I Am Ozzy (42 page)

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My rock 'n' roll hero.

Shaking hands with the Queen. She didn't have to bring me flowers.

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And meeting, err... me. Filming with impersonator Jon Culshaw. That's him on the left. I think.

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Wish I'd been dressed like this when I caught the burglar in my house in 2004.
With Maggie, one of my seventeen dogs.

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Me and Sharon, just after the burglary. We lost PS2 million worth of jewellery.
On stage at the Tower of London for the Prince's Trust in 2006.

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Black Sabbath being inducted into the Hall of Fame with Tony (centre) and Bill (far right). Arm in arm with my sisters. From left: Gillian, me, Iris and Jean. Sharon, trying to keep my hand away from the knife, at my sixtieth in December 2008.
My incredible family.

Patient Notes
Hidden Hills, California 2009

'OK, Mr Osbourne, I'm going to ask you a question,' said the doc. 'Have you ever taken any "street

drugs"?'

This was the new guy I went to see when I decided to get clean. I'd spent almost forty years blasting the booze and the pills, so it seemed like a good idea to see what kind of damage I'd done.
'Well,' I told him, with a little cough, 'I once smoked some pot.'
'Is that it?'
'Yeah, that's it.'
The doc carried on prodding me and checking his notes. Then he stopped and asked, 'Are you
sure
?' 'Well,' I said, with another little cough, 'I've taken a bit of speed. A long time ago, y'know?' 'So just the pot and a bit of speed?'
'Pretty much, yeah.'
The doc carried on doing his thing. But after a while, he stopped again. 'Are you
absolutely
sure it was just the pot and the speed?'
'Well, I suppose I've had a few toots of the old waffle dust in my time,' I said. I was starting to warm up now.
'So pot, speed and... a few lines of cocaine?'
'Pretty much, yeah.'
'And you're sure about that?'
'Uh-huh.'
'I just want to make absolut--'
'Does heroin count?'
'Yes, heroin counts.'
'Oh. And heroin, then. Just once or twice, mind.'
'Are you
sure
it was just once or twice?'
'Oh, yeah. Fucking crap drug, heroin is. Have you tried it?'
'No.'
'Too much throwing up for my liking.'
'The nausea can be intense, yes.'
'It's a waste of booze, that's what it is.'
'OK,' the doctor snapped, 'let's just stop this. Are there any drugs you
haven't
taken, Mr Osbourne?'
Silence.
'Mr Osbourne?'
'Not that I'm aware of, no.'
More silence.
Finally, the doc said, 'And what about alcohol? You mentioned that you drink. How many units per day? '
'Oh, about four? Give or take.'
'Can you be more specific?'
'Bottles of Hennessy. But it depends.'
'On what?'
'On how long I pass out between them.'
'And it's just the Hennessy?'
'Well, beer doesn't count, does it?'
The doc shook his head, let out a big sigh, and started to rub his eyes. He looked like he wanted to go home. Then he asked, 'And do you smoke, Mr Osbourne?'
'Now and again.'
'What a surprise. How many per day, would you say?'
'Oh, thirty-ish?'
'What brand of cigarettes?'
'Cigars. I don't count the cigarettes.'
The doc started to go very white. Then he said, 'For how long has this been your typical daily routine?'
'What year is it?' I asked him.
'2004.'
'Nearly forty years, then.'
'And is there anything else in your medical history I should know about?' asked the doc.
'Well,' I said, 'I got hit by an aeroplane once - sort of, anyway. And I broke my neck on a quad bike. Then I died twice during the coma. I had AIDS for twenty-four hours, too. And I thought I had MS, but it turned out to be a Parkinsonian tremor. I broke my clack that other time. Oh, and I've had the clap a few times. And one or two seizures, like when I took the codeine in New York, or when I date raped myself in Germany. That's it, really - unless you count the abuse of prescription medication.'
The doctor nodded
Then he cleared his throat, loosened his tie, and said, 'I've got one last question for you, Mr Osbourne.'
'Go ahead, Doc.'
'
Why are you still alive?

He was right: there's no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. There's even less of a reason why I should be so healthy. Nowadays there's pretty much fuck-all wrong with me - seriously.

I mean, yes, my short-term memory hasn't been too great since the quad bike accident - I have a memory therapist now, to help me with it - and I still have a mild stammer. But my heart's in great shape, and my liver's like brand new. After a million and one tests, the best the doc could come up with was that I had 'a little bit of cholesterol'. But that's hardly unusual for a sixty-year-old man brought up on lard sandwiches and chips.

