to send me to some sort of celebrity treatment centre, like the world-renowned Meadows Clinic in Arizona, but a facility where not all the places were private, where a certain proportion of people were there on judicial programmes - "jail-swerves", they call them, when you're a drug addict and you're offered a choice of prison or rehab. The same option exists for the terminally saucy - get treatment or go to prison; in prison there'll be much more sex but it could err on the side of coercive.
I had no idea of what to expect when I arrived at KeyStone, although I'd spoken to one of the counsellors several times on the phone - the reassuringly named Travis Flowers. I told Travis about the lack of control I was exercising over who I was having sex with. I was pursuing hanky-panky like it was a job, like there was a league table that I had to be at the summit of. And as I explained how I toiled each day with the diligence of Bobby Moore and the grit of Julian Dicks, humming slave songs to keep my spirits up, Travis reassured me that I was just the sort of person who needed KeyStone's help.
The clinic was in the middle of this square in some quiet Philadelphia suburb. The house looked like a normal American family home does - you know, where they've got the sloping roof to the porch bit and gardens around it, a bit like where the Waltons lived, all pastoral and sweet, but with John-Boy chained up in the mop cupboard scrabbling around trying to fiddle with his goolies through a mask of tears. Over the road there was a church: a modern grey building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.
I was greeted on the steps of the clinic by one of the counsellors. I can't remember her name, but she was wearing a T-shirt with frogs on. It turned out she was obsessed with 'em, and when I asked her why she said, "When I was a kid, there was a pond near my house which all the frogs would try to get back to, and they'd get killed crossing over the road, so I used to try and help them across."
"Fucking hell," I thought. "D'ya wanna have a clearer analogy etched on your T-shirt? How troublingly apposite that your mission in life should now be to save people from destruction as they pursue their natural instinct to spawn."
At this point, the frog-lady introduced me to a subdued and pinch-faced individual. "Arthur will show you around," she said cheerfully. "He's gonna be your roommate." (In the film, Arthur would be played by Rick Moranis or William H Macy.) Arthur showed me round the kitchen with its horrible meaty American meals. Meals which I, as a vegetarian, couldn't eat, so I would have to live on fruit for the month, like a little ape.
One by one, I began to meet more of my fellow clients, or patients, or inmates, or perverts - whatever you want to call them, including an intimidating Puerto Rican cove who looked like a hybrid of Colin Farrell's "Bullseye" character from the film Daredevil and Bill Sykes's dog in Oliver Twist (whose name was also Bullseye, strangely enough), who kept calling me "London" - "Hey, London!" I resented being called "London". There are eight million people living in London, and my identity, I hope, is quite specific. He addressed me the same way he would've Ken Livingstone or Danny Baker - God knows what they'd be doing there. I'm not even from London; I'm from Essex. (Though I suppose "Essex" would have been even less appropriate - it has, after all, got the three letters "s-e-x" in it and that's what caused all this bother.)
This demeaning and geographically inaccurate mode of address was just one aspect of what soon began to seem like a concerted campaign to dismantle every element of my persona. It was not just my copy of the Guardian that had been confiscated on my arrival, but also my Richard Pryor CDs and my William Burroughs novel. And I'd not been at KeyStone long before my attire began to attract complaints. Apparently, the way my excess belt hung in front of my crotch was confusing and enticing to the pervert fraternity as it suggested a phallus. So they censored me. I was like Elvis "the Pelvis" Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy.
As the days went on, I started to learn why other people were in there. I found out that Arthur was a paedophile who had eloped with his 13-year-old foster daughter. If he went back to Arizona to face the charges, he'd be in line for either lifetime imprisonment or execution. Peter, a well groomed, silver-bearded Christopher Lee figure, had had sex with his wife's sister when she was 12. These revelations came as a bit of a blow and made me question the rationale of the whole dashed trip. "OK," I thought, "I've a bit of an eye for the ladies, now as a kind of punishment I'm rooming with a paedophile. Is that gonna be helpful?" Like them lads that get sent down for nicking a car radio and end up sharing a cell with a diligent bank robber mentor who schools them in criminality. I went down to the office and started making frantic phone-calls home, saying, "Get me out of this place." If I'd been less terrified I might've paused to dream up a new reality show format, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of This Demented Sex Centre", where minor faces off the box are forced to doss down with, say, Peter Sutcliffe for the amusement of an apathetic nation.
John was on holiday, and no one I spoke to was prepared to sanction my departure so, out of fear, desperation and a kind of morbid curiosity, I decided to stay.
It's extraordinary how quickly you get institutionalised in that kind of environment. You start wearing, not pyjamas exactly, as you do get dressed, but certainly indoorsy sorts of clothes. They have meetings every morning and afternoon. The rituals are astonishing. You have to go round the room introducing yourself - "Hello, I'm Russell" - and then admitting to your recent transgressions. These aren't really wrongdoings as we would normally understand them, more everyday actions that have developed a sexual component: "I had an erotic thought"; "I experienced eroticised rage"; or "I did some eroticised humour". Then you'd round the whole thing off by saying, "My goal for today is to get through the KeyStone experience and just live it as best I can."
