My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (36 page)

in a really scary voice. It was mad.

My troubled state of mind meant that I was much better suited to this kind of experimental endeavor than anything that might conventionally have been considered entertainment. Meters away from me as I write this, Nik Linnen, John’s eldest son, is here watching and ensuring that I don’t drift off and do something naughty as the book goes to print within weeks and this deadline, its umpteen pre deces sors lying dead from negligence, must be observed. When I met him this ridiculously handsome and generous soul was still young and dwelt in the enormous shadow of his powerful father. He has emerged as together we have forged a working relationship that has taken me from digital TV to Hollywood films in three years. We do not yet know if the film I’ve made for producer and director Judd Apatow 286

Mustafa Skagfi x

(The 40- Year- Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad) will be any good, but Universal has commissioned a further project—and what ever happens it’s better than signing on. Nik, who is a partner in Vanity Projects with me, John and Matt, has been invaluable in keeping me well.

The first time Nik came to see me do stand-up I’d been at the agency for a week. Gunther von Hagens was on the TV that night. The Comedy Café was the venue for a performance that made Gunther’s cadaver-bothering look like jaunty high jinks.

I opened doing Elephant Man impressions, determined still that he was funny. A hen party were sitting near the front, so I took this woman’s handbag and did an autopsy on its contents, to be topical, and scattered her knickers, lipstick and phone around the room. Then I jumped on a table in front of this group of office workers, kicked over all their booze, and ended up pulling down a lighting rig that I’d been swinging on. Ta da!

The gig had to stop for about half an hour while everything I’d broken was put back together. During this hiatus, I walked over to someone at the venue and magnanimously told them not to worry about the twenty quid I was meant to be getting paid, as it could go toward the damages. They said, “Not only are we not going to pay you—we don’t want you to come here ever again.”

I cheerfully asked Nik afterward “That was alright, wasn’t it?”

Nik scrambled around for a bright side. “No one died.” He had a look of what I now realize was horror etched on his face, as the magnitude of the challenge he and his dad had taken on hit home.

287

RUSSELL BRAND

The overall tenor of my life at this point was really rather bleak; most of my friends reported an air of doom around me.

The true extent of my disarray was finally about to become apparent to people with the strength of personality to help me actually do something about it.

I realize that my whole life had been leading up to this moment. People say that when they win an Olympic medal—“My life has been leading up to this moment,” they say. But that’s true of every moment. Even if you’re only doing the washing up, your whole life’s still been building up to that moment. Just because something’s insignificant you can’t immediately relegate it to the past, it has to be in the present for a moment. That is the nature of a chronological existence. Even if at birth I’d splin-tered into a thousand clones and each of these existed in a parallel world, they’d still have to live their lives in some sort of order. And, eventually, they’d all end up at John Noel’s Christmas party in 2002.

I’d only been with John a couple of months by then and didn’t know him that well, yet. All I really knew was that at our first meeting he’d farted in a very loud and unapologetic way, and I’d asked Nik, “Fucking hell—who’s this character?”

I can discern a clear progression in my agents—from those tragic avuncular whoopsies running extras agencies with thinly veiled homoerotic names, through slightly more savvy, wideboy-esque characters like Nigel Klarfeld, to charming middle-class ex-presenter women like Joanna Kay. Until eventually I came across the patriarch I’d always required in John Noel: this sort of heavy-fisted, surly but gentle Northern brute of a man, who has come from a difficult background and overcome his own demons and thereby has an eye for a misfit, and was willing to take me on when I had all but destroyed my own career.

John’s parties are notorious, because he often behaves abys-288

Mustafa Skagfi x

mally in public. Twice to my knowledge he’s been thrown out of his own social functions, but that was not to happen on this occasion. The venue was some place above an Irish pub in Kilburn.

John’s not ever really succumbed to the glitz and glamour of showbiz—he’s always stayed true to his roots. (Frankly, I find that a little disappointing, because I personally like the glitz and glamour—that’s why I got into this damned industry in the first place. Well, that and my cursed talent.)

