My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (8 page)

out like a gunshot; a flock of pigeons took off from a nearby tree, a twitchy stag looked over its shoulder and I stormed off impotently as I realized “I can’t actually go anywhere, because I’m only fucking ten years old. Right, I’ll start adult life now: let’s get a CV done.” In the car on the way home—another idyllic day out spoiled, my “fuck off ” hanging in the air—I remember hearing the first reports of the Heysel football tragedy. It was strangely comforting to me that the world should be so fucked. V

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How Christmas Should Feel

When I was eleven, I got a gerbil, Barney. It was not a popular purchase, nor was it easily achieved. I was like a dogged Green-peace campaigner—dedicatedly fighting for what I believed in against equally resolute opposition. In a way, having to lobby so relentlessly to secure a pet set me in good stead in later life when seducing pious women. “Please take your bra off! Please?” “Can I see your bottom? Oh go on?” By puberty I had learned that nothing worth having could be easily attained and to succeed one must be single-minded. By my twenties I would relish the challenge of chaste maids and the search for the correct combination of words required to decode their moral resistance. Jumping through hoops, ducking questions, feigning indiff erence to sex. “I’m not bothered about sex, we can just cuddle.” Th e nobstacle course, I call it. Perhaps worryingly there was a corollary between getting my hands on rodents as a boy and boobies as a man.

How I adored that hard-won gerbil. Barney. A good solid, blokey name for the new totem of my happiness. I worshipped Barney the way primitive people worshipped the animals they hunted, seeing in the creature a connection to the natural and the divine. My devotion was swiftly rewarded when Barney, with scant regard for his gender, quite brilliantly had a litter of 57

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babies. I treasure the memory of these tiny, pink, squirming chipolatas. It was miraculous—like how Christmas should feel.

Six of them there were, just squeaking, blind little nitwits, fetal and helpless at first, but with their diligent, ever-watchful man-mum constantly nurturing them they all survived, passing through several adorable stages on their journey to maturity. Th ey

develop fur before they can see; there were two black ones, two gold ones and two brown ones—an incredible gerbil spectrum.

Who knew rodents were capable of such an array of colors?

They would bumble about with their little eyes shut, mewing at the world. I wasn’t meant to touch them in case their mum didn’t like it, but I did, all the time, and Barney didn’t mind. I let them run about all over my bedroom and Barney would scuttle about, collecting them up and popping them back in their nest.

Ah! Aaaaah! They were so beautiful. They were like people, living their little lives, growing day by day. Their eyes opened and they’d frolic and play and communicate by stamping their little feet like Th

umper in Bambi. It was truly beautiful. A gerbil uto-pia: we were all equal and treated each other with respect; egali-tarianism wasn’t an issue, it was a self-regulating society founded on love.

Then, the second they were old enough, the little perverts started fucking each other. “Oh well,” I thought, ever the liberal,

“who cares if they’re related, as long as they’re taking precautions.” They weren’t. “Well, that doesn’t matter. We’ll soon have a mighty army of gerbils and we can begin a crusade to spread our values across the globe.” Weeks passed, gerbils germinated.

I awoke one morning, lifted my bleary head from the pillow and glanced over toward the colony to see Sandy, one of the females, with a little pink baby in her paws, eating it. Just chewing into its head she was, as if infanticide was as natural a way to begin the day as a croissant. “Shake dreams from your hair,/My pretty 58

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child, my sweet one,” as Jim Morrison said, “. . . choose the sign of your day.” For me the sign of that day was a baby gerbil being eaten by its auntie. “Good portent for the coming day, d’ya think?” The second generation stuck rigidly to the Old Testament model and ballsed Eden right up. I had to impose apartheids, work out whose babies were whose, because they were all popping out nippers. I think Barney disgraced himself by getting pregnant with one of his son’s children; I despaired of them. I did consider a Sodom and Gomorrah– style smiting, preserving only Barney, but when I looked at their little faces my wrath was assuaged: “How can I stay mad at you? You incestuous, cannibal little slags.”

Time now for a bit more of the ol’ cancer, my poor mother only four years into remission from the previous encounter fell ill once more. On this occasion, it was breast cancer, and she had to go back to that same grim, run-down Orsett medical facility in order to have a mastectomy. But Brenda (one of them numerous aunties who had been with my mum when I was born) really fought for her to get into the Royal Marsden in West London—the Manchester United of cancer hospitals—so she ended up going in there to have radiotherapy instead. I had to go and stay at my nan’s. My mum’s mother. So I was a little apprehensive.

My mum used to send me these postcards from hospital.

They were of chimpanzees dressed in a series of notable London costumes—beefeater, policeman, judge. On the other side it would say, “Hello Russell—hope you’re being a good boy.”

There’d always be some encoded “Try and be a good boy” message stitched into it. Well, I wish I’d been naughtier, if anything.

When I look back, it’s not those misdeeds that I regret—I’d do them again, I tells ya—but the times when I conformed. I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power 59

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over you at school—it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

As respite from the starchy gloom of my nan’s house, I’d sometimes get to stay at my dad’s. This was quite funny really, as he was an incapable sort of man—it was a bit like a John Hughes comedy, Uncle Buck, or Daddy Fuck, him trying to look after me in his bachelor pad in Brentwood, as if the man-child dynamic had never before occurred and we were pioneers, trying to work out this peculiar situation together.