People began to customise this closing declaration, I suppose as a way of emphasising their own particular characters. But far from lessening the institutional feel of the whole proceedings, it kind of exacerbated it. Soon enough, each person seemed to have their own slogan: "Hello, I'm Stuart, and I'm gonna swim like a KeyStone dolphin." These customised slogans would often be drawn from the totemic cuddly toy that we were each obliged to select from the mantelpiece. I had a camel. Or someone else would say, "I'm gonna ride the KeyStone Express," and all the others would make supportive train-noises - "Wooh! Wooh!" And I'd be sat there in the middle thinking, "Oh great, I'm in a nuthouse."
In that situation, however, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realised that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you'll find you've become a butcher. And if you don't want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you're going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.
Perhaps you're wondering what formulated my peculiar sexuality? It ain't that peculiar. I'm a bloke from Essex who likes birds with big bottoms and big boobs, lovely dolly birds. I don't mean to be dismissive - they might be incredibly dark, fretful Sylvia Plath-style heroines for all I know - but if they are, I'd rather not find out because life's difficult enough.
The episode that defined my relations with women - and with myself - occurred in Hong Kong with my dad. I was 17. His third marriage had just broken up, so he needed someone to go on holiday with. I was unemployed, penniless, birdless and desperate for his approval; we were the perfect holiday companions. On the plane home he said, "I went away with a boy and came back with a man." Both of those people were me, so what happened to induce such a significant transition?
In addition to Hong Kong we visited Bali, Singapore and Thailand, and in all those places we saw incredible things. There was only one sight I was interested in seeing. Or rather one thing I was inerested in doing, repeatedly. One thing that chewed its way into my barren little soul and gave me, at long last, a physical pursuit that I was good at. Sex. Disposable sex, sex as leisure, sex for pleasure, sex you sordid little treasure, drag me from monotony and give me kicks too hot to measure.
On day one in Hong Kong we went to some sleazy dive hidden behind a thick black drape where women from the east traipsed louchely along the mirrored promenade in garish beachwear. That promenade was a conveyor belt from which produce could be selected; I didn't know that then but my cock did, twitching, preparing frantically, trying to recall correct procedure. "This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill." My dad sat there next to me, familiar with this glistening and foreign terrain.
I didn't understand what I was witnessing, but by jingo, I knew I liked it. Dumbstruck, I sat looking at the women, their hair, each strand identifiable as it responded to a fan that had been placed there to elicit exactly the reaction I felt in my pantaloons, their toenails, painted and perfect, each solitary toe a match for me. They didn't seem enslaved or exploited - to me they weren't; they were mistresses, goddesses, salvation.
"I can't wait to tell my mates that I saw these women in swimsuits," I said to myself. Before long, I was sat on a barstool with a Filipino girl called Mary-Lou, or something similarly unlikely. I thought, "I can't wait to tell my mates I was sat talking to Mary-Lou." That quickly became, "I can't wait to tell my mates I was kissing her." Then we were leaving, a street, a cab, perfume, hairspray, the three Asian prostitutes that my dad was drunkenly herding - Mary-Lou, another girl and the madam of the club, who had come along just for sport (when I learned that she'd come along without payment, I thought that a testimony to my dad's powers). Back at our hotel room, my dad set about unwrapping his two prostitutes, like pass-the-parcel where the music never stopped, and I sat nervously on the edge of the other twin bed with Mary-Lou, kissing her and thinking she was beautiful and falling in love. I'd only had anything close to sex once before - a week before my 16th birthday. I'd been careful to cultivate an image of myself as an aristocratic sex-pert, but she must have known I was a virgin as soon as the bungling encounter commenced.
In Hong Kong, I was naked and shy about my body. I had trouble getting hard, and the blow job seemed daft, not sexual, just giggly and intrusive.
After the un-sex, I carried Mary-Lou in my weedy arms out on to the balcony to look at the view of a great, looming skyscraper, disapprovingly observing. Mary-Lou didn't make me feel embarrassed, and was incredibly romantic really, given the context. I stroked Mary-Lou's hair and kissed her cheek and traced my finger down her perfect nose, scored by the cacophony from the adjacent bedlam, "Yeah, come on!" and "Phwooar, you're juicy!"
As she was about to go, she said expertly, "Russell, I must leave now before I fall in love with you." My heart skipped, and I heard, "Oh, fucking hell, I'm gonna be sick" - a disapproving announcement from dear old Ron.
The next morning, my dad, concealed behind a newspaper, folded down the top right-hand corner. "Did you wear a condom with that bird last night?" "Oh, no I didn't, Dad." He sniffed, "You should've." Then the corner of the page flicked up once again, and he was gone.
In the course of the rest of that holiday, I had sex with loads more prostitutes; always got a hard on, never wore a condom, and never fell in love. In Bangkok, when bar girls in Patpong left their posts to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair, I felt that I had my dad's unequivocal approval.
When I came back from Asia, I was much more comfortable around women, and my sexuality had morphed forever from bewildered innocence into something more complex and rapacious. Once my career as a comedian and TV presenter started to pick up, I began to have loads of encounters after gigs. As my sexual appetite grew, I found myself engaged in an increasingly desperate quest to satisfy it. I became so open to suggestion that when someone asked me if I'd like to go to an orgy, I didn't think twice before accepting this invitation.
