And:
3. I have a hopelessly addictive nature.
Perhaps you’re wondering what formulated my peculiar sexuality? It ain’t that peculiar. I’m a bloke from Essex who likes birds with big bottoms and big boobs: Lucy Pinder, Linsey Dawn McKenzie, Maria Whittaker, lovely dolly-birds.* I don’t mean
* Linsey Dawn McKenzie, Lucy Pinder and Maria Whittaker are all Page 3 girls, although Linsey has, blessedly, strayed into porn. Even at fifteen she was chomping at the bit to get her boobs out, appearing on breakfast TV with her mother to demand the right to reveal them, causing me, a seventeen-year-old viewer, to nearly weep with desire and confusion.
These women are widely presumed to be intellectually uncomplicated; this is, of course, a prejudiced view and almost certainly true.
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to be dismissive, they might be incredibly dark, fretful Sylvia Plath–style heroines for all I know, but if they are I’d rather not find out because life’s difficult enough without women who su-perficially resemble a “Disneyland for my Dinkle” thrusting me into a tortuous realm of introspection.
Although I sometimes like to portray myself as a rakish fop, meandering up corridors, waltzing around squares, fox-trotting across quads, nimbly tottering through dormitories and boudoirs—I like the same women as readers of Zoo and Nuts. Strip away the innovative barnet, mascara, inky, bejeweled wet suit and the ol’ gift and I’m just a West Ham fan from Grays—a straightforward, red-blooded sort of fella.
The episode that defined my relations with women—and with myself—occurred in Hong Kong with my dad. I was seventeen. His third marriage had just broken up so he needed someone to go on holiday with. I was unemployed, penniless, birdless and desperate for his approval; we were the perfect holiday companions. On the plane home he said, “I went away with a boy and came back with a man.” Both of those people were me, so what happened to induce such a significant transition?
When I think of my father his face is obscured by a newspaper, which in my mind he was forever behind, turning over the corner to flick me a glance, rebuttal or gag. We get on best when reciting lines from comedies that we both like, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Fools and Horses, or chatting about West Ham.
Trips to (East, East) East London kept our relationship alive but when we traveled further east like bizarro pioneers we found a new land of hope and opportunity.
In addition to Hong Kong we visited Bali, Singapore and Thailand, and in all those places we saw incredible things and 132
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if you’d like to know more I recommend you go, or get a Rough Guide, because as an adolescent there was only one sight I was interested in seeing and it would be disingenuous of me to proselytize about sleeping buddhas or monkey forests or floating markets when you know and I know that that trip was about one thing. One thing, done repeatedly. One thing that chewed its way into my barren little soul and gave me, at long last, a physical pursuit that I was good at. Sex. Disposable sex, sex as leisure, sex for pleasure, sex you sordid little treasure, drag me from monotony and give me kicks too hot to measure.
Day one: we went to some sleazy dive hidden behind a thick black drape where women from the East traipsed louchely along the mirrored promenade in garish beachwear. Th at
promenade was a conveyor belt from which produce could be selected; I didn’t know that then but my cock did, twitching, preparing frantically, trying to recall correct procedure. “Th is
is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill.” My dad sat there next to me, familiar with this glistening and foreign terrain.
I didn’t understand what I was witnessing, but by jingo, I knew I liked it. Dumbstruck, I sat looking at the women, their hair, each single strand identifiable as it responded to a fan that had been placed there to elicit exactly the reaction I felt in my pantaloons, their toenails, painted and perfect, each solitary toe a match for me. They walked with the ease of women that fuck for a living. They didn’t seem enslaved or exploited—to me they weren’t; they were mistresses, goddesses, salvation. “I don’t care if there is no God because she exists, she’s there. She can resolve everything with a redeeming kiss. She can heal me with a smile, a touch, a word.” In the beginning there was the word, and the word was “fuck.”
