tears. Kelly and Aimee were hiding in the shed, also in tears. All the other parents were leaving and muttering under their breath. The clown had a bloody nose. And there was me, in the middle of it all, fat, pissed, cake all over my face, dripping wet from something or other, raving, screaming drunk.
I was a beast. Absolutely terrifying.
After I’d come out of the Betty Ford Center, I’d started to say to myself, ‘Well, I might be an alcoholic, but I have the perfect job for an alcoholic, so maybe it’s kind of all right that I’m an alcoholic.’
In a way, it was true. I mean, what other occupation rewards you for being out of your brains all the time? The more loaded I was when I got on stage, the more the audience knew it was gonna be a good night. The trouble was the booze was making me so ill that I couldn’t function without taking pills or cocaine on top of it. Then I couldn’t sleep—or I had panic attacks, or I went into these paranoid delusions—so I turned to sedatives, which I’d get from doctors on the road. Whenever I overdosed, which I did all the time, I’d just blame it on my dyslexia: ‘Sorry, Doc, I thought it said six every one hour, not one every six hours.’
I had a different doctor in every town—‘gig doctors’ I called them—and played them off against each other. When you’re a drug addict, half the thrill is the chase, not the fix. When I discovered Vicodin, for example, I used to keep an old bottle and put a couple of pills in it, then I’d say, ‘Oh, Doc, I’ve got these Vicodins, but I’m running low.’ He’d look at the date and the two pills left in the jar, then whack me up another fifty. So I’d get fifty pills before every gig.
I was doing twenty-five a day at one point.
Mind you, in America, if you’re a celebrity, you don’t have to try very hard to get doctors to give you whatever you want. One gig doctor would drive out to see me in his pick-up. In the back he had one of those tool cabinets full of little drawers, and in each drawer he had a different kind of drug. All the heavy shit you could ever want. Eventually Sharon found out what was going on and put her foot down. She grabbed the doc by the scruff of the neck and said,
‘Do not give my husband any drugs under any circumstances or you’re going to jail.’
Deep down, I knew that all the booze and drugs had turned sour on me; that I’d stopped being funny and zany and had started to become sad. I’d run miles to get a drink. I’d do anything for a drink. I used to keep a fridge full of beer in the kitchen, and I’d get up, first thing in the morning, knock off a Corona, and by twelve o’clock I was fucking blasted. And when I was doing Vicodin and all that other shit, I was always playing with my fucking nose. You can see how bad I was on Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. Everyone thought it was hysterical, me trying to fry an egg at seven o’clock in the morning after I’d been out on the piss all night, drinking bottle after bottle of vino.
Booze does terrible things to you when you drink as much as I did. For example, I started to shit myself on a regular basis. At first I made a joke out of it, but then it just stopped being funny. One time, I was in a hotel somewhere in England, and I was walking down the corridor to my room, but suddenly I felt this turd rumbling down the pipe. I had to go. Right then. It was either do it on the carpet or do it in my pants, and I’d had enough of doing it in my pants. So I squatted down, dropped my trousers, and took a dump right there in the corridor.
At that exact moment, a bellboy came out of the elevator, looked at me, and shouted,
‘What the hell are you doing?’
I couldn’t even begin to think how to explain. So I just held up my room key and said, ‘It’s all right, I’m staying here.’
‘No you’re fucking not,’ he said.
A lot of alcoholics shit themselves. I mean, think about it: a gallon of Guinness makes enough tarmac to pave ten miles of the M6. And when you come round the following day, your body wants to get rid of everything: it just wants to expel all the toxic crap you forced into it the night before. I tried to stop it by switching from Guinness to Hennessy. But I was fruiting it up with orange juice or Coca-Cola the whole time, which made it just as bad. And I was drinking four bottles of Hennessy a day, plus the cocaine and the pills and the beer. At first, I would barely get hangovers, but as time went on they started to get worse and worse, until I couldn’t handle them any more.
So I went back to rehab. I was just so sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. If you drink a liquid that makes you feel better, then that’s one thing. But if you drink a liquid that makes you feel worse than you did originally, then what’s the point? And I felt like I was dying.
I couldn’t face Betty Ford again, so I went to the Hazelden Clinic in Center City, Minnesota. It was winter, freezing cold. I spent the whole time shivering, throwing up and feeling sorry for myself.
On the first day, the therapist got a bunch of us together and said, ‘When you go back to your rooms tonight, I want you to write down how much you think drink and drugs have cost you since you started doing them. Just add it all up and come back to me.’
So that night I got out a calculator and started to do some sums. I kind of wanted to get a big number, so I grossly exaggerated a lot of things, like how many pints I had each day—I put twenty-five—and how much each of them cost. In the end I came up with this obscene number. Just a huge, ridiculous number. Something like a million quid. Then I tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t.
The next day, I showed my calculations to the bloke, and he said, ‘Oh, very interesting.’
I was surprised, ’cos I thought he was gonna say, ‘Oh, come off it, Ozzy, give me some real numbers.’
Then he said, ‘So is this just from drinking?’
‘And drugs,’ I said.
‘Hmm. And you’re sure this is everything?’ he asked me.
‘It’s a million quid!’ I said. ‘How much more could it be?’
‘Well, have you ever been fined because of drinking?’
‘A few times, yeah.’
‘Have you ever missed any gigs or been banned from any venues because of drinking?’
‘A few times, yeah.’
‘Had to pay lawyers to get you out of trouble because of your drinking?’
‘A few times, yeah.’
‘Medical fees?’
‘Big time.’
‘And d’you think you might have lost record sales because your work was affected by drinking?’
‘Probably.’
‘Probably?’
‘OK, definitely.’
‘Final question: have you ever lost property or other assets in a divorce caused by your drinking?’
‘Yeah, I lost everything.’
‘Well, Ozzy, I did some research and some calculations of my own last night, and d’you want to know what I think your addictions have cost you?’
‘Go on then.’
He told me. I almost threw up.
10. Blackout
I woke up groaning.
Fuck me, I thought, as my eyes began to focus: must have been another good one last night. I was lying on a bare concrete floor in a square room. It had bars on the window, a bucket in the corner, and human shit up the walls. For a second I thought I was in a public toilet. But no: the bars on the window were the giveaway.
One of these days, I thought, I really need to stop waking up in jail cells.
I touched my face. Argh! Shit, that hurt.
For some reason, all I was wearing one of my smelly old T-shirts—the kind I used to sleep in—and a pair of shiny black tuxedo trousers. At least it’s better than waking up in one of Sharon’s frocks again, I thought.
I wondered what time it was. Seven in the morning? Nine? Ten? My watch was gone. So was my wallet. The coppers must have bagged my stuff when they booked me. The only thing left in my pockets was a scrunched-up
