Last Rites, page 10
‘Any hypersensitivity to touch or changes in temperature?’
‘Yes and yes.’
Finally he goes, ‘Any spasms, tremors or weakness in your muscles?’
‘Are you seriously asking me that?’ I said.
‘Mr Osbourne,’ he said, ‘what you’re experiencing is almost certainly nerve pain, or neuralgia. It’s from the damage to your nerves during surgery. We already have you on several medications for it. All I can say is, just keep up the physical therapy. Y’know, what I always tell my patients is, you’ll—’
‘Get out of it what I put in,’ I said. ‘I know that, doc. You’ve told me that a thousand fucking times. But I need something stronger for the pain. It’s too much. Can’t you give me some more of whatever I was on in the ICU?’
The doc hesitated a moment, then looked at Sharon.
I knew a brick wall when I saw one.
‘Ozzy,’ said Sharon, ‘he can’t give you anything stronger. It’s just too dangerous. I’m sorry. But I don’t have to tell you… you’re the boy who cried wolf.’
The sad thing was, I knew she was right.
When you’re an addict, every injury is an opportunity. What you quickly learn is, if you complain of certain types of pain, only a mind-reader could know if you’re bullshitting or not. Addicts are some of the best liars out there, man. We’re so good at it, we convince ourselves we’re telling God’s honest truth.
For a long time, toothaches were my way of getting my hands on some naughty pills.
I’d know within five minutes of meeting a dentist if he was gonna open up his prescription pad. Some of ’em could sniff out an addict a mile away. Others didn’t give a fuck if you lived or died, it was just business to them.
When OxyContin came out at the end of the nineties, it was insane how many ‘pain dentists’ suddenly popped up in Florida. Whenever I did a gig in the Sunshine State, I’d book one appointment after another. It was like going on a shopping spree. How they got away with it, I’ve no idea.
Before Oxy, your best bet was to get some minor root canal work done and make friends with the anaesthesiologist. At one point, I had more friends who were dental anaesthesiologists than the average dental anaesthesiologist did. This one guy would hook me up with Vicodin, Percocet, Demerol, shots of morphine, whatever the fuck I wanted. He’d just send ’em to me in the post… or at least he did until Sharon cottoned on to it.
‘I found out what’s been causing all your toothaches,’ she announced one day.
‘Oh yeah?’ I said, all innocent, hoping she meant my secret bag of English sweeties.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I met him at the dentist’s. We had a nice chat about his medical licence, and he reassured me your teeth won’t be hurting any more.’
That was the end of that little scam.
Backaches were the next best thing to toothaches, but back surgeons were harder to crack than dentists, and the last thing you wanted was to end up on the operating table for some non-existent pain you’d been complaining about. I hit the jackpot once, though. I had this Learjet at the time, and I was flying into… okay… let’s just call it Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so I don’t get anyone into any trouble. And on the way there, I started talking to the flight attendant, and it turned out her old man was Milwaukee’s best-known back surgeon. So of course the second I hear that, I start telling her all about my back problems, how I’m in the most unbearable pain all the time, how I’m gonna have to cancel gigs because of it. And of course she says, oh, you should go and see my dad.
I was in that guy’s office almost before we landed.
After checking me out, he says, ‘So how much longer are you on tour, Mr Osbourne?’
‘Six months?’ I said. The real answer was more like three, but I thought I’d better double it in case he was gonna be tight with whatever he was gonna give me.
‘Okay,’ he says, scribbling on his little pad, ‘this should keep you going.’
When I looked at what he’d written down, I could hardly believe my own eyes. He’d given me five hundred maximum-strength Vicodin. It was one of them moments when you’re like, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
When I went to the pharmacy, the woman behind the counter took one look at the prescription, went very pale and called me over for a private chat. She goes, ‘Sir, this is… an awful lot of pills. I don’t know how you got this prescription, or what it’s for, but if you’re going to be taking these yourself, may I suggest I dispense just the narcotic, not the mixer?’ The mixer was Tylenol, she said. In that quantity, it would rot out my liver in about two seconds. Assuming I hadn’t OD’ed on the Vicodin first.