“I can’t wait to tell my mates that I saw these women in 133
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swimsuits.” Before long, I was sat on a barstool with a Fili-pino girl called Mary-Lou, or something similarly unlikely. I thought, “I can’t wait to tell my mates I was sat talking to Mary- Lou.” That quickly became, “I can’t wait to tell my mates I was kissing her.” The velocity so severe that I could but smile for the g-force. Then we were leaving, a street, a cab, perfume, hairspray, the three Asian prostitutes that my dad was drunkenly herding—Mary-Lou, another girl and the madam of the club, who had come along just for sport (when I learned that she’d come along without payment, I thought that a testimony to my dad’s powers). Arriving back at the opulent Mandarin Palace Hotel we revolved into the lobby, like fairground teens dismounting a waltzer, the knowing staff boredly ignoring the “Click, clack, click, clack ” of hired heels across the marble floor as they beat the well-trodden path from door to lift.* And I, with nervous downcast eyes and butterflies, made my way to the elevator and then up into the room. Once there, the room was illuminated by the TV, and the two twin beds waited like sentries, pre emptively guarding the orgy.
“Get some champagne, Russell,” my dad said, so I called down to room service. “I’ll order not the most expensive champagne, but the second-most,” I hastily calculated.
My dad set about unwrapping his two prostitutes, like pass the parcel where the music never stopped, and I sat nervously on the edge of the bed with Mary-Lou, kissing her and thinking she was beautiful and falling in love. I’d only had anything close
* A “waltzer” is a Tilt-A-Whirl, I’ve just learned. I think our name is better. Would you like a waltz? Yes, please! How about a Tilt-A-Whirl? Fuck that! It sounds like a non consensual, diagonal sex attack.
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to sex once before—jabbing my silly prick at poor Marianne Laybourn.
Naked. I was shy about my body then. I had trouble getting hard, the blow job seemed daft, the way it feels when a customs official pulls your trousers down, or a doctor puts his finger up your arse: not sexual, just giggly and intrusive.
After the un-sex, I carried her in my weedy arms out onto the balcony to look at the view of a great, looming skyscraper, disapprovingly observing.
She was a good prostitute, Mary-Lou, she played her part very well. She didn’t make me feel embarrassed, and was incredibly romantic really, given the context. I stroked Mary-Lou’s hair and kissed her cheek and traced my finger down her perfect nose, scored by the cacophony from the adjacent bedlam,
“Yeah, come on!” and “Phwooar, you’re juicy!”
As she was about to go, she said expertly, “Russell, I must leave now before I fall in love with you.” My heart skipped, and I heard, “Oh, fucking hell, I’m gonna be sick”—a disapproving announcement from dear old Ron.
Awake. Yesterday’s shadow lay heavy on the dawn—half-full champagne glasses, discarded bottles and underwear, perhaps even a lipstick and a broken heart.
My dad, concealed behind a newspaper, folded down the top right-hand corner. “Did you wear a condom with that bird last night?” “Oh, no I didn’t, Dad.” He sniffed, “You should’ve.”
Then the corner of the page flicked up once again, and he was gone. In the course of the rest of that holiday, I fucked loads more prostitutes; always got a hard- on, never wore a condom and never fell in love. In Bangkok when bar girls in Pat-Pong left their posts to follow me down the street, cooing and touching my hair, I felt that I had my dad’s unequivocal approval.
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When I came back from Thailand, I was much more comfortab
le around women—sure in the knowledge that I had “come back a man.” Some of the attributes of a man included, “I have now had a prostitute stick her finger up my arse while sucking my cock”—I remember the first time that happened, thinking,
“Bloody hell, this is an interesting way to live your life.” I still didn’t become utterly confident, but it had hardened me. And my sexuality had morphed forever from bewildered innocence into something more complex and rapacious.
