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

unblinking faith. With an almighty glug he tipped the bottle upright into his own little Martin Phillips face, and the liquid filled his cheeks with this foul, medicinal, despicable taste, and the surging heat poured into him. It was a lovely thing to watch, and the whole episode was happily consequence- free.
    The first time I got drunk was at my auntie’s house one Christmas. On this occasion, I got really pissed, and gave an early indication of the seemingly infinite capacity I have to adapt instantly to new circumstances. This was the fi rst time I’d ever got properly inebriated, and yet I straight away became a pitiful, lachrymose drunk, saying to my younger cousin Sam—who was about three years old—“Don’t you ever get like this, son.” But I’d only just got like it, that day, for a half-hour. It wasn’t like alcohol had been the ruin of me—my whole empire in ruins, and all the fault of the demon drink.
    I was fourteen or fifteen and it was six glasses of white wine that did the trick. As I was drinking them, I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I just keep on doing this?” The need to find out what will happen if I don’t relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.
    It was the same with prepubescent masturbation. I remember being on the bathroom floor and thinking, “What happens if I just keep on wanking?” (I’ve had a lot of great moments on bath-82

    Teacher’s Whiskey
    room fl oors. The first time I took heroin, I remember being in a similar situation.) Lying in a state of pre-opiated innocence on my mum’s bathroom floor. (Oh that is the telling adjective—or pronoun, or whatever it is—my mum’s bathroom fl oor. She wasn’t there, of course. It was the floor that she owned, but from which she was at this point absent. And I was lying upon the bath rug—which was pink, with a fringe.)
    Normally at that stage of sexual immaturity, you’d get an erection, carry on wanking for a while, and then stop. But I started wondering what would happen if you persisted beyond that barrier. The answer was a kind of dry orgasm, which set my leg twitching against the pink artifi cial fibers, and left me with an embarrassed, awkward feeling, reminiscent of how I would later feel when receiving oral sex from a vacuum cleaner. (Of course, it’s not really oral sex in that instance, it’s pipe sex—an oft-overlooked category of erotic endeavor.)
    Growing up in Grays, there were two main landmarks looming above you. One was the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge across the Thames (little did I know that lurking on the other side of this, in Dartford, just south of the river, was the infant Matt Morgan). The other was Thurrock Lakeside shopping center—a huge, great, hovering spaceship of consumerism. I did shoplift quite a bit from there. But newsagents in Grays were not safe from my wandering hands either.
    For reasons that may have had something to do with my in-cipient dishonesty, but could equally have been rooted in the lunchtime porn video club I had enterprisingly set up with a few like-minded friends, Mum and Colin did not trust me with a key to the house. They didn’t like me to go home in the middle of the day, but they’d leave a key out for me to let myself in with after school.
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    RUSSELL BRAND
    One time, I’d tried to sneak home at lunchtime, but there was no key there. So when I got back later on and the stone in the garden where the key usually was hadn’t moved, I just put my sleeve over my hand and punched through the glass panel in the door to get in.
    “Good,” I thought. “That’ll show ’em.” My mum got home a couple of minutes after I did. “You alright, Russell?” she asked, slightly nervously. I explained that I’d had to let myself in because there was no key. A short while after that, Colin returned.
    He asked what had gone on, and when I said there was no key left out, I could see him whitening with fury.
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