Gotta Get Theroux This Read online

  Situated in the heart of London, Westminster was founded by Elizabeth I, in fifteen something – or maybe refounded – you can google it if you’re interested. The playwright Ben Jonson went there, the poet John Dryden, and also Shane MacGowan of The Pogues. Its buildings, several of them designed by Sir Christopher Wren, clustered around a cobblestone yard and connected to Westminster Abbey via a network of cloisters. The school charged huge fees, though its proximity to the West End meant its atmosphere was arguably a little less fusty than some other public schools. Those students so minded could study their Cicero, then race up to the Slots o’ Fun on Leicester Square to play video games called Rolling Thunder and Out Run.

  Still, it had its share of ridiculous traditions such as the annual tossing of the ‘Greaze’, a huge inedible pancake that was thrown, each Shrove Tuesday, ‘Up school’, amidst a melee of pupils who fought to see who could retrieve the largest portion. ‘Up school’ was Westminsterese for ‘in the assembly hall’, where the walls were emblazoned with coats of arms with horses, all of them weirdly sporting erections. Another strange bit of terminology was calling normal non-uniform clothing ‘shag’. ‘Good Lord, Theroux, why are you in shag?’ ‘My school trousers were giving me a rash, sir. I have a chit from Matron.’

  Assemblies – ‘Up school’ – started with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, pronounced in a special Westminster style, and it was said that the dining tables in College Hall, a separate roof-beamed building, the other side of the cloisters, where the boarders ate breakfast and supper, had been hewn from the wreckage of the Spanish Armada. At that time, Westminster also had a system known as fagging. This involved the new boys acting as servants to the older boys, waking them up, delivering newspapers, making toast on boxy industrial machines with conveyor belts. Among those I aroused was the future deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg. He was a deep sleeper and needed a lot of pushing and humping. Years later, when I mentioned this fact in an interview, Nick issued a statement: ‘I have no recollection of Louis Theroux waking me up in the morning.’ I didn’t mind, though it makes me wonder if I was humping him hard enough.

  The school uniform was a black suit. The children tended to be bespectacled and hunched over and pale. They’d stalk around the yard like a phalanx of miniaturized undertakers, hands thrust into pockets, coughs wracking their etiolated limbs, or lean against the Wren-designed buildings, heads too big for their tiny necks.

  It was in some ways perfect for me, inasmuch as it was founded on the two lodestars of my life: withering repartee and academic work.

  My geekiness, already in evidence, was about to be turbo-charged. In those days, Westminster ran a programme of ‘accelerating’ the top two classes of each fresh intake, moving them up a year so they took their exams early. This had the effect of isolating them from the rest of their older peers, making them even more freakish and socially disadvantaged, which was probably the idea behind it – to make them likely to work harder. I was among those accelerated and – a late developer anyway, hairless and high-voiced until I was nearly sixteen – I became even more socially maladapted: aged fifteen, I knew twenty different sexual positions by name and the effects of most illegal drugs but I had never touched a girl’s breast or smoked a joint.

  For most of that O level year of 1985, I kept a diary, which I can’t now put my hand to but can probably summarize without too much difficulty: I don’t have any friends. When will my life start? Why don’t I have any pubic hair? These sentiments interleaved with Big Thoughts About Life, the death of God, Crime and Punishment, which I had recently read, a paisley shirt I’d bought at the Great Gear Market on the King’s Road and was excited about, meditations on whether I might be a Nietzschean Übermensch, and a sense of doom at my prospects of ever getting a girlfriend or in fact even speaking to a girl or standing near one at a bus stop.

  In the sixth form, when we were joined by an intake of female students, I must have made a strange apparition, piccolo-voiced androgyne that I was, rubbing shoulders with classmates some of whom were already shaving and starting to go bald. My efforts at seduction put me in mind of those pictures they used to run in the National Enquirer of tiny yappy dogs that have managed to mate with Great Danes.

