My Booky Wook 2 (18 page)
“Ooh, are you Russell Brand?”
“Yes I am.”
“Can I have my photo done with you?”
“Yes you can. Are you eighteen or above?”
“Yes I am.”
“Let’s go to this toilet.”
But it is a ritual nonetheless.
A further sex-scene challenge concerned the practical realities of film-making in that each take began with Nick the director calling “Action!” Now if that word was followed by a breezy scene between me and Jonah, where we riffed out some sarcastic put-downs and did daft voices, that’s all well and good. But in a sex scene the word “Action!” becomes a starting pistol fired at the beginning of a sex race. It loads it with significance and pressure. BEGIN SEX NOW! Plus I’m representing Great Britain against America, I don’t want them thinking we’re a nation of crusty old fuddy-duddies, so I have to deliver, or as they’d say “represent motha-fucka”. I think I probably over-compensated. When that camera started rolling I threw poor Kristen around the set like ballet in Guantanamo Bay – on the bed, against the wall, in the lavvy – using all my moves, the lizard whip, the flesh dagger and the now banned wet-poltergeist.
“CUT! CUT!” came the panicked cry! “He’s gone over! Code red! Code red! This is not a drill. This is not a drill.” The first assistant Gary took aim with his stun gun, the tranquil-liser dart pierced my neck, I roared, Kristen ran to the shower as I slumped, a flaccid grizzly in flesh-coloured pants. The crew sighed. “And scene.”
I’d learned a lot and made some lovely friends, but by the end I was chalking off days.
As the end of production drew near I yearned for Albion and watched the skies for signs. Meredith, my acupuncturist and secular witch, told me that Edgar Allan Poe would write about the shapes in the clouds; we all see shapes in clouds, but Edgar Allan Poe couldn’t see the cloud in the shapes, it was all just a signifier in the sky to him. God’s Facebook.
When you see life as a poem, then people become signs, and messengers. I needed to be again among women, to be adored. My mate Karl once said that I behaved often like a devoted lover betrothed to a woman with a thousand faces – every night we sleep together, and in the morning I wake hungry for her kiss. Today she is called Lucy, yesterday she was Emily, who knows what her name will be tomorrow. I just hope she’s there. Could there ever be a one? A unifying romance that would quell the undimming blaze? I thought not. I yearned for her in Hawaii, because one was not enough.
I got through the shoot without releasing into the convivial set my haunted lunatic shadow self. I kept him in the shack playing one-man football interrupted only by Woody Harrelson and masturbation – thank God those events didn’t clash. Nick and Jason were happy with what we’d shot, there was talk from Judd and Nick about me and Jonah possibly doing a film together. That was of course exciting, but the real triumph was that I’d served my sentence and no one had known about my private madness; well, except Woody, and he can’t talk.
†
It’s What He Would’ve Wanted
Do you, as I do, agree to things assuming that they’ll never happen? These pledges can vary in severity – “Will you pick me up from the airport?” “Sure!” Or: “In the event of my death will you raise my daughter?” “Why not?” Of course the merry assumption is that the plane won’t make it to Heathrow or that the daughter will be like flour – self-raising. In both cases by assuming the promise will remain unfulfilled you are making a fool’s wager. This was the mentality I employed when I was offered the chance to make a film driving across America for three weeks in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel On the Road to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. As usual I eyed the notion of “a future” with rigid scepticism. “Fine. I’ll make your poxy film in September,” I belched. “Who’s to say there’ll even be a September?” I thought. With that idea safely stashed in the “thinky-fuck-hole” that is my brain-pot, me and my gaggle of gits got on with making my new TV series – the brilliantly named Ponderland.
Ponderland was a clip show in which we pulled together funny archive and then I’d comment on the clips and use them as a “jump-off point” for stand-up. For example in the episode about crime we used footage of the notorious Santana gang boasting about their artillery to ridicule their re-appropriation of guitarist Carlos Santana’s merchandise. The thugs stood there with their AKs, brazenly wearing Carlos Santana baseball caps; if they’d changed their name to “The Hello Kitty Crew” they could’ve brandished everything from toasters to hairnets – they’d’ve been the best-dressed gang of thugs in history – not including the Nazis.
