Authors: Russell Brand
For me, though, as a teenager, this was no time for semantic pedantry but one of inexplicable rapture. I couldn’t wait for Lakeside to descend, to make sense of the as-yet-empty lake, to fill my life as surely as they’d fill that lake, to occupy my mind as surely as they’d occupy that barren land. I couldn’t wait to go to Lakeside. The fact that I had no money was no obstacle to my excitement at the oncoming Mardi Gras of consumerism. Lakeside seemed like the answer, that’s for sure, but what was the question?
What kind of void can there be in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy that requires a shopping center to fill it? Why would a lad growing up in Essex in the eighties have a yearning to shop that would be a more probable endowment of one the gals from
Sex and the City
?
Joseph Campbell, the cultural anthropologist who I’ll be banging
on about a lot in this book, said, “If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews. If you were to ask the developers of Lakeside or any shopping center what they are offering consumers (formerly known as “people”) they’d say, “It’s all under one roof”—great, a ceiling, and, more importantly, “choice.” Choice is the key. Apparently, then, what excited me as a bulimic Smiths fan and onanist was the possibility of choice, and for anybody to be stimulated by the idea of choice, the precondition must be a lack of choice. Which is a way of saying a lack of power, a lack of freedom.
I’m not inferring that we need to revert to a medieval culture, by the way, all bubonic and snaggletoothed with shabbily bandaged hands, chewing on a turnip, genuflecting in a ditch as a baron sweeps by on horseback. If we’ve learned anything from
Blackadder
, it’s that history was a shit-hole.
What I believe is that we’re only just beginning to understand the incredible capacity of human beings, that we can become something unrecognizable, that we can have true freedom, not some tantalizing emblem forever out of reach. Not weary compromise and nagging fear.
I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid. I saw what was being offered in wipe-clean magazines and silver screens, and I signed up. I wanted choice, freedom, power, sex, and drugs, and I’ve used them and they’ve used me.
“Why would you be satisfied with the scraps of fame and fortune, of sex and distraction?” asked a fellow recovering drunk that I was chatting to in New Orleans. He was well tanned—in an overly literal way, the way leather is tanned—his skin coarse and lined, his
beard gripped his face like a furry fist. His shirt had faded stains and rings, like coffee-cup marks on an old map. He looked like a man who had lived, who’d had long nights and fistfights, but his eyes were as clear as his words.
“Money, fame—those are the crumbs,” he said, brushing the words away with his thick forearm. “I want to be at the banquet.” At this last he looked up and smiled. Then he strolled off with brutish majesty to do volunteer work with the plentiful New Orleans homeless. In retrospect, his departure was melodramatic, like a grass in a police drama swanning off after a midnight subterranean confab with his cop handler, maybe grinding out a fag, then leaving—why don’t they ever say, “Well, I better be off, then; toodle-oo,” like normal people?
The most positive thing about being a drug addict is that it calcifies your disillusion; someone else, also a drunk—I’m starting to think I spend too much time listening to these lushes—said to me, “Drugs and alcohol are not our problem, reality is our problem; drugs and alcohol are our solution to that problem.” That’s a very smart way of putting it.
The same impulse that made Lakeside seem a good idea to me also made heroin seem like a good idea. That might seem like a radical corollary to offer, but it isn’t. When I was a kid in Grays I was aware of an emptiness, a sadness, a nameless sense of disconnection, so when it was suggested by a local paper, a local politician, a mayor or whatever, that Lakeside might be the answer, I suppose I thought, “Yes, Lakeside might be the answer.” Given that I subsequently went on to become addicted to anything that could be cooked, snorted, or swallowed, it seems Lakeside’s palliative qualities were at best limited. Perhaps I’m an extreme case. But isn’t that all addiction really is, “an extreme case”?
Aren’t we all, in one way or another, trying to find a solution to the problem of reality? If I get this job, this girl, this guy, these shoes. If I pass this exam, eat this pizza, drink this booze, go on this holiday. Learn karate, learn yoga. If West Ham stay up, if my dick stays up, if I get more likes on Facebook, more fancy cookbooks, a better kitchen, cure this itchin’, if she stops bitching.
