My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (38 page)

RUSSELL BRAND

I was astonished by the array of humanity that I encountered in that group, and quickly became fond of them. There was a woman called Lisa who I took quite a shine to, a couple of sort of pepper-pot alcoholics—tiny, brittle people—and a house-wifey woman, who was addicted to cough medicine. Th en there

was this guy called Mark, who was like a giant toddler. He was quite a tragic character. About five years previously, he’d been on a fireman’s training course and failed the exam at the end, but he was still obsessed with being a fireman and used to wear fireman t-shirts and had a fireman pencil case.

There were some hardened junkies as well—one quite clever bloke, who I was a bit threatened by.

And Steve, who became one of my best friends in rehab. He was a big skinhead, about forty-odd, who had the demeanor of Roy Keane—that kind of steely masculinity. For some reason I got on really well with him.

He’d lived quite a dark life and was, I think, a Satanist; at least he had all these satanic tattoos up and down his arms and quite high up his neck (he’d obviously thought, “Well, I’m not fitting in anyway, so I might as well write all over my body, as there’s no point trying to get a job”). He was a nice bloke though, and he used to pick me up in his van from the B&B and take me to Focus. “Alright, Russell, how’s it going?” he’d ask, all psy-chopathically slow, surveying the terrain for constant invisible threats.

I was always glad to see the back of the Quakers in the morning, with their titchy eating area full of sub-Constable landscape prints and horse brasses, and all the polished accoutrements to tend a fireplace, but never once a fucking fire. I decided to eat fruit and nuts, and live like a monkey. After some minutes of struggling to get the attention of the Jesus-loving real-people-hating Quakers, I put my head round the door of the kitchen 306

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and said, “Ooh hello, could I just get some fruit, please, instead of the normal fried breakfast?”

I noticed this huge mound of fruit on the sideboard, like one of Carmen Miranda’s hats. Of course it was crap fruit that you have to peel—great big oranges and bananas and stuff —not nice posh fruit like I’d have now: strawberries, grapes, blueber-ries, little soft round fruit that you can stuff in your gob straightaway. The woman looked at me, and said, in a June Brown sort of voice—this really did happen, and I thought at the time, “It is funny that she has said this thing”—“we don’t have any fruit here.”

“But what about that big mound of fruit by your elbow?” I countered. She looked down at it with a sort of curled, peeping letter box mouth and spat, “Well, I suppose you could have a lemon.” I said, “Won’t that be rather sour?” Adding, just as a joke so I could write it down one day, “Though compared to this conversation, ’t’would be as sweet as candy.” I giggled to myself at how splendid I’d been and she gave me an orange.

Steve, who used to come and rescue me from that breakfast room, is dead now, so I suppose there’s nothing to prevent me from telling you the story he once told in the treatment center.

It put my life in perspective at the time and perhaps can do so again. As a lad of eleven or twelve, he’d worked at The Cut market in Waterloo, helping his brother on the fruit stand. Th ey’d

always detested the mean, brown-fi ngered fi shmonger, and one day, when they were playing football up by the lockup garages where the market traders kept their stock, Steve accidentally kicked the ball against his garage.

Steve told us this story in a group session, staring impassively ahead as he did so. His brother just ran off, but the fishmonger—fat, stinking and in a leather apron—caught Steve, and dragged him into his lockup. He had a rusty old tin bath in there, full of 307

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cold, gray water, and the heads and eyes and innards of the fish he’d gutted for the stall. He bent Steve over the edge of the bath, plunged his head into the filthy water and raped him.

