it. You’d find a comfort blanket that was absolutely identical in every way to Baby, but Jack would take one look at it, throw it back at you, and bawl his eyes out until he got his real Baby back. And of course as time went on, Baby ended up having major surgery after being eaten by Sharon’s dog a few times, so in the end there was no mistaking him.
As much as I was drunk and absent a lot of the time, I loved being a dad. It’s just so much fun watching these little people you’ve brought into the world as they develop and grow up.
Sharon loved being a mum, too. But enough was enough after a while. After Jack was born, I remember her saying to me, ‘Ozzy, I can’t have you anywhere near me next time you finish a tour. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for ever, I can’t do it any more.’
So I went and got the snip. What a strange experience that was.
‘You know this can’t be reversed, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’ said the doc.
‘Yeah.’
‘So you’re sure about this?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Absolutely sure?’
‘Doc, believe me, I’m sure.’
‘OK then, sign this form.’
After the operation, my balls swelled up to the size of watermelons. They ached terribly, too. ‘Hey, Doc,’ I said. ‘Can you give me something that will leave the swelling but take away the pain?’
All in all, I don’t recommend it, as far as elective surgery goes. When you pop your load after you’ve had the snip, nothing but dust comes out. It’s like a dry sneeze. Really weird, man.
Then, nine months later, Sharon got broody again. So I had to go back to the doc and ask him to unsnip me.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘I told you that couldn’t be done. But we can always try, I suppose.’
It didn’t work. As the doc said, it’s very hard to reverse a snip. Maybe if I’d gone back to get my pipes cleaned out, it would have been OK. Who knows? But we gave up on having any more kids after that. Still, five kids in one lifetime ain’t bad—and I love them all so much.
They’re the best things that ever happened to me, no question about it.
Another problem with getting the snip was that it made me think I suddenly had the freedom to do whatever I wanted to—or at least whatever I thought I wanted to, when I was pissed out of my skull. But my wife was brought up in a rock ’n’ roll environment, and she can sniff out a lie from six thousand miles away. And I’m the world’s worst liar, anyway.
So she knew exactly what I was up to. Of course, she hated it, but she put up with it. At first.
It wasn’t like I was having affairs. I just wanted to think I was Robert Redford for an hour.
But I was never any good at that game. Most of the time, when I was with a chick, she’d be calling an ambulance or carrying me back to my hotel room in a cab while I puked my guts out. I’d start the night like James Bond, and end it like a pile of shit on the floor. And the guilt that followed was always fucking lethal. I hated it. I felt like such an arsehole. And I’m a terrible hypochondriac, so I’d always be shitting myself that I’d caught some rare and deadly virus. I can catch a disease off the telly, me. I’ll be taking some pill to help me get to sleep, then I’ll see an ad for it on TV, and the voiceover will say, ‘Side-effects may include vomiting, bleeding and, on rare occasions, death’ and I’ll convince myself I’m halfway to the morgue. It got to the point where I had doctors coming over to look at my dick twice a week, just to be on the safe side.
Then AIDS came along.
I wasn’t worried at first. Like most people, I thought it was a gay thing. And no matter how drunk or high I got, I never felt the urge to jump in the sack with some hairy-arsed bloke.
But it didn’t take long for everyone to realise that you don’t have to be gay to get AIDS.
Then, one night, I bonked this chick in the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood. As soon as I was done, I just knew something wasn’t right. So, at two in the morning, I called the front desk and asked if they had a doctor on duty. They did—those fancy hotels always have their own in-house quacks—so he came up to my room, checked out my tackle and told me I should go and have a test.
‘What d’you mean, a test?’ I asked him.
‘An HIV test,’ he said.
That was it, as far as I was concerned. I was a goner.
For a few days I drove myself halfway insane with worry. I was impossible to be around.
Then I blurted everything out to Sharon. You can imagine how that went down. Think of that 100-megaton bomb the Russians once set off in the Arctic.
That was Sharon when I told her that I had to get an HIV test ’cos I’d bonked some dodgy chick from a hotel bar. Angry doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was such a bad scene, I began to think that being dead might actually be better than being alive for another bollocking.
Anyway, I got the test. And then a week later, I went with Sharon to get the results.
I’ll never forget the doctor walking into that little room, sitting down, getting out his file, and going, ‘Well, Mr Osbourne, the good news is that you don’t have herpes, the clap or syphilis.’
The second he said that, I knew something was up.
‘What’s the bad news?’ I asked him.
‘Well, I’m afraid there’s no easy way to tell you this,’ he said, as my whole body went numb with fear. ‘But you’re HIV positive.’
I literally fell to my knees, put my hands over my head, and screamed, ‘WHAT THE FUCK
DO YOU MEAN I’M HIV POSITIVE? THAT’S A FUCKING DEATH SENTENCE, YOU ARSEHOLE!’
You’ve got to remember, in those days HIV wasn’t treatable like it is now. If you got HIV, it meant you’d get AIDS—and then you’d die. The End. And if I was HIV positive, then it probably meant that Sharon was HIV positive, too. Which meant I’d killed the mother of my kids.
I couldn’t even look at Sharon, I felt so fucking terrible. She must have hated me at that moment. But she didn’t say anything. I suppose the shock of it must have been as bad for her as it was for me.
Then the phone on the doctor’s desk rang. I was still on my knees and screaming at this point, but I soon shut up when I realised it was the lab, calling about my results. I listened as the doctor ummed and ahhed for a while. Then he put down the receiver and went, ‘Actually, Mr Osbourne, let me clarify: your test was borderline, not positive. That means we need to run it again. Sorry for the confusion.’
Confusion? If I hadn’t been such a mess, I would have got up and chinned the bastard.
But I was in no state for anything.
‘How long will that take?’ I croaked, trying not to throw up.
‘Another week.’
‘I won’t last a week,’ I said. ‘Seriously, doc, I’ll have topped myself by then. Is there any way of getting it faster?’
‘It’ll be expensive.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘OK then. I’ll get it for you overnight. In the meantime, Mrs Osbourne, I suggest you get a test, too.’
Sharon nodded, her face white.
The next day we went back for my results. I’d been a fucking wreck all night, but Sharon wasn’t exactly in the mood to give me any sympathy. The only thing she was in the mood for was divorce. I honestly thought my marriage was over.
‘So, Mr Osbourne,’ began the doc. ‘We ran another test on you, and I’m delighted to say that you don’t seem to have HIV—although we should do the test one more time, to be sure.’
I put my head in my hands, released all the air from my lungs, and thanked God like I’d never thanked Him before. Meanwhile, I heard Sharon let out a sob of relief and blow her nose.
‘The confusion seems to have arisen from the state of your immune system,’ the doc went on. ‘Basically, Mr Osbourne, your immune system currently isn’t functioning. At all. At first, the lab couldn’t understand it. So they did some more blood-work, and then they came across some—well, er, some lifestyle factors that probably explain the anomaly.’
‘Lifestyle factors?’
