I Am Ozzy (27 page)

By the time the tour ended, we were all still alive, but my prediction that someone would die still came true. It happened when Vince Neil went back to his house at Redondo Beach in LA and got fucked up with the drummer from Hanoi Rocks. At some point they ran out of booze and decided to drive to the local bottle shop in Vince's car, which was one of those low-slung, ridiculously fast, bright red De Tomaso Panteras. Vince was so loaded he drove head-on into a car coming in the opposite direction. The bloke from Hanoi Rocks was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

I didn't see much of Motley Crue after the tour, although I kept in touch with Tommy, on and off. I remember going to his house years later with my son Jack, who must have been about thirteen.
'Wow, dude, come in,' said Tommy, when I rang the door-bell. 'I can't believe it. Ozzy Osbourne's in my house.'
There were some other guests there, too, and after we'd all been given the tour of his place, Tommy said, 'Hey, dudes, check this out.' He tapped a code into a keypad in the wall, a hidden door slid open, and on the other side there was this padded sex chamber with some kind of heavy-duty harness thing swinging from the ceiling. The idea was that you'd take a chick in there, strap her to this contraption, then fuck the living shit out of her.
'What's wrong with a bed?' I asked Tommy. Then I turned around and realised that Jack had walked into the room with the rest of us. He was standing there, his eyes bulging. I felt so embarrassed, I didn't know where to fucking look.
I didn't take him to Tommy's again after that.

By the time the
Bark at the Moon
tour ended, me and Sharon's fights had reached another level of craziness. Part of it was just the pressure of being famous. I mean, don't get me wrong, I ain't complaining: my first three solo albums eventually sold more than ten million copies in America alone, which was beyond anything I could have hoped for. But when you're selling that many records, you can't do anything normal any more, 'cos you get too much hassle from the public. I remember one night when me and Sharon were staying in a Holiday Inn. It was maybe three or four in the morning, and we were both in bed. There was a knock on the door, so I got up to answer it, and these guys in overalls just brushed past me and walked into the room.

When Sharon saw them she said, 'Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in our room?' They went, 'Oh, we're just interested in seeing how you live.'
Sharon threw something at them and they brushed past me again on their way out. All they wanted to do was come in and stare. That was it.
We stopped staying in cheap hotels after that.
I mean, I'm usually happy to meet fans, but not when I'm asleep with my wife at four in the morning. Or when I'm eating. It drives me nuts when people come up to me when I'm in a restaurant with

Sharon. It's a big taboo with me, that is. The worst is when they say, 'Hey, you look like you're somebody famous! Can I have your autograph?'

