More Fool Me (12 page)

Storage? I won’t believe a single coke user who tells me they haven’t at least once opened their wallet only to watch, with a shudder of horror, their precious packet or baggy fall out and splash into the lavatory bowl below.
^*
So, aside from the obvious advice to make sure you always close the seat before opening your pockets and getting down to business, consider the container. For a short time I favoured the highly fashionable, for sadly obvious reasons, condom holder. You could slip three well-packed wraps and a blade in this two-piece plastic container and then slide the two halves together. It was compact and safe. I would keep two straws in the other pocket. In later years I discovered Californian head shops, where simple grinders were on display in the window. Even smarter ones allowed you to grind out a dose and then quickly sniff it up, concealing the action behind a handkerchief. No visit to the loo, no waiting for said loo to empty so that the sounds of one’s chopping and snorting went unnoticed, just a simple indiscernible action. Of course, buying such a thing and several spares too is an unspoken – even to oneself – concession of one’s addiction.

Incidentally, using the phrase ‘getting down to business’ when describing a men’s lavatory may seem a little ‘ho ho’, but during the 1980s the epidemic of cocaine fever sweeping through the mewses, squares and side-streets of Mayfair had reached such a pitch that I remember sitting one evening in the bar of the wildly successful nightclub Annabel’s when a friend, a great wit, known by just about everyone in the world of London fashion and parties, a man one could genuinely call a playboy, came up from the men’s room with a look of outrage on his face.

‘Do you know what just happened?’ he asked, a frown of indignant disgust clouding his otherwise fair features.

‘No.’

‘Some arsehole just came into the coke-room while I was chopping out a line and, without so much as a by-your-leave, he took his cock out and had a piss in one of those porcelain bowl things … I mean, should we get Mark to fling the man out and have him thrashed on the steps of the club?’

That really is how prevalent the white stuff was then and how utterly unremarkable the taking of it in public was. Inasmuch as the gentlemen’s lavatories of Annabel’s can ever be called public.

Incidentally, some of the paragraphs above look like I am writing out a template of instructions and encouraging advice for the coke novice. It should go without saying and must be apparent if you read on and find out what damage I believe this noxious yet maddeningly beguiling substance did to me that
I wouldn’t recommend cocaine to my worst enemy
. Which won’t, of course, stop someone taking it out of context and damning me. Goes with the turf. Chap gets used to it. Barely a day goes by without someone on Twitter favouring me with the information that ‘I thought better of you than that’ – the ‘that’ being anything from passing on the blandest of off-colour jokes, to employing a swear word that ‘offends’ them (don’t get me started), to using a epithet that apparently slights a minority of some kind. Which I don’t really get. ‘God, there have been a lot of clever yids’ doesn’t seem in the least problematic. Nor does ‘Amazing how many of the greatest ever American comedians have been kikes – must be something to do with their 2,000-year need to stay together and keep themselves amused’, or whatever. Perfectly charming observations that don’t need someone to say, ‘Excuse me, those words are offensive. Kindly use the word “Jews” or better still the phrase “Jewish people”,’ (as if the latter takes the sting out of being a Jew, as if even that word is too strong). ‘All Jewish people should be beaten up’ and ‘Fucking Jews run everything – you know they conspire to keep others out?’ How is it better that whoever writes something so ghastly is using ‘acceptable’ words? It is the sentiment expressed that is repulsive or not repulsive, not the words. Hell, I’m turning into a foaming ‘political correctness gone mad’ animal. I shall shush on that topic. Paraphernalia then is described not for the purposes of an instruction manual, but as a warning: permanent sniffles, blood from the nose and other unwelcome parts, sleeplessness, diarrhoea, headaches, itchy skin … and on top of these indignities, that of dealing with your dealer. We’ll come to that interesting, intriguing and inscrutable being in a little while. Hold that thought.

UNEXPECTED DIVERSION AHEAD

Now this section isn’t a diary (diary entries lie up ahead, waiting for you) but I do feel I have to insert here, by way of flavour, the unexpected nature of today, this day of my writing this sentence. A not untypical day in my life except for one rare but wild circumstance. In this interruption itself, as throughout the book, there will be plenty of unexpected excursions, which I hope will not annoy.

