My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Read Online Free PDF

party. I went round there and was all crazy and off the hook—jumping in his paddling pool and knocking things over and being all mental. If it had been an office party, I’d have photocopied my arse or eff ed some temp in the stock cupboard but, as it wasn’t, I simply did the childish equivalent. Which meant, I think, I stood on the edge of a plastic paddling pool making it hemorrhage into the lawn, and taunted the children’s entertainer with a balloon sausage dog that I held between my legs as a humorously misshapen phallus.
    When I saw Ben at school the next Monday, I was expecting him to say, “Hey, Russell, great party man. You’re wild!
    Listen, I’m thinking of going to Vegas next week—wanna come?” But instead he sobbed, “You’re the bad boy who ruined my birthday,” and ran off crying. “Jeez, what a downer—that kid totally killed my buzz. I was the life and soul of that poxy little shindig—man what a square.” Thus another friendship was dashed on the cruel rocks amid the storm of my self-destruction.
    You’ll see later that I made no great leaps forward in the ensuing decades, either with regards to my conduct at parties or my perception of my own conduct. Many’s the time I’d strut off stage at some dingy comedy pit thinking, “There! Feel the magic!” as the audience queued for refunds.
    From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities—“This is how you are with your mum, and this is how you are with your dad”—so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And this image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even 25

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    further. I had a sense of formulating a papier-mâché version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some snug suburban barracks. When I used to watch TV
    as a tot, I’d sit really close to the screen: just trying to get into that box. V
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    Shame Innit?
    Over the road from where I grew up there was a disused chalkpit and an overgrown and abandoned army barracks. I would go there—losing days at a time—to retrieve newts: these quick, sharp, darting slivers of energy. I’d liberate them from the slav-ery of nature—trees and ponds and that—knowing that they craved the freedom of a tiny death in my bedroom opposite.
    It was amazing, that bit of wasteground. Obviously now, through the nostalgic haze of my adult perspective, it seems impossible that this place could ever have existed. Th ere were
    these concrete bunkers—utterly featureless, like Stonehenge, but all overgrown with brambles and moss. They were linked together by underground tunnels, in which you’d have to completely trust yourself—walking into absolute, terrifying darkness, within which anything could lurk.
    There was a strong stink of damp, the occasional crisp-packet, discarded solvents and evidence of sexual congress. There was a burned- out car, and a pervasive sense that tramps might have been there. The whole place had a mythical air about it and—informed as I was by reading C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton at a very early age—it felt like a fantastic kingdom. I was lucky to have a place where my fantasy life could manifest itself.
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    RUSSELL BRAND
    There was one bit that was all red sands, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet. And, with all the lakes and chalk mountains, it wouldn’t have surprised me to look up and see two moons. It just seemed extraordinary that you could be in gray, desolate, suburban Essex, and there would be something so exotic so nearby.
    Apart from the wilderness over the road, the psycho-geography of Grays was basically irrelevant to me. There’s not a particular cultural identity to growing up in industrial Essex, and southern suburbia in general: it’s just very banal. And I didn’t really feel safe in that place. I didn’t really like it. It felt closed to me.
    As a child, the idea of class would obviously not have been a