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

bedtime to children is a remarkable currency and a powerful playground status symbol: “What time’s your bedtime?” some schoolyard wag’d inquire. I’d be too nervous to respond. “You look like an eight o’clock kind of guy to me, you’re missing the best part of the day.”
    In this moment my father was naively handing me the keys to the Promised Land, he was allowing me to set my own bedtime.
    “Oh, about ten o’clock,” I responded, nonchalantly studying my nails while my heart beat at gerbil speed. As a junkie I would revive this “Oh my God, I’m getting away with it” sensation when traveling through airport customs with a bottom full of heroin, but for now I was smuggling my way to a late-night opiate heaven. My dear dad didn’t realize that children don’t go to bed when they like till my mum came out of hospital; by then it was too late, I’d tasted the sweet elixir of late-night telly.
    With his pinewood bathroom and impractical, deep-pile carpets, and all these faintly pornographic things hanging around, like the poster of that tennis player scratching her arse, it was not a tastefully decorated apartment. There were brass lions either side of the fireplace, and an old camera—which was actually 60

    How Christmas Should Feel
    quite nice—in the middle of the front room, and a lot of pornography.
    The contrast between the two house holds was stark. My dad’s family were theoretically Catholic, but not in practice very religious at all—after his dad died there was no time for any of that rhubarb. My mum’s side, on the other hand, were prim and proper Protestants. So one night I’d be stuck in this really stuffy, controlling, “Look at this L. S. Lowry book and be enthused by a fireplace” type of atmosphere, and the next I’d be at my dad’s.
    He’d drift off and I’d settle down to watch hardcore porn—black men with huge cocks fucking white women up the arse. Good it was. I was more content there, with the hands-off parenting, than in the throttling, restrictive kind my nan practiced.
    I thought Ron Brand was great and in lots of ways he is: he taught me that you can get what you want if you refuse to let circumstances defeat you, and perhaps there is no more valuable lesson. I only wish I’d felt he liked me more. “They still make you play in goal, son?” he once asked me, in reference to my low status as a school footballer; in the question, for me, was confirmation of my inadequacy. I shouldn’t be made to play in goal by them, I should be out there, in the middle of the park, making surging runs and delivering intelligent balls, controlling the game and rallying the team. I’m just not any good at football, daft that it seems so important; my mate Ade’s legs don’t work and he has responded to that problem by becoming one of the world’s best wheelchair basketball players. I still almost daily lament my inability to trap a ball. Occasionally, I get phone calls from former West Ham striker and legend Tony Cottee—which, incidentally, is as bonkers and exciting as Robin Hood popping round for dinner or Dick Whittington offering to feed your fish while you’re on holiday—asking me to participate in celebrity football matches and part of me wants to, so much, but I’m 61

    RUSSELL BRAND
    scared and embarrassed. “Don’t worry,” he once said, “we can stick you in goal.”
    How I viewed my dad at that point was as this magnifi cent bloke who was either reading newspapers, picking his nose, farting or making an incredible fuss of women. Sometimes he would turn the light of his attention on me and it would be brilliant. He’d tease me and wind me up and be very funny, but he’d get bored really quickly, and then I’d just be there again—all tubby and useless. Tubby because I sought solace in chocolate consumption, the foil wrappers of the delicious P-p-p-Penguin bars I’d scoff, a perspicacious trailer for the tinfoil tapestry I would later weave with smack