I Am Ozzy (31 page)

'OK, definitely.'
'Final question: have you ever lost property or other assets in a divorce caused by your drinking?' 'Yeah, I lost everything.'
'Well, Ozzy, I did some research and some calculations of my own last night, and d'you want to know

what
I
think your addictions have cost you?'
'Go on then.'
He told me. I almost threw up.

10

woke up groaning.

Blackout

I

Fuck me, I thought, as my eyes began to focus: must have been another good one last night. I was lying on a bare concrete floor in a square room. It had bars on the window, a bucket in the corner, and human shit up the walls. For a second I thought I was in a public toilet. But no: the bars on the window were the giveaway.

One of these days, I thought, I really need to stop waking up in jail cells.
I touched my face. Argh!
Shit
, that hurt.
For some reason, all I was wearing one of my smelly old T-shirts - the kind I used to sleep in - and a

pair of shiny black tuxedo trousers. At least it's better than waking up in one of Sharon's frocks again, I thought.

I wondered what time it was. Seven in the morning? Nine? Ten? My watch was gone. So was my wallet. The coppers must have bagged my stuff when they booked me. The only thing left in my pockets was a scrunched-up receipt from my local Chinese restaurant, the Dynasty. I pictured the inside of the place - red, like hell - and saw myself sitting in one of the leather booths, arguing with Sharon, and crushing powder and pills in one of those... what d'you call them? A pestle and mortar. What the fuck had I been doing last night? Coke? Sleeping pills? Amphetamines? All that and more, knowing me.

I felt disgusting. My whole body ached - especially my face, and my teeth, and my nose. I needed a bag of ice.
I needed a shower.
I needed a doctor.
'HELLO?' I shouted through the bars. 'ANYBODY THERE?'
No reply.

I tried to think what my drunk, coked-up evil-twin brother could have done to put me behind bars. But my brain was empty. Blank. Just that image of me in the Dynasty, then static. I'd probably been caught pissing in the street again, I thought. But if that was the case, why was I wearing my pyjama T-shirt? Had I been arrested at my
house
? Whatever I'd got up to, it had given me the mother of all headaches. I hoped I hadn't already used up my telephone call, 'cos I needed to tell Sharon that I was in jail, so she could come and get me. Or maybe she'd gone to America. She was always fucking off to America to get out of my way, especially after a big argument. In which case I'd need to call Tony Dennis.

Good old Tony.

He'd sort me out.

It was September 3, 1989.

By then, we'd moved back to England full time. We'd bought a place called Beel House, in Little Chalfont, Bucking hamshire. The house dated back to the seventeenth century, or so Sharon told me. Dirk Bogarde once lived there. It was a
real
house, not the fake, movie-set bullshit you get out in California. But my favourite thing about it was our next-door neighbour, George, who lived in what used to be the gatehouse. George was a chemist, and he made his own wine. Every day I'd knock on his door and say, 'Gimme a bottle of your super stuff, George.' It was like rocket fuel, that wine of his. People would come over from America, take one swig, their eyes would widen, and they'd go, 'What the fuck
is
this stuff?' A few glasses of Chateau d'George was enough to put you under for good. The funny thing was George didn't even drink. He was a teetotaller. He'd say, 'Oh, Mr Osbourne, I saw that you set fire to the kitchen last night. That must have been a good one. Remind me, was it the elder-berry or the tea leaf?'

But Sharon was on my back, big time, so I couldn't drink George's brews in front of her. And I couldn't hide the bottles in the oven any more, either. So I started to bury the stuff in the garden. Trouble was, I would always hide the booze when I was pissed, so the next night I could never remember where the fuck I'd put it. I'd be out there with a shovel until two o'clock in the morning, digging holes all over the place. Then Sharon would come down for breakfast and look out of the window, and there'd be all these trenches everywhere. 'Fuck me, Sharon,' I'd say to her, 'them moles have been busy, haven't they?'

In the end, I had floodlights installed to help me find the booze. Cost me an arm and a leg. Then Sharon twigged, and that was the end of that.
'I should have known better than to think you would develop a sudden interest in horticulture,' she

said.

It was probably good that I got caught, 'cos my body could hardly take the hard stuff any more. I was forty, and my system had started to give up. I knew something was badly wrong when I went to the pub one time and woke up
five days
later. People would come up to me and say, 'Hello, Ozzy,' and I'd ask, 'Do I know you?' And they'd go, 'I spent three months living at your house over the summer. Don't you remember?'