This change was apparent as soon as I came home from the Far East. One of the first things that happened when I returned from that holiday was I got an acting job on this show called Eddie and the Bouffants. It was an Anglia TV program about the evolution of a hairdresser’s—there were scenes set in the ’50s,
’60s and ’70s, with all these different wigs. It’s not a show that has gone down in TV history as a landmark of quality and innovation, but David Morrissey—a really good actor—was in it as well, fresh out of RADA, he was.*
On the shoot I was sharing a room with this gay lad on the makeup team, who told me about going to gay orgies and sticking a puppet of a policeman up some fella’s bum. And there was this woman on the crew, she was thirty-two, which to me—being seventeen—seemed preposterously grown-up. And I fucked her, well . . . as best I could. I struggled a bit with getting an erection again—this was my first encounter post-Th ailand—but
she helped me get into the swing of things by being kind of rude and unabashed. On our first date she stuck her finger in her own pussy and then in my mouth. I thought “Oh my Gawd!
* The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the poshest, best, most famous drama school in the world.
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What kind of world are these people living in?” So these were the folk that initiated me into a more sexualized world—prostitutes, that thirty-two-year-old and my dad. After that, I started to get a bit more confident about sex—and popped love in a self-storage facility in Finchley Road. V
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The fi rst time I was arrested it was for cultivating marijuana. I had about thirty dismal plants—optimistically nurtured from the seeds that you get free in weed, not good weed; “No stems, no seeds, no sticks” is how Snoop Dogg describes proper grass, and he should know. After my holiday with my dad there was a period of eighteen months where I moved back to Grays with my mum and Colin—it was fraught. I kept myself as anesthe-tized as possible and signed on. I grew the plants to save money—pointless business, I’d have got a better buzz from bludgeoning myself over the head with the pots they were planted in. For someone who smoked as much weed as I did, I was pretty enraged, and carved into my arms as a kind of medieval release and as a palpable demonstration of internal trauma. One of my mum’s friends advised her, “Next time Russell cuts himself in front of you, just call the police.” She did. I went berserk in the midst of some tiresome conflict and slashed myself with a knife.
My weary arm yawned bored blood, and Mum called for an ambulance; the police came too, perhaps for something to do, they were always on the lookout for an interesting collar in Essex. Before they arrived, I’d gone. I must have been eighteen by now, and I’d been doing a kids’ TV show called Mud. Th ere was
a car that I’d bought myself with my wages parked outside. I 138
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couldn’t drive it yet, but the only way I ever used to get anything done was by setting myself a deadline: “If I get a car, then I’ll have to learn to drive it.”
As sensible as it was, this plan did not allow for uncontrollable losses of temper. I went outside and gave that car a Basil Fawlty– style thrashing while it just carried on being a car much in the same way as it would have if I’d given it a glass of wine and combed its hair. I broke the windscreen and kicked the door in—then sobbed off round to the MacLean’s house, carrying the knife that I’d cut myself with and loads of grass in my sock—and I was smoking a joint and calming down with the sympathetic surrogates when three carloads of riot police in shields and helmets arrived simultaneously through the front and back doors as if they were about to nick “Leon.”* As the police poured in through every orifice of his house, Bill MacLean—a great big hod-carrying Northern man bemused by this overkill—shook his head and said, “Fooking ’ell, it’s only Russell.”
I’d managed to get rid of the knife in the house, which wasn’t an incredible operation—it was a domestic kitchen-knife, I just put it down, I didn’t have to hide it in the concrete of a fl yover or feed it to some pigs, but when I was escorted into the police car, cuffed and crestfallen, I still had the grass in my sock. At the station I encountered all the shoelaces and belt business and the realization that there are forces in the world that can curtail and contain you. I didn’t want to be in that cell. I wanted to leave. But the police left me in there for ages. It was sad and annoying, full of sick and shouting. Plus I was meant to have a bird coming round.
* Leon: The eponymous Jean Renault simpleton assassin who fell in love with the child Natalie Portman.
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I did have to go to court, and I was convicted of possession of marijuana. They dropped the more serious charge of cultivation.
I was able to employ this experience creatively when I got a part in an episode of Th
e Bill playing a teenage racist. When I
sat in the pretend “Bill” cell I did some spiffing acting on account of my recent troubles.