“What time do you go to bed?” he once asked me. Well, bedtime to children is a remarkable currency and a powerful playground status symbol: “What time’s your bedtime?” some schoolyard wag’d inquire. I’d be too nervous to respond. “You look like an eight o’clock kind of guy to me, you’re missing the best part of the day.”

In this moment my father was naively handing me the keys to the Promised Land, he was allowing me to set my own bedtime.

“Oh, about ten o’clock,” I responded, nonchalantly studying my nails while my heart beat at gerbil speed. As a junkie I would revive this “Oh my God, I’m getting away with it” sensation when traveling through airport customs with a bottom full of heroin, but for now I was smuggling my way to a late-night opiate heaven. My dear dad didn’t realize that children don’t go to bed when they like till my mum came out of hospital; by then it was too late, I’d tasted the sweet elixir of late-night telly.

With his pinewood bathroom and impractical, deep-pile carpets, and all these faintly pornographic things hanging around, like the poster of that tennis player scratching her arse, it was not a tastefully decorated apartment. There were brass lions either side of the fireplace, and an old camera—which was actually 60

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quite nice—in the middle of the front room, and a lot of pornography.

The contrast between the two house holds was stark. My dad’s family were theoretically Catholic, but not in practice very religious at all—after his dad died there was no time for any of that rhubarb. My mum’s side, on the other hand, were prim and proper Protestants. So one night I’d be stuck in this really stuffy, controlling, “Look at this L. S. Lowry book and be enthused by a fireplace” type of atmosphere, and the next I’d be at my dad’s.

He’d drift off and I’d settle down to watch hardcore porn—black men with huge cocks fucking white women up the arse. Good it was. I was more content there, with the hands-off parenting, than in the throttling, restrictive kind my nan practiced.

I thought Ron Brand was great and in lots of ways he is: he taught me that you can get what you want if you refuse to let circumstances defeat you, and perhaps there is no more valuable lesson. I only wish I’d felt he liked me more. “They still make you play in goal, son?” he once asked me, in reference to my low status as a school footballer; in the question, for me, was confirmation of my inadequacy. I shouldn’t be made to play in goal by them, I should be out there, in the middle of the park, making surging runs and delivering intelligent balls, controlling the game and rallying the team. I’m just not any good at football, daft that it seems so important; my mate Ade’s legs don’t work and he has responded to that problem by becoming one of the world’s best wheelchair basketball players. I still almost daily lament my inability to trap a ball. Occasionally, I get phone calls from former West Ham striker and legend Tony Cottee—which, incidentally, is as bonkers and exciting as Robin Hood popping round for dinner or Dick Whittington offering to feed your fish while you’re on holiday—asking me to participate in celebrity football matches and part of me wants to, so much, but I’m 61

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scared and embarrassed. “Don’t worry,” he once said, “we can stick you in goal.”

How I viewed my dad at that point was as this magnifi cent bloke who was either reading newspapers, picking his nose, farting or making an incredible fuss of women. Sometimes he would turn the light of his attention on me and it would be brilliant. He’d tease me and wind me up and be very funny, but he’d get bored really quickly, and then I’d just be there again—all tubby and useless. Tubby because I sought solace in chocolate consumption, the foil wrappers of the delicious P-p-p-Penguin bars I’d scoff, a perspicacious trailer for the tinfoil tapestry I would later weave with smack and crack. I was a connoisseur of the Penguin, which came in yellow, green, blue and red wrappers. I was a particular devotee of the blue variety, even though all Penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we’re likely to get for the futility of racism.

Once the blues were devoured I’d feast upon their inferior cousins the greens, then the reds, and finally those filthy heathens the yellows.

When my mum recovered I was happy to return home. She again said she’d pulled through because she loved me so much. I felt proud and responsible for her improved health. “Better be grateful, ’cos your mum’s not died,” adults intoned. Auntie Brenda said, “If your mum tells you to go down the end of the garden and jump up and down, you’d better do it.” I thought such an eventuality would be a sign that she’d gone loopy and if she said anything of the sort I’d write to Dr. Barnardo myself and demand refuge.* Before I had chance to put pen to paper it

* Dr. Barnardo was the head of a charitable fund for orphans. In my mind, he is a benevolent Col o nel Saunders figure, smiling at unloved children. He had more personal relevance than I, as a man with parents, can ever justify.

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was disconcertingly decreed that I should go to boarding school to make me less clingy; Hockerill, a state-run boarding school in Bishop’s Stortford. Now what I should’ve done is at the audition or interview or what ever it was that took place in that musty room full of swivel-eyed skeleton folk, is carried on like a nut, gurning, swearing and talking about Satan so they’d’ve thought, “Uh oh, this boy’ll be a drain on resources”—but I’m such a vain nit that I charmed them and tried my best. Th ey

took on a few troubled kids a year, in the hope of setting them straight, and they concurred that I’d benefit under that remit.

Visiting my nan the day before departure, I smashed up the bathroom in an impotent prison protest. That night, my dog Topsy died. She opted to spend her last evening behind the sofa alone to prepare for the hereafter. The next morning she lay with her dry, pink tongue lolling out—undignified in death. I tried to put it back in her mouth; a squeamish, teary mortician, I couldn’t make her passing palatable. I was taken to Hockerill 63