The content of the show was less significant than the fact that it was the first project undertaken by Vanity Projects, me and Nik’s production company, without the stewardship of a more “grown-up” operation. The production process comprised me, Matt, Nik, Jack and Gareth sat about in my office watching telly and giggling. Occasionally I imagine Jack and Gareth had to go and do boring production work, but as far as me and Matt were concerned, it was a cinch. Have a look at the show on YouTube; it’s funny.
So when September arrived with its smug knowledge that I was contracted to make Russell Brand on the Road, I didn’t want to do it. Aware that it would be real work, I tried to sabotage the production.
The documentary was for the BBC and had a highly professional production team. In a now all-too-common refrain, they assured me that the film would be made in the spirit of its subjects, in this case Kerouac and Neal Cassady, his muse, side-kick and fast-pulsing heart of the movement, the heart-Beat. Kerouac was a bit of a square actually, a scholar and a worrier. Neal Cassady was the real deal; a hard-drinking, womanising animus-storm. In the book they drive across their country listening to jazz and searching for enlightenment, some all-encompassing moment of bliss, satori, “it”.
The troubling thing about the Beats is that they are a right bunch of earnest prigs, clicking their fingers and calling each other “man” and proselytising about “negroes”. This was all well and good when I (sort of ) read the book at nineteen and didn’t know bugger-all, but now I was thirty and had lived a bit. Of course the Beats were a great movement and begat modern counterculture and gave birth to the Sixties, but fifty years later to remain humourlessly enamoured of them would be a sure indication that you ain’t no kind of comedian. And I may not be much, but I am a comedian. At least I’d read the fucking book, which is more than can be said for that layabout Matt Morgan who was accompanying me on the trip – in his first on-camera role of note. Matt, who has a brilliant mind, which he uses mostly to self-diagnose increasingly unlikely new ailments to satisfy his hypochondria, announced that he couldn’t read the book because the writing was too small, or the cover was too crap, or he was worried that he’d developed a flesh-eating book allergy. So the pair of us embarked on a trip to pay homage to a legendary book which neither of us could be arsed to read. Which just about sums us up.
On the first day of shooting, which was blessedly in Blighty, we went to meet Neal Cassady’s widow, Carolyn Cassady, who ridiculously lives in a caravan park in Bracknell, Berkshire. A place, it seems, for aspirational hillbillies – trailers but with window boxes, and inside carriage clocks and chintz. Now me and ol’ Matt had developed a brilliant on-air chemistry for our radio show, utterly authentic, our relationship perfectly transposed to the studio. But telly is a different animal and, on it, so am I. A lone wolf, a prowling jungle-cat glaring sexual charisma and insidious seduction of my subject. I couldn’t be expected to do that with Matt sat there, piping up with the kind of enquiries you’d toss a lollipop lady on a classroom visit.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but as a presenter I had a terrible reputation for being difficult. A reputation for being difficult is what you have while you await the day where you have enough power to do what you want professionally. Then you are just focused and determined. Until then, though, you are difficult, and this was still my difficult phase. It manifested thusly: I like documentaries, and in fact most entertainment, to have some integrity, so if you’re filming the meeting of a presenter and, say, Carolyn Cassady, I prefer to just turn on a camera and film it. Often protocol and tradition mean that you go and meet Carolyn, say hello, then turn on the camera and say hello again in a contrived and awkward way – I find it embarrassing. Plus I found presenting alongside Matt, like we were Richard and Judy (Regis and Kelly), bloody odd as it disrupted my tried and tested seduction methods. Therefore after about thirty minutes of impotently flirting with a baffled little old lady while Matt asked where she’d got her porcelain shire horses and coalscuttle I was ready to make a break. I have a self-destructive streak. A thread of divine madness that sometimes makes me really funny and wild but other times makes me a fuckin’ liability. I get this gurgling discontent in my belly, a sense that everything is pointless and that nothing, nobody is worthwhile and that maybe it’d be better to slip off under a blanket or a drug and never face the light again. I think it’s fear, dread, terrible knowledge. It can come at any time. It came on in Carolyn’s caravan. “Fuck this,” I thought. I wordlessly stood and drifted to the door. I smiled at Carolyn in a way that I hoped reminded her of Neal and slipped outside. There was a car waiting, I got in and sat and eyed the caravan park, a pre-emptive refugee camp for a disaster that hasn’t happened yet.
