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

hostility between us was mostly unspoken. It was a silent war, constantly in motion. Colin went into the back garden—wearing the blue overalls that he had for work. He looked under the stone, and came back, full of terrifying adult man-rage. My mum was all panicked—“Oh Colin, Colin.” As he dragged me out into the back garden, I fell over and pissed myself. I was at an age when it was horrible to have done that—school trousers clad about my thighs. He threw me on the ground, screaming,
    “There it is!” with an incandescent rage that had to be about more than broken glass.
    It turned out that at some point between my two attempts to gain entry to the house, he had returned home and replaced the key.
    There’s a theme that runs throughout my childhood of adults taking me to one side to utter these unbelievable things. I’m not sure if it was on this or one of the other five or six occasions when things between Colin and me got really out of hand—but I distinctly remember him taking me into a vestibule and hissing, “Why don’t you fuck off and leave us alone?” And me just thinking, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” and having to hold myself to-84

    Teacher’s Whiskey
    gether. “Why are these people saying these things?” I would ask myself. “This can’t be right.”
    There have been times over the last couple of years—as things have started to work out for me in career terms—when I’ve stopped to reflect on what the legacy of all this formative unhappiness has been, in terms of the ultimate goals of my ambition. When would I stop? I’ve realized that my ambition is actually beyond the designs of the Th
    ird Reich.
    When I used to sit in the front seat on car journeys with my dad, he always listened to motivational tapes: Anthony Robbins, people like that. The one thing I got from them—something my dad endowed me with himself, as well as through these self-help brainwashing cassettes—was that you can do what ever you want.
    Now if I want something—whether it’s a job or a woman—I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way, until I possess the object of my desire.
    My dad’s philosophy was (and I think still is) that life is a malevolent force, which seeks to destroy you, and you have to struggle with it. Only those who are hard enough will succeed. Most people get crushed, but if you fight, in the end life will go, “Fucking hell. This one’s serious. Let him through.” V
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    “ Boobaloo”
    Until I encountered the Grays School drama teacher, Colin Hill, I had no intention of being a performer. I’d always hoped my dad would be my way out: in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lenny’s dopey gaze is forever fixed on an imaginary horizon where he’ll finally get his rabbits and alfalfa plants; I dreamed of an unlikely Brand and Son enterprise, like Open All Hours but more sexy; perhaps we’d have a casino or a brothel or be guns for hire. I’d not developed a business plan, but the name I liked.
    Colin Hill was a big, bovine man with a deeply creviced face and ashen hair. He was also the fi rst teacher I thought of as human, the type of teacher who ushers you across the wobbly, Indiana Jones rope bridge into adulthood. I imagine he may have been a teacher that you could address by his Christian name or smoke a fag with. Before that, when you find out a teacher’s first name it’s like you’ve seen them on the lavvy wanking, a glimpse of a world so terribly private that while they rattle on about Wilfred Owen or geological stratification you can think nothing but, “Well, I can’t accept all this from a Derek.”

Colin Hill said I was good in drama classes. “It’s just showing off,” I thought, “sanctioned showing off . . . Oh my God, I’ve found a loophole.” “Erm, Colin, you like this showing off , do 86

    “ Boobaloo”
    you? You say I’m doing it well? I can also torment dogs and masturbate, do you have any classes for those?” “No, I