I Am Ozzy (37 page)

I can't remember much of the next two weeks. For the first few hours, I was slipping in and out of consciousness all the time. I have this vague memory of Sam, my security guard, lifting me on to the back of his bike and driving me back across the field. Then all I can remember are glimpses of the inside of an ambulance, followed by lots of doctors peering down at me.

'How did you get him to an ambulance?' one of them said.
'We put him on the back of a bike,' replied a voice I didn't recognise.
'You could have paralysed him! He's got a broken
neck
, for God's sake. He'll be lucky to walk again.' 'Well, how were we
supposed
to get him out of the forest?'
'A helicopter was on its way.'
'
We didn't know that
.'
'Clearly.'
Then everything started to melt away.
Apparently the last thing I did before losing consciousness was to pull on a doctor's sleeve and whisper

in his ear, 'Whatever you do, don't fuck up my tattoo.'

Sharon was in LA, so Tony called her and put the chief doc on the line. He told her everything, and they agreed I had to go straight into surgery.
I was very badly injured. As well as breaking my neck, I'd fractured eight of my ribs and punctured my lungs, which was why they were filling up with blood. Meanwhile, when my collar-bone broke it cut through a main artery in my arm, so that there was no blood supply. For a while the docs thought they were gonna have to chop it off. Once they were done operating on me, they put me into a 'chemical coma', 'cos it was the only way I was going to be able to handle the pain. If I'd copped it then, it would have been a fitting end for me: I'd spent my whole adult life trying to get into a chemical coma. They kept me under for eight days in the end. Then they started to bring me slowly back to consciousness. It took another six days for me to fully wake up. And during that time I had the most fucking insane dream. It was so vivid, it was more like a hallucination. All I can say is that the NHS must have loaded me up with some top-quality gear, 'cos I can still picture every detail like it was yesterday.
It started off with me in Monmouthshire - where I used to go to rehearse with Black Sabbath and my solo bands. It was raining - pissing it down. Then I was in this corridor at Rockfield Studios, and in front of me was a camouflaged fence, like something they might have had in the trenches during World War Two. To my left was a window. When I looked through it, on the other side was Sharon, having a party. She couldn't see me, but I could see her. I followed her out of this party and watched as she met up with some handsome, wealthy guy, who had his own plane. In the dream I thought, There's my wife, and she's leaving me. It was terribly sad. The guy had a landing strip in his back yard, and at the end of it was a big gun. Then, all of a sudden, he could see me - so I offered him some telescopic night-vision sights, because I wanted him to like me. He told me to fuck off, and I felt rejected all over again. At that point, all the guests from the party came running on to the lawn. The crowd got bigger and bigger until in the end it became this big music festival.
That was when Marilyn Manson showed up.
It was fucking nuts, man.
Next, I was on the rich guy's plane going to New Zealand, and they were serving draught Guinness in the cockpit. I suppose that must have had something to do with my son Louis's wedding in Ireland, which I was missing because I was in hospital. In New Zealand it was New Year's Eve. Jack was there - he'd bleached his hair completely white and he was letting off fire crackers. Then he got arrested.
At that point, Donovan strolled into the dream and started to play 'Mellow Yellow'.
What made all this even freakier was that I kept coming around, so some aspects of the dream were real. For example, I thought I was living in a fish 'n' chip shop, but in fact my bed was right next to the hospital kitchen, so I could smell them cooking. Then I saw my guitarist Zakk Wylde - which in the dream I thought was impossible, because he lived in America - but I later learned that he'd flown over to see me, so he was really there.
I also saw him wearing a frilly dress, dancing with a mop and a bucket.
But that
wasn't
real.
Or at least I hope it wasn't.

'Ozzy,
Ozzy
, can you hear me?'
It was Sharon.
After almost two weeks, they'd finally brought me out of the coma.
I opened my eyes.
Sharon smiled and dabbed at her face with a tissue.
'I've got news for you,' she said, squeezing my hand.
'I had a dream,' I told her, before she could say anything more. 'You left me for a rich guy with an

aeroplane.'
'What are you talking about, Ozzy? Don't be silly. No one's leaving anyone. Everyone loves you. You
should see the flowers that your fans have left outside. You'll be touched. They're beautiful.' She squeezed
my hand again and said, 'Do you want to hear the news?'
'What is it? Are the kids OK?'
'You and Kelly are at number one. You finally fucking did it.'
'With "Changes"?'
'Yes! You even broke a record, Ozzy. It's never taken anyone thirty-three years from having their first
song in the charts to getting a number one. Only Lulu has even come close.'
I managed a smile. 'Is that supposed to make me feel better?' I said. Then I laughed. Not a good idea, with eight broken ribs.

