I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  ‘YOU CALL THIS THE BIGGEST?’ goes Mr Jones. Then he strides to the back of the class, looks at the rack, comes back with another, bigger shoe, and orders me to bend over.

  Everyone’s still staring. At this point I’m trying incredibly hard to stop myself bawling and there’s fucking snot running out of my nose, so I wipe my face with the back of my hand.

  ‘I SAID BEND OVER, OSBOURNE.’

  So I do as he says. Then he lifts up his arm as far as it’ll go and brings down this fucking size-ten shoe as hard as he can.

  ‘ARRRGGGHHHHHH!!’

  It hurts like a motherfucker. Then the bastard does it again. And again. But by the third or fourth time I’ve fucking had enough. I suddenly get angry. Just blind fucking rage. So, as he brings the shoe down for another wallop, I reach into my satchel and take out my dad’s metal rods and throw them as hard as I can at Mr Jones’s fat, sweaty face. I was never any good at sport, but for those two seconds I could have bowled for the English cricket team. Mr Jones staggers backwards with blood spurting out of his nose and I realise what I’ve done. The class gasps. Oh, fuuuuuck. And I’m off, legging it as fast as I can, out of the classroom, down the corridor, out of the school, up the fucking driveway, through the gates, and all the way back to 14 Lodge Road. I run straight upstairs to where my father’s sleeping and shake him awake. Then I burst into tears.

  He went mental.

  Not with me, thank God, but with Mr Jones. He marched straight back to school and demanded to see Mr Oldham. You could hear the shouting from the other end of the school. Mr Oldham said he had no idea about Mr Jones and the tennis shoes, but promised to look into the situation. My father said fucking right he should look into the situation.

  I never got another beating again after that.

  I wasn’t exactly a Romeo at school – most chicks thought I was insane – but for a while I had a girlfriend called Jane. She went to the all-girls school up the road. I was nuts about her. Big time. Whenever we were due to meet, I’d first go to the boys’ toilets at school and rub soap into my hair to slick it back, so she’d think I was cool. But one day it started to rain, and by the time I arrived my head looked like a bubble bath, with all this soap dripping down my forehead and into my eyes. She took one look at me and went, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Dumped. On the spot. I was fucking heartbroken. Then, a few years later, I saw her coming out of a club in Aston when she was off her face, and I wondered what I’d been so upset about.

  There were other girls, but most of the time it never came to anything. I soon found out how painful it is when you see a girl you fancy walking around with another guy. Getting stood up wasn’t much fun, either. One time, I planned to meet this chick outside the Crown and Cushion in Perry Barr. It was pissing down with rain when I got there at seven-thirty, and she was nowhere to be seen. I told myself, ‘Oh, she’ll be here in half an hour.’ So I waited until eight. No sign. I’ll gave it another half an hour. Still no sign. I was there until ten o’clock in the end. Then I just walked home, soaking wet and feeling so sad and rejected. Now that I’m a parent, of course, I just think, What the fuck was wrong with me? I wouldn’t let my daughter go out in the lashing rain to meet some kid from school.

  It was all only puppy love in those days. You felt like you were being a grown-up, but you weren’t. Another time, when I was about fourteen, I took this girl to the movies. I thought I was Jack the Lad, so I decided to smoke to impress her. I’d been smoking for a while by then, but not like heavy-duty. This night I’ve got five fags and a penny book of matches in my pocket. So I’m sitting in this movie theatre, trying to be a big shot, and suddenly I break out in a fucking cold sweat. I’m thinking, What the fuck’s up with me? Then I burp and taste vomit. I run to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall and cough my fucking guts up. I was so fucking sick, man. I dragged myself out of the exit and went straight home, throwing up the whole way. I don’t know what happened to the chick, but at least she got a box of Maltesers out of it.

