My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (39 page)

That was one of my favorite days in treatment, but there were others that I really loved. And fortunately, they’re all recorded in my daily diaries. The idea behind these is that you write a log of everything that’s happened, then you hand it to your counselor, and that one person reads it to check you’re not going to kill yourself or relapse or go mad or something. But I’m such an inveterate show- off that I wrote mine in the sort of style which suggests I knew that a couple of years later I’d be reading it out in front of a live audience (which I did when I did a stand-up show called “Better Now”) and a couple of years after that transcribing it into my autobiography.

Here is a sample daily diary to show you what they looked like, then I’ll transcribe a few, so you can just read them without having to decipher my expressionistic penmanship.

313

RUSSELL BRAND

21/12/02

I have decided to overthrow the government. I feel right proper chipper—like Dick Van Dyke

01/01/03

I am a slithering knot of neurosis, a tumor of tumult. Incapable of the merest social encounter, my days are a series of embarrassing ordeals, strung together with miserable introspection. Th e grim

weather, but for its potency, reflects my maudlin soul 07/01/03

Got in adventures on my way home: was threatened with anal rape with a broomstick by an enraged jeweler. Feel a bit nauseous . . .

15/01/03

I am my own higher power. God of Yoga. High Commander of Destiny and the Fates. I feel quite cheerful 29/01/03

In my dreams last night I was in the garden of my childhood and I thought I could see burrowing moles. On further inspection they appeared to be giant bald donkeys writhing in the earth. Still, not to worry

13/02/03

A beautiful “pheasant thing” ran across my path as I cycled here today with almost phosphorescent colors about its neck, quite marvelous. Being a simple man I took this to herald some mys-tic event or magical era. Or perhaps it’s a load of Mephistopheles and we’re all damned . . .

314

Out of the Game

14/02/03

[In honor of the special significance of the date, this entry is decorated with hearts]

Oh amoré, love, romance

.

.

.

Let cupid’s arrows rain.

315

RUSSELL BRAND

Salutations

Eros—let’s bathe in Casanova’s sperm (he was

impotent—the pedants cry). How many cards? Ooh, let me count . . . a big fat zero. Still, you don’t get bitter, do you? You’ve got to laugh at life. Look at all the cruelty, injustice, propaganda and terror and laugh. HA HA HA HA HA HA.

[four more hearts follow]

I will find her . . .

Terrifying.

Jackie, a very astute counselor woman who was a nice version of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (I’m being R. P. McMurphy) once said to me, “Russell, I think you’re really not taking this seriously: in your mind, you’re just taking notes for your stand-up comedy.” This is something they said at the KeyStone place as well . . . ’cos I fucking was, and always have been, because that’s all life is to me—raw material for comedy.

People tell you “Life’s not a rehearsal.” Well, mine is—it’s a rehearsal for when I get onstage and do the real performance.

My whole time in rehab is a bit of a blur really, ’cos I was just getting my brain back, but quite a lot of rubbish did go on with the locals. I do remember going to visit Chip once—who kindly gave me a lot of personal attention, and is now my sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous. Chip lived above this jeweler’s, and for some reason I had to climb over an iron gate to get in. Th e second I started to do that, the jeweler came out with a rubber glove on one hand and clutching some sort of mop as a make-shift weapon, and we had this ridiculous exchange where I said,

“What are you going to do with that—stick it up my arse?”

I am still immensely grateful to that Focus place, though (I’ve subsequently gone back for reunions and become a patron), and I do feel that between them John Noel and Chip Somers saved my life. Had I not gone into treatment, I do honestly feel 316

Out of the Game

that I would either be dead now, or living a life so close to death that it would be difficult not to take the final step. I don’t think that’s melodramatic, that’s just the way I was going. But John wouldn’t let it happen, and Chip had the ability to see me through the process till I came out the other side.

I cried when I left Focus. When you graduate, they go round the room and people say what they think of you, and it’s lovely.

Chip came to mine. I’d written something I wanted to read out, but when the time came to do it, I couldn’t speak. Everyone was dead proud of me.

I was determined not to relapse, but there were powerful forces pulling me back. My whole identity was built around being this kind of crazed, swashbuckling, intoxicated man. I remember Karen—my first girlfriend after going in treatment—saying that when she spoke to people who’d known me before, “Th ey talked

about you like you were a monster.”

It wasn’t just me who had to adjust to a new idea of the kind of person I was; everyone else did as well. Not long after John had brought me that dope as a present, when I was still in Focus, I got a couple of days off and went back to Essex for a little break, where I soon found myself chopping out lines of coke for people while they said, “Go on, Russell, have a bit of a toke—it’s just heroin that’s the problem.”

