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Amanda Alguero Alejos, I still get satisfaction from writing her name, the three As, triple A. A schoolroom endorsement of the woman I came closest to loving. It was a very volatile relationship, but it was fun. I couldn’t speak Spanish properly and she couldn’t really speak En glish. But instead of that creating a situation where we couldn’t communicate, it meant everything became very simple—we didn’t waste time discussing nonsense, we just talked about very simple things. To describe pirates to me without using the word “pirate,” which she did not know (her En glish teacher, me, was on drugs), she said “very bad boys only love for gold.”
I was with Amanda for six years in the end—on and off —and lived with her again quite recently, but there was never really any prolonged period when we were what you’d call comfortable together.
I’d go over to see her in Ibiza, and we’d just ricochet from argument, to sex, to argument (I chased her down the street in nothing but a towel once, shouting “please come back”). Th en I’d
return home to London, to a life of whores and heroin.
A further complicating factor in what was an already troubling dichotomy was Amanda’s job. In the early part of my time at MTV, she was managing a motel in Ibiza which was affi li-224
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ated with a famously seedy nightclub. It was the most decadent, vile place. I’d go and visit her there and there’d be loads of drugs and fucking going on everywhere you looked.
This was extraordinary to me, because obviously this was the kind of thing that I was generally into, but at that time I was in love with someone. And it seemed oddly in keeping that when I finally found a woman who I felt quite romantic toward, she was ensconced in the kind of de cadent environment that would cause me to constantly balk at the context of this unaccustomed tenderness.
From the day I met her at the language school, I wanted Amanda with me always, but because we spent most of our time apart, I went through a lot of psychological tumult, and I increasingly used heroin to take the edges off those emotional extremes. When things went well, I’d smoke heroin to celebrate, and when they went badly, I’d smoke some more to comfort myself.
Th
e first time I realized I’d become addicted to it, I was staying with Amanda in a risible ’70s-style hotel in Ibiza. It was a horrible beige nightmare of a place, which claimed to provide four-star accommodation. I don’t know where they’d got those stars from—they must have tumbled from the heavens, ’cos the AA certainly couldn’t have seen fit to award them.
Amanda didn’t like me using heroin. She knew I’d been doing it in London, but I’d told her I’d given up, so I had to hide my drug-taking from her. On this occasion, though, there’d been no opportunity for me to smoke it in secret. When I said I thought I might go for a walk, Amanda was (understandably) suspicious and insisted on coming with me. At that point I began to get anxious. I could feel myself heating up and breaking out in a sweat, and then my legs started kicking and jumping.
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the nausea and the sweating, but I hate it when your legs go all kicky. That’s where the phrase “kicking the habit” comes from.
When I was traveling, I used to smoke heroin in terminal toilets. I’d burn it and then inhale the vapor and hold my breath until there wasn’t a single bit left. When you do eventually breathe, the smell is so beautiful. It tastes like warm, chocolatey tar, sweet ink, saccharin venom. Obviously I knew it was addictive, but prior to this occasion in that appropriately brown Ibiza hotel room, I hadn’t yet realized that this small drawback was relevant to me.
Amanda eventually fell asleep, and I had to go into the bathroom and quietly unfold all the things I needed, which I’d managed to secrete about the place. I got the foil out, sat on the toilet, lit the lighter under the foil, and the tiny lump of heroin started to liquefy and bubble. Then it begins to run along the foil, and as it does so a vapor escapes, and you have to hover above it, sucking it up with a tube.
I was very conscious of the sound of the lighter, then almost as soon as the smoke had hit the back of my throat, that feeling—the kicky leg, the sweating—it just went. It was like turning off a light. Then I could lean back and everything was suddenly all relaxing and beautiful. It was at this point that I knew that I was an addict, though the pain of that realization was greatly mitigated by the impact of the heroin: that’s how it gets you.
We filmed a lot of Dancefl oor Charts in Ibiza, and I got another job there presenting a program for Sky One with dear, lovely Tess Daly. She was very kind to me. She once had to knock on my hotel room door and drag me out of bed to go to work when I was all smacked up.
I used to get in a lot of trouble going back and forth between London and Ibiza. One time, my pursuit of drugs led me to be 226
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shot at with what Matt Morgan describes as “a tiny gun.” I was on my way to the airport, and I had to go to this estate in Swiss Cottage, taking the dealer with me in the MTV account car (I had dealings with this individual over a long period of time without ever being sure if he/she was a man or a woman).
Anyway, me and the androgynous creature went to the tower block where Goldie used to live (the drum and bass pioneer turned EastEnders star plays no further part in this anecdote, it was just that whenever you had to go anywhere near that place, people always used to point it out and say “Goldie lived there”). The driver took the dealer’s bike out of the back of the car, while he/she went inside to get the drugs, and as he/she did that a pellet pinged off the top of the car—someone was firing at us from inside the block.
