Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

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, one-foot-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.