“Too much fuckin’ perspective.” Because you’re so busy taking everything one day at a time, one of the things they try to do for you at Focus is build some idea of a future, so you don’t just get trapped in the present. This technique might come in handy if you know someone who’s dead depressed. If that person tells you they don’t think there’s any point in living anymore, just say, “OK, well, I’m off now, but remember, we’re going to see Shrek 2 on Wednesday” [or Shrek 3 or Shrek 4]. It’s important to plant that idea in their heads, because later on they might be about to put a bag over their head and tie it shut with an elastic band, or run the bath full and hot so they can die like a Roman general, razor blade on the forearm. And at the exact moment when they’re about to end their grim life by taking that final journey into dark sweet relief, they’ll think, “Oh no, I can’t do this, I’ve got to go and see Shrek 2/3/4 with Russell.”

Because what they’re dealing with is a room full of people who have just got through life by being off their heads, they try to create some sort of structure for you to arrange your day around, and then hammer it home via endless repetition. They make you write a daily diary in the morning, and at night you have to reit-erate what your plans are for the next day.

I felt pleased to have had an effect on Steve eleven or twelve days in. One by one, they went round the room, asking everyone what their upcoming projects for the next day were. Th e standard response would be something like “might go for a burger.”

But Steve said, “I imagine I shall probably go for a spot of lunch”—an uncharacteristically grandiloquent phrase, which I took to be evidence that I had infiltrated his mind.

Unfortunately, Steve was one of a group of three who got 308

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chucked out of Focus for relapsing. This was a terrible shock, because we’d seen a couple of people graduate, but prior to that, no one had been forced to leave for any other reason, and it felt as if we’d all found sanctuary. I’d really got into the ethos of the place by then, having resisted it initially. When that unhappy trio were thrown out, I felt betrayed. They’d got together to drink some wine and smoke a joint. They’d not taken any of what I’d call “men’s drugs,” but they’d nonetheless breached the strict rules of Focus. Individually they were summoned before the counselors. I thought: “They’ll be alright. They’ll just be told off.” One by one they emerged, and said, “Yeah, I’ve been thrown out.”

I found it difficult to accept and groped around for a way to assuage my impotence. I remembered the speech from Antigone I’d performed at Drama Centre, in which Haemon convinces his powerful father, Creon, to show clemency. I acquired a copy of Sophocles’ masterpiece and delivered it with renewed authenticity. Chip agreed to give Lisa a further opportunity, but drew the line at that adorable necromancer Steve. In explaining why, Chip outlined the principle of common good. He said, “What’s important is the pro cess, and those people can’t stay within it once they’ve relapsed, as there’s a danger they’ll fuck it up for everyone else.”

When I eventually graduated from Focus, I occasionally received text messages from Steve. I’d responded while I was still there, but when you’re in early recovery it’s deemed unwise to stay in contact with junkies, so we lost touch. He addressed me with an eerie Native American name, “Once Were Friends.”

He’d start a message, “Hello Once Were Friends,” which was poignant. Six months after I left Focus, I heard that Steve had been found dead, with a needle in his arm. V

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Out of the Game

I was cheesed off with the evictions from Focus. Th en the

Quakers threw me out of their B&B (it was something to do with women or noise, or a combination of the two). I thought this was going to be a blessing in disguise, as I moved into this amazing health spa which didn’t cost much more but had a swimming pool, a gym and a sauna.

I only lasted two nights there, because the nightwatchman (whose previous job had been in a funeral parlor—he kept telling me and my mate Gee, who’d come to see me, about the bodies coughing at night; I bet he diddled with those corpses) got me thrown out for trying to let Gee stay in my room—adding racism to the already worrying charge of necrophilia—when I was off with some girl. I was gutted to have to leave that place, even more so when the next place I ended up in turned out to be a Travel Tavern.

For the next two months I lived a life as close to Alan Par-tridge as one could without infringing Steve Coogan’s copyright.

I kept my bicycle in my room and cycled into treatment every day, where the message, “Don’t take drugs ’cos you’ll ruin your life . . . right, now, look—here is an alternative way of living” was endlessly drummed into my selfish little mind hole.