Low-rent location notwithstanding, the 2002 John Noel Management Christmas Party was attended by such luminaries as Davina McCall, Tess Daly and Dermot O’Leary. My escort for the evening was a homeless gentleman called Harmonica Matt, who couldn’t speak without stammering, but could sing the blues perfectly when he picked up his harmonica. He told me once that he’d taken a load of acid some years before, and had “never come back.”

Making that “Homeless James” episode of RE:Brand had done nothing to diminish my interest in down-and-outs. I just used to get fascinated by them. I know that’s the sort of thing people say, and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, “You don’t mean that. You just think it sounds good.” Like Big Brother contestants insisting they want people “to get to know the real them” before they’ve even been on the show.

“But I don’t know the unreal you. I don’t know any aspect of your personality. I have no opinion of you at all. I don’t want to see the real you, or an artificial you, or some you that you’ve made out of Twiglets—give us further oblivion, you nit.” But, aware as I am of the contrivances of compassionate language, I do tend to identify with those who watch life from the periphery. Harmonica Matt. I can’t remember exactly where I found him—he’d have been at the bottom of some escalator somewhere, playing his mouth organ.

He used to haunt the Central Line at Liverpool Street, singing a 289

RUSSELL BRAND

haunting melody to a baby doll in a pram he pushed: “Th ere’s

something wrong with my baby, there’s something wrong with me.” There was; he was eccentric. “Even Nostradamus couldn’t’ve predicted that” was another of his hits. I befriended him, and in the spirit of “Hey, yeah man, it’s the sixties,” invited him to John Noel’s party.

I’d always found Harmonica Matt to be a charming fella, and I was aware of many of his idiosyncrasies, but one that had escaped my attention until the night of that party was that he had something of an eye for the ladies. I always tend to feel a bit on edge in those kind of supposedly convivial situations, and the sight of Harmonica Matt looming over assorted permatanned digital TV starlets, breathing his vomity-Wotsit breath over ’em (“I like him,” I used to tell people, “he smells of Wotsits”: “Th at’s

not Wotsits,” Matt would reply, “it’s his own sick”) did nothing to put me at ease.

The resulting social anxiety prompted my customary response. I disappeared off to the lavatory to see if my brain was so committed to thinking its thoughts that it would be prepared to do battle with its nemesis and savior, Auntie Heroin. I drizzled some in and it were, like, real horror show. Nik ambled in.

“Fookin’ hell mate,” he exclaimed, “is that heroin?” I admitted that it was (I had mentioned to John before that I had a drugs problem, but I think he just took this to mean that I smoked a bit too much grass). “You need to do something about that, mate,” Nik insisted, with a sense of urgency that I had not yet learned to recognize. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I really should,” I said, distractedly, not expecting anything to come of it. But before I knew it, I found myself embroiled in a series of brief but life- changing meetings.

Meeting One was in the Lansdowne pub and involved John 290

Mustafa Skagfi x

Noel buying me and my mum pizzas and saying, “Russell’s got a problem; we need to sort it out.” My mum had the same air that she’s had at countless previous meetings with headmasters and counselors and policemen—that kind of bruised and battered love for me. On this occasion though, she seemed a little more confident—perhaps because there was an alpha male off ering to help.

As he spoke, John was characteristically and confi dently interfering with the fireplace. John could never leave an open grate alone. Nik’s the same—they have to put wood on it, or stir up the ashes with a poker. I’m not like that. I might play with a fire if I’m on my own, but not in a pub—it’s not my job. But John’s straight in there, meddling with the fire, that’s how primal he is: it wouldn’t surprise me if one day he fashioned a wheel out of granite.

John said that he was going to introduce me to a man called Chip Somers, who it turned out had been instrumental in Davina McCall’s recovery from addiction. Intrigued though I was, I broke off from the conversation at this point to go and meet Gritty and score some heroin—just to get through the rest of the meeting about how I had to give it up. It was easier to have that discussion once I’d taken some (in fact, the impact of that specifi c inhalation still gives me a nostalgic pang of comfort, the sort of warm glow one might get from remembering a beloved Christmas gift—

Batman costume aged seven). Once you’ve had some heroin, the idea of stopping taking it is bearable; it’s when you’ve not had any that it becomes fucking terrifying.