  That wasn’t my only bad experience with cigarettes, growing up. Another night around that time, I remember smoking a fag in my bedroom at Lodge Road, then pinching the end of it so I could have the rest in the morning. I woke up a few hours later choking. Smoke everywhere. Fucking hell, I thought, I’ve set the house on fire! But then I looked down at the ashtray by my bed and saw that my cigarette wasn’t even lit. What I didn’t know is that my dad had come home a bit merry that night and had also been smoking inside the house. But instead of putting out his cigarette he’d dropped it down the back of the settee, and now all the foam in the cushions was smouldering and giving off this horrendous black smoke.

  Next thing I knew I was legging it downstairs to the living room to find my dad looking hungover and guilty, and my mum with tears streaming down her face, doubled over, coughing.

  ‘Jack Osbourne,’ she was saying, between splutters. ‘What the bloody hell did you d—’

  Then she coughed so hard, her false teeth literally flew out of her mouth and smashed through the window, letting in this freezing cold wind from outside, which fanned the flames – making the couch go up like a fucking bonfire. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shit myself. Anyway, somehow me and my dad managed to put the fire out while my mum went out into the garden to look for her choppers.

  But the house didn’t smell right for weeks.

  It didn’t put me off smoking, mind you. I was convinced it made me look cool. And maybe I was right, ’cos a few weeks after the fire, I got my merry end away for the first time. I’d only just discovered that my penis wasn’t just for pissing through and I was banging it all over the fucking place. Jacking off, tossing everywhere. I couldn’t sleep for milking the old maggot. Anyhow, I was at a dance in a pub in Aston. This was before I was drinking, so maybe it was a birthday party or something in a back room. There was an older girl there – I can’t for the life of me remember her name, I swear to God – and she danced with me for a bit. Then she took me back to her parents’ house and shagged the shit out of me all night. I had no fucking idea why she decided to pick me. Maybe she felt a bit horny and I was the only spare dick in the room. Who knows? But I wasn’t complaining. Of course, I wanted more after that. I wanted seconds. So, the next day, I went running back to her house like a dog sniffing around the old pole again.

  But she just blurted out, ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘How about another shag?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  That was the end of our beautiful romance.

  I was fifteen when I left school. And what did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said,

  John Osbourne attended Birchfield Road Secondary Modern.

  Signed,

  Mr Oldham (Headmaster)

  That was fucking it. Not a single qualification. Nothing. I had two career choices: manual labour or manual labour. The first thing I did was look for jobs in the back of the Birmingham Evening Mail. That week they happened to be running a special feature on occupations for people who’d just left school. I looked at them all – milkman, bin man, assembly-line worker, brickie, street cleaner, bus driver, that kind of thing – and decided on plumbing, because at least it was a trade. And I’d been told that I wouldn’t get anywhere in life without a trade. By the time I got the job I wanted it was late in the year and starting to get cold. I didn’t realise that plumbers work their arses off in the middle of winter, when all the pipes burst. So you spend most of your time bending over a manhole when it’s minus five degrees, freezing your fucking nut sack off. I didn’t last a week. It wasn’t the cold that did me in, though. I got fired for scrumping apples during my lunch break.

  Old habits die hard.

  My next job was less ambitious. It was at an industrial plant outside Aston. This place made car parts, and I was in charge of a big fucking degreasing machine. You’d get baskets full of bits – rods, springs, levers, whatever – and you dropped them into th
is vat of bubbling chemicals which cleaned them. The chemicals were toxic and there was a sign on top of the machine which said, ‘EXTREME HAZARD! PROTECTIVE MASKS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES. NEVER LEAN OVER THE TANK.’

  I remember asking what was in the vat and someone told me it was methylene chloride. I thought to myself, Hmm, I wonder if you can get a buzz off that stuff? So one day I pull down my mask and lean over the tank, just for a second. And I go, ‘Whooooooaaaah!’ It was like sniffing glue… times a fucking hundred. So every morning I started taking a whiff of the old degreasing machine. It was a lot cheaper than going down the pub. Then I started doing it twice a day. Then three times a day. Then every five fucking minutes. Trouble was, every time I leant over the vat I got a big black greasy face. So it didn’t take long for the other guys in the plant to work out what was going on. I’d be taking a tea break and they’d see my face covered in all this black stuff and they’d go, ‘You’ve been at that fucking degreasing machine again, haven’t you? You’ll fucking kill yourself, man.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I’d say, all innocent.