I got through two hundred and fifty of ’em before I freaked out. I flushed the rest down the toilet. But of course a few days later I was out looking for more.
The trick I’d use was, I’d keep an old pill bottle from a year earlier – with four or five pills still rattling around in the bottom – so when I did a gig, I could say to the doctor in that city, ‘Look, I’m running low, and I’m out on the road, could you refill me?’ The bottle would have a date on it from the pharmacy, which in theory meant you weren’t misbehaving. In reality, of course, I’d have been through at least ten other bottles since then. Gig doctors aren’t stupid, of course. They know the games rock stars play. But sometimes if you give ’em enough cover, they’re happy to play along.
My only lucky break when it came to addiction was that I never, ever wanted to shoot up. Which meant street heroin was off the menu. Needles just freak me out, man. Everyone’s got their limit. That’s mine. If I ever got injected with anything, I had a doctor do it for me. They’d be sitting there with me the whole time, in case anything happened. Given how much I like opioids, it’s probably the only reason I’m still here.
Now that I’m sober, I’ve learned to think of a doctor’s appointment as like walking into a pub. The first thing I say is, look, I’m an addict, no matter what I say, don’t give me any kind of controlled substance. Better yet, I take Sharon with me, and she puts the fear of God into ’em. Of course, there are times – like in the ICU after the surgery – when they have to put me on something. But it’s a joke, ’cos I’ve built up such a tolerance, I need about eight times more than the average person. And that’s just the start of my problems. On the way up, it’s all sunshine and roses. But coming down again, it ain’t so funny. The withdrawal. The cravings. Realising you’ve gotta slay the dragon all over again.
My addictive nature scares me a lot more now than it ever did before, to be honest with you. I’m older. Not as strong as I used to be. If I ever start climbing the old relapse ladder again, I’m pretty sure it’ll be a one-way trip.
By the time spring arrived, something happened I never expected: I lost hope. I was crawling up my back steps at the time, sweating and cursing, and I just thought… who am I kidding? This ain’t going nowhere.
At this point, you’ve gotta remember, I’d been forced to keep my head in a completely rigid position – other than the times when I was doing the rubber-band exercises – for three months straight. I had no privacy whatsoever. Even when I was taking a shit, I had nurse hovering outside, asking me for the details of my bowel movement. My legs kept going cold. My arm was still numb. And I was in non-stop pain. Even a ‘nerve block’ procedure – when an anaesthesiologist came over and injected some anti-inflammatory shit into my spine, like an epidural – didn’t help much.
Meanwhile, the Parkinson’s doc had gone back to my old files, run some extra tests and confirmed that my Parkinsonian syndrome was caused by a dodgy gene called PARK2. I’d inherited a fucked-up copy of it from both my mum and dad, he said. What the mutated gene was doing was, it was killing the dopamine-producing nerve cells in my brain that control my muscles. That’s why, when you have Parkinson’s caused by PARK2, you get tremors and stiffness, which fucks up your balance and coordination. But of course those are the exact same problems you get from unsuccessful spinal surgery, so it was impossible to tell which was to blame. And because Parkinson’s gets worse over time, just ’cos I could walk before the surgery this didn’t mean it couldn’t have progressed since then. I mean, I personally didn’t believe it was my Parkinson’s fault for one second. But what could I say? It was a catch-22 situation.
More than anything, I just felt so stupid for believing everything the docs had told me. I’d done months of physical therapy by now, but I was still a cripple. Still wearing the neck brace. Still needing around-the-clock care. Before the surgery, I’d been able to walk like a normal human being. Now I had the posture of fucking Gollum.
I just felt so jaded, man. I mean, why the fuck had I agreed to the surgery? I didn’t understand it. If anyone had said to me, look, Mr Osbourne, the recovery for this operation could involve weeks in the ICU, and oh, by the way, you might end up more or less paralysed from the waist down – with a numb right arm – and if you complain about anything we’re gonna blame it on your Parkinson’s, I’d have told ’em to fuck off.