I'd been warned about blackouts when I went to the Betty Ford Center that time after Kelly was born. The doc told me that my tolerance would eventually hit zero, and then my body and brain would shut down. But I thought it was just bullshit to frighten me. 'You know what my real drinking problem is?' I said to him. '
I can't find a fucking bar in this place
.'

But then the blackouts started, just like he said they would. They didn't stop me drinking, though. They just made me worry, which made me drink even more. After what had happened with Vince Neil and the car crash, my biggest fear was waking up in a courtroom one day with someone pointing at me and saying, 'That's him! He's the one who ran my husband down!' Or, 'That's him! The one who killed my baby!'

'But I had a blackout, Your Honour' would be my last words before they locked me up and threw away the key.

'HELLO?' I shouted again. 'ANYBODY THERE?'

I was getting nervous now - which meant all the booze and the coke from the night before must have been wearing off. As soon as I get out of this shithole, I told myself, I'm gonna have a nice drink to calm myself down.

Silence.
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.

Where the fuck was everybody?
I was sweating and shivering now. And I really needed to take a shit.
Finally this copper showed up: big bloke, my age - maybe older - with a right old pissed-off look on

his face.
'Excuse me,' I said to him. 'Will someone please tell me what I'm doing in this place?' He just stood there, looking at me like I was a cockroach in his dinner. 'You really want to know?' he

said.
'Yeah.'
He came up to the bars, took an even better look at me, and said, 'Normally I don't believe people

when they have a convenient loss of memory while they're breaking the law. But in your case, after seeing the state of you last night, I might make an exception.'
'Eh?'
'
You should have seen yourself
.'
'Look, are you gonna tell me why I'm in here or not?'
'I'll tell you what,' said the copper. 'Why don't I just go and get your file? Then I can read you the charges.'
Read me the charges?
I almost crapped my pants when he said that.
What the fuck had I done? Killed someone? I began to think about the documentary I'd watched a few weeks before on American telly, about a murderer in New York. He was on trial, this bloke, and he knew he was going to get for ever in jail, so he got some peanut butter and smeared it up his arse crack, then, just before the jury went out to consider its verdict, he put his hand down his trousers, scraped it up, and started to eat it out of his hand.
And he got off for being insane.
Trouble was, I didn't have any peanut butter. So if I wanted to look like I was eating my own shit,
I'd have to eat my own shit
.

Y'know, even after Sharon played me the video of Kelly's birthday party - the one where I made all the kids cry - I never really thought of myself as a
frightening
drunk. I couldn't see why I was doing any harm. I thought I was just going out, having a few beers, going home, shitting myself, then wetting the bed. Everyone did that, didn't they? It was just a bit of a laugh, par for the course, what you did. But in rehab they said, 'Look, what you've got to do is reverse the role. How would you feel if you went home and it was Sharon who was lying on the floor in a puddle of her own shit and piss, and she was out of her mind, and the kitchen was on fire, and she couldn't look after the kids? How long would you stay with her? How would you feel about your marriage?'

