My Booky Wook 2 (9 page)

In the flat the atmosphere was not good. Matt must have had a girlfriend as he was “umming” and “ahhing” about “right” and “wrong” as often he does, and Trevor was dancing in the corridor. Because I don’t drink I’m a lousy host. I forget that most people need a stiffener before an orgy, whereas I white-knuckle my way into the mayhem with sobriety gleaming like frost across my brain-scape. We got some gin and tonic from the bar downstairs and Trevor became a clumsy, bespectacled nit version of Tom Cruise in Cocktail.

Trevor Lock is an interesting cove, he’s married to a Peruvian lady, and spent time in her country learning at the feet of shamans. They must’ve been baffled by him – he’s hyper-intelligent, analytical, sensitive, spiritual and naturally quite brilliant, funny, gentle and quick and nimble and a good performer. I really enjoyed working with Trevor Lock, a good chap and a good person to take the piss out of, a lot of fun to ridicule.

STUDIO. DAY.RUSSELLAre you alright, Cocky-Locky?TREVORI am. I’m feeling much better, been a little bit ill this week.RUSSELLOh, I’m sorry to hear that but not that interested.STUDIO. DAY.TREVORI was born in Lincoln.RUSSELLYou say born, Trevor, you were more created in a Petri dish by a pervert.

He’s very situated, very English and provincial, you could imagine him wearing brown brogues and having a bicycle with a basket on the front and pushing his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose, saying “Oh blimey”, the sort of egg who would get a bit hot under the collar. One would be very surprised to encounter malice from him, he’s a very positive person. Which made it all the more astonishing when he was accused of rape.

There are a lot of people who quite pointedly don’t introduce anything negative into my experience or my life. I have some friendships that are quite complicated and difficult, but one of my best qualities is that I’m very good at selecting people to have around, people who won’t fuck me up. I’m aware of what my deficiencies are, so I surround myself with people who are fully formed and developed in the areas where I am lacking, self-assuredness perhaps sometimes, and a grounded consistency. That is not a ubiquitous verdict on all the people around me, but there are certain shared traits and one of them is a lack of negativity. I like people not to be negative or down, and Trevor was positive, positively charged energy to be around.

In Edinburgh that night, a night that we would forensically discuss and be forced to recall in excruciating detail, I had foolishly created a harem that lacked the facilities that would have been imposed by any half-decent sheikh. Surprised drunk women who moments before had been in a bar and before that were in an audience, were now in a shabby, badly run party that even Alan Yentob had swerved. Occasionally I’d sidle off with someone to a vestibule and have a canoodle and then return to the party for fifteen minutes.

I do enjoy the fifteen minutes after an orgasm, the rationality that follows, the calm, patient, reasoned man that I become, liberated momentarily from the razor-sharp biological imperative – I really hope my biological nature appreciates what I do for it because I ain’t half a diligent servant. It’s as if my biological nature went, “Procreate, Russell, we must continue to procreate.”

“Oh yes, sir. Yes, m’lud.”

I’m the most obsequious creature, utterly enslaved by that need; I do whatever it wants, it’s ludicrous, the level of servitude and the mastery over me that it has achieved.

If only one day I could find love and, like Rapunzel or some other fairy-tale twerp trapped in a phallic tower, be released from ploughing this seedy trench.

As I mooched about, snogging and seeking salvation in all the wrong places, Matt and Trev and the hostages tried their best to conjure up the atmosphere of a party in what should more realistically be considered a sexual buffet. I would have written “smorgasbord”, but it’s one of those words that gets used a lot in comedy situations because people obviously like it, it is a nice-sounding word but some things get tainted, “smorgasbord” being one of them, which is a shame because it’s a pleasant word, but there’s no going back; although, I never thought I’d use the exclamation mark again, but now I use it in texts and letters and Post-its!!! I’ll tell you why, because in text communications these days there’s so much lol-ing and gsoh-ing and :) and :( – wow that’s literally the first time I’ve ever done that – and smiley faces in my day just used to mean “Aciieed!” or “Mr Happy” – that now the vulgar exclamation mark resembles a modest grammatical quirk, not the great, big, goofy, upside-down truncheon-phallus, gooning its way into a sentence, announcing its presumed humour. If the exclamation mark is now comparatively subtle, so I can use them again, perhaps “smorgasbord” too will make its way back into polite society, but until that day let’s say it was a sexual buffet and people were trying to conjure up the atmosphere of a party.