It might seem a bit reckless to be picking up drugs on the way to Heathrow, but my need for a regular supply of narcotics would not be constrained by the exigencies of international air travel. I generally traveled with drugs up my arse in the belief that should customs officers decide to pursue this unsavory line of inquiry my day would be ruined and the discovery of crack or heroin couldn’t make it much worse.
You’d think the presence of packages of illegal narcotics within the confines of my own body would have restricted my normal inclination to seek out center stage. And no doubt this might have been the case, had it not been for the unlimited quantities of alcohol available in business-class lounges. Th ey’ve
now attached metal teats to the tops of the bottles in those lounges, ostensibly to aid in the pouring of the liquor, but actually to indicate ownership. But at that stage the general understanding was that you could have as many drinks as you liked, so I used to just take the bottle.
I was thrown off an Iberia Airlines jet at Barcelona airport, 227
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after I refused to remove my feet from the top of the seat in front of me. Scruffy people are not welcome in any class other than economy. If you find a way of affording overpriced travel without dressing like a boffin it irritates conformists. Th ey’ve
been assured that by relinquishing freedom and dressing all square they will be rewarded and if someone turns up claiming privileges for which they’ve eschewed good haircuts they get browned off and look for ways to penalize you.
I offered the haughty air hostess the perfect chance to tell me off by being a bit drunk and bawdy and lounging about. She told me off but I ignored her. I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if no matter what happens I refuse to cooperate with this woman?” I know she was just doing her job but I sensed she was enjoying being authoritative and we all know “ just doing my job” is the excuse offered up for enacting genocide. She became increasingly agitated and elicited the support of the pilot who, honestly, fl ung open the cockpit door and had a go at me over his shoulder like a dad chastising naughty daughters on a motoring holiday. I ignored that too; I was in a silly mood. The pilot made an announcement over the Tannoy that because of “passenger disrup
tion,” the flight would not be taking off, thereby falling back on a form of psychological warfare constantly deployed against me in childhood, where the teacher says, “Because Russell’s been naughty, the whole class has to stay behind,” in the hope of turning everyone else against you.
I’d put up with that kind of thing as a kid, but now that I’d read a bit of Noam Chomsky and a Che Guevara biography I understood the way that society is formulated; I was damned if I was going to put up with any more of that nonsense. I got defiantly to my feet and (realizing I would get no support from the bourgeoisie and the landed classes) swept grandly through the 228
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curtain separating business class from economy and stood there, holding my flip-flops in my hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced to the packed aircraft,
“you are being told that this plane is being taken back to the airport because of the behavior of a passenger. Well, I am that passenger, and let me tell you that I have committed no crime. I was simply resting my feet on the chair in front, in the same way that I can see many of you are. Can we be dealt with in this fashion by authority? If we don’t take this opportunity to bind together and stand up against the people that have power over us, then surely we will forever be oppressed. They are planning to throw me from this plane. If you refuse to let that happen, then it cannot happen.” Take that society. “Who’s with me?” So came the cry from the obviously drunk TV presenter, newly arrived from business class. I would like to say that at this point all the passengers rose up and marched to the front of the plane, like in the fi lm United 93, and overthrew, not terrorists from an Islamic fundamentalist sect, but the terrorists of the corporate sector, who seek to govern us in every aspect of our lives (be it walking through Bluewater, be it working for IBM or be it—as in this case—on an Iberia Airlines flight). What actually happened was that one drunk man, seeing the chance for a fi ght, nodded enthusiastically—even though I think he was Spanish and didn’t understand, and everyone else just looked at their newspapers.
The plane pulled over and security got on. There was one man and one woman. “Russell,” said my brain, finally turning up, “this is one of those decisions that you have to make quite quickly. Are you going to dart under the seats and make yourself really difficult to catch, or will you just go quietly?” “Well brain, as you’re so late, I think I might go for the former stupider option to punish you.” I began to dart down an aisle. “I 229
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should probably mention that your anus is full of heroin,” countered my brain, the little know-all. The security people took me off into this little room to have a bit of a go at me, and I apologized with such heartfelt sincerity that not only did they neglect to give me a full body search, but the security woman booked a hotel for me, because there weren’t any more flights that night.
And she gave me a hug when I left.
I had this job in Cuba once, which I got through Nigel Klarfeld (my then-agent). It was a chewing gum advert, filmed in Havana. I was reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo at the time, so my head was awash with all these deliciously palatable ideas about capitalism and consumerism—ideas which seemed to be borne out by the endeavor in which I was engaged. Of all the con-230
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sumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment—you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.
Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, “I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.” Fired up by this self- evident absurdity, I threw myself into learning about Che and Castro and the way a handful of men were able to seize power in Havana because of the corruption of the Mafia and American politicians (I also met Castro’s brother in a nightclub, but that is another story).
A short while before this, I had a part in a musical history of Cuba. Martino Sclavi was producing it for a friend of his who was at film school. Martino is an exceptional man, cosmopoli-tan, principled and bright, and he facilitated a vital transition in my life. His parents are Italian, but he grew up in America and Germany. He is brilliantly educated and humors me like John Rogers when I tell him things that he already knows.
The problem with the role I’d been given was that it involved singing and dancing, both of which—but especially the latter—I was very nervous about. My talents in these two areas were simply not up to the standard you’d expect of a man who had once auditioned for the
boy-band 5ive; I sang George Michael’s
“Faith” into an empty bottle.
I was still working at the language school at this point, and the night before filming, I had a really bad spasm in my back while I was teaching, and fell to the floor in front of the class, completely unable to move. Unfortunately, my students knew me as a bit of a joker so my plaintive cries of “Help! I’m in agony”
were met with a cheery chorus of, “Oh Mr. Russell, you are a very funny man.”
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but not before several of my charges had tantalized me as I lay on the ground by waving crisps in front of my face. The other staff were a bit off with me because of the whole AIDS thing. I told them back spasms were mentioned in the leaflet and that they ought to be more sympathetic. When the ambulance arrived, they had to wheel me out of there upright, propped up on the same kind of stretcher thing that Hannibal Lecter gets put on, with that grille over his face. Although I didn’t have one of those.
Amanda came with me to the hospital, and I went through some work with her in this curtained-off bit of the ward, while they gave me some painkilling injections. Her pronunciation was terrible, so I kept telling her, “Come on Amanda, you’ve got to learn this.” My back hurt and I was being a bit aggressive.
This Scottish drunk hollered from the next bed—“Ah shut up, ye bastard!”
I recovered quickly enough, but I was so fucking glad I didn’t have to do that dancing. The guy who was doing the choreography—this quite handsome black lad—stepped up in my place, and ended up lip-synching to my voice. It was ridiculous to see him in the finished film, miming with my voice coming out, like I was some kind of Bollywood soundtrack artist.
Martino (who you’d think might have heeded this warning about my general reliability as a colleague) ended up becoming my business partner when I set up my production company, Vanity Projects, a couple of years later. It was around the same time we started that company that I finally convinced Amanda to leave Spain and come and live with me in London.
Her two conditions for doing this were that 1. I should quit heroin, and 2. I should get us somewhere to live. In pursuit of the first of these goals, Martino booked the three of us a cottage in the Cotswolds. The last night (as I grandly, though ultimately inaccurately, styled it at the time) of my using, I was presenting 232
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the annual awards for this dance music magazine, with June Sarpong.
I had a coterie of friends around me, including Amanda. I smoked abundant marijuana, smack and crack, and drank a skinful, as well as taking four tabs of Viagra, so I could still fuck. At one point, I mispronounced the name of a famous DJ (I think it was Danny Tenaglia, but I’m still not sure even now, to be honest) and fell off the stage. Boy George later wrote in his Daily Express column that I’d been brilliant and had done these things deliberately. The canyon between the perception of me and my actual reality seemed to be widening on a daily basis.
The next day, me, Amanda and Martino took an MTV cab to the Cotswolds, costing them £400. I took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, an ounce of weed, and loads of videos to get me through my rattle (as we denizens of the drugs underworld term it). It was awful—hot and cold, nausea, and, worst of all, I remained hor-rifically awake all weekend. The best thing about heroin is it turns your
life into a waking dream, but then, when I needed it most, my mistress sleep had deserted me.
I still made it through though, with Amanda and Martino’s help, and also managed to fulfill the other
precondition
for Amanda moving to London, by renting this ridiculously gorgeous flat, just off Brick Lane. This glamorously empty, warehouse-style apartment soon echoed with misery, as our relationship almost instantly became a psychological war.
Amanda was a strong, beautiful woman. After a string of infidelities on my part, she finally had the good sense to leave me. I just came home one night, and all her clothes were gone. I thought this a flabbergasting affront, and threw myself with ever more self-destructive intensity into my work, womanizing and, above all, a renewed and increasingly all-encompassing relationship with heroin.
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I thought, “Well, at least now she’s left me, I can just take loads of drugs again.” The moment when you decide not to try any more is always such a relief with an addiction. Even now, four and a half years since I got clean, there’s still a lot of eff ort involved for me in not taking drugs. But that “Ah, fuck it” moment, there’s some sort of beauty in that—maybe even more so than in the drugs themselves. There’s something about the col-lapse, the yielding; it’s giving into death I suppose, but it kind of makes you feel at ease. I’ve got this sense in me sometimes that perhaps death will simply be blissful—an endless expanse of nothingness, which might be a great relief from the tyranny of life’s minutiae.
Throughout this period, my instinctive drive toward the abyss was coming through more and more strongly in the stand-up shows I was doing. I had long since abandoned the idea of actually rehearsing material that was meant to be funny. Instead I’d generally end up out of my mind on a cocktail of heroin and Smirnoff Ice, releasing locusts, cutting up pigs’ heads, smashing up dead mice and birds with a hammer and then throwing them into the audience. On other occasions, I’d slash myself with glass and take drugs on stage. I once did an “industry showcase” at a venue called 93 Feet East—just round the corner from the flat in Brick Lane. Loads of people turned up, including Th e Mighty
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 20