The word "orgy" is undeniably an evocative one. It conjures up sumptuous images of delicate muslin drapes being teased by a breeze, Turkish music playing everywhere (in fact my whole orgy scenario seems to have been lifted pretty much wholesale from a Turkish Delight advert), nubile Nubian women entwined about each other like a Henry Moore statue, people decadently devouring grapes. I thought there'd probably be a sort of Swiss bloke with no irises or pupils in his eyes as well, just kind of staring. But what I got in a tower block in Hackney was people who looked like they were made out of Ready Brek, swathed in clingfilm, waddling back and forth with towels about their waists. And everywhere there was this intangible sadness, as if the orgy was being directed by Mike Leigh. I remember this woman came bustling out of a doorway when I first got there - she reminded me of my mum, which didn't help - and said, "Just done my second . . . better go and rinse my mouth out." Then a washing-machine repair man turned up - not as a guest, but to repair the washing-machine.
It was to rescue me from these kinds of grisly scenarios that John Noel sent me to KeyStone. And I'm glad he did. One day I had to write a victims' list - a litany of the women I'd wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I felt like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds.
· My Booky Wook, by Russell Brand, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on Thursday priced £18.99. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
Russell Brand tried every drug in the book, from cannabis to crack cocaine. But heroin was the one that took over his life. In our second extract from the comedian's autobiography, he reveals what he was willing to endure for the sake of that 'great big smack cuddle'
Tuesday November 13, 2007
The Guardian
Ever since the first couple of times I'd smoked it, in my early 20s, I had always maintained a great interest in heroin. I'd sort of fallen in love with the warmth of it - the way it felt like crawling back into the womb. Heroin delivered. LSD does a bit, especially when all the things that are familiar to you peel away and you suddenly realise the fragility of how you normally see the world. Marijuana 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.
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 feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need.
It makes you feel lovely and warm and cosy. 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."
And I never had much trouble getting it, especially when I was working as a presenter at MTV's Camden studios. Heroin was everywhere in Camden: little blue bags the size of, I suppose, two peas. That's how big a £10 bag 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 north London, you can take this article with you as a guide to weights and measures. "That's not £10 worth, you scumbag. Look at this Malteser." Possibly that'll be the last sentence you utter before being flung into a canal.
The dealers keep the bags in their mouths. When you buy one they spit it into their hand and you have to put it directly into your mouth. Even though you want the heroin, a little bit of you is thinking, "Eeugh! He's had it in his 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 nought but an inky black snake carving its way through the days," I once wrote. Probably to impress a girl.
Once I started hanging out with homeless people in the West End, scoring heroin with them, I realised 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.
Until recently, when I gratefully gave up public transport, I would 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 increment first of your clothing, then of your skin; when it finally comes for your life it must be a relief.
The first time I realised I'd become addicted to heroin, I was staying with Amanda, the woman I've come closest to loving, in a risible 70s-style hotel in Ibiza. We lived together for six years, on and off, sometimes in Spain, where she came from, and sometimes in Britain, but there was never any prolonged period when we were what you'd call comfortable together. I'd go to see her in Ibiza, and we'd just ricochet from argument, to sex, to argument. (I remember chasing her down the street in nothing but a towel once, shouting, "Please come back!") Then I'd return home to London, to a life of whores and heroin. I wanted Amanda with me always, but because we spent most of our time apart, I went through a lot of psychological tumult, and increasingly used heroin to take the edge off. When things went well, I'd smoke heroin to celebrate, and when they went badly, I'd smoke some to comfort myself. "Mustafa Skagfix", my mate Matt nicknamed me, after I acquired a predilection for wearing Arabian robes.
Amanda didn't like me using heroin. She knew I'd been doing it in London, but I'd told her I'd given up, so I had to hide my drug-taking from her. On this occasion, though, there had been no opportunity for me to smoke it in secret. When I said I thought I might go for a walk, Amanda was suspicious and insisted on coming with me. At that point I began to get anxious. I could feel myself heating up and breaking out in a sweat, and then my legs started kicking and jumping. That's the worst symptom of heroin withdrawal; I can tolerate the nausea and the sweating, but I hate it when your legs go all kicky. That's where the phrase "kicking the habit" comes from.
Amanda eventually fell asleep, and I had to go into the bathroom and quietly unfold all the things I needed, which I'd managed to secrete about the place. I got the foil out, sat on the toilet, lit the lighter under the foil, and the tiny lump of heroin started to liquefy and bubble. Then it begins to run along the foil, and as it does so a vapour escapes, and you have to hover above it, sucking it up with a tube.
I remember being very conscious of the sound of the lighter, then almost as soon as the smoke had hit the back of my throat, that feeling - the kicky leg, the sweating - it just went. It was like turning off a light. Then I could lean back and everything was suddenly all relaxing and beautiful. It was at this point that I knew that I was an addict, though the pain of that realisation was greatly mitigated by the impact of the heroin: that's how it gets you.
I used to get in a lot of trouble going back and forth between London and Ibiza. One time, my pursuit of drugs led me to be shot at with what Matt describes as "a tiny gun". I was on my way to the airport, and I had to go to this estate in Swiss Cottage, taking the dealer with me in the MTV account car.
I had dealings with this individual over a long period of time without ever being sure if he/she was a man or a woman. Anyway, me and the androgynous creature went to the tower block where Goldie used to live (the drum'n'bass pioneer plays no further part in this anecdote - it was just that whenever you had to go anywhere near that place, people always used to point it out and say, "Goldie lived there"). The driver took the dealer's bike out of the back of the car, while he/she went inside to get the drugs, and as he/she did that a pellet pinged off the top of the car. Someone was firing at us from inside the block.