I don’t know if Russ Abbot’s “What an Atmosphere” was playing, but in these situations my brain usually provides an appealing score.

“Oh what an atmosphere, I love a party with a happy atmosphere, what’s Russell doing now?, he’s just drifting from room to room like a land shark – ‘Oh let me take you there, and you and I will be dancing in the cool night air’ – is he in the bathroom again? Yes, yes, I think he is.”

Whilst this was going on, a girl who worked in a local bar had ambled into the tragic-comic upstairs VIP area. She was drunk, too drunk to be behind a bar. I myself was an alcoholic barman and it’s the last place you should be. Or the first – there’s two ways of looking at the situation and it depends what results you’re trying to achieve. If it’s drunkenness, get behind a bar; if it’s sobriety, get out.

This girl was drunk; she was beautiful and I flirted with her for a while and enjoyed her company, she seemed sweet. I was by no means on the precipice of a great love affair, but I thought the two of us might be able to create a mutually beneficial diversion from the looming shadow of death, or to give him his proper name, Matt. No, not really, I do genuinely think of sex as a legitimate and fun way to avert the mind’s eye from impending doom. The fact that I was chatting up this girl was by no stretch an “Excalibur” situation, where a union would signify a magically ordained bond, because I was marching around yanking cutlery out of every bit of granite in that city, there can scarcely have been a fork or spoon left un-man-handled. “Perhaps this is the sword,” I’d announce, “or this, or this or this one.”

“Mr Brand, you’ve got your foot in my fork drawer and your hand is groping the coal scuttle.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the way I roll, I’ve got four limbs for a reason, and that lady in the lake was alright, can you get me her number?”

Ghastly business really, but such is the nature of single life at a Scottish arts festival.

“Come on, shall we go and kiss each other?” I schmoozed. Luckily for me she said, “Look, I’d like to talk to you first.”

I think my face must have frozen and I must have rolled my eyes, chuckled and murmured, quietly I hope, something along the lines of “OK, I’ll be moving along to this person a yard away who, hopefully, won’t make such outrageous demands on my time.”

I like a good chat, a chinwag, a lovely conversation. When I want sex I want to be physically involved with someone, and that too is communicative, good kissing and good sex is communication beyond language. I love language, I like sexual communication with beautiful women and I don’t think it’s invalid. I don’t think it’s any lesser and I don’t know how it’s been tainted by morality and adjudged to be somehow lower. I know it’s animal and it’s primal, but there’s certainly an argument that it’s a purer form of communication, that there’s less duplicity. I don’t try and mislead someone with my sexual communication. I purely communicate, by holding on to them, by dancing my way through them, by kissing them and adoring them.

This glorious ritual could be devalued by enquiring, “Will this lead to a marriage?” The answer is no, but why ask that question? Why not ask, “Will this lead to a space mission? Will this lead to us going on a tropical quest or us setting up an accountancy firm?” No! No! No! But ought we let that undermine one of the best damn hobbies known to humankind?

That girl said, “Do you want to have a conversation?”

I said, “No, I do not want to have a conversation.”

Men did not evolve over millions of years to have an inconvenient sack of chemicals dangling between our thighs that compel us to have conversations.

“Go forth and converse” is not in the Bible. I’ve checked it, I’ve double checked it, I’ve gummed the pages together because I’ve checked it so thoroughly that I had to have a wank while reading it because of the human biological imperative to go forth and multiply.

“Take that back, Gideon, I’m going to need another one.”

So I went and slept with someone else who had a bit more of a gung-ho attitude to these matters. Matt skulked off and ended up in a lap-dancing club with some interesting fella, a peripheral chancer we met, a driver; we were always meeting strange drivers around Edinburgh. Trevor ended up chatting up that girl and going to bed with her, and what happened is subject to legal dispute. Trevor says, and I believe him, that they had consensual sex. It sounded rather comical actually – until we heard her version of events FROM THE POLICE!!! (Go, exclamation mark.)