I ain’t saying the doc did anything dodgy. Or that he didn’t believe the operation would be a success. And obviously when you’ve got Parkinson’s, it’s gonna make things harder. But when it comes to anything spinal related, when they tell you what’s wrong and what’s needed, it’s an opinion. And no two doctors ever seem to say the same thing. It’s so frustrating when all you wanna do is get back on your feet and go back to work.
At the same time, after the surgery I couldn’t help but think to myself, the American medical profession is all about money. Operations like mine cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even a million or more, not including all the follow-ups and medication. But if all goes tits up and you end up in worse shape than when you went in, everyone still gets paid.
If anyone should have known that going in, it was me. I mean, I was the one who’d spent decades taking advantage of the same fucked-up system to get doctors and dentists to prescribe me all kinds of pills I didn’t need.
The final kick in the bollocks was knowing that Zakk had told me at least twice to get a second opinion. If I’d have listened to him, who knows what would have happened. It’s hard to imagine it could have turned out any worse.
The one thing that had kept me going after my surgery was my determination to get back on tour. But my recovery – if it could even be called a recovery – was so slow I was starting to worry that even the tour dates we’d rescheduled for 2020 would end up getting pushed back again. Meanwhile, the fourth season of Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour had to be called off entirely. I felt like I had nothing to look forward to. Like I was never gonna work again. I was in a dark place, man.
Sharon knew it was serious when I went to bed and just stayed there. All I wanted to do was sleep and forget the last six months had ever happened.
But then came the tiniest glimmer of light.
One morning, when I was close to the lowest I’d ever been, Sharon burst in to tell me they’d named a bridge in Birmingham after Black Sabbath. I thought she was taking the piss. I mean, in my mind, a bridge is a huge thing, like the Golden Gate Bridge or Sydney Harbour Bridge. There wasn’t anything like that in Birmingham. Besides, Birmingham had surely moved on from anything Sabbath had ever done. In our day, it was a totally different city. It was all factories and soot-faced blokes trudging off down the pub. Now it’s all coffee shops and posh shopping centres. Meanwhile, half the world’s moved there. When I last went back to Lodge Road, there was a Muslim bloke with a Brummie accent who lived in one of my old neighbours’ houses. Nice bloke, actually. Made me a cuppa and gave me a biscuit. It was weird. But whatever, man, things change. In our day, it was the Irish Catholics who were moving in.
Anyway, it turned out the bridge wasn’t some huge suspension deal or anything. According to Sharon, it was a little stretch of Broad Street that crossed over the old canal, in what’s now the city centre. They’d even put a little park bench on it with life-size portraits of me, Geezer, Tony and Bill on the backrest, each of us dressed in black, wearing the iron crosses my dad made for us during his tea breaks at the GEC factory. Our names were in bronze letters underneath, along with ‘Made in Birmingham’.
It was fucking surreal, lying there in my bed in LA, hearing that piece of news.
And it only got stranger.
‘Whose idea was that, then?’ I asked Sharon.
‘A local promoter, Mike Olley, and another bloke called Mohammed Osama,’ she said. ‘He’s an Egyptian architect.’
‘Am I hallucinating again?’ I asked. ‘Is Elvis about to pay another visit?’
‘No, that’s what it says here,’ said Sharon, looking closer at whatever was on her phone. ‘The architect lives in Dubai now. Calls himself a “superfan”. Says he’s been more to more than fifty gigs since he was eight years old. See, Ozzy. More people around the world are into your music than ever before.’
‘We never even played Dubai, did we?’
‘No, but you did play Abu Dhabi. And I haven’t even told you the best part.’
‘What?’
‘Because of the order of the portraits on the bench, fans have to sit on Geezer’s face if they want to get a photo with their arm around you. Which they all do.’
It was the first time I’d burst out laughing in what felt like a thousand years. If felt so, so good, man – even though it made my whole body hurt. And thinking about the bridge sent me right back, y’know?
