Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘You mean…?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Someone needs to teach Bill how to use that fucking thing.’

The constant fear of getting busted wasn’t the only downside to coke. It got to the point where practically every word out of my mouth was coked-up bollocks. For fifteen hours straight, I’d tell the lads how much I loved them more than anything else in the world. Even me and Tony—who never had conversations—would have nights when we’d be up for hours, hugging each other and saying, ‘No, really, I love you, man—I really love you.’

Then I’d go to bed, wait for my heart to stop beating at eight times its usual speed, then fall into this fucking horrific withdrawal. The comedowns were so bad that I used to pray. I’d say, ‘God, please let me sleep, and I promise I’ll never do cocaine again, as long as I live.’

Then I’d wake up with my jaw aching from spouting so much bullshit the previous night.

And I’d do another line.

It was amazing how quickly it took over our lives. It got to the point where we couldn’t do anything without it. Then it got to the point where we couldn’t do anything with it, either.

When I finally realised the pot wasn’t enough to calm me down from all the coke, I started getting into Valium. Then eventually I moved on to heroin, but thank God I didn’t like that stuff.

Geezer tried it, too. He thought it was fucking brilliant, but he was sensible. He didn’t want to get involved. Frank, the roadie, wasn’t so lucky—heroin ruined him in the end. I haven’t heard from Frank in years now, and I’d be amazed if he survived, to be honest with you. I hope he did, I really do, but when heroin gets hold of you, it’s usually The End.

During the making of Vol. 4, we all had moments when we were so fucked up that we just couldn’t function. With Bill, it was when he was recording ‘Under the Sun’. By the time he got the drums right on that song, we’d renamed it ‘Everywhere Under the Fucking Sun’. Then the poor bloke came down with hepatitis and almost died. Meanwhile, Geezer ended up in hospital with kidney problems. Even Tony burned out. Just after we’d finished the album, we did a gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Tony had been doing coke literally for days—we all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. I mean, that stuff just twists your whole idea of reality. You start seeing things that aren’t there. And Tony was gone. Near the end of the gig he walked off stage and collapsed.

‘Severe exhaustion,’ the doctor said.

That was one way of putting it.

At the same time, the coke was fucking up my voice, good and proper. When you’re taking heavy-duty amounts of cocaine, this white gunk starts to trickle down the back of your throat, and you find yourself doing that phlegm-clearing thing all the time—like a sniff, but deeper and gunkier. And that puts a lot of stress on that little titty thing that hangs down at the back of your throat—the epiglottis, or the ‘clack’, as I’ve always called it. Anyway, I was taking so much coke that I was clearing away the phlegm every couple of minutes, until eventually I tore my clack in half. I was lying in bed at the time in the Sunset Marquis hotel, and I just felt it flop down inside the back of my throat. It was horrific. Then the fucking thing swelled up to the size of a golf ball. I thought: Right, this is it—I’m gonna die now.

So I went to see a doctor on Sunset Boulevard.

He asked, ‘What’s the problem, Mr Osbourne?’

‘I’ve sucked my clack,’ I croaked.

‘You’ve what?’

‘My clack.’

I pointed at my throat.

‘Let’s have a look,’ he said, getting out his lollipop stick and his little flashlight. ‘Open wide.

‘Say “ahh” for me now.’

So I opened my mouth and closed my eyes.

‘Holy mother of Christ!’ he said. ‘How in God’s name did you do that?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Mr Osbourne, your epiglottis is the size of a small light bulb, and it’s glowing almost as brightly. I don’t even need to use my flashlight.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘I think so,’ he said, writing out a prescription. ‘But whatever it is you’ve been doing, stop doing it.’

That wasn’t the end of our medical problems, though. When it was time to go back to England, we were all terrified of taking home an STD from one of the groupies and giving it to our other half. Catching some exotic disease was always a big worry when we were in America. I remember one time during a particularly wild night at a hotel somewhere, Tony came running out of his room, going, ‘Aargh! My knob! My knob!’ I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he’d been messing around with this groupie when he looked down and saw all this yellow pus coming out of her. He thought he was about to die.

‘Did the pus smell funny?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, white in the face. ‘I almost puked.’

‘Ah.’

‘What d’you mean, “ah”?’

‘Was it the blonde chick?’ I asked. ‘The one with the tattoo?’

‘Yeah. And?’

‘Well, that probably explains it then.’

‘Ozzy,’ said Tony, getting visibly angry. ‘Stop fucking around, this is serious. What are you talking about?’

‘Look, I ain’t a doctor,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think the yellow stuff was pus.’

‘Well what was it then?’

‘Probably the banana I stuck up there earlier.’

I don’t think Tony knew whether to be relieved or even more worried after that.

Of course, one failsafe way to make sure you never gave anything dodgy to your missus was to get a shot of penicillin. I’d learned that after getting the clap one time. But in those days we didn’t know any dodgy doctors, which meant the only way to get a ‘safety shot’ was to check yourself into the emergency room of the nearest hospital.

So that’s what we did after making Vol. 4.

By then we’d left Bel Air and were on the road in small-town America somewhere, doing a few shows before our flight back home. I’ll never forget the scene: me, Tony, Geezer, and pretty much the entire road crew—I don’t know what Bill was up to that day—checking ourselves into this hospital one night. And of course no one had the bottle to tell the good-looking chick on the front desk why we were there, so they were all going, ‘Go on, Ozzy, you tell her, you don’t care, you’re fucking crazy, you are.’ But even I couldn’t bring myself to say,

‘Oh, hello there, my name’s Ozzy Osbourne, and I’ve been bonking groupies for a couple of months, and I think my knob might be about to fall off, would you mind terribly giving me a shot of penicillin to make sure my missus doesn’t get whatever I’ve got?’

But it was too late to turn around and walk away.

So when the girl asked me what the problem was, I just turned bright red and blurted, ‘I think I broke my ribs.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Here’s a ticket. See this number? They’ll call it out when the doctor’s ready to see you.’

Then it was Geezer’s turn to go up.

‘I’ve got whatever he’s got,’ he said, pointing at me.

Eventually the doctors twigged. I don’t know who came clean with them, ’cos I certainly didn’t. I just remember this bloke in a white suit coming up to me and going, ‘Are you with the others?’ and me nodding. Then he showed me into this room with Tony, Geezer and about half a dozen other hairy English blokes all bent over with their trousers down, their lily-white arses ready for their penicillin jabs.

‘Join the line,’ he said.

It was September when we got back to England.

By that time the deal to buy Bulrush Cottage had gone through, and Thelma, Elliot and the baby were already settled in. It always made me smile, going home to Bulrush Cottage—mainly because it was on a little country road called Butt Lane. ‘Welcome to Butt Lane,’ I used to say to visitors, ‘the arsehole of Britain.’