  By now I’d at least found some friends, a small gang of arty types who, like me, were a little bit pretentious, over-interested in music and comedy, and scared of girls. Two of them, Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, went on to success in TV, radio and film, and it’s striking how fully formed they were as young teenagers. Joe, aged fifteen, was tall and angular, with a dry sense of humour and an occasionally haughty attitude that didn’t win him friends among the clique of sporty brooding boys who were nicknamed The Lads. He’d already set his sights on being a director and written four or five screenplays, making posters for them, which he put up in his bedroom. Adam, cuddly and ingratiating, was an obsessive diarist, a Bowie fan, and maker of ‘compies’ – compilation tapes of music – for friends. He was also an early adopter of video technology. On shoebox-sized cameras he and Joe would film improvised skits in which I occasionally appeared. Parodies of adverts. A spoof French art film called L’Homme Avec La Tête. Our version of an American TV show we’d seen called Danger Freaks. We filmed a friend called Daniel Jeffries as he squirted lighter fluid on his sleeves and set them on fire. ‘This is called the Danger Freaks double hander!’ he shouted as he whooped and cavorted under the low wooden ceilings of the highly flammable Westminster buildings.

  Under Joe’s influence, our weekends revolved around a regimen of movie-going, of whatever happened to be on at the Cannon Oxford Street – often horror, sometimes comedy, occasionally art house, many of them films that posterity has done the favour of consigning to oblivion: The Stuff, The Incredible Shrinking Man, American Ninja 2, Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous. Others I still remember fondly, like Reanimator, The Burbs, the first Nightmare on Elm Street. Another friend, Zac Sandler, introduced me to the world of comics – The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers by Gilbert Sheldon; Viz – and in history class we’d compose strips, doing alternate panels, under the noses of our teachers. For the first time I began to feel that I had a little team of likeminded compadres, that I wasn’t quite so alone.

  In the first term of sixth form, Adam and Joe, with another friend, Ben Walden, put on a production of an American play called Pvt Wars, in which the three public school adolescents took roles as grizzled Vietnam vets with PTSD in a mental hospital. It was all oddly predictive of the Wes Anderson film, Rushmore. Joe and Adam had announced they were now co-proprietors of their own media corporation called Joe/Adz and they approached the production with a seriousness and ambition that verged on the comical, but the scariest part may have been how skilled they all were – the years of immersion in American movies and television meant their accents were pitch-perfect, better than those you might hear on the professional stages of the West End. Later, feeling jealous, I announced I was founding my own corporation with Zac, called Lou/Zac. ‘It sounds like a toilet cleaner,’ Joe said.

  Also with Zac I took a role in a production of Ritual for Dolls, an allegorical play about repressed Victorian society written in 1970, featuring children’s toys. Zac was in the role of ‘Golliwog’, which was questionable even then, while I played the Wooden Soldier. For my climactic speech, I had to confess my forbidden love for my sister, the doll, and declaim the line, ‘I spill my seed on the sheets of my fever-soaked bed.’ It was supposed to be dramatic but caused a school colleague, recognizable even in the dark as Reed Smith, to snort involuntarily with laughter.

  Towards the end of the year, when Joe and Adam made plans for an ambitious staging of the children’s musical Bugsy Malone, I was cast as Dandy Dan, which led to several weeks of anxiety on my part as I thought about going back on stage. After my first rehearsal, feeling self-conscious about my performance, I went off and brooded, then finally sought out Joe and told him, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t think I can do it, I’m j
ust no good.’ He was understanding. ‘I’m sure we could have sorted it out, Lou,’ he said. But he accepted my resignation and gave me a couple of tiny walk-on roles. When the show finally went on – preceded by a massive promotional blitz masterminded by Joe/Adz and based on the publicity campaign for Ghostbusters – it was a triumph. My performance as Looney Bergonzi would be the last time I ever attempted to act, unless you count a role in a porn film for Weird Weekends many years later.

  When we weren’t watching movies in the West End we’d sometimes spend the evening at Ben’s flat in Kentish Town – he lived with his mum who was often away – and we’d smoke cigarettes and drink gin there until morning. There still exists some video of these evenings shot by Adam. If Vladimir Putin is ever minded to blackmail me, I’d suggest he take a look at them. There’s no peeing, but there are definite homoerotic undertones. I come across as a squealing drunken ninny, giggling and prancing around like someone auditioning for a comedy update of the Merchant Ivory film Maurice. Sometimes we’d watch fifteen minutes of whatever film Joe had brought on video before conking out on Ben’s mum’s double bed.