I was pretty sure I knew exactly which part of Broad Street it was. Me and my mate Patrick Murphy used to ride our bikes for miles and miles down the towpaths. Birmingham has more canals than Venice, if you can believe it. But when we were kids, the coal barges had only just stopped running as haulage was moved to the roads, and the canals were abandoned. Some of ’em were filled in, but most were just left as they were. Which was great for us, ’cos they became our playground.
He was a good guy, Pat. He lived at 30 Lodge Road, a few houses up from ours. He was a Catholic, like me, but a proper one who went to church. I thought he’d go on to big things, and I’d be the one who didn’t amount to anything. But as time went on, he kept getting busted for all kinds of shit. Eventually he got into big-time drug dealing. I was like, Pat, what the fuck are you doing, man? Eventually his wife asked for a divorce, ’cos she couldn’t stand him going in and out of the nick the whole time. It pushed Pat over the edge, that did. He went into his garage, started up his car and gassed himself to death. It really knocked me about when I heard that. I remember calling his mum, and she told me, ‘I just want my Pat back.’ She lost three of her six kids in the end. It was fucking heartbreaking.
I used to think about Pat after Paranoid came out, ’cos I lived in a houseboat on a canal in London for a while. It was in Little Venice, not that far from Paddington. The boat was owned by our wide-boy manager at the time, Patrick Meehan, who’d taken over from Jim Simpson. Why he’d bought the thing, I’ve no idea. He was raking in so much cash from our album sales and touring, he was probably running out of things to spend it all on. He certainly had no shortage of Rollers and diamond rings.
I loved that houseboat, man. I’d do coke there all night, and talk so much the bloke in the next boat would come over and bang on the hatch to complain. Richard Branson’s barge was just a few boats up, if I’m not mistaken. I know that ’cos after I left Sabbath, me and Sharon sold the rights to Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman to him – or to Virgin, anyway – and he insisted on us going there to sign the contract.
This was ten or fifteen years after I’d lived there, and I was expecting Branson’s barge to be like Meehan’s, which was all cosy with fresh paint and nice little kitchen. But it was the most rinky-dinky piece of shit I’d ever seen in my life. For a start, someone had shot out all the windows with a pellet gun, so there was all this broken glass and bird shit everywhere.
‘Is this a joke?’ I said to Sharon after we climbed on board and waited for one of England’s richest men in this absolute shithole. I honestly thought we’d been pranked, that Jeremy Beadle was about to jump out of a cupboard.
‘Ozzy, this is not a joke,’ Sharon hissed at me, ‘and you need to be nice to him, because we’re broke and he’s about to give us half a million pounds.’
‘He should spend it on this fucking boat,’ I said, ‘’cos it looks like it’s about to sink—’
‘Oh, Richard!’ went Sharon as the man himself appeared. ‘How lovely to see you…’
He was also at that Party at the Palace thing, Branson. I went to shake his hand and he kind of looked down his nose at me like we’d never met before, even though we’d done that deal. I suppose that’s what you get with those upper-crust guys. I ain’t in his world, and he ain’t in mine. At least Sharon was eventually able to get back whatever rights we sold him.
Once my mind finally stopped wandering after hearing about the bridge, my thoughts turned to Tony, Geezer and Bill. All the shit we’d been through together. The great albums we’d made. How much I missed ’em.
In some ways, it felt like only yesterday we’d set up our gear at the Newtown Community Centre – just down the street from the Villa Park football ground – after changing our name from Earth to Black Sabbath. That’s when Tony started played that creepy three-note riff, Bill did his free-form jazzy thing on the cymbals, Geezer got stuck in there, his bass notes making the windows rattle, and I started wailing about being the ‘chosen one’. What a moment that was. It was close to the blues, what we were playing. But it wasn’t the blues. It was something else. Something no one had done before. Not that we had any idea at the time. All we knew was we had goosebumps and needed to keep playing ’til we finished the song.
The more I thought about it, the more I knew we needed to get together one more time. Even if I had to be wheeled on stage on a stretcher.
We owed it to ourselves. To the fans. To the people who’d named that bridge after us.
There was just one problem.