Normally, I hate Christmas. I mean, if you're an alcoholic and you're drinking, Christmas is the best thing in the world. But if you ain't drinking, it's fucking agony. And I hate the fact that you have to buy everyone a gift. Not because I'm tight - it's just that you do it out of obligation, not because you want to.

It's always seemed like total bullshit to me.
But Christmas 2003 was the exception. Me and Kelly might not have got the Christmas number one - we were outsold in the last week by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, with their cover version of 'Mad World' - but I got to live another day. Which is pretty unbelievable, when you think about it. The only sadness I have from that time is that none of my old Black Sabbath bandmates called to say they liked 'Changes', or to say, 'Well done on getting to number one.' Even if they'd called to say they thought it was a piece of shit, it would have been better than silence. No wonder it was raining so hard in Monmouthshire when I was there in the dream.
But whatever, man. It ain't a big deal.
The hospital where I'd been in the coma, Wexham Park, couldn't have been better. But I pissed them off in the end. I wanted to go home, 'cos I'd had enough, but they told me there was no way I could leave. I mean, at that point I couldn't walk; I had a neck brace on; my arm still hadn't come back to life; and I was in excruciating fucking pain. But my dream had fucked me up. I was convinced that Sharon was flying around the world in a private jet with a hot tub in the back, while being shagged senseless by some billionaire. If I was in hospital, I thought, I had no chance of getting her back. But by the time Sharon had raced over to the hospital with the kids to tell me for the millionth time that everything was OK, that it was all just a dream, it was too late: I'd managed to sign myself out. So Sharon had to get a hospital bed for me at Welders House and a home-help nurse to wipe my arse and shake my dick. For weeks, the only way I could get from room to room was in a wheelchair, and every night I had to be carried upstairs to go to bed.
But eventually I made a full recovery. Or as full as anyone could expect. My short-term memory seemed worse, but maybe that was just age, or the sleeping pills. And my ribcage is still full of screws and bolts and metal rods. When I walk through an airport metal detector these days, a klaxon goes off in the Pentagon.
But I can't complain, y'know? I remember when I first went back to America after the crash, and I had to go to the doc for a check-up. He took all these X-rays of my chest, put them up on the viewing box, and started to whistle through his teeth. 'Nice work,' he said. 'Must have been a bit pricey, though. What did it cost ya? Seven figures? Eight?'
'Nothing, actually,' I said.
He couldn't believe it. 'What d'you mean?'
'National Health Service,' I said, and shrugged.
'Holy crap,' he went. 'No wonder you guys put up with the weather.'

Once I was out of the wheelchair and the neck brace, it was time to renegotiate our contract with MTV -
again
. But I couldn't face another season of
The Osbournes
.
Enough was enough.
Anyway, by then MTV had killed the show by trying to wring every last ounce of dough out of it. It seemed to be on twenty-four hours a day. And when you overdo a show like that, people get bored. You want the folks at home to be saying, 'Oh, it's nine o'clock. Time for
The Osbournes
.' You want them to be jacked up for it. But when it's on every night, they just say, '
Meh
, it'll be on tomorrow.' They did the exact same thing with
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
It was brilliant for five minutes, then you couldn't get away from it.
Another problem was that after three years of doing the show, we'd filmed just about everything we could ever film. So, for the last season, we had to come up with all these gimmicks - and we were so famous that we were mobbed whenever we left the house. It started to feel a bit fake, which was the exact opposite of what
The Osbournes
was all about.
So that was the end of it. By 2005 the show was over, Fort Apache was taken down, and the crew moved out. Not long after, Jack and Kelly moved out too. But I like to think we made our mark on TV. And especially on MTV. They love reality shows now, that lot. You have to stay up until three in the morning just to catch a music video these days. And, of course, a lot of people have tried to take credit for
The Osbournes
now that it's over. But I've never been in any doubt about who were the
true
creators of
The Osbournes
.
They're called the Osbournes.

One of the great things about the show was that it allowed Sharon to go off and have a successful career in TV. After she got through her chemotherapy, all I wanted was for Sharon to be happy, and when she got the gig as a judge on
The X Factor
, she loved it. When Sharon wanted to leave after the fourth season, I said to her, 'Look, are you absolutely sure this is what you want to do, because if it is then I'm completely behind you.' And in the end, it worked out very well for her, because now she's having the time of her life doing
America's Got Talent
.