'I tell you what,' I want to say to them, 'why don't you go away and find out who you think I am, come back again, and
then
I'll give you my autograph.'
But fame wasn't the biggest problem for me and Sharon. That was my drinking, which was so bad I couldn't be trusted with
anything
. When we were in Germany doing a gig, for example, I went on a tour of the Dachau concentration camp and was asked to leave because I was being drunk and disorderly. I must be the only person in history who's ever been thrown out of that fucking place.
Another thing I did when I was drunk was get more tattoos, which drove Sharon mental. Eventually she said, 'Ozzy, if you get one more tattoo, I'm gonna string you up by your bollocks.'
That night, I went out and got 'thanks' tattooed on my right palm. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. I mean, how many times do you say 'thanks' to people during your lifetime? Tens of thousands, probably. Now all I had to do was raise my right hand. But Sharon didn't appreciate the innovation. When she noticed it the next morning - I'd been trying to keep my hand under the kitchen table, but then she asked me to pass the salt - she drove me straight to a plastic surgeon to get the tattoo removed. But he told me he'd have to cut off half of my hand to get rid of the thing, so it stayed.
When we left the hospital, Sharon thanked the doctor for his time.
I just raised my right palm.
Another time we were in Albuquerque in the middle of winter, freezing cold, ice and snow everywhere. I was pissed and coked out of my fucking mind and decided to take a ride on this aerial tramway thing, which goes ten thousand feet up the Sandia Mountains to a restaurant and observation deck at the top. But there was something wrong with the cable car, and it swung to a halt halfway up the mountain.
'What do you do if you get stuck up here?' I asked the bloke at the controls, after we'd been dangling there for ages.
'Oh, there's an escape hatch in the roof,' he said, pointing to this hatch above our heads.
'But how do you climb up there?' I asked.
'There's a ladder right behind you. All you have to do is pull it out. It's very simple.'
'Is the hatch locked?'
'No.'
Big mistake, telling me that. As soon as I knew there was a ladder and an unlocked hatch I had to try it out. So I pulled out the ladder and started to climb up to the ceiling.
The guy went mental.
'What the hell are you doing? You can't do that! Stop!
Stop!
That just egged me on even more. I opened the hatch, felt this blast of icy wind, and pulled myself up on to the roof, by which time the guy and everyone else in the cable car was screaming and begging me to come back down. Then, just as I was getting my balance, the car started to move again. I almost slipped and went
splat
onto the rocks thousands of feet below, but I kept my balance by putting out my arms like I was surfing. Then I started to sing 'Good Vibrations'. I stayed up there until we were almost at the top.
The funny thing is I hate heights. I get vertigo going up a doorstep. So when I saw the cable car from the ground the next day - stone-cold sober, for once - I almost threw up. It makes me shiver even now, just thinking about it.
Doing crazy stuff like that always led to another argument with Sharon. On one occasion I lost it so badly with her, I picked up a vodka bottle and threw it in her direction. But the second it left my hand, I realised what I'd done: it was going straight for her head. Oh,
fuck
, I thought, I've just killed my wife. But it missed by an inch, thank God. The neck went straight through the plaster in the wall above her head and just stuck there, like a piece of modern art.
Sharon would always find ways to retaliate, mind you. Like when she'd take a hammer to my gold records. And then I'd retaliate to her retaliation by saying I didn't want to go on stage that night. One time, I shaved my head to try to get out of doing a show. I was hung over, knackered and pissed off, so I just thought, Fuck it, fuck them all.
But that shit didn't work with Sharon.
She just took one look at me and said, 'Right, we're getting you a wig.' Then she dragged me and a couple of the roadies to this joke shop which had a Lady Godiva wig in the window that had been there for five hundred years, with dead flies and dust and dandruff and God knows what else embedded in it. I put it on and everyone pissed themselves laughing.
But it turned out to be quite cool in the end, that wig, because I rigged it with blood capsules. Halfway through the show I'd pretend to pull out my hair and all this blood would come running down my face. It looked brilliant. But after the bat-biting incident, everyone thought it was real. At one gig, this chick in the front row almost fainted. She was screaming and pointing and crying and shouting, 'It's true what they say! He
is
crazy!'

*

'Darling,' said Sharon, a few months after the
Bark at the Moon
tour, when she found out that she was pregnant with Kelly. 'I've heard about this great place in Palm Springs where you can take a break before the next tour. It's a hotel, and they have classes every day where they teach you how to drink like a gentleman.'

'Really?' I said.

