My Booky Wook 2 (29 page)

The next time we met was on the promotional tour that accompanied the publication of the first instalment of this book, My Booky Wook. Danny and five or six of his crew were doing the security for a nationwide book chain. That tour was mayhem. It came during a period where my carnal appetites raged like a bush fire or an awesome CIA-manufactured plague. The words “book tour” hardly summon the spirit of Dionysus. Alan Bennett does book tours and I bet he’s no trouble. I imagine he signs the fans’ books then gets on his way. Well, this was a carnival of destruction, we marauded up and down the country causing mayhem, doing gigs in the evenings before thousands and signing books in jam-packed precincts by day. Proper fame, with screams and bras and codewords to select. In Danny O’Leary I found the perfect accomplice, someone who gleefully facilitated my gluttony. Jack said we reminded him of Fred and Rose West as we exchanged glances after gigs and gave nods and winks and directed women to the area ordained for these matters to reach their conclusion. Once more, I am not proud of the morality employed during this indulgent time but one has to marvel at the efficiency. This operation travelled all over the world and effortlessly assimilated into any culture it encountered, New York, Sydney, Hull – it was all the same: wristbands issued, rooms filled with women in their dozens, day after day. A relentless machine with no off switch, like an untethered lawnmower chewing its way through the Amazon jungle. Journalists often ask me to estimate a number, but I never do because I know they’ll isolate it and make me look like Bluebeard, but between me and you it was a one-man, multi-woman sex epidemic. And some of it was fun. Brilliant, exactly what you’d expect. I felt like I was repaying a debt to the fifteen-year-old boy I’d been who watched life from the sidelines, blustering and shy. “And what’s wrong with that?” many people will say – all the girls were willing and up for it, sometimes they DRESSED up for it. It was astonishing, like being able to walk through walls or dance like Michael Jackson. Naturally though, as is always the case with such things, there was a price to pay – in loneliness. What an unexpected and disappointing clause. I should have read the small print but I was distracted by the boobs. If you live cyclically and obsessively something within you withers as you gorge. But enough of that morose honesty – let’s get back to the rollercoaster.

Danny and I had been working together for a while, we’d connected and laughed and swapped stories. We’d formed a bond. One of the most notable stops on our hectic book tour was at Lakeside shopping centre, Essex. It was fantastic to see the crowds numbering thousands waiting for Booky Wooks, because as a kid I’d bunked school and shoplifted in that very mall. I always gave Danny and his lads problems at these signings by breaking away from the agreed parameters – which means signing books and smiling – and instead merrily romped through the crowds and out of the shop to cause a bit of bother. As you know, I like chaos. Seeking refuge from the hysteria I’d stirred up, me and the lads and my mum were hiding in the storeroom of the bookshop when my mum, on learning where Danny was from, asked if he knew Mark Stone. Mark Stone was one of my best friends at school, a benevolent, funny fella, tall and handsome and sweet, who after we left school worked at the Ford plant in Aveley and of an evening worked doors in pubs and clubs around Essex. Sadly at the age of just twenty-nine Mark had been killed in a motorbike crash, and though by then I’d been swallowed up by London and drugs, it still broke my heart. Not for him an early death, Mark who was so fit and happy. Untroubled and straight in word and thought, Mark Stone would surely make old bones. It had never occurred to me to ask Danny about Mark, but my mum, who’d loved him too, was keen to know if they were acquainted. At the mention of Mark’s name Danny’s eyes filled. “I knew him,” he said quietly. It transpired that the two men had laughed and fought side by side and that had I been more psychologically present in my early twenties I’d have heard Mark talk of “Big Dan”. What’s more, if I’d had the presence of mind and a little more sense of duty I’d have been at his funeral and seen my school friend, this sweet and affable man, generous and fun, carried to his grave by Big Danny and his lads.

We stood among the boxes of books in a moment of silence for Mark. Then, when we were once more composed, I took a copy of My Booky Wook from a storeroom shelf, and opened it to the acknowledgements page at the back and showed Danny the tribute I gave Mark in lieu of attending his funeral. He welled up as he read on the short list of names “Mark Stone RIP”.

The tenth one down. Stoney.

Me and Mark, when a little worse for wear, had often conjectured through the fumes that one day, when I was famous, he and I would work together. “I’ll be your bodyguard mate,” he’d say. So now me and Dan had an unbreakable alliance; the tragic bond of our friend’s death.

