Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

He smiled and shook his head.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You should, y’know. It’s very interesting.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ the bloke chuckled. ‘But why go and see a movie when I had a part in the real thing?’

As soon as I heard that, I broke out into this horrible prickly sweat. This guy was bad news. I just knew it.

‘Listen, man,’ I said. ‘Who do you work for?’

He put down his newspaper and took a sip of his coffee. ‘The United States government,’

he said.

I almost jumped off my recliner and made a dive for the hedge. But my head was spinning, and I hadn’t felt my legs since the night before. That’s it, I thought: we’re all fucked now.

‘Jesus Christ, man, relax,’ he said, seeing the look on my face. ‘I’m not the FBI. You’re not about to get busted. We’re all friends here. I work for the Food and Drug Administration.’

‘The what?’

‘The FDA.’

‘You mean, all that coke… it’s coming from—’

‘Think of it as a gift from Santa Claus, Ozzy. Because you know what they say about Santa Claus, don’t you?

‘No?’

‘There’s a lot of snow where he comes from.’

Before I could work out if the bloke was being serious, he looked at his watch and said he had a meeting to attend. So he finished his coffee, got up, patted me on the back, and fucked off. I thought no more of it. Then I went back inside the house for a bit more coke and a few hits on the bong.

So there I am on the sofa, with all these sealed vials of coke lined up in front of me—along with a big bowl of pot—and I’m cutting up my first line of the day. But then I start to sweat again—that same horrible, prickly sweat as before. Fuck me, I’m thinking, the paranoia’s really bad today. At that moment Bill strolls into the room with a beer in his hand and goes, ‘It’s like a furnace in here, Ozzy. Why don’t you switch on the AC?’ Then he pokes his head out of the patio door to get his first sunlight in days.

I thought, What’s ‘the AC’ when it’s at home? Then it clicked: air conditioning. I always used to forget that the mod cons in America were so much more advanced than they were in Britain. I’d only recently got used to the novelty of an indoor shitter, never mind automated climate control. So I got up and started looking for the thermostat. Must be on the wall somewhere around here, I said to myself. After a few minutes—bingo!—I found it in a little nook by the front door. So I turned down the temperature and went back to my coke and pot.

Magic.

But as soon as I’d got the first line up my nose, I heard something.

Was it…?

Nah.

Shit, it sounded like…

Suddenly Bill threw himself through the open patio door, with this wild-eyed look on his face. At the same time, I heard doors slamming at the other end of the house and what sounded like three big blokes falling down the stairs. Then Tony, Geezer and one of the roadies—an American bloke called Frank—came puffing into the room. Everyone was half-dressed apart from Frank, who was still in his underwear.

We all looked at each other.

Then in unison, we shouted: ‘Sirens!’

It sounded like the entire fucking LAPD was coming up the driveway. We were being busted! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

‘GET THE COKE! GET THE COKE!’ I started to scream.

So Frank dived towards the coffee table, grabbed the vials of coke, but then just ran around in circles, his hair standing on end, a fag still in his mouth, his briefs riding up into his arse crack.

Then I remembered something else.

‘GET THE POT! GET THE POT!’

Frank dived back towards the coffee table and grabbed the big bowl of pot, but when he did that he dropped the coke. So he ended up scrabbling around on the floor, trying to balance everything in his arms. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even move. Even before the sirens, my heart had been going at triple speed. Now it was beating so fast I thought it was gonna crack open my rib cage.

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

By the time I pulled myself together, Bill, Geezer and Tony had all bolted. So it was just me and Frank, and enough coke to march the Bolivian army to the moon and back.

‘Frank! Frank!’ I shouted. ‘Over ’ere. The bog. Quick!’

Somehow Frank managed to haul himself and all the drugs over to the bog, which was just off the hallway near the front door, and we dived inside and locked the door behind us.

The sirens were fucking deafening now.

Then I heard the brakes of the police cars squealing as they pulled up outside. Then a radio crackling. Then a knock at the door.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

‘Open up!’ shouted one of the cops. ‘C’mon, open up!’ By now, me and Frank were kneeling on the floor. In our panic, we’d tried to get rid of the pot before the coke—first by washing it down the sink, then by flushing it down the bog. Big mistake. The sink and the bog couldn’t take it, and they’d started to overflow with all this brown, lumpy water. So we tried forcing some of the pot down the U-trap, using the end of the bog brush. But it wouldn’t go. The pipes were backed up.

And we still had to get rid of all the coke.

‘There’s nothing else for it,’ I said to Frank. ‘We’re gonna have to snort all the coke.’

‘Are you fucking out of your mind?’ he said. ‘You’ll die!’

‘Have you ever been to prison, Frank?’ I said. ‘Well, I have, and I’m telling you right now, I ain’t going back.’

So I started to break open the vials and tip the coke on to the floor. Then I got down on all fours, pressed my nose against the tiles, and started to vacuum up as much of the stuff as I could.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

‘Open the door! We know you’re in there!’

Frank was looking at me like I was insane.

‘Any second now,’ I told him, my face bright red, my legs tingling, my eyeballs throbbing,

‘they’re gonna break down that door, and we’ll be fucked.’

‘Oh, man,’ said Frank, joining me on all fours. ‘I can’t believe I’m about to do this.’

We must have snorted about six or seven grams each before I heard the tapping noise outside the door.

‘SHHH! Listen,’ I said.

There it was again: tap, tap, tap, tap…

It sounded like footsteps…

Then I heard the front door open and a woman’s voice. She was speaking in Spanish. The maid! The maid was letting in the cops. Fuck! I broke open another vial and put my nose to the floor again.

A male voice: ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I believe someone at this residence pressed the emergency call button?’

I stopped, mid-sniff.

Emergency call button?

The maid said something in Spanish again, the man replied, then I heard two sets of footsteps in the hallway and the man’s voice getting louder. The cop was inside the house!

‘It’s usually located right next to the AC thermostat,’ he said. ‘Yep, here it is—right on the wall. If you press this button, ma’am, it sounds an alarm down at the Bel Air station and we dispatch some officers to make sure everything is OK. Looks as though someone might have pressed it by accident when they were adjusting the thermostat. Happens more often than you’d think. Let me just reset the system—there we go—and we’ll be on our way. Any problems, just give us a call. Here’s our number. Or hit the button again. We have someone on call twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Gracias,’ said the maid.

I heard the front door close and the maid walk back towards the kitchen. All of the air came out of my lungs. Holy shit: that had been a close one. Then I looked over at Frank: his face was a mask of white powder and snot, and his left nostril was bleeding.