  When, around 1988, Joe made me a compilation tape that introduced me to Eric B and Rakim’s ‘Paid in Full’ (the Coldcut remix), I felt I’d found some kind of missing piece: a popular art form that was infectious and vital but which – I told myself with more than a touch of self-importance – was also socially significant, an authentic expression of the streets. It was swaggering and confident, occasionally angry, unapologetically masculine, with hints of criminality – in short, everything that I was not and secretly aspired to be.

  At the beginning of my last year at Westminster I sat what was called ‘Fourth Term’ – an entrance paper to study at Oxford. Weeks of memorization of history essays followed. A month or two after I sat the exams I was summoned for an interview. Thanks to being accelerated, I was only just sixteen years old. My voice had recently broken. I borrowed a suit of my brother’s, but I’d grown so fast I had to wear the trousers prison-style round my bum so the cuffs could reach my ankles.

  It would be hard to imagine someone in whom book learning and emotional maturity were more out of balance. I was like something created in a laboratory, a freakish man-child in culottes, offering opinions about the Valois kings of France in a voice that went up and down like a broken radio.

  I took the train up the night before, then spent the best part of a day waiting for my fifteen-minute slot, strolling around the Magdalen grounds, its gracious configuration of quads and cloisters, and its deer park. Steeped in the atmosphere of its centuries of history, the chiming of the bell tower, heavy oaken doors and lawns and rose gardens, I felt overawed but also oddly as though I was enacting a drama of myself as a candidate self-consciously thinking big thoughts about ‘the death of the Middle Ages’ and ‘baronial power’. When the time came, I climbed a narrow stone staircase that led up from a cloister, to find three professors, all male, who ushered me into a seat so yielding that it felt a little like falling through a trap door.

  The dons seemed kindly. One looked old enough for me to be concerned about his ability to live out the duration of the interview. Another, a little younger, in tweeds, smiled and, after some throat-clearing remarks, said, ‘You quote a comment of Vaughan’s describing Philippe de Commynes as having been “a mendacious charlatan”. Why do you suppose “charlatan”?’

  Nerves had made my voice little more than a whisper.

  ‘Because he wasn’t who he claimed to be?’

  There were nods. I imagine, looking back, they were registering my evident anxiety and wondering whether, if pushed too hard, I might burst into flames or just short-circuit, emit a ‘bzzzzt’ sound and a ribbon of smoke waft out of my ears.

  When the acceptance message came, I read it with a weird blank feeling of inevitability. Well, of course. They also sent a letter to the school, which my head of house was kind enough to read out to me. It made reference to ‘this remarkable young man’, and I remember thinking how odd it was that they called me a ‘man’.

  Chapter 3

  Bird-dogging Chicks and Banging Beaver

  In some ways, Westminster spoiled Oxford for me. By the time I went up, in the autumn of 1988, I had already done medieval cloisters and archaic slang like ‘subfusc’, which meant formal clothing, and ‘battels’, which meant bills. Half the people at Oxford were from Westminster or Westminster-ish places – academic public schools like Eton and St Paul’s and Winchester – and, like me, brimming with entitlement and floppy hair. Crossing Magdalen Bridge, I nodded at many of the same faces as in Westminster’s Little Dean’s Yard: the location had moved fifty-six miles down the M40 but the population was to a great extent the same.

  I was by now eighteen, having taken a year off to give nature a chance to make me a fraction more man-like. The less said about that year, the better. It’s a tradition of British public school children to travel to the developing world between school and university. The idea, I think, is that the imperial powers of yore did too little to harm their former colonies and so it falls to the younger generation to hobble them further by arriving in hordes as unqualified and incompetent volunteers.

