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.
Then Sharon and Tony were dragging me on to the back seat of the car, and we were driving round and round, trying to find a doctor. Finally, I was on a bed with all these drips coming out of me, and in a muffled voice I could hear the doc saying to Sharon, ‘Your husband has gone into an alcoholic seizure. It’s very, very serious. We’ve put him on anti-seizure medication, but we’re going to have to keep monitoring him overnight. He might not come out of it.’
Then, little by little, the feeling returned.
Toes first. Then legs. Then chest. I felt like I was being lifted up from deep, deep under the sea. Then, all of a sudden, my ears popped and I could hear an EKG machine behind me.
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
‘How many fingers?’ Sharon was saying. ‘How many fingers, Ozzy?’
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
‘Ozzy, what’s my name? What’s my name?’
Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.
‘Your name’s Sharon. I’m so sorry, Sharon. I’m so fucking sorry for everything. I love you.’
Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp.
The copper walks up to the bars of my cell holding a sheet of paper in his hand. I’m looking at him, sweating, breathing fast and shallow, fists balled, wanting to fucking die.
He’s looking back at me.Then he clears his throat and starts to read: John Michael Osbourne, you are hereby charged with the attempted murder by strangulation of your wife,Sharon Osbourne, during a domestic disturbance that took place in the early hours of Sunday, September 3, 1989, at Beel House, Little Chalfont, in the county of Buckinghamshire.
It was like someone had hit me over the head with a shovel. I staggered backwards, fell against the shit- smeared wall, then slumped on to the floor, head in my hands. I wanted to throw up, pass out and scream, all at the same time. Attempted murder? Sharon? This was my worst nightmare. I’m gonna wake up in a minute, I thought. This can’t be happening. ‘I love my wife!’ I wanted to tell the copper. ‘I love my wife, she’s my best friend in the world, she saved my life. Why the fuck would I want to kill my wife?’
But I didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t speak.
I couldn’t do anything.
‘I hope you’re proud of yourself,’ said the copper.
‘Is she all right?’ I asked him, when I finally got my voice back.
‘Her husband just tried to kill her. How d’you think she is?’
‘But why would I do that? I don’t understand.’
‘Well, it says here that after returning home from a Chinese restaurant—you’d gone there after celebrating your daughter Aimee’s sixth birthday, during which time you became heavily intoxicated on Russian vodka—you walked into the bedroom naked and said, I quote, “We’ve had a little talk and it’s clear that you have to die.”’
‘I said what?’
‘Apparently, you’d spent the entire night complaining about being overworked, because you’d just come back from the Moscow Festival of Peace—fitting that, ain’t it?—and then you had to go to California. Sounds more like a holiday than work to me.’
‘It can’t be true,’ I said. ‘I’d never try to kill her.’
But of course it could be true. Sharon had been saying for years that she never knew which version of me was going to walk through the front door: Bad Ozzy or Good Ozzy. Usually it was Bad Ozzy. Especially when I’d just come off the road, and I had that horrendous restless feeling. Only this time I’d decided to kill more than my chickens.
‘Another thing,’ said the copper. ‘Your wife told us that if she’d had access to a gun at the time of the assault, she would have used it. Although I see she had a pretty good go at scratching your eyes out. She’s quite a fighter, your missus, isn’t she?’
I didn’t know what to say. So I just tried to make light of it, and said, ‘Well, at least it’ll give the press something to write about.’
The copper didn’t like that.
‘Given the severity of the charges,’ he said, ‘I don’t think this is very fucking funny, do you? You’re up for attempted murder, you piss-head. Your wife could very well be dead if others in the house hadn’t heard her screaming. They’re gonna put you away for a long time, mark my words.’
‘Sharon knows I love her,’ I said, trying not to think of Winson Green and Bradley the child molester.
‘We’ll see about that, won’t we?’
It would be fair to say that the coppers in Amersham jail didn’t take much of a shine to me.
My little dance, my little ego, it didn’t do me any favours in there. I wasn’t the bat-biting, Alamo-pissing, ‘Crazy Train’-singing rock ’n’ roll hero. All that celebrity shit counts for nothing with the Thames Valley Police.