I hadn’t spoken to Bill in almost ten years.
‘Yes and yes.’
Finally he goes, ‘Any spasms, tremors or weakness in your muscles?’
‘Are you seriously asking me that?’ I said.
‘Mr Osbourne,’ he said, ‘what you’re experiencing is almost certainly nerve pain, or neuralgia. It’s from the damage to your nerves during surgery. We already have you on several medications for it. All I can say is, just keep up the physical therapy. Y’know, what I always tell my patients is, you’ll—’
‘Get out of it what I put in,’ I said. ‘I know that, doc. You’ve told me that a thousand fucking times. But I need something stronger for the pain. It’s too much. Can’t you give me some more of whatever I was on in the ICU?’
The doc hesitated a moment, then looked at Sharon.
I knew a brick wall when I saw one.
‘Ozzy,’ said Sharon, ‘he can’t give you anything stronger. It’s just too dangerous. I’m sorry. But I don’t have to tell you… you’re the boy who cried wolf.’
The sad thing was, I knew she was right.
When you’re an addict, every injury is an opportunity. What you quickly learn is, if you complain of certain types of pain, only a mind-reader could know if you’re bullshitting or not. Addicts are some of the best liars out there, man. We’re so good at it, we convince ourselves we’re telling God’s honest truth.
For a long time, toothaches were my way of getting my hands on some naughty pills.
I’d know within five minutes of meeting a dentist if he was gonna open up his prescription pad. Some of ’em could sniff out an addict a mile away. Others didn’t give a fuck if you lived or died, it was just business to them.
When OxyContin came out at the end of the nineties, it was insane how many ‘pain dentists’ suddenly popped up in Florida. Whenever I did a gig in the Sunshine State, I’d book one appointment after another. It was like going on a shopping spree. How they got away with it, I’ve no idea.
Before Oxy, your best bet was to get some minor root canal work done and make friends with the anaesthesiologist. At one point, I had more friends who were dental anaesthesiologists than the average dental anaesthesiologist did. This one guy would hook me up with Vicodin, Percocet, Demerol, shots of morphine, whatever the fuck I wanted. He’d just send ’em to me in the post… or at least he did until Sharon cottoned on to it.
‘I found out what’s been causing all your toothaches,’ she announced one day.
‘Oh yeah?’ I said, all innocent, hoping she meant my secret bag of English sweeties.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I met him at the dentist’s. We had a nice chat about his medical licence, and he reassured me your teeth won’t be hurting any more.’
That was the end of that little scam.
Backaches were the next best thing to toothaches, but back surgeons were harder to crack than dentists, and the last thing you wanted was to end up on the operating table for some non-existent pain you’d been complaining about. I hit the jackpot once, though. I had this Learjet at the time, and I was flying into… okay… let’s just call it Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so I don’t get anyone into any trouble. And on the way there, I started talking to the flight attendant, and it turned out her old man was Milwaukee’s best-known back surgeon. So of course the second I hear that, I start telling her all about my back problems, how I’m in the most unbearable pain all the time, how I’m gonna have to cancel gigs because of it. And of course she says, oh, you should go and see my dad.
I was in that guy’s office almost before we landed.
After checking me out, he says, ‘So how much longer are you on tour, Mr Osbourne?’
‘Six months?’ I said. The real answer was more like three, but I thought I’d better double it in case he was gonna be tight with whatever he was gonna give me.
‘Okay,’ he says, scribbling on his little pad, ‘this should keep you going.’
When I looked at what he’d written down, I could hardly believe my own eyes. He’d given me five hundred maximum-strength Vicodin. It was one of them moments when you’re like, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
When I went to the pharmacy, the woman behind the counter took one look at the prescription, went very pale and called me over for a private chat. She goes, ‘Sir, this is… an awful lot of pills. I don’t know how you got this prescription, or what it’s for, but if you’re going to be taking these yourself, may I suggest I dispense just the narcotic, not the mixer?’ The mixer was Tylenol, she said. In that quantity, it would rot out my liver in about two seconds. Assuming I hadn’t OD’ed on the Vicodin first.
