My booky wook A memoir of sex, drugs, and stand-up

A memoir by Russell Brand. You know, the Russell Brand. THREE men are at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks them what they did on Earth. The first is a doctor who was married 30 years, earned $1 million a year, but gave half to the free clinic he started. The second is a lawyer who was married 20 years, adopted three children and turned down a job at a big firm to devote his life to pro bono work. They are both let in. St. Peter asks the third man what he did on Earth. "Not much," he says. "I never made more than $7,500 a year. I've been married three times, had five children with five different women, and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." And St. Peter says, "What have I seen you in?" Russell Brand, the English comedian and actor, has taken the States by squall with memorable turns in the film "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and as the unknown but indelible host of the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards. His unflinching 2007 memoir, "My Booky Wook," a runaway-and-not-hide best seller in Britain, has now been slightly updated and released in the United States in an attempt to capitalize on what has been a bloody good start. We have a name for that on this side of the Atlantic: Brand-building. A child's garden of vices, "My Booky Wook" is also a relentless ride with a comic mind clearly at the wheel. That means you get what really happened, as well as material passed off as what really happened. Brand's style is stream of consciousness. Or firth of consciousness. Herein lies the problem. In the repackaging of the book, this 21st-century Fagin has footnoted and explained some local references to de-cockneyfy his work. Some. It's as if his editor said, "I need 100 footnotes by Saturday." Imagine if he had taken the whole weekend to annotate. It is a rough crossing. Brand, who says "American" with the same intimation the party out of power says "this administration," takes to his assignment with the fervor of Pete Best's publicist. If he has a joke, you get a footnote. Otherwise, you're on your own. Among those people, places and things left unasterisked: Peter Sutcliffe, Dot Cotton, Del Boy, Bagpuss, David Walliams, Roy Keane and Rod Hull. I Wikipedia'd "Dot Cotton" and my computer shrugged and said, "Ask Russell Brand." Unlike his immediate predecessors, Ricky Gervais and Eddie Izzard, who debarked on these shores talented but humble, Brand does not make himself accessible to a new audience. He makes us try to catch him. He may very well be funnier or have a longer career, but do we want to work so hard to figure that out? This chronicle of all his notorious, though mostly unseen, moments onstage and on British TV seems at times more like a closing argument at a competency hearing than a memoir. Brand withholds nothing. He drinks. He smokes. He scores. He dope-fiends. And he regrets nothing except those incidents of depravity he may have forgotten. The only thing edited out is remorse. If "rollicking" means "wildly uneven," then his story is indeed rollicking. And that's the most infuriating thing of all. The bloke can write. He rhapsodizes about heroin better than anyone since Jim Carroll. With the flick of his enviable pen, he can summarize childhood thus: "My very first utterance in life was not a single word, but a sentence. It was, 'Don't do that.'" Sadly, when he's got time and space to kill, he'd rather be naughty. He'd rather gratuitously toss off a mention of sex with a vacuum cleaner than stare down the blank page for more of the vivid insight he wields in moments like this: "She wouldn't have known I was a virgin until the bungling encounter commenced (when it would've become startlingly obvious, as I adopted the demeanor of a man struggling to build a cuckoo clock in oven gloves)." Brand spends the last 50 pages clearing the path for redemption, as he finally assails his full buffet of addictions. But in tone, his account of rehab is no different from the way he recounts yet another enabler-financed television project. He does some fancy footwork with the 12 steps. He's not keen on the concept of anonymity, and I'd be willing to bet (if I still bet) he had his manager make his amends for him. There is an English-size Channel between recovery and a killer bit on recovery. Seven pages from closure, Brand shows us this entry in his rehab diary: "Watched 'Malcolm X' - great story but overlong and indulgent filmmaking." Pot paging kettle, anyone? Russell Brand has a compelling story, but it is a story that compels the reader to wish for the more he is clearly capable of. If he stays clean, who knows? He does. And he tells us: "I'll write another book one day about how it feels to become famous . . . but to the people who know me I've been famous for ages." Somewhere, Del Boy and Bagpuss are nodding. Bill Scheft is a writer for "Late Show With David Letterman." His new novel, "Everything Hurts," will be published next week.