Isn’t there always some kind of condition to contentment? Isn’t it always placed in the future, wrapped up in some object, either physical or ideological? I know for me it is, and as an addict that always leads me to excess and then to trouble.
Do you feel like that? Are you looking for something? It’s not just me, is it? Do you sometimes feel afraid, self-conscious, lonely, not good enough? I mean, you’re reading this, so you must want to change something.
Don’t leave me out on a limb, all vulnerable and exposed. Are you reading this on a yacht, through your Ray-Bans with, I dunno, a pair of glistening Russian sisters and a gob oozing with lobster juice as the sun shines down on you and the sisters smile up at you? And even if you are, especially if you are, is it working, behind the salty tang and priapic pang, is it real, is it real, is it like God is holding your hand?
I mean, I’ve tried decadence too. I lived in a Hollywood mansion, I went to the Oscars, I hosted big dos.
In 2002, at two weeks clean, in a Bury St. Edmunds B&B on Christmas Eve, watching TV, perched on a single bed with my mum, both of us with the glum cordiality of an A&E waiting room—shell-shocked smiles and no hope—if some twinkling superficial fairy had flown in and said, “You’ll be taking your mum to the Oscars in a few years, don’t worry,” I’d obviously’ve been surprised (I mean, a fairy), but what would’ve been incomprehensible to me would’ve been the veracious addition from the ethereal intruder that “Oh, by the way, you’ll both find the Oscars fucking boring.”
Lakeside is a local parish; Hollywood is the Vatican. I wondered how the other parishioners had fared when I went back to Grays recently. I wondered whether Lakeside had delivered for the people I grew up with, the people I left behind, the people I was running from; I wondered if they got their choice, freedom and opportunity.
I fare-dodged my way out of Grays on the Fenchurch Street train, which primarily transports commuting city workers from Essex to the City of London. Stopping at Chafford Hundred—the new estate
they built opposite the street where I grew up—Purfleet, Lakeside, Rainham, Dagenham Dock, Barking, and Limehouse. I’d hide in the toilet under my gelled quiff, with my own “Out of Order” sign on the door, a cross between Del Boy and Matt Goss, puffing skunk, counting stops.
Now I glide in the back of Mick’s Mercedes. Mick would be “my driver” if I employed possessive determiners before people and if he exhibited a modicum of professionalism. Instead, he is my mate, who drives me. It is still, of course, in reality a long way from where I am from—child of a single mum, on benefits, drug addicted—as we journey down the A13 past the disused Ford factory where my nan’s husband, Bert, worked, past the marshes where there was talk of building Euro Disney. I was naturally devastated when they went for Paris instead—I mean, fucking Paris?! Walt must be spinning in his grave, or cryogenic chamber, or wherever the hell it is they keep his brilliant Nazi corpse.
The reason for this trip down memory lane—or memory pain as I tend to call it, because my past is soaked in misery and rejection; it rejected me, then I rejected it—is that my schoolfriend Sam asked me to open a Mind shop. Mind is the mental-health charity that he works for, and I, with my history of mental illness, plus the fact that he’s a mate and the irresistible pun “open your Mind (shop), man,” feel it’s worth risking a visit to the scene of the crime. The crime of being born, which is the manner in which I regarded my birth as a troubled and troubling adolescent.
Grays wasn’t great when I grew up, but a lot of that might’ve been because I was looking at it from inside my head and I reckon I could’ve been reared in Tuscany and rendered it a tragedy, the way my nut operated. I had a tendency for misery. What Grays is and was—and as the name suggests, aside from my self-aggrandizing melancholy—is a normal town. You could say a normal, suburban, Essex town; you could say a normal British town, or a normal northern European town, or even a normal town in a secular, Western democracy.