It might seem a bit reckless to be picking up drugs on the way to Heathrow, but my need for a regular supply of narcotics would not be constrained by the exigencies of international air travel. I generally travelled with drugs up my arse in the belief that if customs officers decided to pursue this unsavoury line of inquiry, my day would already be ruined, and the discovery of crack or heroin couldn't make it much worse.
Eventually I succeeded in convincing Amanda to leave Spain and come and live with me in London. Her two conditions for doing this were that 1) I quit heroin, and 2) I get us somewhere to live. In pursuit of the first of these goals, my friend Martino booked the three of us a cottage in the Cotswolds. The last night (as I grandly, though ultimately inaccurately, styled it at the time) of my using, I was presenting the annual awards for some dance music magazine.
I had a coterie of friends around me, including Amanda. I smoked abundant marijuana, smack and crack, and drank a skinful, as well as taking four tabs of Viagra, so I could still fuck. At one point, I mispronounced the name of a famous DJ (I think it was Danny Tenaglia, but I'm not sure even now) and fell off the stage. Boy George wrote in his Daily Express column that I had been brilliant and had done it all deliberately. The canyon between the perception of me and my actual reality seemed to be widening on a daily basis.
The next day, me, Amanda and Martino took an MTV cab to the Cotswolds, costing them £400. I took a bottle of Jack Daniel's, an ounce of weed, and loads of videos to get me through my rattle (as we denizens of the drugs underworld term it). It was awful - hot and cold, nausea, and, worst of all, I remained horrifically awake all weekend. The best thing about heroin is it turns your life into a waking dream, but then, when I needed it most, my mistress sleep had deserted me.
I still made it through, though, with Amanda and Martino's help, and managed to fulfil the other precondition for Amanda moving to London, by renting this ridiculously gorgeous flat, just off Brick Lane. This glamorously empty warehouse-style apartment soon echoed with misery, as our relationship almost instantly became a psychological war.
Amanda was a strong, beautiful woman. After a string of infidelities on my part, she finally had the good sense to leave me. I just came home one night, and all her clothes were gone. I thought this a flabbergasting affront, and threw myself with ever more self-destructive intensity into my work, womanising and, above all, a renewed and increasingly all-encompassing relationship with heroin.
I thought, "Well, at least now she's left me, I can just take loads of drugs again".
Not content with damaging myself physically, I set about dismantling my career. Gritty was the main dealer I used to get heroin off when I worked at MTV. I liked the fact that destiny had allotted him the name "Gritty". Just as Ned Ludd, leader of the Luddites who opposed the Industrial Revolution, would have struggled to make such an eloquent case against the spinning jenny had his name been Fabrizio Zodiac, so the name Gritty seemed well adapted to the needs of his profession.
He seemed a nice sort of man, though. He had quite a caring side to him, for a drug dealer. I remember one occasion when I was buying drugs off him near Camden Bridge. Having just sold me my two £10 bags of smack and two £10 rocks of crack, he gave me a sincere look and said, "Be careful with that, won't you Russell?" I was thinking, "What do you mean, 'Be careful with that'? They're drugs. What does he think I'm gonna do with them? 'Oh no, I seem to have taken them. Why didn't I heed Gritty's prophecy?' "
One day Gritty asked me once if he could bring Edwin, his eight-year-old son, into MTV to have a bit of a look round. I said, "Sure, why not?" What could possibly go wrong? We could call it Bring Your Drug Dealer to Work Day.
The date that the inaugural BYDDTWD happened to fall upon was September 12 2001, the day after the destruction of the World Trade Centre. With typical restraint, I decided to go into work dressed in a camouflage flak jacket, a false beard and a tea towel on my head, held in place by a shoelace.
I had been aware of Osama bin Laden for about a year. He wasn't someone people of my age group generally knew about, but he'd been involved with some other bombings and he was top of the FBI's most wanted list, and I was fascinated by that sort of stuff. That day, I was going to present this programme called Select, where kids phoned in and chose videos for us to play, and pop stars would come on to flog their records. Our guest was to be Kylie Minogue. Me, Gritty and Edwin went into the toilet and the two older members of our party smoked some crack. Edwin didn't have any. He was just a little boy, and seemed quite upbeat about life anyway. Children don't need drugs, because they have sweets.
We blearily swaggered out of the disabled toilet. On the other side of the foyer - with its round console, banks of TVs, trendy turnstile and endless parade of beautiful young people of both genders and every sexual persuasion trundling in and out - I saw Kylie Minogue, all famous and everything.
Somewhere in my mind, the artist within me - the situationist within me - thought: "I can create a moment here. When am I ever going to get an opportunity like this again?" Before I knew it, I'd walked across that foyer, made a kind of "Woo-ooh" noise - in a mum-across-a-neighbour's-fence sort of way - and said: "Kylie, meet Gritty." Then I just stood back to watch it unfold.
What were these two going to talk about? It's the day after 9/11, and Kylie and Gritty are having a sort of awkward chat, with Gritty trying to be polite and Kylie asking, "What do you do?" sort of like the Queen would. And there's me standing beside them, still dressed as Osama bin Laden.
I thought: "It don't get any better than this."
And it didn't, cos they sacked me about two days later.
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 feel for God, for oneness, for truth. And what heroin does really successfully is objectify that need.
It makes you feel lovely and warm and cosy. 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."
And I never had much trouble getting it, especially when I was working as a presenter at MTV's Camden studios. Heroin was everywhere in Camden: little blue bags the size of, I suppose, two peas. That's how big a £10 bag 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 north London, you can take this article with you as a guide to weights and measures. "That's not £10 worth, you scumbag. Look at this Malteser." Possibly that'll be the last sentence you utter before being flung into a canal.
The dealers keep the bags in their mouths. When you buy one they spit it into their hand and you have to put it directly into your mouth. Even though you want the heroin, a little bit of you is thinking, "Eeugh! He's had it in his 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 nought but an inky black snake carving its way through the days," I once wrote. Probably to impress a girl.
Once I started hanging out with homeless people in the West End, scoring heroin with them, I realised 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.
Until recently, when I gratefully gave up public transport, I would 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 increment first of your clothing, then of your skin; when it finally comes for your life it must be a relief.
The first time I realised I'd become addicted to heroin, I was staying with Amanda, the woman I've come closest to loving, in a risible 70s-style hotel in Ibiza. We lived together for six years, on and off, sometimes in Spain, where she came from, and sometimes in Britain, but there was never any prolonged period when we were what you'd call comfortable together. I'd go to see her in Ibiza, and we'd just ricochet from argument, to sex, to argument. (I remember chasing her down the street in nothing but a towel once, shouting, "Please come back!") Then I'd return home to London, to a life of whores and heroin. I wanted Amanda with me always, but because we spent most of our time apart, I went through a lot of psychological tumult, and increasingly used heroin to take the edge off. When things went well, I'd smoke heroin to celebrate, and when they went badly, I'd smoke some to comfort myself. "Mustafa Skagfix", my mate Matt nicknamed me, after I acquired a predilection for wearing Arabian robes.
Amanda didn't like me using heroin. She knew I'd been doing it in London, but I'd told her I'd given up, so I had to hide my drug-taking from her. On this occasion, though, there had been no opportunity for me to smoke it in secret. When I said I thought I might go for a walk, Amanda was suspicious and insisted on coming with me. At that point I began to get anxious. I could feel myself heating up and breaking out in a sweat, and then my legs started kicking and jumping. That's the worst symptom of heroin withdrawal; I can tolerate the nausea and the sweating, but I hate it when your legs go all kicky. That's where the phrase "kicking the habit" comes from.
Amanda eventually fell asleep, and I had to go into the bathroom and quietly unfold all the things I needed, which I'd managed to secrete about the place. I got the foil out, sat on the toilet, lit the lighter under the foil, and the tiny lump of heroin started to liquefy and bubble. Then it begins to run along the foil, and as it does so a vapour escapes, and you have to hover above it, sucking it up with a tube.
I remember being very conscious of the sound of the lighter, then almost as soon as the smoke had hit the back of my throat, that feeling - the kicky leg, the sweating - it just went. It was like turning off a light. Then I could lean back and everything was suddenly all relaxing and beautiful. It was at this point that I knew that I was an addict, though the pain of that realisation was greatly mitigated by the impact of the heroin: that's how it gets you.
I used to get in a lot of trouble going back and forth between London and Ibiza. One time, my pursuit of drugs led me to be shot at with what Matt describes as "a tiny gun". I was on my way to the airport, and I had to go to this estate in Swiss Cottage, taking the dealer with me in the MTV account car.
I had dealings with this individual over a long period of time without ever being sure if he/she was a man or a woman. Anyway, me and the androgynous creature went to the tower block where Goldie used to live (the drum'n'bass pioneer plays no further part in this anecdote - it was just that whenever you had to go anywhere near that place, people always used to point it out and say, "Goldie lived there"). The driver took the dealer's bike out of the back of the car, while he/she went inside to get the drugs, and as he/she did that a pellet pinged off the top of the car. Someone was firing at us from inside the block.
It might seem a bit reckless to be picking up drugs on the way to Heathrow, but my need for a regular supply of narcotics would not be constrained by the exigencies of international air travel. I generally travelled with drugs up my arse in the belief that if customs officers decided to pursue this unsavoury line of inquiry, my day would already be ruined, and the discovery of crack or heroin couldn't make it much worse.
Eventually I succeeded in convincing Amanda to leave Spain and come and live with me in London. Her two conditions for doing this were that 1) I quit heroin, and 2) I get us somewhere to live. In pursuit of the first of these goals, my friend Martino booked the three of us a cottage in the Cotswolds. The last night (as I grandly, though ultimately inaccurately, styled it at the time) of my using, I was presenting the annual awards for some dance music magazine.
I had a coterie of friends around me, including Amanda. I smoked abundant marijuana, smack and crack, and drank a skinful, as well as taking four tabs of Viagra, so I could still fuck. At one point, I mispronounced the name of a famous DJ (I think it was Danny Tenaglia, but I'm not sure even now) and fell off the stage. Boy George wrote in his Daily Express column that I had been brilliant and had done it all deliberately. The canyon between the perception of me and my actual reality seemed to be widening on a daily basis.
The next day, me, Amanda and Martino took an MTV cab to the Cotswolds, costing them £400. I took a bottle of Jack Daniel's, an ounce of weed, and loads of videos to get me through my rattle (as we denizens of the drugs underworld term it). It was awful - hot and cold, nausea, and, worst of all, I remained horrifically awake all weekend. The best thing about heroin is it turns your life into a waking dream, but then, when I needed it most, my mistress sleep had deserted me.
I still made it through, though, with Amanda and Martino's help, and managed to fulfil the other precondition for Amanda moving to London, by renting this ridiculously gorgeous flat, just off Brick Lane. This glamorously empty warehouse-style apartment soon echoed with misery, as our relationship almost instantly became a psychological war.
Amanda was a strong, beautiful woman. After a string of infidelities on my part, she finally had the good sense to leave me. I just came home one night, and all her clothes were gone. I thought this a flabbergasting affront, and threw myself with ever more self-destructive intensity into my work, womanising and, above all, a renewed and increasingly all-encompassing relationship with heroin.
I thought, "Well, at least now she's left me, I can just take loads of drugs again".
Not content with damaging myself physically, I set about dismantling my career. Gritty was the main dealer I used to get heroin off when I worked at MTV. I liked the fact that destiny had allotted him the name "Gritty". Just as Ned Ludd, leader of the Luddites who opposed the Industrial Revolution, would have struggled to make such an eloquent case against the spinning jenny had his name been Fabrizio Zodiac, so the name Gritty seemed well adapted to the needs of his profession.
He seemed a nice sort of man, though. He had quite a caring side to him, for a drug dealer. I remember one occasion when I was buying drugs off him near Camden Bridge. Having just sold me my two £10 bags of smack and two £10 rocks of crack, he gave me a sincere look and said, "Be careful with that, won't you Russell?" I was thinking, "What do you mean, 'Be careful with that'? They're drugs. What does he think I'm gonna do with them? 'Oh no, I seem to have taken them. Why didn't I heed Gritty's prophecy?' "
One day Gritty asked me once if he could bring Edwin, his eight-year-old son, into MTV to have a bit of a look round. I said, "Sure, why not?" What could possibly go wrong? We could call it Bring Your Drug Dealer to Work Day.
The date that the inaugural BYDDTWD happened to fall upon was September 12 2001, the day after the destruction of the World Trade Centre. With typical restraint, I decided to go into work dressed in a camouflage flak jacket, a false beard and a tea towel on my head, held in place by a shoelace.
I had been aware of Osama bin Laden for about a year. He wasn't someone people of my age group generally knew about, but he'd been involved with some other bombings and he was top of the FBI's most wanted list, and I was fascinated by that sort of stuff. That day, I was going to present this programme called Select, where kids phoned in and chose videos for us to play, and pop stars would come on to flog their records. Our guest was to be Kylie Minogue. Me, Gritty and Edwin went into the toilet and the two older members of our party smoked some crack. Edwin didn't have any. He was just a little boy, and seemed quite upbeat about life anyway. Children don't need drugs, because they have sweets.
We blearily swaggered out of the disabled toilet. On the other side of the foyer - with its round console, banks of TVs, trendy turnstile and endless parade of beautiful young people of both genders and every sexual persuasion trundling in and out - I saw Kylie Minogue, all famous and everything.
Somewhere in my mind, the artist within me - the situationist within me - thought: "I can create a moment here. When am I ever going to get an opportunity like this again?" Before I knew it, I'd walked across that foyer, made a kind of "Woo-ooh" noise - in a mum-across-a-neighbour's-fence sort of way - and said: "Kylie, meet Gritty." Then I just stood back to watch it unfold.
What were these two going to talk about? It's the day after 9/11, and Kylie and Gritty are having a sort of awkward chat, with Gritty trying to be polite and Kylie asking, "What do you do?" sort of like the Queen would. And there's me standing beside them, still dressed as Osama bin Laden.
I thought: "It don't get any better than this."
And it didn't, cos they sacked me about two days later.
· My Booky Wook, by Russell Brand, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on Thursday, price £18.99. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
Russell Brand
Wednesday November 14, 2007
The Guardian
I became preoccupied with London's Hogarthian underbelly when I was in my late teens and studying at the Drama Centre in Clerkenwell - 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 ..." And scoring off Lucky Ricky, who sold me speed and weed and hash.
Lucky Ricky was 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 socio-economic 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 Ricky. 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 downwards. 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 that they had on their wall. A charcoal drawing, I suspect from Leicester Square - not a caricature, a realistic one. The street artist had really captured the tragedy of Pearl as a character, so this thing that was meant to be a memento of a happy trip to the Trocadero was actually a haunting reminder of the family's terminal dilemma.
Ricky was a proud man, and I really liked him, although one time he 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 Ricky, 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, other than among those who are actually homeless. I went round there once and the house was all full of wreaths because one of their kids - a 15-year-old girl - had had a baby, and it had died. I remember them all going, "Yeah, it's terrible really, but you know ..." like they came from a time when infant mortality was normal.
Lucy - one of Ricky's surviving granddaughters - had some terrible respiratory illness that meant she had to spend a lot of time at the Royal Free Hospital. 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. Their one concession to the medical needs of this child - whom 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 Ricky," I called out anxiously. "Lucy is eating some crisps - look."
"Oh yeah," he replied. "She likes them."
The family 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 that could sustain it.
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 - one of those washed-out, almost transparent people. I was just round there for a 16th of dope - about £7.50 worth - and she goes, "Oh Ricky, I'm really depressed. I was thinking about killing myself last night." He just said, "OK, 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 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.
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." But I used to be fascinated by down-and-outs. 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. But I do tend to identify with those who watch life from the periphery.
Like 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 haunting melody to a baby doll in a pram he pushed: "There's something wrong with my baby, there's something wrong with me." He 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". I befriended him, and in the spirit of "Hey, yeah man, it's the 60s", invited him to my manager's Christmas 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 breathing over assorted permatanned digital TV starlets did nothing to put me at ease. "I like him," I used to tell people. "He smells of Wotsits." "That's not Wotsits," my mate Matt Morgan would reply. "It's his own sick."
Five or six years ago, after I'd been sacked from my presenting job at MTV, I found myself sharing my flat with a homeless person. UK Play, a now defunct satellite channel, had given me a quarter of a million pounds to make a TV series about whatever I wanted - a decision that perhaps throws some light on its subsequent financial collapse. The idea behind RE:Brand was basically, "Let's challenge different social taboos. Let's look at things that confuse and confound people, and I'll embrace them." So I'd have a fight with my dad to examine the idea of the Oedipus complex, get to know a member of the BNP to see what they were like, seduce an old woman ... It was an extraordinary experience making that series. Each episode was such a psychological strain that had I not already been a heroin addict, I would very likely have become one.
I'd first met Homeless James when I saw him being harassed by the police off Oxford Street, while begging by a cashpoint. On my Che Guevara trip, I'd gone over and got involved: "Why are you hassling him? Aren't we all equal? That could be you begging one day. Hey, I pay your wages." After the pair of us had knocked around together for a bit, I asked him, "James, would you like to make a TV programme? We'll give you some money." Obviously, he said yes. That's how it is with heroin addicts - if you give them money, they'll agree to do just about anything.
At the time I was living on my own in a gorgeous flat off Brick Lane, which I'd originally shared with Amanda, the woman with whom I'd had one of most significant, romantic and destructive relationships of my soppy life. The driving ideology behind the Homeless James encounter was that with all the unoccupied buildings there are in the UK, no one should really be homeless. Presumably the reason it continues is that we somehow think of homeless people as dirty and unpleasant; so how would it be if I took a homeless person, brought him right into the core of my life - shared my bed and my bath with him? How would that make us both feel?
The intention was to film with James for a one-week period, but the reality was that after two days he decided that he preferred being homeless to living with me. Also, as a junkie, he needed to get out to score drugs. Still, I do have very clear memories of being kept awake by James's snoring on the night we shared a bed together.
The most significant moment, though, was probably when we had a bath together. We were both naked, and James's ulcerated leg was sending clouds of pus into the bathwater. But I just got on with washing James's back and shaving him, while he coped with this enormous discomfort by keeping his eye on the ultimate prize of £500, or whatever it was we were paying him.
One day we took him to the Ideal Home Exhibition, thinking, oh, that'll be amusing, as he's homeless. I know - some of our ideas were a little stunted. There was a moment where I said, "Look, James, do you feel exploited by this?" And he went, "Yeah, I do a little bit." When I asked him why, he said, "You don't really know me. I could be anyone. I could be a murderer or something - I'm not - but having me living in your house is still a bit weird, isn't it?" And I said, "Yes, I suppose it is."
So that was kind of how it ended. It's strange booking a cab for a homeless person. Where do you say they're going? We gave him £20 for his fare and they dropped him off in one of his old doorways on Oxford Street.
I stayed in touch with James after the show and used with him quite a lot. We only fell out after I gave him £100 to get me some heroin and he fucked off and didn't come back.
It's obviously difficult to have a genuine friendship when one of you is on the telly and the other is a tramp: "He's a homeless person and I'm a glamorous TV presenter - we're the original odd couple!" Still, 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.
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. I had one with Barry - fine brown hair, concave chest, sad, sad eyes. Him and his handler, who looked like Mike Reid crossed with an ox, did house clearances - taking all the stuff out of old people's homes after they'd died. His mate told me that the first thing Barry would do was go straight to the medicine cabinet, riffle 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 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 had when she was ready to die, but he was in his 20s - 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-licence, I tumbled into the nocturnal camaraderie that only penniless drunks can purchase. My fleeting companion, my soulmate 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. "That's newly sprung in June," I said knowingly, thinking about Amanda. Then together: "My love is like the melody, that's sweetly played in tune." We defiantly recited Rabbie Burns's poem, entangled arms keeping us from falling. "Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun." Just two more drunks serenading 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."
Lucky Ricky was 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 socio-economic 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 Ricky. 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 downwards. 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 that they had on their wall. A charcoal drawing, I suspect from Leicester Square - not a caricature, a realistic one. The street artist had really captured the tragedy of Pearl as a character, so this thing that was meant to be a memento of a happy trip to the Trocadero was actually a haunting reminder of the family's terminal dilemma.
Ricky was a proud man, and I really liked him, although one time he 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 Ricky, 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, other than among those who are actually homeless. I went round there once and the house was all full of wreaths because one of their kids - a 15-year-old girl - had had a baby, and it had died. I remember them all going, "Yeah, it's terrible really, but you know ..." like they came from a time when infant mortality was normal.