I got through two hundred and fifty of ’em before I freaked out. I flushed the rest down the toilet. But of course a few days later I was out looking for more.
The trick I’d use was, I’d keep an old pill bottle from a year earlier – with four or five pills still rattling around in the bottom – so when I did a gig, I could say to the doctor in that city, ‘Look, I’m running low, and I’m out on the road, could you refill me?’ The bottle would have a date on it from the pharmacy, which in theory meant you weren’t misbehaving. In reality, of course, I’d have been through at least ten other bottles since then. Gig doctors aren’t stupid, of course. They know the games rock stars play. But sometimes if you give ’em enough cover, they’re happy to play along.
My only lucky break when it came to addiction was that I never, ever wanted to shoot up. Which meant street heroin was off the menu. Needles just freak me out, man. Everyone’s got their limit. That’s mine. If I ever got injected with anything, I had a doctor do it for me. They’d be sitting there with me the whole time, in case anything happened. Given how much I like opioids, it’s probably the only reason I’m still here.
Now that I’m sober, I’ve learned to think of a doctor’s appointment as like walking into a pub. The first thing I say is, look, I’m an addict, no matter what I say, don’t give me any kind of controlled substance. Better yet, I take Sharon with me, and she puts the fear of God into ’em. Of course, there are times – like in the ICU after the surgery – when they have to put me on something. But it’s a joke, ’cos I’ve built up such a tolerance, I need about eight times more than the average person. And that’s just the start of my problems. On the way up, it’s all sunshine and roses. But coming down again, it ain’t so funny. The withdrawal. The cravings. Realising you’ve gotta slay the dragon all over again.
My addictive nature scares me a lot more now than it ever did before, to be honest with you. I’m older. Not as strong as I used to be. If I ever start climbing the old relapse ladder again, I’m pretty sure it’ll be a one-way trip.
By the time spring arrived, something happened I never expected: I lost hope. I was crawling up my back steps at the time, sweating and cursing, and I just thought… who am I kidding? This ain’t going nowhere.
At this point, you’ve gotta remember, I’d been forced to keep my head in a completely rigid position – other than the times when I was doing the rubber-band exercises – for three months straight. I had no privacy whatsoever. Even when I was taking a shit, I had nurse hovering outside, asking me for the details of my bowel movement. My legs kept going cold. My arm was still numb. And I was in non-stop pain. Even a ‘nerve block’ procedure – when an anaesthesiologist came over and injected some anti-inflammatory shit into my spine, like an epidural – didn’t help much.
Meanwhile, the Parkinson’s doc had gone back to my old files, run some extra tests and confirmed that my Parkinsonian syndrome was caused by a dodgy gene called PARK2. I’d inherited a fucked-up copy of it from both my mum and dad, he said. What the mutated gene was doing was, it was killing the dopamine-producing nerve cells in my brain that control my muscles. That’s why, when you have Parkinson’s caused by PARK2, you get tremors and stiffness, which fucks up your balance and coordination. But of course those are the exact same problems you get from unsuccessful spinal surgery, so it was impossible to tell which was to blame. And because Parkinson’s gets worse over time, just ’cos I could walk before the surgery this didn’t mean it couldn’t have progressed since then. I mean, I personally didn’t believe it was my Parkinson’s fault for one second. But what could I say? It was a catch-22 situation.
More than anything, I just felt so stupid for believing everything the docs had told me. I’d done months of physical therapy by now, but I was still a cripple. Still wearing the neck brace. Still needing around-the-clock care. Before the surgery, I’d been able to walk like a normal human being. Now I had the posture of fucking Gollum.
I just felt so jaded, man. I mean, why the fuck had I agreed to the surgery? I didn’t understand it. If anyone had said to me, look, Mr Osbourne, the recovery for this operation could involve weeks in the ICU, and oh, by the way, you might end up more or less paralysed from the waist down – with a numb right arm – and if you complain about anything we’re gonna blame it on your Parkinson’s, I’d have told ’em to fuck off.