  ‘It’s fucking toxic, Ozzy.’

  ‘That’s why I wear a protective mask at all times and never lean over the tank, just like the sign says.’

  ‘Bollocks. Stop doing it, Ozzy. You’ll kill yourself.’

  After a few weeks it got to the point where I was just out of my brains all the time, wobbling around the place, singing songs. I even started to have hallucinations. But I kept doing it – I couldn’t stop myself. Then, one day I went missing for a while. They found me slumped over the tank, passed out. ‘Get ’im an ambulance,’ said the supervisor. ‘And don’t ever let that idiot back in this place again.’

  My parents went nuts when they found out I’d been fired again. I was still living at 14 Lodge Road, and they expected me to chip in for the rent, even though I tried to spend as little time at home as possible. So my mum talked to her bosses and sorted me out with a job at the Lucas factory, where she could keep an eye on me. ‘It’s an apprenticeship, John,’ she said. ‘Most people your age would give their right arm for this kind of opportunity. You’ll have a skill. You’re going to be a trained car horn tuner.’

  My heart sank.

  A car horn tuner?

  In those days, the working person’s mentality went like this: you got what little education you could, you found an apprenticeship, they gave you a shit job, and then you took pride in it, even though it was a shit job. And then you did that same shit job for the rest of your life. Your shit job was everything. A lot of people in Birmingham never even made it to retirement. They just dropped down dead on the factory floor.

  I needed to get the fuck out before I got stuck in the same trap. But I had no idea how to leave Aston. I tried to do this ‘emigrate to Australia’ thing, but I couldn’t afford the ten-quid fare. I even tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t have me. The bloke in the uniform took one look at my ugly mug and said, ‘Sorry, we want subjects, not objects.’

  So I took the job in the factory. I told my friend Pat that I’d got a gig in the music business.

  ‘What do you mean, the music business?’ he said.

  ‘Tuning stuff,’ I told him, vaguely.

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Mind your own fucking business.’

  On my first day at the Lucas plant the supervisor showed me into this sound-proofed room, where I’d do my shift. My job was to pick up the car horns as they came along a conveyor belt and put them into this helmet-shaped machine. Then you’d hook them up to an electrical current and adjust them with a screwdriver, so they went, ‘BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.’ Nine hundred a day – that’s how many car horns they wanted tuned. They kept count, because every time you did one you clicked a button. There were five of us in the room, so that’s five car horns burping and beeping and booping all at the same time, from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.

  You came out of that fucking place with your ears ringing so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

  This was my day:

  Pick up horn.

  Attach connectors.

  Adjust with screwdriver.

  BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

  Put horn back on belt.

  Click the button.

  Pick up horn.

  Attach connectors.

  Adjust with screwdriver.

  BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

  Put horn back on belt.

  Click the button.

  Pick up horn.

  Attach connectors.

  Adjust with screwdriver.

  BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

  Put horn back on belt.

  Click the button.

  While I was doing this, my mum would be watching me proudly through this glass screen. But after a couple of hours of listening to that fucking din I was starting to go insane. I was ready to murder someone. So I started to click the button twice for every horn I did, thinking I could knock off early. Anything to get out of that fucking booth. When I realised I was getting away with it, I started to click three times. Then four. Then five.

  This went on for a few hours until I heard a tap-tap and a squeal of feedback from somewhere above me. The conveyor belt juddered to a halt. Then this angry voice comes over the Tannoy:

  ‘OSBOURNE. SUPERVISOR’S OFFICE. NOW.’

  They wanted to know how come I’d done five hundred car horns in twenty minutes. I told them there was obviously something wrong with the clicker. They told me they weren’t born fucking yesterday and that the only thing wrong with the clicker was the fucking idiot operating it, and that if I did it again, I’d be thrown out on my fucking arse, end of story. Did I understand? I said, ‘Yeah, I understand,’ and sloped back to my little booth.