A week later, I was arrested again. I was sitting in Carnaby Street, waiting for an audition for a Tango advert—not those daft slapping ones, but that same campaign. I was smoking a joint when a big meat wagon went past, all full of police like they were off on an outing. I thought, “If you act suspiciously now, you’re fucked.” So I made eye contact with one of the coppers, and took a big draw on my joint as they went past. The van stopped and reversed back. “Alright young man, what’s going on?” Th is policeman conducted my arrest with such urbane and ironic self-awareness that I was still chuckling when he cuffed me and threw me in the van. “Nothing up my right sleeve, nothing up my left sleeve,” he said like a TV magician as he searched my bag.
They took me to Bow Street nick, where Wilde was held, so I pretended I was in Oscar’s cell and ranted at that idiot Bosie who ballsed up Wilde’s life. They dropped the charge. Th e Met
are a bit more grown up about that kind of thing, whereas Essex police it’s, “Reefer Madness! Have you any idea what this stuff does to a marriage?”
These comic arrests became more and more frequent as I became more and more drugged and less interested in observing laws that seemed abstract. I swapped my bike for a load of acid and set about reevaluating my life. “Russell, you do not reevaluate your life on a trip,” said Dean, as if I’d breached one of acid’s central tenets. It really made him rather cross. He was actually a lovely chap, and when in the course of my reevaluation 140
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I started to cry he gave me my bike back, which I was then able to exchange for some amphetamines the next day. We were conducting this symposium in my mum’s shed having returned to Essex from wherever the hell we were staying especially to collect collateral. We were both high having taken a couple of tabs and while I wept and hugged my bike’s front wheel, for in that moment my bike became a talisman of childhood, innocence and the soul, Dean chatted with my mum with the grace and ease of Lady Diana visiting a children’s ward.
We went into the house, Dean charming my mum’s friends and delivering perfectly judged anecdotes while I had a mental breakdown because the plates they
were dining from were
slightly different to how I remembered them. It wasn’t the acid, they were slightly different, it was a very subtle diff erence, they were still brown and cream floral plates but a bit diff erent, that’s what threw me, the subtlety. If you’re gonna get new plates, ge
t new plates. They were so similar that I couldn’t understand the logic of the replacement. It was like looking at your mum’s face and noticing that her eyes were a centimeter closer. Which they were, but that was definitely the acid.
I left Dean doing card tricks to the enchanted gathering who were oblivious to his expertly concealed intoxication and went into the garden to continue my maligned evaluation. With the help of my constant mistress, the moon, I decided I needed to go to drama school. I dashed into the house, told my startled mother of my epiphany, smashed a couple of my crockery-foes and disappeared into the night leaving Dean to apologize and close with a song.
There were two places that I auditioned for in the hope of re-building my life. One of them was RADA, and the other was called Drama Centre, which was built around the teachings of Stanislavski—the great Russian dramatic theorist, who popu-142
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larized Method acting. You had to pay twenty or thirty quid to audition, and that was a pain in the arse to get hold of. I probably tried to swap my bike for auditions.
I can’t remember what happened at RADA, but I didn’t get in, so I assume it didn’t go well. I’d developed the habit at Italia Conti of drinking and taking drugs when I performed.
And when I rehearsed. Or read scripts. Or moved about. Before performing I used to get so nervous that it was impossible to cope without chemicals. The nervousness is not vague, but overwhelming—almost crippling. It loosens my stools. It aff ects me bio chemically and anatomically.
This is what the auditions are like: two students from year 2
sit on the panel with Christopher Fettes, the intensely charis-matic inspiration for his ex-student Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, his partner, Yat Malmgren, a Swedish Yoda who once danced for Hitler—why he did this I’ve never understood.
Why did Hitler even need dancers? No wonder we won the war, Hitler was dicking about watching ballet while the Eastern front was being compromised—and Reuven Adiv, who was a contemporary of Al Pacino at the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio.
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