Inside Matt rolled his eyes and explained as he’d done a thousand times that I was a peculiar man and meant no harm. It was my childhood, the drugs, the dreams; the drug-induced dreams of childhood.
I told the driver we were off, he turned the ignition. Matt made his way outside and explained to Iain, the producer, Paul, the cameraman, and Adam, the soundman, that I was a good bloke but complicated. That I had unique and delicate methods. That I needed nurture like an orchid but that with that care I’d bloom and create something wonderful, that the key to working with me was to respect that I was fragile, brilliant and mercurial, a complex and challenging man – sensitive but ultimately rewarding. I saw them nodding in hard-won agreement as my car screeched by, Hendrix bawling, door flung open, my torso thrust through like a hard-on through a drunkard’s fly – “See ya later, suckers!” I hollered like a nutter as I hammered the horn. “See? Sensitive,” said Matt.
Having assured myself that skidding off in a loopy dust cloud was “what Kerouac would’ve wanted” and therefore less a tantrum and more a touching tribute, I rang Nik and told him I wasn’t making the documentary. “Don’t worry, though,” I added, “I gave that man the greatest posthumous nod since Elton John fucked up the lyrics to ‘Goodbye Norma Jean’ for Lady Diana.”
I panic before jobs begin or when I arrive in new environments. This is because I like to control my surroundings so as to avoid emotional peril or attack. We were due to leave for the three-week road trip the next day, but I was basically a bit too scared. The reason for this fear was my lack of acceptance of the conditions under which we’d be filming, and acceptance is a vital component of recovery. In NA you have a sponsor, someone who’s been in recovery longer than you who can give you advice. Mine is Alfie. Alfie is a greengrocer’s son turned merchandise magnate and photographer, but his greatest gift is his charm. People like to be around Alfie, testament to this fact is his disproportionately high number of eclectic, famous friends. Billy Bragg, Ed Norton and Lee Dixon are all chums of Alfie’s. When I was in Hawaii making Sarah Marshall and Ed Norton showed up, the only thing he wanted to talk about was Alfie. This is because he listens, gives good advice and is funny. Plus he looks hilarious. Like George Cole playing a bloodhound who’s had his hair cut in Hoxton.
In this crisis I turned to Alfie. Alfie can always offer a new perspective on a problem in spite of, in his own life, being afraid of insects, viruses and kiwi fruit. When it comes to other people’s problems he’s a swami. In this case he told me to stop being self-obsessed and think of others and how they might feel about being on the trip. Whilst thinking of others may superficially seem like kindness it’s actually a selfish technique to stop you thinking of yourself. With this deployed I reversed my destructive decision and decided to go, forgive me, On the Road.
Me, Matt and the crew flew to Boston and drove on to Lowell, Massachusetts, where Kerouac was from, with me all the while robotically asking people if they were OK and kindly offering them boiled sweets for the air pressure – even after we’d landed.
Lowell is a small town where the only reasonable response for a talented man like Kerouac is to clear off. We were only there for a night, but for me a night without a woman is like Gerry Conlon’s prison sentence – long and completely unjust. Luckily the hotel was screening that perennial classic of modern sexploitation, Girls Gone
Wild, which whilst being spiritually deplorable does serve as a masturbatory aid. If for some reason you’re unfamiliar with the franchise allow me to puncture the sphere of your ignorance. In Girls Gone Wild real girls are encouraged to not so much “go wild” as to flash their boobs, bottoms and on occasion vaginas in exchange for T-shirts. A girl that had truly “gone wild” would most likely savage the off-camera antagonist who was cajoling them into nudity with the offer of cloth and smash through the window of the heavily branded tour bus before rejoining her pack. These girls aren’t so much “wild” as eager for approval. Let’s put aside the obvious moral problems these films present and instead celebrate how sexy they are. Normal porn is now so candid and formulaic that it can pass across the retina unaddressed like an escalator handrail, but this evil smut is sufficiently tethered to reality to trick the wank-weary mind into stiff, prickly interest. I once heard that pornography is bad not because it shows too much but because it shows too little, it demeans and reduces humans, strips us of our divinity and splays us on a slab like pork. That’s probably true, but were it not for those wild girls that night in Lowell would’ve been continuing still.