I awoke early this morning, still tingling. Last night I experienced one of the strongest manic episodes of my life. It had been stealing up on me for some days, but last night I felt almost possessed. I texted everyone I knew furiously, knowing that safety with cyclothymia (my particular variation of Bipolar Disorder) lies in the support of friends and family. They can tell from one’s voice how over-sharp the edge of hysteria might be and talk one down or insist upon one accepting help. Hypomania (I know, one would have thought it should be called hyp
er
mania) often presents with a euphoric need to be in touch with people and a garrulity and excitable chattering manner that can make one barely comprehensible. It is, I am told, much harder to live with someone manic than someone depressed. The worst state for a family member, spouse or companion to deal with is the transitional mood that develops as one cycles between the two. I realized last night that this was what I had been going through the previous week, when I had felt angry and prickly about everything. I was energetic but in what you might call a negative manner.

But last night I was so charged, flying so high, feeling so positive and convinced of my worth that I suddenly understood historical figures like Joan of Arc and the wild prophetic ravings of Howard Beale, the radiant seer of broadcasting played so memorably by Peter Finch in his posthumous Oscar-winning last hurrah in
Network
. I’m sure you remember the scene where, raincoat over pyjamas, he comes dripping and possessed into the network building to take up his position in the newsroom as anchorman and, live on air, stands with arms outstretched exhorting all his viewers to go to their windows and shout, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!’ God knows what drivel I might have come out with had I been in front of a camera last night.

If I didn’t have a tiny core of sanity inside me I quite seriously would have believed myself imbued with some great spirit. Only those who have endured, or perhaps enjoyed, hypomania will understand quite what I mean. I am still today rattling away at top speed, though I dare say I will come back to revise this passage when I’ve either floated down (as I earnestly hope) or crashed to earth (as I worriedly fear).
^*

The nature of depression, mania’s sinister twin, is that it is opposite in
every
regard. The one gives you hope and a vainglorious, grandiose belief in the future; the other convinces you of life’s entire and eternal futility. The one gives an urge to communicate by text, letter, phone call, Twitter and personal visit. The other casts one alone into a darkened room, refusing visitors and rolling away to turn one’s back on those poor concerned ones who love you and want to speak to you. Two poles.

So, I repeat. Yesterday was as high a day as can be. As a matter of fact I went to see my team, Norwich City, suffer a catastrophic and wholly undeserved defeat at Craven Cottage, the home ground of Fulham Football Club. How we will avoid the drop from Premiership to Championship I don’t know.
^†
But that is entirely another matter, and one that holds no interest for you. I mention it only because being in the directors’ box in the company of Delia Smith and fellow board members and club staff allowed me to squawk and scream and jabber and joke and yell and yodel without it seeming the least odd. By the time I got home, undefeated even by the terrible loss of the match, I found myself in a state of unparalleled OCD busy-ness.

You will have the pleasure of learning more about my strange mind later as we go, but for the remainder of yesterday evening I polished shoes, tidied cupboards, reorganized stationery, cleared clutter and cooked a supper which took about half an hour to plate up, so fantastically symmetrical and exquisitely layered were its ingredients.

When I had finished this Adrian Monkish meal I began to feel my hands shaking, the blood singing in my head and a pressure pushing down on my chest. I was alone that evening so I set about sending long, long texts to those I knew best. I told them that I was manic, but that I was safe and had no feeling that I was going to do something mad, embarrassing or unsafe. Finally, I took the decision to text my psychiatrist, who was just returning from Marseilles, and he texted back with a suggested tweak to my medication and instructions to call him tomorrow, Sunday, by which time he would be home.

I slept well last night despite such an extraordinary and quite unexpected swing of the internal weather-vane. This morning I worked on a passage of this book, words tumbling furiously from me. I do hope, by the way, that this doesn’t show. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, as Congreve wrote. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure, as I have learned. Sorely. Write in haste, revise at leisure, as experience has also taught me. ‘I can write drunk, but must revise sober,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have told his editor, Maxwell Perkins.