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Among the visitors were my dad, Karl Theobald, my darling stylist Sharon Smith and John Noel—who drove the wrong way round the Bury St. Edmunds one-way system, and brought me an ounce of weed to help me cope with getting off drugs. (I had to tell him, “Thanks very much, John, but I’m in a drug rehabilitation center”—I don’t think he realized it was a drug.) Matt came up just after I’d had to write my life story as an exercise. He went through the whole thing taking the piss out of it (God knows what he’ll make of this—especially the bit in the next chapter, where I out him as a pervert and a casual drug user).

He detected a somewhat self-aggrandizing tendency within the narrative. He kept reading out bits where I emphasized successes in my career, saying, “This is meant to be a therapeutic exercise, not an opportunity for you to show off .”

For me, though, a therapeutic exercise that did not involve an opportunity to show off would be a contradiction in terms, as the next anecdote will clearly illustrate. The best thing about drug rehab I think are the day trips they take you on, to try and get you used to civilization again. It is my personal belief that you cannot consider your life complete until you’ve been indoor-go-kart racing with twenty junkies.

The place we went to was supervised by the most humorless, joyless sixteen-year- old boys I’ve ever encountered in my life.

They knew we were all smackheads, but they treated us with absolutely no empathy whatsoever. The worst one was the kid who did the induction, telling us how to safely operate the go-kart: a relatively simple task which he approached in the following fashion.

“OK,” he proclaimed sternly, “when you are riding in these karts, there will be no overtaking on the inside . . . or you’ll be out of the game. During the race, you will not remove your 311

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crash helmet . . . or you’re out of the game. You will also not crash your car into the central chicanery . . .”

You know when people are so utterly dull that you feel yourself severing the cord that connects you to their reality and floating away from their tedium like helium?

I remember thinking, “This kid is sixteen years old. When some of us were sixteen years old, we were down by the disused railway track with an empty Hovis bread bag filled up with solvents, inhaling deeply—you’re wasting your life, son.”

There was this (much nicer) eighteen-year-old boy called Gavin, who was actually in treatment with me and recognized me from MTV and thought I was all cool. He looked up to me.

“Russell [and I can’t swear that these were his actual words, but this was definitely what he was thinking], you’re so cool and mad and dangerous, and we’re going go-kart racing together. It’s gonna be such fun, because you’re so crazy and wild.” I thought,

“This kid thinks I’m crazy and wild! I can’t let him down, with his little face all full of hope.”

So we get into the karts and set off, and pretty soon, not long after the race begins, I overtake Gavin on the inside. A Klaxon sounds, and the sixteen-year- old comes charging over, waving a flag. “OK,” he admonishes, “anymore of that monkey business and you’re out of the game.”

We set off again, and this time Gavin overtakes me on the inside. I quickly reciprocate, and swing my car right into the central chicane which is made of all these tires. As the kart makes its impact, I feel like a cattle rustler or an animal rights activist. Tires—cartwheeling, silly, giddy tires—are fl ying in all directions: “Free, free, free, my pretties . . .”

What happens next is actually ridiculous. Lights fl ash, people are running around with flags, a widow wipes a single tear 312

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from her cheek, black-shirted youth look nobly toward a racially pure future. It’s like fucking Nuremberg in there. The boy’s reaction is apoplectic. He comes over to me and demands to know my name. I tell him, and he says, “Well, Russell, because of what you’ve done today, you’re out of the game. Not only that, but all your friends . . . they’re out of the game too. All of them.

You’re all out of the game! Out of the game!” Hysterically.

I feel a show of unity might have been a more appropriate response but Tim, who I was in treatment with, went, “Oh well done Russell.” “Bloody hell Tim,” I said, “I’ve not breached the Geneva Convention; this is just an arbitrary rule plucked from the brain of a boy.” I wouldn’t have minded, but Tim had been addicted to crack-cocaine about two weeks earlier. Could we get some perspective on this maybe? On the one hand, the go-kart trip has been cut short, and that is bad, but on the other, you’re not dependent on crack-cocaine any more, so it’s swings and roundabouts really.