I must say I thought my life would become a bit more normal after
The Osbournes
ended. Fat fucking chance. Welders House almost burned down three times, for a start. Then I nearly murdered a cat burglar in the middle of the night in my own bathroom.

I swear this kind of crazy shit only ever happens to me.
If it hadn't been for my dodgy bladder, I wouldn't even have seen the guy. But I'm up and down during the night like a fiddler's elbow, I am. It's because I drink so much liquid, even when I'm not boozing. The cups of tea I make are the size of soup bowls. And I can get through a dozen of them a day. Whatever I do, it's always to excess.
Anyway, the break-in happened just before dawn on Monday, November 22, 2004. I woke up busting for a piss, and luckily I wasn't loaded on anything more than the usual pills, so I wasn't staggering around, falling into things. I just got out of bed, stark bollock naked, and walked into the bathroom, which leads through to this little vanity area. I switched on the lights and lifted up the toilet seat, and as I did so, I glanced towards Sharon's dressing table.
There he was: a bloke about my height, dressed head-to-toe in black, a ski mask over his face, crouched down, but with nowhere to hide.
It's hard to describe the kind of fright you get when something like that happens. But then the urgency of the situation takes over. As soon as he knew that I'd seen him, the bloke legged it to the window and tried to climb out. For some reason - God knows why, given how much of a chickenshit I am - I ran after him and got him in a headlock before he could get his whole body through the gap. So there he is, this cat burglar, on his back with his eyes twinkling up at me, and I've got my arm around his throat. Suddenly I'm thinking: Right, what now? We seemed to be there for ages, neither of us saying anything, while I decided what to do.
If I pull him back inside, I thought, he might have a crow-bar, or a gun. I also thought he might have had a friend outside, waiting to help out in an emergency. And I wasn't exactly up for a fight at four o'clock in the morning. I didn't have my Rambo attire on, put it that way. So then I thought, Why don't I just kill the bastard? I mean, he was in my house, and I hadn't invited him. But did I really want to live with the fact that I'd taken someone's life, when I knew I could have let him go?
In the end, I just threw the fucker out of the window, which was on the second floor. I could hear him crash through the branches of a tree on his way down. Then I watched him hobbling across the field, yelping with every step. With any luck, he broke something.
He got away with two million quid's worth of jewellery, and the cops never caught him. The stuff was insured, but you never get back the full value with those things. I suppose I should have shouted for Sharon to press the alarm button, but I didn't think. And she didn't know anything about it until it was all over.
But it's only stuff, isn't it? And it could have been a lot worse. He could have beaten me over the head with a baseball bat while I was asleep. He could have raped Sharon. I mean, you hear people down the pub saying, 'Oh, I'd fucking
love
that to happen to me, I'd show the bastard,' but believe me, when you're taken by surprise like that, it's a lot different.
I've bought a few guns since then, mind you, so if there's ever another bloke, he won't have it so easy. Then again, I don't know if I'd have the nerve to shoot someone. And you've gotta be fucking careful with guns. It's like my father always said to me, if you ever pull a weapon on somebody - no matter what it is - you've got to be fully prepared to use it, because if you're not, the other guy will see the doubt in your eyes, and he'll take it off you and use it on you instead. Then you're
really
in trouble.
The day after the burglary, the press went crazy, as they always do with stories about me. 'NAKED OZZY'S RAGE AS HE FIGHTS JEWELLERY ROBBER AT HIS HOME' said the
Sun
's headline. Then some of the other papers sent reporters to Aston to write about how I'd robbed Sarah Clarke's clothes shop, and how it was ironic that I was now complaining about being a victim of burglary. I thought that was a bit of a stretch, to be honest with you. I was just a stupid kid when I broke into Sarah Clarke's; I was hardly the fucking night stalker. And I learned my lesson.
In 1965, the clothes I nicked were worth about twenty-five quid, and I thought that was all the money in the world. I never would have believed that forty years later I'd have two million pounds' worth of stuff for someone to pinch - and enough left over to not really notice when it was gone. It's ridiculous, really. My life should never have happened the way that it did. But, believe me, I'm grateful. Not a day goes by without me thinking about where I came from, and where I ended up, and how no one in their right fucking mind would have put a bet on it turning out that way.