At two-thirty in the afternoon I slipped into a good shirt, knotted the silk salmon-pink and cucumber-green Garrick Club tie around my neck, selected some unassuming trousers and a pleasing jacket and trotted over to the Criterion Theatre, that little Thomas Verity jewel-box right by Eros
^*
on Piccadilly Circus. The bar next to the theatre (the Cri, as it used to be known in its late-Victorian, early-Edwardian heyday, the age and locus of Wodehouse’s Hon. Galahad Threepwood and his nemesis, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe) is where Doctor Watson met up with his old dresser from Barts Hospital, ‘young Stamford’, who was to go on that very afternoon to introduce him to Sherlock Holmes. So for me, despite the hordes of Chupa Chups-coloured tourists who clamber up to be photographed as they mime sucking the aluminium figure’s elegantly veiled little dick while fingering his pert botty,
^†
carelessly breaking the bowstring as they do so, despite their moronic, thoughtless littering of the surrounding area and despite at night drunks pissing into the trough at the base of the bronze fountain, despite all this, Piccadilly Circus – ‘the hub of the Empire’, as they used to call it – is sacred turf to me. Sacred paving, I should say.

I have the honour of being the chairman of the Criterion Theatre. It involves little more than a board meeting every now and then, but it is such a beautiful playhouse, and it does give me a little kick to see my name in the back of the programme, lost in the tiny print somewhere amongst the producers, investors and other board members. Our proprietor is the munificent Sally Greene, whose bountiful patronage (should that have been proprietress and matronage?) has also breathed life into the Old Vic and the great Soho jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s.

So, I arrive at the theatre and descend to the stalls (the Criterion is one of the rare theatres where everything is underground: bars, dressing rooms, stage and auditorium) for an afternoon celebrating the life of the actor Richard Briers, who died some months ago. He was a fellow Garrickian, hence the choice of tie. Everyone who worked with him and is still breathing seems to be here. Pennies Wilton and Keith, Peters Egan and Bowles, Dickie’s wife Annie, of course, his daughters and grandchildren and the great Sir Kenneth Branagh, a man as busy, if not busier, than I am, and whom I rarely get to see these days. Before the event begins I stand gabbling away with him, for once matching him in verbal pace and energy. I tell him of my current mental state. Like so many he responds with understanding and experience, recommending, of all things, meditation. The Kenneth Branagh I knew in the days of the film
Peter’s Friends
would have sprayed out his tea derisively at the idea of meditation and embarked upon a hilarious, vituperative and brilliant extemporized monologue exposing the idiocy of staring at nothing and chanting, ‘Om mani padme hum.’ This is one of the many things I enjoy about ageing: I discover that I am so much less likely to find things twatty, pretentious and scorn-inducing, and I must assume KB feels the same.

Just as the houselights dim I approach the stalls seats from the wrong end and have to scuttle all the way round. I am rewarded with a hard glare from Penelope Keith, who is well known for … well. It is not my place to say.

She reads, however, the verse that Sir Henry Irving wrote as a farewell on his final stage appearance – a plea for the public to be charitable to lesser-known actors – very well. Everyone in fact is on top form as they summon up memories of a man who charmed all who knew him and swore more regularly and fantastically than anyone I ever met. Never having met myself, who would count as the one exception, I might boldly claim. Although the best swear I ever heard came from a close friend of both mine and Ken’s, an actor who, forgetting his lines on a film set, reprimanded himself with the savage cry of ‘Cunting Auschwitz!’ Being Jewish, he could get away with it, I suppose. Just. But it’s a curse one needs to keep for a serious moment of distress or fury, one can’t but feel. For this person, forgetting his lines while filming was as serious and infuriating as anything could ever be. I am afraid I am more dilettante about such occasional lapses.

A remembrance of a much-loved man without a dud moment, although it is KB who, family aside, wins the afternoon by several lengths. Celebrations, memorials, funerals and charitable evenings are not competitive, you are thinking. To an actor, let me assure you, every single opportunity to open your mouth and perform to an audience alongside other actors is always a fierce and biting adversarial combat, and do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise.