My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up by Russell Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

and George Best.* He, like my dad, had been a brilliant footballer in his youth. He was handsome but utterly lacked glamour. Not that lacking glamour is necessarily a terrible thing; Alan Bennett lacks glamour and is perhaps the greatest living Englishman.† Colin was, I suppose, part of the paradigm where dead beautiful women sometimes neglect to develop a personality, because they’ll be invited to functions regardless:
    “Just pop a frock on, and I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
    A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo, regardless of gender. Colin moved into the house that we already inhabited, and never really recovered from the sense that he lived in a home that my mum and dad had occupied together.
    Because Colin had a job (he initially worked nights in a factory, checking breeze blocks, and then later became a van driver), there was a flush of new income into the house hold. Whenever a new consumer item was bought—a sofa, or a washing machine—it would be worshipped like a Dyson Deity entering the home: as dear Morrissey said, “Each house hold appliance is like a new science in my town.” Colin would extract a tiresome price for these exciting new material idols.
    He had these pointless, hateful drills, like rotating the sofa cushions at night—lest the sofa should show some sign of the
    * George Best was the best British footballer of all time. A self- destructive, alcoholic genius, he came to prominence during the pop cultural revolution of the ’60s, and was frequently referred to as the “fifth Beatle” like umpteen other people at that time—there were so many fifth Beatles that, had they all been allowed on stage, they’d’ve made Earth, Wind
    & Fire look like an underfunded one-man band. Four years after his death, Manchester United fans still sing anthems in his honor; think Mickey Mantle meets Jim Morrison.
    † Alan Bennett is an English playwright and comic legend. He is an integral part of the British comedy landscape, as he became famous as part of the Beyond the Fringe team that included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He is northern, bespectacled, working class, gay, timid and demure, and his most famous character was a Church of England minister, but passages of his prose have the intensity of Byron.
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    Fledgling Hospice
    passing of time, or experience, or joy. And him sat forever in reluctant pants in the corner of the room, clutching a can of Ten-nent’s Super, or some other homeless lager, the faithful TV
    remote forever resting on his naked thighs like Blofeld’s cat.
    I was unable to categorize or understand the flow of Colin’s moods. All I knew was that he were perpetually displeased with something, and fundamentally disapproved of me. I was the an-tithesis of all that he stood for—this simple, working-class man, a humble individual with low expectations of life, whose only dream of becoming a successful footballer had long ago been packed away. And while in retrospect I can understand his resentment of my Quentin Crisp quirkiness—flitting around, all self-absorbed and vain and unusual—for me, he was a toxic in-terloper in my home. Colin: this essentially misanthropic man, 43

    RUSSELL BRAND
    not having enough vitality to be actively hateful, but constantly down on all life.
    I had a growing sense that I was a disappointment to people: not only that I wasn’t the kind of person my dad would have wanted me to be, but also that I wasn’t able to look after my mum; either to prevent her from getting ill, or to stop Colin from moving in. All that seemed to be left to me were my own limited resources, and an intensifying thirst for animal friendships.
    I really craved the company of animals—the wordless simplicity of it. Even now, with my cat Morrissey, I cherish the moments that I’m absolutely alone with him, and the unrecorded tenderness that no one will ever know of—the simplicity of
    “Oh, I’m just here, with this cat.” I