"How could I get back the feeling I'd had in front of that audience?" Brand wonders about acting on page 93. Yes, you read that right-PAGE 93. It takes him THAT LONG to get around to this question, this sudden revelation, this epiphany that every other actor seems to have about page five. It might as well be page 903, because any spark of interest has been killed off long, long before. Brand goes on to describe how he "got on with" learning whatever craft he thinks he does, which translates to an additional 259 pages of doing drugs, failing, and what my catechism referred to as "premarital sexual congress." While Brand earns a few points for honesty, a big vocabulary, and general cheekiness, this is too dreary a recitation of various addiction treatments of a self-indulgent assworm. "It's difficult to be honest," he writes, "because in cold print it seems serious and egotistical" (note: another name for this condition is "Sting"). And while I'm a happily almost-married man, the dormant alpha male in me bridles at the thought of this taco head with Katy Perry in the same way it bristled at John Mayer with Jessica Simpson. Rated: X for eXcrement.-Douglas Lord, "Books for Dudes," Booksmack! 9/2/10 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

My Booky Wook A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Chapter One April Fool On the morning of April Fools' Day, 2005, I woke up in a sexual addiction treatment center in a suburb of Philadelphia. As I limped out of the drab dog's bed in which I was expected to sleep for the next thirty wankless nights, I observed the previous incumbent had left a thread of unravelled dental floss by the pillow--most likely as a noose for his poor, famished dinkle. When I'd arrived the day before, the counselors had taken away my copy of the Guardian , as there was a depiction of the Venus de Milo on the front page of the Culture section, but let me keep the Sun , which obviously had a Page 3 lovely. What kind of pervert police force censors a truncated sculpture but lets Keeley Hazell pass without question? "Blimey, this devious swine's got a picture of a concrete bird with no arms--hanging's too good for him, to the incinerator! Keep that picture of stunner Keeley though." If they were to censor London Town they would ignore Soho but think that the statue of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square had been commissioned by Caligula. Being all holed up in the aptly named KeyStone clinic (while the facility did not have its own uniformed police force, the suggestion of bungling silent film cops is appropriate) was an all too familiar drag. Not that I'd ever been incarcerated in sex chokey before, lord no, but it was the umpteenth time that I'd been confronted with the galling reality that there are things over which I have no control and people who can force their will upon you. Teachers, sex police, actual police, drug counselors; people who can make you sit in a drugless, sexless cell either real or metaphorical and ponder the actuality of life's solitary essence. In the end it's just you. Alone. Who needs that grim reality stuffed into their noggin of a morning? Not me. I couldn't even distract myself with a wank over that gorgeous slag Venus de Milo; well, she's asking for it, going out all nude, not even wearing any arms. The necessity for harsh self-assessment and acceptance of death's inevitability wasn't the only thing I hated about that KeyStone place. No, those two troubling factors vied for supremacy with multitudinous bastard truths. I hated my fucking bed: the mattress was sponge, and you had to stretch your own sheet over this miserable little single divan in the corner of the room. And I hated the fucking room itself where the strangled urges of onanism clung to the walls like mildew. I particularly hated the American gray squirrels that were running around outside--just free, like idiots, giggling and touching each other in the early spring sunshine. The triumph of these little divs over our indigenous, noble, red, British squirrel had become a searing metaphor for my own subjugation at the hands of the anti-fuck-Yanks. To make my surrender to conformity more official I was obliged to sign this thing (see page 6). I wish I'd been photographed signing it like when a footballer joins a new team grinning and holding a pen. Or that I'd got an attorney to go through it with a fine-tooth comb: "You're gonna have to remove that no bumming clause," I imagine him saying. Most likely you're right curious as to why a fella who plainly enjoys how's yer father as much as I do would go on a special holiday to "sex camp" (which is a misleading title as the main thrust of their creed is "no fucking"). The short answer is I was forced. The long answer is this . . .  Many people are skeptical about the idea of what I like to call "sexy addiction," thinking it a spurious notion, invented primarily to help Hollywood film stars evade responsibility for their unrestrained priapic excesses. But I reckon there is such a thing. Addiction, by definition, is a compulsive behavior that you cannot control or relinquish, in spite of its destructive consequences. And if the story I am about to recount proves nothing else, it demonstrates that this formula can be applied to sex just as easily as it can be to drugs or alcohol. Having successfully rid myself, one day at a time, in my twenties, of parallel addictions to the ol' drugs and drinks--if you pluralize drink to drinks and then discuss it with the trembling reverence that alcoholics tend to, it's funny, e.g., "My life was destroyed by drinks," "I valued drinks over my wife and kids." Drinks! I imagine them all lined up in bottles and glasses with malevolent intent, the bastards--I was now, at this time, doing a lot of monkey business. I have always accrued status and validation through my indiscretions (even before I attained the unique accolade of "Shagger of the Year" from the Sun--not perhaps the greatest testimonial to the good work they do at KeyStone), but sex is also recreational for me. We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings, but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless. And this is what sex provides for me--a breathing space, when you're outside of yourself and your own head. Especially in the actual moment of climax, where you literally go, "Ah, there's that, then. I've unwound. I've let go." Not without good reason do the French describe an orgasm as a "little death." That's exactly what it is for me (in a good way though, obviously)--a little moment away, a holiday from my head. I hope death is like a big French orgasm, although meeting Saint Peter will be embarrassing, all smothered in grog and shrouded in post-orgasmic guilt. My Booky Wook A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up . Copyright © by Russell Brand . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up by Russell Brand All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.