In my head, I was going, That's it! I've been doing it wrong. That must be why I've been getting these terrible hangovers. I need to learn how to drink like James Bond!
'What's the name of this place?' I said.
'The Betty Ford Center. Have you heard of it?'
'Nope.'
'Well, it just opened, and it's run by the wife of a former president. I think you'll have a good time there.'
'Sounds magic,' I said. 'Sign me up.'
'Actually, I've already booked you in for the week after the baby's due,' Sharon replied.
In the end, Kelly arrived on October 28, 1984. It was an eventful birth, to say the least. For some insane reason, Sharon had decided that she didn't want an epidural. But then as soon as the contractions started, she went, 'I've changed my mind! Get me the anaesthetist!' Now, for Sharon to say that meant that she was in fucking agony - 'cos my wife can take a bit of pain, certainly a lot more than I can. But the nurse wasn't having any of it. She goes, 'Mrs Osbourne, you do realise that there are people in third world countries who give birth without an epidural all the time, don't you?' Big mistake, that was. Sharon sat up in bed and screamed, 'LISTEN, YOU FUCKHEAD, THIS ISN'T A FUCKING THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, SO GET ME A FUCKING ANAESTHETIST!'
An hour later, Kelly came out into the world, screaming - and she hasn't stopped since, bless her. She's a real chip off the old block, is Kelly. I think that's why I've always felt so protective of her. It certainly wasn't easy, leaving my beautiful little girl with Sharon and the nurses only a few hours after she was born, but at the same time I knew I had to get my drinking under control. With any luck, I thought, I'll come home from Palm Springs a new man. So the next morning I got on the plane, drank three bottles of champagne in first class, landed at LAX twelve hours later, threw up, had a few toots of cocaine, then passed out in the back of a limo as it drove me to the Betty Ford Center. I hope this place is relaxing, I thought, 'cos I'm
knackered
.
I'd never even heard the word 'rehab' before. And I certainly didn't know that Betty Ford - the wife of President Gerald Ford - had been an alcoholic herself. While I was on tour I never spent much time watching telly or looking at newspapers, so I had no idea what a big deal the clinic was, or that the press had been calling it 'Camp Betty'. In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar, while a middle-aged woman with a voice like Barbara Woodhouse said, 'OK, gentlemen, after me: take the olive, stir it around the martini, pick up the glass with your fingers arranged like so.
That's right
, good, good. Now, take a sip, count to three, and do it again. Slowly,
slowly
.'
This is going to be my dream holiday of a lifetime, I said to myself.
But when I got there, the place looked more like a hospital than a hotel. Mind you, the grounds were stunning: freshly sprinkled lawns, tall palm trees and man-made lakes everywhere, and these huge, brown, alien-looking mountains looming in the background.
I walk in the door and Betty herself is waiting for me. She's a tiny little thing. Polo-neck sweater, big hairdo. Not much of a sense of humour, by the look of it.
'Hello, Mr Osbourne,' she goes. 'I'm Mrs Ford. I spoke with your wife Sharon a few days ago.'
'Look, Betty, d'you mind if I check in a bit later?' I say. 'I'm gasping. Terrible flight. Where's the bar?'
'I'm sorry?'
'The bar. It must be around here somewhere.'
'You do know where you are, don't you, Mr Osbourne?'
'Er, yeah?'
'So you'll know that we don't... have a bar.'
'How do you teach people to drink properly, then?'
'Mr Osbourne, I think your wife might have misled you slightly. We don't teach you
how
to drink here.'
'You don't?'
'We teach you
not
to drink.'
'Oh. Maybe I should stay somewhere else, then.'
'I'm afraid that's not an option, Mr Osbourne. Your wife was... How can I put this? She was very
insistent
.'
I can't even begin to describe the disappointment. It was almost as bad as the boredom. After one hour in that place, I felt like I'd been there a thousand years. The thing I hated most about the weeks that followed was talking about my drinking in front of all these strangers during the group sessions. Although I learned some pretty cool things. One bloke was a dentist from LA. His wife found out about his drinking and she was on his case twenty-four hours a day. So he emptied the tank of wind-screen-washer fluid in his BMW, refilled it with gin and tonic, disconnected the plastic tube from the nozzles on the bonnet, and re-routed it so it came out of one of the air vents under the dashboard. Whenever he wanted a drink, all he had to do was get in his car, put the tube in his mouth, pull on the indicator stalk, and he'd get a squirt of G&T down his throat. It worked brilliantly, apparently, until one day there was a really bad traffic jam and he turned up at work so out of his shitter that he accidentally drilled a hole in the head of one of his patients.
I'm telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, 'Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,' the disease would be history in five seconds.
As well as the group sessions, I had to see a therapist on my own. It was hard, being sober and having to discuss all the things I'd just found out were wrong with me. Like being dyslexic and having attention deficit disorder. (They didn't add the word 'hyperactivity' to it until a few years later.) It explained a lot, I suppose. The shrink said that my dyslexia had given me a terrible insecurity complex, so I couldn't take rejection or failure or pressure of any sort, which was why I was self-medicating with booze. She also said that because I was poorly educated, and
knew
I was poorly educated, I always thought people were taking me for a ride, so I didn't trust anyone. She was right, but it didn't help that I usually
was
being taken for a ride - until Sharon came along. Mind you, I had moments of coked-up paranoia when I didn't trust my wife, either.
The shrink also told me that I have an addictive personality, which means that I do
everything
addictively. And, on top of that, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all ten times worse. I'm like a walking dictionary of psychiatric disorders, I am. It blew my mind. And it took me a long time to accept any of it.
My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I'd been without drink or drugs in my adult life, and the comedown was horrendous. Everyone else was going through the same thing, but I can't say that made me feel any better. At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. I said to him, 'Look, if you suffer from depression, why the fuck do you work in a mortuary?'
'Dunno,' he said. 'It's just what I do.'
The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy - he was like a moose with a tracheotomy. The whole room shook. So I ended up spending every night on the sofa in the lobby, shivering and sweating.
Eventually, Sharon came to get me. I'd been in there six weeks. I looked better - I'd lost a bit of weight - but I'd got the whole rehab thing wrong. I thought it was supposed to
cure
me. But there ain't no cure for what I've got. All rehab can do is tell you what's wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better. Later, when I realised it wasn't a solution by itself, I used to go there just to take the heat off myself a bit when things got out of hand. Rehab
can
work, but you've got to want it. If you really want to quit, you can't say, 'Well, I want to quit today, but I might have a drink next week at my friend's wedding.' You've got to commit, then live each day as it comes. Every morning, you've got to wake up and say, 'OK, today's gonna be one more day without a drink,' or a cigarette, or a pill, or a joint, or whatever it is that's been killing you.
That's as much as you can hope for when you're an addict.