I ain’t saying the doc did anything dodgy. Or that he didn’t believe the operation would be a success. And obviously when you’ve got Parkinson’s, it’s gonna make things harder. But when it comes to anything spinal related, when they tell you what’s wrong and what’s needed, it’s an opinion. And no two doctors ever seem to say the same thing. It’s so frustrating when all you wanna do is get back on your feet and go back to work.
At the same time, after the surgery I couldn’t help but think to myself, the American medical profession is all about money. Operations like mine cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even a million or more, not including all the follow-ups and medication. But if all goes tits up and you end up in worse shape than when you went in, everyone still gets paid.
If anyone should have known that going in, it was me. I mean, I was the one who’d spent decades taking advantage of the same fucked-up system to get doctors and dentists to prescribe me all kinds of pills I didn’t need.
The final kick in the bollocks was knowing that Zakk had told me at least twice to get a second opinion. If I’d have listened to him, who knows what would have happened. It’s hard to imagine it could have turned out any worse.
The one thing that had kept me going after my surgery was my determination to get back on tour. But my recovery – if it could even be called a recovery – was so slow I was starting to worry that even the tour dates we’d rescheduled for 2020 would end up getting pushed back again. Meanwhile, the fourth season of Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour had to be called off entirely. I felt like I had nothing to look forward to. Like I was never gonna work again. I was in a dark place, man.
Sharon knew it was serious when I went to bed and just stayed there. All I wanted to do was sleep and forget the last six months had ever happened.
But then came the tiniest glimmer of light.
One morning, when I was close to the lowest I’d ever been, Sharon burst in to tell me they’d named a bridge in Birmingham after Black Sabbath. I thought she was taking the piss. I mean, in my mind, a bridge is a huge thing, like the Golden Gate Bridge or Sydney Harbour Bridge. There wasn’t anything like that in Birmingham. Besides, Birmingham had surely moved on from anything Sabbath had ever done. In our day, it was a totally different city. It was all factories and soot-faced blokes trudging off down the pub. Now it’s all coffee shops and posh shopping centres. Meanwhile, half the world’s moved there. When I last went back to Lodge Road, there was a Muslim bloke with a Brummie accent who lived in one of my old neighbours’ houses. Nice bloke, actually. Made me a cuppa and gave me a biscuit. It was weird. But whatever, man, things change. In our day, it was the Irish Catholics who were moving in.
Anyway, it turned out the bridge wasn’t some huge suspension deal or anything. According to Sharon, it was a little stretch of Broad Street that crossed over the old canal, in what’s now the city centre. They’d even put a little park bench on it with life-size portraits of me, Geezer, Tony and Bill on the backrest, each of us dressed in black, wearing the iron crosses my dad made for us during his tea breaks at the GEC factory. Our names were in bronze letters underneath, along with ‘Made in Birmingham’.
It was fucking surreal, lying there in my bed in LA, hearing that piece of news.
And it only got stranger.
‘Whose idea was that, then?’ I asked Sharon.
‘A local promoter, Mike Olley, and another bloke called Mohammed Osama,’ she said. ‘He’s an Egyptian architect.’
‘Am I hallucinating again?’ I asked. ‘Is Elvis about to pay another visit?’
‘No, that’s what it says here,’ said Sharon, looking closer at whatever was on her phone. ‘The architect lives in Dubai now. Calls himself a “superfan”. Says he’s been more to more than fifty gigs since he was eight years old. See, Ozzy. More people around the world are into your music than ever before.’
‘We never even played Dubai, did we?’
‘No, but you did play Abu Dhabi. And I haven’t even told you the best part.’
‘What?’
‘Because of the order of the portraits on the bench, fans have to sit on Geezer’s face if they want to get a photo with their arm around you. Which they all do.’
It was the first time I’d burst out laughing in what felt like a thousand years. If felt so, so good, man – even though it made my whole body hurt. And thinking about the bridge sent me right back, y’know?