When they put it like that, I could see their point.
But it's taken me until now to realise how scary and wrong it all was. I was just an excessive fucking pig. I would drink a bottle of cognac, pass out, wake up, then drink another. I'm not exaggerating when I say I was drinking four bottles of Hennessy a day.
Even now, I have a lot of trouble understanding why Sharon stayed - or why she married me in the first place, come to think of it.
I mean, she was actually afraid of me half the time.
And the truth was
I
was afraid of me, too. Afraid of what I'd do to myself or, even worse, to someone else.
A lot of the time, Sharon would just leave the country when I went on a bender. 'See ya, I'm off to America,' she'd say. It was around then that she'd started to manage other acts, because I was so fucking volatile, she didn't want to be totally dependent on me. But that made me worry that she was gonna run off with some young fucking hot shot. I mean, I wouldn't have blamed her - I wasn't exactly much fun to be around. Being with me was like falling into an abyss.
One night, when Sharon was away, I paid George the chemist fifty quid for this extra-super-strong bottle of wine, and got well and truly shitfaced with my old keyboard player, John Sinclair. It so happened that I'd been to see a doctor that day, so I had this scoopful of pills: sleeping pills, pain meds, temazepam, you name it. Doctors would give me jars and jars of that shit, all the time. So while I was getting pissed, I was also popping these things, one after the other, until eventually I blacked out.
When I woke up the next morning, I was in bed with Johnny, and we were all tangled up with each other. But when I reached down to check my dick, to make sure nothing had happened, I realised I couldn't feel anything. I was numb. Totally numb.
So I was lying there, and I started to scream, 'Fuck! Fuck! I can't feel my legs!'
Then I hear this grunt next to me.
'That's because they're
my
legs,' said Johnny.
I had to take three showers after that. It makes me shudder just to think about it. In fact, I felt like such a fucking mess, I said, 'Right, that's it. No more booze, no more pills, no more nothing. This is ridiculous. Sharon's gonna leave me at this rate.'
I went cold turkey.
Which, as any drug addict will tell you, is the stupidest thing you can ever do. When Sharon came home, Jack ran up to her and shouted, 'Mum! Mum! Dad's stopped drinking! He's stopped drinking!' Then I crawled off to bed, feeling horrendous, but couldn't sleep from the comedown. So I scoffed my face full of Excedrin PM, because I thought Excedrin PM didn't count as a drug.
Then I really
did
go numb.
I couldn't feel a thing.
By the time I opened my eyes again, all I could see was Sharon leaning over me and going, 'What's my name? What's my name?' I couldn't answer because I felt like I was under -water. Then she was going, 'How many fingers am I holding up? How many fingers, Ozzy?' But I couldn't count. All I wanted to do was sleep. For the first time in years, all my pain had gone. Suddenly I knew what the phrase 'out-of-body experience' meant. It was the richest, warmest, most comforting feeling I'd ever had.
I didn't want it to end.
It was beautiful, so beautiful.
Then Sharon and Tony were dragging me on to the back seat of the car, and we were driving round and round, trying to find a doctor. Finally, I was on a bed with all these drips coming out of me, and in a muffled voice I could hear the doc saying to Sharon, 'Your husband has gone into an alcoholic seizure. It's very, very serious. We've put him on anti-seizure medication, but we're going to have to keep monitoring him overnight. He might not come out of it.'
Then, little by little, the feeling returned.
Toes first. Then legs. Then chest. I felt like I was being lifted up from deep, deep under the sea. Then, all of a sudden, my ears popped and I could hear an EKG machine behind me.
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
'How many fingers?' Sharon was saying. 'How many fingers, Ozzy?'
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
'Ozzy, what's my name? What's my name?'
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
'Your name's Sharon. I'm so sorry, Sharon. I'm so fucking sorry for everything. I love you.'

Clomp
,
clomp
,
clomp
,
clomp
.
The copper walks up to the bars of my cell holding a sheet of paper in his hand. I'm looking at him,
sweating, breathing fast and shallow, fists balled, wanting to fucking die.
He's looking back at me.Then he clears his throat and starts to read:

John Michael Osbourne, you are hereby charged with the attempted murder by strangulation of your wife,Sharon Osbourne, during a domestic disturbance that took place in the early hours of Sunday, September 3, 1989, at Beel House, Little Chalfont, in the county of Buckinghamshire.

It was like someone had hit me over the head with a shovel. I staggered backwards, fell against the shit-smeared wall, then slumped on to the floor, head in my hands. I wanted to throw up, pass out and scream, all at the same time.
Attempted murder? Sharon?
This was my worst nightmare. I'm gonna wake up in a minute, I thought. This can't be happening. 'I love my wife!' I wanted to tell the copper. 'I love my wife, she's my best friend in the world, she saved my life.
Why the fuck would I want to kill my wife?

But I didn't say anything.
I couldn't speak.
I couldn't do anything.
'I hope you're proud of yourself,' said the copper.
'Is she all right?' I asked him, when I finally got my voice back.
'Her husband just tried to kill her. How d'you
think
she is?'
'But why would I do that? I don't understand.'
'Well, it says here that after returning home from a Chinese restaurant - you'd gone there after

celebrating your daughter Aimee's sixth birthday, during which time you became heavily intoxicated on Russian vodka - you walked into the bedroom naked and said, I quote, "We've had a little talk and it's clear that you have to die."'