Next to Danny, in silhouette from the back seat of his Mercedes sits Mick. The two of them natter, squabble and laugh. On tour I watch them like TV as they crash and stagger through the issue of the day – women, crime, politics, mostly women – and chuckle cosily. “Lights are green, Mick,” says Dan as Mick invariably fails to notice that they’ve changed. Mick is Cypriot and will never lose his Eighties taint. For him regardless of the date or his impeccable attire it will always be 1984 – Wham! and espadrilles, gold hooped earrings and Thatcher and, more pertinently, Hoddle and Waddle; or just Hoddle after he’s eaten Waddle. Mick is a Tottenham fan, the mighty Spurs he calls them. He loves them only marginally less, I imagine, than his two kids Yiodi and Christy. He has a giant heart and a panda face, eyes permanently and prominently ringed, even on his ludicrously tanned face. Mick has a grace that all drivers, hairdressers and masseurs ought be endowed with: the ability to know when someone wants to chat and when they want to be quiet. He speaks with gurgling, faltering joy, somehow slow but energetic, each word formed and sent out as if brought down from Mount Sinai. Which is why it’s surprising that he comes out with such a lot of rubbish.

One Christmas Eve we all went to Nicola’s – me, my mum, Gee, and a few of the others. We sat in festive comfort in their tinsel-Katrina front room. What a Yuletide scene it was too, Nicola on the carpet with her two-year-old daughter Minnie and her little niece Elsie, her mum Debbie, a one-woman chain gang of snacks, her dad Albert, at the computer playing patience, and beloved Nanny Pat, peering at it all through her glasses thick as pub ashtrays, sighing sentimentally. Mick and Albert got on well, they chatted about Spurs and Arsenal, who Albert supports, and the Christmas telly, which they agreed was crap. My mum and Debbie kept up the grub and Nanny Pat chirped contentedly. The two girls were happy with their “one Christmas Eve gift”. In short, it was perfect. I watched with awe as this exchange unfolded.

INT. DAY.MICKWhat’s that film, Albert?ALBERTI dunno. Tom Hanks. Poland Express or summink.MICKAny good?ALBERTIt’s fuckin’ shit.NICOLADAD!!!! Mind yer language!Pause here. Albert embarrassed, Mick steps up.MICKIt’s alright, Nicola, I don’t mind.

Mick sincerely thought that Nicola was trying to protect him from the “eff ” word; not the two little girls or the pensioner in the corner or even the mums, but him, Mick, great big burly Spurs fan Mick. Not to mention that the film is actually Polar Express, not Poland Express.

This kind of exchange is invaluable to me. Banter from the people who treat you just the same, who take the piss and call you out. You need them around you when the cacophony of sycophancy is so loud it drowns out the voice in your head that says, “None of this is real, you know, it’s all an illusion, all of it will pass.”

†

The Last Autograph

The severance that success brings was further exacerbated when my mum moved from Grays. After that I had no umbilical link to the place where I’m from – I need never go back there again. I went to visit “one last time” on the day that she was leaving while Morrissey scored, as usual: “As you walk without ease, on these streets where you were raised …” Me and John Rogers walked past the flowerbed that I’d stomped on because the man who lived there had asked me nicely not to. We went to the garages at the end of the street, where once as a boy I’d hijacked a vacant unit and kept pet mice in it. Also I’d wee’d in it. And so did the mice. It stank beneath the corrugated iron roof, behind the battered door. “I am moving house, a half life disappears today, with every hand waves me on secretly wishing me gone, well I will be soon …”

There too were the allotments, fabled to the kids of the street, for the unused lots, wild with brown grass, an arsonist’s dream, all in the shadow of the fire station tower where they practise being firemen, that once I’d climbed in moonlit dread and on top seen all the world roll out beyond the sirens and the tarmac. “Goodbye house forever! I never stole a happy hour around here …”

At the garages I examined the courtyard floor and could recall, almost affectionately, individual potholes and cracks. Later, as me and John strolled past the ambulance station at the top of our road (ambulances and fire engines, my childhood must have been incessantly rinsed with distressed chimes and blue light), I instinctively jumped up on the short boundary wall and continued on with one arm outstretched upward to my mother who was no longer there but still in 1979, when we’d have last walked there together.