I can honestly say I never expected to last into my seventh decade - never mind still be viable. When I was a kid, if you'd put me up against a wall with the others from my street and asked me which one of us was going to make it to the year 2009, which one of us would end up with five kids and four grandkids and houses in Buckinghamshire and California, I'd never have put any money on me. I have to laugh every so often, 'cos I grew up with the entire system against me. I got thrown out of school at the age of fifteen without even being able to read a sentence properly.

But I won in the end.
We all did - me, Tony, Geezer and Bill.
And I'm feeling great now. Better than ever.
I mean, I still have my issues. I get very phobic about meeting new people, although it comes in

waves. And I'm very superstitious. If I'm working out in the gym, I'll always do more than thirteen repetitions.
Always
. And I won't, under any circumstances, wear the colour green. It freaks me out, green does. I've no idea why - maybe it's just because I had a green car once that was always breaking down. And I swear that being sober has made me a bit psychic, too. I'll say to Sharon, 'I wonder how so-and-so is' - someone I haven't seen for years - and the next day he'll pop out of the wood-work.

I had something similar when Princess Diana died, y'know.

The week before the crash, I had a dream about it. It was so vivid I told Tony Dennis about it. Then, a few days later, she was gone.
'Don't have any fucking dreams about
me
,' Tony said.

People ask me if I'm really,
truly
clean now.
I can't give them the answer they want. All I can say is I'm clean today. That's all I've got. That's all I'll
ever have.
But I'm certainly cleaner than I've been for the last forty years. One of the last times I got seriously
fucked up was a few years ago now, after a gig in Prague. The beer was so good, man, I couldn't help
myself. And I was out with Zakk, my guitarist, who's the most dangerous company in the world if you're an
alcoholic. The bloke can knock 'em back like you wouldn't believe. He's a machine. That was a memorable
night, that was. After hitting the town big time, we went back to my suite on the ninth floor of this fancy
high-rise hotel and got stuck into the minibar. Then, at about one in the morning, this thought came to me. 'D'you know what I've never,
ever
done?' I said to Zakk.
'That must be a short fucking list, man,' he replied.
'Seriously, Zakk,' I said. 'There's one rock 'n' roll thing that I've never got around to doing, in all these
years.'
'What?'
'I've never thrown a telly out of a hotel window.'
'Shit, man,' said Zakk. 'We'd better do something about that.'
So we pulled the telly out of the cabinet and hauled it over to the window, which we started to crank
open. But they'd designed the window so you could open it only a few inches. Which meant we had to
smash off the hinge by bashing it with a paperweight, until the thing finally opened wide enough to slide
out this fifty-inch TV.
Then we gave it a good old shove.
Whoooooooossssssssssssssssh!
Down it went, past the eighth floor, the seventh floor, the sixth floor, the fifth floor, the fourth floor... 'Is that a bloke down there smoking a fag?' I said to Zakk.
The TV kept falling.
'Don't worry,' said Zakk. 'He's miles away.'
BANG!