I was pretty sure I knew exactly which part of Broad Street it was. Me and my mate Patrick Murphy used to ride our bikes for miles and miles down the towpaths. Birmingham has more canals than Venice, if you can believe it. But when we were kids, the coal barges had only just stopped running as haulage was moved to the roads, and the canals were abandoned. Some of ’em were filled in, but most were just left as they were. Which was great for us, ’cos they became our playground.
He was a good guy, Pat. He lived at 30 Lodge Road, a few houses up from ours. He was a Catholic, like me, but a proper one who went to church. I thought he’d go on to big things, and I’d be the one who didn’t amount to anything. But as time went on, he kept getting busted for all kinds of shit. Eventually he got into big-time drug dealing. I was like, Pat, what the fuck are you doing, man? Eventually his wife asked for a divorce, ’cos she couldn’t stand him going in and out of the nick the whole time. It pushed Pat over the edge, that did. He went into his garage, started up his car and gassed himself to death. It really knocked me about when I heard that. I remember calling his mum, and she told me, ‘I just want my Pat back.’ She lost three of her six kids in the end. It was fucking heartbreaking.
I used to think about Pat after Paranoid came out, ’cos I lived in a houseboat on a canal in London for a while. It was in Little Venice, not that far from Paddington. The boat was owned by our wide-boy manager at the time, Patrick Meehan, who’d taken over from Jim Simpson. Why he’d bought the thing, I’ve no idea. He was raking in so much cash from our album sales and touring, he was probably running out of things to spend it all on. He certainly had no shortage of Rollers and diamond rings.
I loved that houseboat, man. I’d do coke there all night, and talk so much the bloke in the next boat would come over and bang on the hatch to complain. Richard Branson’s barge was just a few boats up, if I’m not mistaken. I know that ’cos after I left Sabbath, me and Sharon sold the rights to Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman to him – or to Virgin, anyway – and he insisted on us going there to sign the contract.
This was ten or fifteen years after I’d lived there, and I was expecting Branson’s barge to be like Meehan’s, which was all cosy with fresh paint and nice little kitchen. But it was the most rinky-dinky piece of shit I’d ever seen in my life. For a start, someone had shot out all the windows with a pellet gun, so there was all this broken glass and bird shit everywhere.
‘Is this a joke?’ I said to Sharon after we climbed on board and waited for one of England’s richest men in this absolute shithole. I honestly thought we’d been pranked, that Jeremy Beadle was about to jump out of a cupboard.
‘Ozzy, this is not a joke,’ Sharon hissed at me, ‘and you need to be nice to him, because we’re broke and he’s about to give us half a million pounds.’
‘He should spend it on this fucking boat,’ I said, ‘’cos it looks like it’s about to sink—’
‘Oh, Richard!’ went Sharon as the man himself appeared. ‘How lovely to see you…’
He was also at that Party at the Palace thing, Branson. I went to shake his hand and he kind of looked down his nose at me like we’d never met before, even though we’d done that deal. I suppose that’s what you get with those upper-crust guys. I ain’t in his world, and he ain’t in mine. At least Sharon was eventually able to get back whatever rights we sold him.
Once my mind finally stopped wandering after hearing about the bridge, my thoughts turned to Tony, Geezer and Bill. All the shit we’d been through together. The great albums we’d made. How much I missed ’em.
In some ways, it felt like only yesterday we’d set up our gear at the Newtown Community Centre – just down the street from the Villa Park football ground – after changing our name from Earth to Black Sabbath. That’s when Tony started played that creepy three-note riff, Bill did his free-form jazzy thing on the cymbals, Geezer got stuck in there, his bass notes making the windows rattle, and I started wailing about being the ‘chosen one’. What a moment that was. It was close to the blues, what we were playing. But it wasn’t the blues. It was something else. Something no one had done before. Not that we had any idea at the time. All we knew was we had goosebumps and needed to keep playing ’til we finished the song.
The more I thought about it, the more I knew we needed to get together one more time. Even if I had to be wheeled on stage on a stretcher.
We owed it to ourselves. To the fans. To the people who’d named that bridge after us.
There was just one problem.
I hadn’t spoken to Bill in almost ten years.