When we awoke, the previous day’s shadows lay heavy upon the walls and floors. Mementoes scattered as if they contained, locked within, the memories of the nocturnal events. By this time I had acquired a PA, a personal assistant – which now, some years on seems unremarkable, which is a fair barometer of the changes in my life. A personal assistant is a barrier between you and the world – it’s not the same as a secretary, their duties are mostly clerical whereas a PA will bat away, like tedious gnats ballsing up the paradise of your holiday-life, any chores that you’d rather not do. From paying the phone bill to sending flowers to collecting prescriptions, all can be swerved once a PA is recruited. Now I know that this is an alienating reality, that I now write from behind a platoon of mollycoddling adult nannies and this may put some distance between you as a reader and me as a spoiled arriviste brat. But know this: I am aware how ridiculous it all is, the money, the fawning, the girls, but what does one do? And believe me it comes at a price. Privacy and sanity are not commodities to be traded lightly. That said, having a PA is fucking brilliant.

At that time I had a lesbian PA called Helen, perhaps unconsciously I was trying to balance some of the marauding misogyny that had inadvertently come to characterise my life – I needn’t have bothered administering punitive measures to myself because the cosmos was soon to make its judicious presence felt. Helen and her bird, Shaz, awoke us from the debris of the final night and we hurtled towards Princes Street, keen to board the King’s Cross train before the festival officially concluded and we were turned into pumpkins.

It was a beautiful train journey home. British train journeys can be so charming when relieved of the obligation to avoid ticket inspectors and smoke in toilets. Matt was twinkly, morning drunk and riling Trevor about the night before: the corridor dancing, the Vicar of Dibley cocktail bar he was running and his rare and, to us, amusing seduction of a woman. All in all we were enjoying the benefits of my new-found, hard-won fame.

When I got back to London I was invited to dinner with charm-monger Neil Strauss, writer of The Dirt – the Mötley Crüe book – and The Game. A further advantage of success is getting invited out to dinner by famous strangers. I was intrigued to meet Neil because The Game is the Koran (let’s take a risk, I mentioned the Bible a page ago) of womanisers everywhere. This guide Neil penned on how to hoodwink girls into sex left me with mixed feelings – it’s very well written but is it right? That is the problem with the whole womanising culture – it gets sleazier with every hour that you age and starts becoming a bit soulless. Oh, sure, it’s a big, stiff hoot when you’re gadding about like Bruce Wayne, but you can never forget that on the horizon, bleaching his hair and popping a Viagra, awaits Peter Stringfellow. But these were not considerations for this swish night in Claridge’s – a lovely posh restaurant that you can only relax in if you are the Queen or Claridge himself – God knows what he’s like. Tonight I was concerned with seeing Neil’s “game”, and more importantly, comparing it to mine. Neil brought Courtney Love with him – who is a mad enchantress, a rasping white witch, barmy and opinionated and lion-hearted. More interesting than her lion-heart, though, is her vagina, which has been referred to as magic, in that it has a mythical power to bestow stardom and heavenly gifts ’pon those who enter – a kind of Blarney-fanny. Lord alone knows many a famous man has emerged from its confines – some of whom surely must’ve been famous on the way in. Neil told me I didn’t need The Game as I was a natural – the best he’d seen, which utterly charmed me, making him the winner of the “game contest” before we’d even had soup. Which was a bloody good job because it was one of those posh soups where you get a bowl with some croutons and bits in it and the actual soup comes in a jug on its own. (On one terrible occasion I phoned room service demanding that my soup be delivered, as I just had a bowl of breadcrumbs, and a waiter then arrived to tip soup that was millimetres away into the dish. He couldn’t have looked more contemptuous if he were changing my nappy.)

Neil charmed anything that moved and gave me some tips on writing. Courtney held, well, court and was marvellously indiscreet and interesting. She gets a right drubbing in the papers but she’s brilliant. We never had sex, because we became mates, and besides, that night I only had eyes for Neil, the manipulative dreamboat.

I then went off to Morocco on holiday with a very lovely girl, a gentle blonde breeze of sweetness and fun. While I was there, there were stories about me and Courtney Love saying that we’d slept together, which often means been in spitting distance of each other – which in my view is an integral part of sex. The distance itself, though, should not be viewed as confirmation of coitus.