Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

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 underwater. 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.