  Pick up horn.

  Attach connectors.

  Adjust with screwdriver.

  BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

  Put horn back on belt.

  Click the button.

  After a few more weeks of this bullshit I decided to strike up a conversation with the old guy next to me, Harry.

  ‘How long have you be working ’ere?’ I asked him.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘How long you been ’ere?’

  ‘Stop whispering, son.’

  ‘HOW LONG HAVE YOU WORKED HERE?’ I shouted. Harry had obviously gone completely deaf from listening to car horns all day.

  ‘Twenty-nine years and seven months,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Stop whispering, son.’

  ‘THAT’S A LONG FUCKING TIME, HARRY.’

  ‘You know what the best thing is?’

  I raised my hands and shook my head.

  ‘In five months’ time, I’ll get my gold watch. I’ll have been here thirty years!’

  The thought of thirty years in that room made me want the Russians to drop the bomb and get it over with.

  ‘If you wanted a gold watch that badly,’ I said. ‘You should have nicked one from the fucking jeweller’s. Even if you got caught, you’d only do a tenth of the time that you’ve done in this shithole.’

  ‘Say again, son?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘NOTHING.’

  I’d had enough. I threw down my screwdriver, walked out of the door, past my mum, out of the factory gate, and straight to the nearest pub.That was the end of my first job in the music business.

  The idea of getting a real job in the music business was a fucking joke. It was just one of those impossible things, like becoming an astronaut or a stuntman, or shagging Elizabeth Taylor. Still, ever since the time I’d sung ‘Living Doll’ at our family shindig, I’d been thinking about starting a band. I even went around for a while boasting that I was a member of a group called the Black Panthers. Bollocks, I was. My ‘band’ was an empty guitar case with ‘The Black Panther
s’ written on the side (I’d used some emulsion paint which I’d found in the garden shed). It was all in my imagination. I used to tell people I had a dog, too: it was a Hush Puppy that I’d found in a dumpster, which I put on the end of a leash. I’d walk around the streets of Aston with my empty guitar case, pulling this old fucking shoe behind me, thinking I was some kind of Mississippi bluesman. Everyone else thought I was fucking insane.

  When I wasn’t spending time with my imaginary band and my Hush-Puppy dog, I used to hang around with the Teddy Boys. It was a bit before my time, the Teddy Boy scene, so I never got into the long coats and the brothel creepers and all that shit. But I liked the music they played on the jukebox. I went around singing ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul & Paula for weeks. Those old tunes were great. Then I got into the mod stuff – I used to like the slim-fit mohair suits. Then I was a rocker, with the leather jackets and the studded belts. I’d switch back and forth all the fucking time. I was just looking for adventure, me. Anything that didn’t involve working in a factory.

  Then the Beatles happened.

  All of a sudden, these four moptop Liverpudlians were all over the radio and the telly. Using my last pay cheque from the job at the Lucas plant, I bought their second LP, With the Beatles.

  The moment I got it home, everything changed.

  A light went on in my head when I heard that record. It just sucked me in. Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies were like magic. They took me away from Aston and into this fantasy Beatleworld. I couldn’t stop listening to those fourteen songs (eight were originals, six were covers, including a version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’). It might sound over-the-top to say it now, but for the first time I felt as though my life had meaning. I played that record over and over again on my dad’s big, polished radiogram, which was a combination of a valve radio and an old-fashioned phonograph, made to look like a piece of furniture, which took pride of place in our living room. Then I’d go to the Silver Blades ice rink and they’d be playing it on the Tannoy system there. Sometimes I would just walk around with the album under my arm, I was so fucking pleased with it. Soon I began to collect anything with ‘The Beatles’ written on it. Photographs. Posters. Cards. Anything. It would all go up on the bedroom wall. My brothers didn’t mind – they were mad about the Beatles, too.