  My stay in Zimbabwe was definitely educational, though sadly not for my students as I quit halfway through the posting, unable to keep control in the classroom. I had been struggling from the get-go: with no natural authority or instinct for the job, I had tried to bond with students by being silly and making them laugh, which turned out to be a short-term strategy. My classes became unruly; fewer and fewer homeworks were handed in. I was putting children in detention en masse, trying to claw back some control, to little avail. Then my dad wrote to say he was coming to the country and wanted to visit. I sent him a mealy-mouthed letter of non-encouragement, feeling it undermined the purpose of my being there, which was, I supposed, to remove myself from my normal milieu and develop my autonomy. The Great Traveller dropping by, checking up on things, would have felt like being upstaged.

  He arrived unannounced in the middle of a maths lesson, having taken a two-hour taxi ride from Harare. ‘Lou, I couldn’t reach you on the phone.’

  I hugged him. He began taking photographs and the students erupted. I still have the photos. I’m smiling, surrounded by overexcited children. Maybe it was what I needed: to recognize the whole misadventure of ‘teaching in Africa’ as play-acting, something I was too young and too immature to know how to handle.

  I muddled on to the end of the term, then handed in my notice and went travelling in Zambia, Malawi, and Botswana. Given that the idea was to teach and help out, not up stumps halfway through the job, you could say that my going and then leaving was worse than not going at all – and I wouldn’t argue with you. I sometimes wonder how different the fate of the African continent might have been had I stuck it out.

  Arriving at Oxford, I’d planned to take it easy, kick back a little, start to enjoy life – go out bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver. Or if that couldn’t be arranged, maybe take a long walk through Magdalen deer park, holding hands and talking about Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. But, despite my best resolutions, working less proved more difficult than you might think. Something in me kept driving me to study. My subject was ‘Modern History’, which in classic Oxford style meant everything after the end of Roman Britain. During a one-to-one midway through my second term, Magdalen’s head history tutor, Angus Macintyre, told me he thought I was on track to get a first in the end-of-year exams. This had not previously occurred to me as a possibility but from then on I saw it as an obligation. The beaver banging and tail-chasing, already delayed, now drifted further behind schedule as I applied myself to essay writing and rote learning with my wonted obsessiveness while all the time being aware, like a rider on a startled horse, that I needed to slow down, that I was in danger of missing out, of letting student life pass me by.

  At the end of my first term I struck up a romance with a fellow student. She seduced me, coming round to
my bedroom half-drunk one evening and saying, ‘Kiss me.’ She’d also been at Westminster – she was, by coincidence, the ‘doll’ I’d ‘spilled my sheets over my fever-soaked bed’ about. In the play. And possibly in life. Her name was Sarah. (Her name wasn’t Sarah.) Fiercely intelligent, thoughtful and argumentative, she came from a Jewish family in north London that was in its way as status-conscious and idiosyncratic as my own, though less liberal and less at pains to signal its bohemian credentials. There was no question of smoking ganj with the parents in Sarah’s family. Raised like a caged veal, as the American writer Shalom Auslander once wrote of his upbringing, she’d been shielded from pop music – or maybe had just taken no interest in it – until her adolescence. She was intensely self-conscious of her privilege and spoke an English so correct that people sometimes thought she was foreign. Around her I could pass as something of a hipster.

  Once every couple of terms I would break up with her, imagining a wealth of romantic opportunity waiting to be taken. Then reality would sink in, I’d be alone and she’d call, or on at least one occasion she climbed through the window and we’d find ourselves back together again. My relationship with Sarah continued, with breaks and intermissions, over the next twelve years.

  At the weekend, when I’d finished studying, I’d hunt for house parties among the student lodgings up and down Cowley Road and Iffley Road, senses primed for any open doors and the sound of music emanating from them – it was a little like a game in which the objective was to become inebriated in a stranger’s kitchen. Sometimes I’d take the coach down to London to visit Adam and Joe, and Zac, who was starting a career as a comic-book artist. These were my most dedicated years of pot-smoking and, with Joe, I’d walk down to Armoury Way, round the corner from the Arndale Centre in Wandsworth, to buy an eighth or a sixteenth of hash from a West Indian dealer called The Professor who lived in a flat in a twenties Peabody Estate-style housing block. Later The Professor gave way to an older man named Coarsey – the spelling of his name is pure conjecture on my part – whose services we used for five or more years.