When I was a kid, that meant the town center, where I was due to “open your Mind, man,” had a market, chain stores, and local
businesses. People did their shopping there, hung out, you know, normal stuff. When I disembarked from my tinted capsule of privilege, I was shocked to see how much Grays has changed. I mean, we’re not describing the sacking of Rome here, not the desecration of the sacred treasures of a glorious city-state, it was always a bit of a dump, but the chain stores were gone, the local businesses were gone, and the market had shut down.
Now there were pound shops, betting shops, charity shops, and off-licenses. The people of the town I’d left twenty years ago were different: More of them were drunk; more of them were visibly undernourished—more than that, though, I could feel that there was a despondency among the fifty or so folk assembled with listless anticipation around the barrier outside the Mind shop.
The more callous among you might say that was as a result of my impending visit, you swines, but it wasn’t that. Something had been taken from them, and I could feel its absence. More shocking though than this sad deterioration is that Grays, this lesser, depleted Grays with its food banks, Wonga loans, and escalating addiction problem, is still normal.
This is happening everywhere. The richest 1 percent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 percent. Some people like me were in the 55 percent and are now in the 1 percent, but, mostly, normal people are getting poorer. Globally it’s worse. Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth’s population—that’s three and a half billion people.
Though I can’t imagine they’d be getting on a bus with that kind of money or be hanging out together, I bet there’d be a lot of tension, jealousy, and petty bickering on that bus:
“My corporation is bigger than your corporation.”
“Yeah? I’ve got my own media network!”
“YEAH!? I’ve got an elite organization that controls global politics.”
“Stop this bus. I want to return to my subaquatic palace with my half-fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life.”
The last example might be from the Disney film
The Little Mermaid
. Walt’s frozen noggin is definitely on that bus.
In America, a country that, let’s face it, has really run with this whole capitalism thing, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune have more wealth than the poorest 30 percent of Americans. There’s six of them! They can’t even form a football team, how are they going to stop a Revolution when we act on the unfairness of that statistic? Unless the entire system is rigged to maneuver wealth to an elite group of people, then ensure that it remains there.
What you just read is crazy. Insane. Unbelievable but true. As real as your hands that are holding this book (Kindle/tablet/intra-neural-brain hologram, if it’s really far in the future), that information is as real as the breath that you are inhaling.
Six people whose dad was “good at supermarkets” have more money than hundreds of millions of struggling Americans. A bus full of plutocrats, royals, and oligarchs have as much money as every refugee, war child, and potbellied, rough-sleeping person on the planet.
You can hear that is crazy, you can see that it’s wrong, you feel that this is beyond disturbing. We’re told there’s nothing we can do about it, that this is “the way things are.” Naturally, of course, that verdict emanates from the elite institutions, organizations, and individuals that benefit from things being “the way they are.”
More important, perhaps, than this galling inequality is the fact that we have a limited amount of time to resolve it. The same interests that benefit from this—for brevity I’m going to say “system”—need, in order to maintain it, to deplete the earth’s resources so rapidly, violently, and irresponsibly that our planet’s ability to support human life is being threatened. This is also pretty fucked up.
I mean, if someone said they had a socio-economic system that creates a hugely wealthy elite at the cost of everyone else but it was ecologically sound, we’d tell them to fuck off. What we’ve got is one that is systematically inflating the wealth of the elite, rapidly suffocating everybody else, and it’s destroying the planet that we all live on. I know you already know this. I know. We all know. But
it’s so absurd—psychopathic, in fact—that we obviously need to reiterate it.
These elites, these loonies on the diamond-encrusted fun bus, they live on the planet with us, they’re basically the same as us. So they’re in trouble too—unless this bus is equipped for space travel and they plan to wait until the earth is a scorched husk, then blast off to a moon base.
As I perused the new shelves bearing secondhand goods in a charity shop in the run-down town where I’m from, I thought about this stuff. The hymen ribbon that I’m supposed to cut is slung unsliced across the door. The volunteers have half-empty glasses of
supermarché
champagne, collectively willing it to be a good day.