My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (26 page)

Just then, a girl emerges from the bar to change a barrel. She looks me up and down, with the pink umbrella shielding my dignity (or what’s left of it), and says, “Can I help you?” What a question. It’s three forty-five, I’m naked but for the stupidly comic pink umbrella, it’s cold and I’m in Hackney. “Pretty much anything you do would be a help.” Ten pee, a sweet, a match. I’ve got nothing. Eventually, she offers to call me a locksmith. After I’ve waited for what seems like an age, but is probably only thirty minutes, she emerges again. I ask her how long he’s going to be, and she says, “Oh sorry, I forgot.”

Finally moved to action by my increasingly despairing pleas, she roots round in the cellar and comes up with a pair of those chef ’s trousers—giant, musty, stinking things—and lets me come down to use the phone because it’s “quietening down a bit now.”

I pull the trousers on—they’re much too big—and I have to hold them up by hand with the pink umbrella over my shoulder.

I walk into the bar behind this girl and, obviously, it’s gay night.

Gay night. Really gay it was, the whole night dedicated to gayness. The whole place was full of gay lads, sniffi ng poppers and

GHB. As I’m trying to use the phone—with change that she’s grudgingly lent me—my trousers are falling down, and all these gay lads touch me up while I’m struggling to make the call. But I finally manage to get through to the locksmith I spoke to before. He agrees to come, and I go back outside and wait for ages.

And ages.

Eventually he turns up, takes out a bit of plastic that looks like a bit of cut-off Coke bottle, and runs it down the narrow gap between the door and the frame, roughly the way you’d swipe a credit card through a machine. The door just opens straight away—the whole process probably takes about ten seconds—and he charges me £250. Instant karma. I spit, almost 213

RUSSELL BRAND

before the spit lands, the door slams shut behind me, the crime and punishment administered in the same moment. Daniele never found out about this terrible indiscretion.

Once I finally got a bit of success, it became clear that my internal deficit of sadness and longing would not really be sated by the things I’d always thought would save me. Th is realization

made me turn to hard drugs—specifically heroin—in an even more concerted way than I ever had before.

Ever since the first couple of times I’d taken it, in my early twenties, I’d always maintained a great interest in heroin. I’d sort of fallen in love with the warmth of it—the way it felt like crawling back into the womb. I always knew it’d be the one, because it was the only drug that did what was promised.

I won’t lapse into saying that it did exactly what it said on the tin, because I despise advert-authorized idioms, but heroin delivered. LSD kind of does a bit, especially when all the things that are familiar to you peel away and you suddenly realize the fragility of how you normally see the world. Marijuana kind of doesn’t really, although it’s a laugh for a while (I say that having smoked it constantly for a decade). Alcohol makes you sick and gives you a headache. Crack is like inhaling plastic, but so brief and flimsy and brittle as a high. Normal cocaine just makes you nervous, amphetamines are even worse and ecstasy never really agreed with me. But heroin gets the job done.

What it mainly does is take you right out of reality, and plant you somewhere more manageable. In short, it contextualizes everything else as meaningless.

All of us, I think, have a vague idea that we’re missing something. Some say that thing is God; that all the longing we feel—be it for a lover, or a football team, or a drug—is merely an inappropriate substitute for the longing we’re supposed to 214

Photographic Insert II

Haircuts must be high.

I persevered with that

haircut for longer than

my dad persevered

with his marriage.

Dagenham Park, elfin,

porcine, oddly Puerto

Rican; this look has it

all. I loved that shirt.

This is the first time I performed. I found the best light on that stage and I lost my virginity to one of those girls.

Actor cake.

Callan Language School, with my beloved

students. I slept with none of these ones.

Me, doing acting in The B lil.

Me and Karl in Ilford Park, scrabbling around for fame.

I will pose nude for work.