Lucy - one of Ricky's surviving granddaughters - had some terrible respiratory illness that meant she had to spend a lot of time at the Royal Free Hospital. 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. Their one concession to the medical needs of this child - whom 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 Ricky," I called out anxiously. "Lucy is eating some crisps - look."
"Oh yeah," he replied. "She likes them."
The family 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 that could sustain it.
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 - one of those washed-out, almost transparent people. I was just round there for a 16th of dope - about £7.50 worth - and she goes, "Oh Ricky, I'm really depressed. I was thinking about killing myself last night." He just said, "OK, 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 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.
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." But I used to be fascinated by down-and-outs. 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. But I do tend to identify with those who watch life from the periphery.
Like 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 haunting melody to a baby doll in a pram he pushed: "There's something wrong with my baby, there's something wrong with me." He 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". I befriended him, and in the spirit of "Hey, yeah man, it's the 60s", invited him to my manager's Christmas 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 breathing over assorted permatanned digital TV starlets did nothing to put me at ease. "I like him," I used to tell people. "He smells of Wotsits." "That's not Wotsits," my mate Matt Morgan would reply. "It's his own sick."
Five or six years ago, after I'd been sacked from my presenting job at MTV, I found myself sharing my flat with a homeless person. UK Play, a now defunct satellite channel, had given me a quarter of a million pounds to make a TV series about whatever I wanted - a decision that perhaps throws some light on its subsequent financial collapse. The idea behind RE:Brand was basically, "Let's challenge different social taboos. Let's look at things that confuse and confound people, and I'll embrace them." So I'd have a fight with my dad to examine the idea of the Oedipus complex, get to know a member of the BNP to see what they were like, seduce an old woman ... It was an extraordinary experience making that series. Each episode was such a psychological strain that had I not already been a heroin addict, I would very likely have become one.
I'd first met Homeless James when I saw him being harassed by the police off Oxford Street, while begging by a cashpoint. On my Che Guevara trip, I'd gone over and got involved: "Why are you hassling him? Aren't we all equal? That could be you begging one day. Hey, I pay your wages." After the pair of us had knocked around together for a bit, I asked him, "James, would you like to make a TV programme? We'll give you some money." Obviously, he said yes. That's how it is with heroin addicts - if you give them money, they'll agree to do just about anything.
At the time I was living on my own in a gorgeous flat off Brick Lane, which I'd originally shared with Amanda, the woman with whom I'd had one of most significant, romantic and destructive relationships of my soppy life. The driving ideology behind the Homeless James encounter was that with all the unoccupied buildings there are in the UK, no one should really be homeless. Presumably the reason it continues is that we somehow think of homeless people as dirty and unpleasant; so how would it be if I took a homeless person, brought him right into the core of my life - shared my bed and my bath with him? How would that make us both feel?
The intention was to film with James for a one-week period, but the reality was that after two days he decided that he preferred being homeless to living with me. Also, as a junkie, he needed to get out to score drugs. Still, I do have very clear memories of being kept awake by James's snoring on the night we shared a bed together.
The most significant moment, though, was probably when we had a bath together. We were both naked, and James's ulcerated leg was sending clouds of pus into the bathwater. But I just got on with washing James's back and shaving him, while he coped with this enormous discomfort by keeping his eye on the ultimate prize of £500, or whatever it was we were paying him.
One day we took him to the Ideal Home Exhibition, thinking, oh, that'll be amusing, as he's homeless. I know - some of our ideas were a little stunted. There was a moment where I said, "Look, James, do you feel exploited by this?" And he went, "Yeah, I do a little bit." When I asked him why, he said, "You don't really know me. I could be anyone. I could be a murderer or something - I'm not - but having me living in your house is still a bit weird, isn't it?" And I said, "Yes, I suppose it is."
So that was kind of how it ended. It's strange booking a cab for a homeless person. Where do you say they're going? We gave him £20 for his fare and they dropped him off in one of his old doorways on Oxford Street.
I stayed in touch with James after the show and used with him quite a lot. We only fell out after I gave him £100 to get me some heroin and he fucked off and didn't come back.
It's obviously difficult to have a genuine friendship when one of you is on the telly and the other is a tramp: "He's a homeless person and I'm a glamorous TV presenter - we're the original odd couple!" Still, 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.
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. I had one with Barry - fine brown hair, concave chest, sad, sad eyes. Him and his handler, who looked like Mike Reid crossed with an ox, did house clearances - taking all the stuff out of old people's homes after they'd died. His mate told me that the first thing Barry would do was go straight to the medicine cabinet, riffle 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 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 had when she was ready to die, but he was in his 20s - 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-licence, I tumbled into the nocturnal camaraderie that only penniless drunks can purchase. My fleeting companion, my soulmate 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. "That's newly sprung in June," I said knowingly, thinking about Amanda. Then together: "My love is like the melody, that's sweetly played in tune." We defiantly recited Rabbie Burns's poem, entangled arms keeping us from falling. "Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun." Just two more drunks serenading 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."
· My Booky Wook, by Russell Brand, is published by Hodder & Stoughton tomorrow, priced £18.99. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
· The following clarification was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday November 19 2007. The POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) was not a "rebel socialist army" during the Spanish civil war as it was described in the book excerpt above. Although the POUM organised a militia, it was a political party, not an army, and it supported the Popular Front government of the republic against the military uprising led by Franco.
... una extraña manera de ganarse la chuleta.
No comments:
Post a Comment