You shoulda seen that thing explode, man. Holy crap. It was like a bomb going off. The poor bloke having a smoke almost swallowed his cigarette, even though he was on the other side of the plaza.
When we got bored of staring at the wreckage, I climbed into the cabinet where the TV had been and pretended to read the news. Then the phone rang. It was the hotel manager.
'May I speak to Mr Osbourne?' he said. 'There's been an... incident.'
'He's not here,' said Zakk. 'He's on TV.'
In the end, the manager just moved me to another room - the window was in a pretty bad state - and when I checked out they added a 'miscellaneous item' to my bill: $38,000! They justified it by saying the room couldn't be used for a month. Which was bullshit. Zakk was billed another $10,000. And they charged us $1000 for the booze from the minibar.
But it was worth it, in a way.
When I paid that bill, I realised I didn't want to be that person any more. It reached the point where I just thought, What are you gonna do, Ozzy? Are you gonna carry on being that one-foot-in-the-grave, onefoot-out-of-the-grave type of person, until you end up like so many other tragic rock 'n' roll cases? Or are you gonna climb out of the hole for good?
I'd hit rock bottom, in other words. It had taken me four decades to get there, but I'd finally arrived. I disliked everything about myself. I was terrified of living, but I was afraid to die.
Which is no kind of existence, take it from me.
So I cleaned myself up.
First I quit the cigarettes. People ask, 'How the fuck did
you
do
that
?' but I was just so fed up with buying patches, taking them off, smoking a fag, putting them back on, that I thought,
Fuck it
, and went cold turkey. I simply did not want to do it any more.
Then I did the same with the booze. After I'd been sober for a while, I asked Sharon, 'Can I have a drink now?'
All she said to me was, 'You're old enough to make up your own mind.'
'But I've never been any good with choices,' I said. 'I always make the wrong ones.'
'Well, do you
want
a drink, Ozzy?' she said.
For the first time in my life, the honest answer was 'no'. In the old days, whenever I stopped boozing, I always used to think about the good times I was missing. Now, all I think about is how the good times always - and I mean fucking
always
- turned bad.
I couldn't tell you how much a pint of beer costs now, and I don't want to know. Which is amazing, considering how much my life used to revolve around the pub. I just ain't interested any more. The other week, I was in the Beverly Hills Hotel and I ran into Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones. He looked like he'd had a few. And I just thought, Fucking hell, he's still going. I also bumped into Keith Richards recently, at an awards show. 'How are you doing, Keith?' I asked him. He replied, 'Oh, not bad for a living legend.' I almost said, '
Living?
Keith, you and me are the walking fucking dead.'
A lot of my old drinking buddies are still going, actually. But they're getting to the age where they just can't handle the damage any more. One of them died not long ago from cirrhosis of the liver. And everyone went to the pub after the funeral. They were all standing there at the bar with their black armbands, drinking rum and black. 'Are you trying to catch up with him or something?' I said to them.
But that's just what people do in England - they go to the pub to celebrate the life of someone who's just killed themselves by going to the pub too much. It's an alcoholics' culture. When I was younger, I used to think the whole world was drunk. Then I moved to America and realised it's just
England
that's drunk.
I got off the drugs, too, eventually. Apart from the stuff I take for my tremor and my anti-depressants, I'm a narco-free zone. When I go to a doctor now, the first thing I say is, 'Look, I'm an addict, I'm an alcoholic, so please don't listen to a word of my bullshit.' Tony comes with me to all of my appointments, too, as a kind of insurance policy.
The drugs I'm taking now don't have many side-effects - unlike the ones I got from some of those other docs I used to go to. Although the anti-depressants have played havoc with my sex drive. I can get a boner, but no fireworks. So I end up pumping away on top of Sharon like a road drill all night, with nothing happening. I tried Viagra, but by the time it kicked in, Sharon was fast asleep. So it was just me and this tent pole in front of me, with nothing to do but watch the History Channel.
When I asked the doctor about it, he said, 'Oh, you don't still do
that
, do you?'
'It's the only fucking pleasure I have left!' I told him.
Mind you, I've never felt the temptation to run off with a younger chick, like some guys my age do. I mean, what do you fucking talk about with a twenty-year-old? The real estate market? The situation in Afghanistan? It would be like talking to a child.
I must have been clean for at least four or five years now. I don't keep count. I don't know the exact date when I stopped. It's not a fucking race. I just get out of bed every morning and
don't
drink, and
don't
take drugs. I still avoid those AA meetings, though. To me, it feels too much like substituting an addiction to booze with an addiction to the programme. I ain't saying it's unhelpful, 'cos it can be very helpful. But the change had to come from
me
Therapy's helped a lot, mind you, even though I didn't understand it at first. I made the same mistake as I had with rehab - thinking it would cure me. But it's just a way of relieving a problem by talking about it. It helps because if you ain't talking about something it stays in your head and eventually you get whacked out on it.
I have a sponsor, too: Billy Morrison, the guitarist from Camp Freddy. I met him through AA. If I ever get the feeling that I should have a joint, 'cos it would help me write a song or whatever, I pick up the phone to Billy. And that defuses the thought. He'll say, 'A joint might feel good for the first two minutes, but by the end of the day you'll be throwing bottles of Scotch down your neck.' It's a good system because it's the secrets and the lies that get you drunk again.
I couldn't be a sponsor, though. I have too much of a problem trusting people, and, like I said, I don't go to the meetings, so I've never worked my way through the twelve steps, like you're supposed to. It's not the God thing that puts me off, because you don't have to believe in God to do the programme. You just have to accept that there's a higher power - it could be the lamp in the corner of the room, for all they care. Some people use nature, the ocean, their dick - whatever comes to mind.

The thing about being clean is, if I fell off the wagon now there's a good chance I'd die. Your tolerance falls off a cliff when you quit. A couple of drinks, and I'd be fucked. So I don't go out much when I'm not on the road. I don't need to: I've got my wife, I've got my friends, I've got my dogs - all seventeen of them - and I've got my land. And you should see our new house up in Hidden Hills. Talk about a rock-star mansion. When I'm lying in bed, all I have to do is press a button and this giant flat-screen TV rises out of the floor and dangles above my head. And the bogs - fucking hell, man, I wish my old man could have lived long enough to try out one of my bogs. I grew up having to piss in a bucket 'cos there was no indoor shitter, and now I have these computerised Japanese super-loo things that have heated seats and wash and blowdry your arse at the touch of a button. Give it a couple of years and I'll have a bog with a robot arm that pulls out my turds, so I don't have to strain.