Meeting Two, the next day, was with Chip Somers, at John Noel’s offices. In the blink of an eye I’d gone from scoring drugs from Gritty—“Oh Gritty!”—to applying for salvation via the ridiculously joyfully named Chip Somers: a man who sounded like a Mamas and Papas song title.

291

RUSSELL BRAND

Chip turned out to be a distinguished, bespectacled gent, warm and forceful, like good sodomy; he’d been to Radley College, so perhaps that’s where he got it from. He carries himself with dignity and has incredible insight. You wouldn’t know that he’s served four years in prison for armed robbery and was an intravenous junkie five times longer than that if I hadn’t just blithely told you. He wouldn’t mind because now he is a living monument to the possibility of redemption and change. He founded and runs a treatment center in Bury St. Edmunds called Focus 12.

He sat me down and asked about the extent of my drug use. I took him through how it developed, and told him that for the last four years I’d been taking heroin and crack every day, but for a few failed “clucks,” and now had a £50–£100-a-day habit. He told me that I was a “complete garbage head” and needed to come into treatment straightaway. While he was talking I was doing something I often do; I just watch a conversation happening—the real me sat away all snug, thinking, “This will have no consequences: none of these proposals will be implemented.”

Then we went back into John’s office across the corridor, with all its gifts and photographs and newspaper stories concerning his notorious clients, and he said, “Right, so what’s the fookin’

situation?” Chip explained swiftly that if I didn’t stop taking drugs straightaway, I’d be in prison, a mental asylum or a coffin within six months. He said it was vital I come into Focus 12

within the week, and that an integral part of the process would be that I made this decision myself. “There’s no point making him if he doesn’t want to,” Chip counseled gently.

There was a pause while Chip eyed me encouragingly and waited for me to do the right thing. He would’ve had a long wait but for John. “Fook that, he’s going.” And that was the end of the matter.

292

Mustafa Skagfi x

In my case, fl ying in the face of rehab convention by not giving me any choice probably was the only way forward. Especially as the best reason I could come up with for not going into treatment straightaway was that I was due to start making a program called Five Go Dating, an E4 reality show that would chart the relationships of five “celebrities.” Not even as the host of it, just as one of the five twerps that was taking part.

Chip left and I stood up and looked out of the offi ce window.

It was a winter day, crisp and clear and bright, and sharp naked trees scarred the sky. The eager moon prematurely looked down.

John said, “I only want what’s best for you, Russell.” He was standing by the window, all big and solid, and me all empty. I stood there and silently cried. Only my eyes though, the rest of me was frozen. John formed a protective barrier around me, with his arms, and the edifice of his character, and told me everything was going to be alright.

When I went outside, I looked up. “I suppose you don’t have to take drugs every day,” I thought. Since the age of sixteen this had never occurred to me. I was a child, then a drug addict, and then this. Now.

I learned later that a girl I’d been at drama school with—on hearing that I’d stopped drinking and taking

drugs—said,

“Well, what does he do then?” Like there was literally nothing else to me: I was just this thing that drank and took drugs. For the next two days, I didn’t use hard drugs at all, only drank and smoked weed. Then, on the night before I went into treatment, I had a smack and crack wake. I called Gritty for the last time and gave him everything I had, and told him I was off ; he was supportive, he’s a nice bloke. I called my mate Gee, who I’d got close to after John Rogers’s poetry nights and told him I was fucked and that I was going away. He said he’d visit. I went to see Karl and spent most of the night in his toilet dosing myself up. Th en I

293

RUSSELL BRAND

went to my flat and spent my last few hours with heroin, just the two of us like lovers. I took everything I could from heroin and it took everything it could from me; then we fell asleep together. I woke up fucked for the last time on Friday 13 December 2002.

I’d missed my train. V

294

29

A Gentleman with a Bike

I got the next train from Liverpool Street Station on Friday 13