John said it was as if the memories were not neurological but physical. They lay there, amongst the gutters and cracks, awaiting collection on our return, like a once-prized rag doll, tarnished and forgotten.

In my bedroom where I’d spent years in devoted solipsism and self-absorption I signed an autograph for a removal man’s daughter and finally bleached away the last remaining corner of my anonymity. Fame seeped through the walls and delivered its dubious cure to the forlorn youngster who’d sat and craved away summers seeking its gilded kiss.

The Scandalous tour, the show for which the Daily Mail almost deserve a credit as co-writers, romped into the country’s biggest stand-up venue, the O2 arena. Eighteen thousand people would see me joke my way through the media furore that months before had threatened to derail the whole kerazy Brand-Wagon. But here we were. We few, we happy few. Danny and Mick, by now at the apex of this Caligulan excess, openly competed to see who could bring me the most post-gig girls; they were delivered in giggling gaggles. After a night at the Brixton Academy I took home five girls and we kissed, canoodled and shrieked till the early morning in my notorious, “never gonna be clean enough” hot tub. And through their white wine kisses and perfect skin I tasted something poisonous. The end was approaching, the fun had faded, the lights flickered on the Ferris wheel and the carriage uneasily creaked – but still it turned. As I lay on my bed watching them above me it felt like an alien autopsy; they prodded, not caressed, they fed, they did not kiss. Their fingers were like scalpels dissecting my compulsion. Still the beast lumbered on. I tried to quell the impotent liquor of this lust by doubling the dose. You would not believe, because I cannot believe, the ferocity, the velocity, the pounding, racing, thrusting curse of my commitment. Women met for the first time in my bed and tumbled into the abyss of my serpentine kiss. Chains and trains of strangers, some as young as eighteen, some as old as forty-five, were flung together in a metropolis of flesh. Four in the bed, two in the kitchen, three in the hot tub and still the doorbell rings. Night after night, I don’t know how I could be a conduit for so much passion. As I gaze across the collages left behind, there were compelling, diverting giddy times. Five girls in Bournemouth closing in on me like sweet murder. Four in Sydney, coffee brown to lily white, a mother and daughter on the coast, and, perfectly, given its reputation for incest, sisters in Devon. Protocols and taboos dissolved at my touch, momentarily some power visited me and, by this alchemy, transformed the “World’s ugliest boy” into this creature with flashing eyes and darting tongue and the desperate wail of my adolescence was at last silenced by the climactic screams of a thousand strangers.

Them sisters were bloody amazing actually. We were staying in some castle in Devon, we were crewed up, loads of us were there. I was exhausted, but after the gig we brought back maybe twenty girls and they were scattered around the grand drawing-room bar of the castle. By 3am it looked like the cover of an album the Stones never got round to recording called “Crumpet Banquet” or “Floosie Soup”, they were propped up against the mantle or dumped on chairs like plane crash survivors. They’d chat to lads for a while, but then I’d swoop down from the turrets and claim ’em.

I don’t know why I wouldn’t just go to sleep. I’d take a couple upstairs, Jagger through the motions then Bowie back down to the bar, all knackered.

This castle was the scene of some vintage Mick conduct. Each morning at 10am, as breakfast was served the hotel would put on a display of falconry on their glorious grounds for the guests. A Tawny Owl would at the behest of its handler circle overhead and take meat from the gloved hand. What a treat. On rainy days like this one, however – a rain sent no doubt to wash away the transgressions of the previous night – the display, more excitingly, took place in the corridor visible from the sumptuous restaurant.

We sat, munching toast and slurping cornflakes, awaiting the hour when the display would start. Mick stumbled down late complaining that some of the girls I’d consorted with in his room, because mine was occupied with sleeping sisters, had nicked his lighter. “I liked that lighter,” said Mick, glumly looking off into the distance where in his mind the lighter was still at hand. “It was over a hundred pounds.” “Sit down, Mick,” commanded Danny. “That lighter was pony. And they’re gonna be doing the owl display in that corridor at ten, that’s in five minutes.”

Mick’s panda eyes dilated with wonder. He looked down at his watch. “Really?” he said, unable to contain his enthusiasm, then, cynically, as if this might be one of Danny’s pranks, “Wait a minute. How does the owl know what time it is?”