I was very nervous about the idea of sobriety. Again, quite early on in my time in rehab, they took us to this huge New Year’s Eve show that Eric Clapton was playing at Guildford Leisure Centre. The idea was that the gig was completely dry, and I fucking detested it. I suppose it was probably one of the first social functions I’d ever been to as an adult where I wasn’t on drugs, and it was like being in hell. I was wearing this jacket with all these zips on it, that still had loads of tinfoil left in the pockets, which made me feel really strange, and I said to the girl I was with, 317

RUSSELL BRAND

“This ain’t for me. If this is what it means to be saved or redeemed, I ain’t gonna be a happy ending.”

In order to distance themselves from temptation, and draw a line under their previous misdemeanors, a lot of people become very puritanical once they’ve been through the rehab process.

But in contrast with a lot of recovering addicts, I’ve never felt the need to gloss over what it was about drinking or taking drugs that I liked so much. Apart from anything else, I think doing that puts up a barrier between you and those people who have had the self-restraint to keep their indulgence in those pleasures within socially acceptable limits.

The fact that I had a drug problem meant that wherever I went in the world, from Havana to Ibiza to the mean streets of the Edinburgh Festival, I always had to seek out the poor and the dispossessed, as they are the people who generally know where the drugs are. The thing about being an addict is—as you’ll find from the poetry of Charles Bukowski or the novels of William Burroughs or Henry Miller—it forces you into unusual places: “Down among the have-nots,” as Lucky Benny’s accomplice put it.

George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, wrote (on the first page, thank God, otherwise I wouldn’t know about it) of the immediate recognition of shared humanity.

When he was signing up for POUM—the rebel socialist army fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War—there was a red-haired Italian soldier who was just in front of him in the queue where you signed up to fight. Orwell said he instantly liked him, and could tell he would get on with him and could love him, though he was only in his company for a minute, and barely any words were spoken.

Down among the have-nots, the drunks and the junkies, fleeting moments of mutual connection happen quite frequently.

318

RUSSELL BRAND

With Barry, fine brown hair, concave chest, sad, sad eyes, the Queens Arms pub; “ ’Ello me old mucker, put one in the pipe for us, I’m brassick.”* With his handler Pats, who looked like Mike Reid crossed with an ox; they did house clearances—taking all the stuff out of old people’s homes after they’d died. Pats told me that the first thing Barry would do was go straight to the medicine cabinet, rifl e through all the pill packets and bottles, and neck the lot. It made no difference what they were for—rheumatism, athlete’s foot, piles.

Barry, perpetually upbeat, had never got over the death of his father, who was a boxer. I once went round to the place where he’d lived with his dad. It was quite a big terraced house—and there was hardly any furniture in it. I sat in there with just this electric bar heater for comfort, smoking dope and taking daft prescription drugs.

We’d induced a comfortable silence and I glanced at Barry; orange in the three-bar glow, he just looked lost and sad, like my nan when I recognized that she was ready to die, but he was in his twenties—just a man in an empty house, lit by a bar fire, on drugs he’d found in a dead man’s cupboard. A beautiful soul who fell through life.

Once in Soho, drunk and alone, coping with the spiteful light of an Old Compton Street off license, I tumbled into the nocturnal camaraderie that only penniless drunks can purchase. My fleeting companion, my soul mate for that moment, was a Scottish lad, young and reeking. I told him how I missed Amanda, he told me how he missed his home. “My love is like a red, red rose,” he said, all wistful about Burns. “Th at’s newly

sprung in June,” I said knowingly, thinking about her. Th en

* “Mucker” is a Cockney word meaning “friend.” “Brassick” is rhyming slang, “brassick lint”—skint—penniless—poor. Jesus, it’s like Latin.

320

Out of the Game

together: “My love is like a melody, that’s sweetly played in tune.” We defiantly recited Rabbie Burns’s poem, entangled arms kept us from falling. “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” Just two more drunks sere-nading an indifferent world. The poem and our Brotherhood ended simultaneously and we carried on alone into the night.

“And I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands of life shall run.” V

321

31

Hare Krishna Morrissey

I graduated from Focus in the early spring of 2003 and moved into a small flat on the fringes of Hampstead in North London, where I lived for the next four years. In the early stages of recovery, I lived a quiet life of AA and NA meetings and seeing friends, as I struggled to adjust to a drug-free existence. I’d taken up yoga, and for eight weeks I didn’t have sex or masturbate as an experiment. My life was held together by my beautiful friends, my lovely mum and my cat Morrissey, who was an irresponsible Christmas gift from a girl I was seeing for about a week. Morrissey remains my constant companion, sauntering and judging, eating and attacking life with a sense of entitlement that makes the Duchess of Kent look like Saint Francis of Assisi.

I became enchanted by the Hare Krishna devotees; I went to the mansion in Watford that George Harrison bought them. I met a swami who radiated the truth from his eyes, he was clearly living by principles that, though I can understand, I find it difficult to apply. He understood that life is transient and that material attachments bring suffering. Not the way I understand it, which is by sagely nodding when it’s brought up in conversation then sneaking home to marvel at my glorious skull-emblazoned boots. Radanat swami would not politely greet me, wisely dis-322