Fierce (17 page)

Other times, he’d be sitting upright chattering to anyone who’d listen because he’d taken cocaine and was as high as a kite. That was a normal scenario for me and it made me so scared for him. I was terrified that something bad would happen. Kids, even at the age of eight, are very perceptive. That’s
why I spent the whole time worrying about my dad.

The first time I really thought about my Dad’s ‘gene talk’ and really got what he was trying to tell us was when I was thirteen. It wasn’t long after we’d moved to LA permanently and I started to suffer from sore throats. I was eventually diagnosed with tonsillitis and the doctors decided that I should have my tonsils taken out instead of suffering the agony of the excruciating needle-stabbing pain in my throat at regular intervals throughout the year.

I was admitted into Cedars-Sinai in the summer of 1998 and my mum took me in for the operation and a one-night stay. The surgery was over quickly, and afterwards I got to stay in my own room while I recovered. It was while I lay there in bed with the sun shining through the window that I realised I might have an issue with drugs. The doctors had prescribed liquid Vicodin, a strong painkiller only available in America; it’s mainly given to patients who have had oral or dentistry operations but you can take it for other things too. The nurses would pop by my room and give me a little capful every so often and it would help numb the pain from the operation. I didn’t think I was taking a drug because it was just a medicine to me. But for the first time since we’d moved to Los Angeles, whenever I swallowed that tiny dose of medicine I felt relaxed and contented. Liquid Vicodin seemed to take away the stress of living in another country. I was prescribed two weeks’ worth while I recovered at home on North Beverly Drive and I thought, ‘I like the feeling this drug gives me.’

When the two-week prescription ran out, there was no more access to liquid Vicodin so that was the end of that. Then, years later, when I was sixteen, I started going to a nightclub called Las Palmas, just off Hollywood Boulevard. It was the summer of 2001, just before we started filming
The Osbournes
that October. The club was very close to The Sunset Marquis hotel, where we were staying in an apartment while we waited to move into our new home on Doheny
Road. We were staying in a whitewashed three-bedroom apartment that was next to the main entrance. I remember it overlooked a side street and I shared a bedroom over the garage with Aimee.

Wednesday was Las Palmas night and on this particular night I’d gone alone and planned to meet my friends inside. It was around this time that Jack had also told me he didn’t want to hang out with me any more. I used to turn up at the same nightclubs as him and he’d scream in the queue at me, ‘Kelly, I don’t want you coming here. What are you doing here? I discovered it first.’ We would have terrible, terrible fights. We’d always been so close, but all of a sudden we were arguing night and day. It broke my heart.

Jack was fifteen and had started drinking and experimenting with cannabis; he was using them to escape the anxieties he was feeling. It would seem Jack had ‘the gene’. I knew what he was doing – we were both experimenting with drugs – and I think that’s why we started to argue because we simply couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about it. That was weird because we’d always confided in each other about everything.

On loads of occasions, Jack would march into the house at the end of a night out and go and wake up my mum and say, ‘Kelly’s out of order, Mum. She abandoned me in a nightclub.’ But the truth was he’d told me he hadn’t wanted me around him and his friends. I couldn’t win.

On the day I got busted by the newspaper, Jack had been clean for nearly a year after seeking help for an addiction to the painkiller OxyContin as well as marijuana and alcohol. He’s been clean ever since and thank God he has because it’s meant our friendship has
been able to go back to how it was when we were kids. I’m lucky. But for a while I lost that friendship.

I started hanging out with my own friends, but Jack and I would always end up in the same places because that’s what LA’s like and there was a limit to the number of clubs we could get into because Jack was fifteen and I was sixteen and we were well under the LA age limit of twenty-one to drink and get into nightclubs. I knew a whole bunch of people at Las Palmas and most people were underage, but no one gave a shit. The show hadn’t started yet and everyone in the club knew me for me, not Kelly Osbourne from
The Osbournes
. I’d driven myself there in my black 4x4 – I’d passed my test to drive an automatic car – no one walks in Los Angeles. Walk somewhere? Are you joking?

I pulled up outside the club that was about a five-minute drive from the hotel and parked on the road. It was around 11 p.m., noisy and hot inside. I talked to the people I knew while I sat at a table with my sour-apple martinis, which I always ordered. An hour or so went by, then this guy, who I’d never seen before and who was older than me, leaned over his friend and said, ‘Hey, do you want one of these?’

I didn’t have a clue what he was offering, but when I looked down in his hand he was holding a prescription bottle full of pills. The bottle had similar writing to the sticky label that had been
on the outside of the bottle of liquid Vicodin that I’d taken when I’d had my tonsils out. It didn’t scare me. It reassured me. So I took a small white pill out of the bottle and swallowed it back with my drink.

I wasn’t stupid. I’d been brought up with a father who had taken every drug available to him – including Vicodin – and I knew some of my friends smoked cannabis. But I’d not really thought about taking drugs myself. After swallowing the little white pill I very quickly felt like I could talk to anyone. I was relaxed and happy and a bit tingly. It was the same feeling I’d experienced when I was thirteen and in that hospital bed. I knew it was Vicodin. In an instant it stopped me feeling self-conscious and I thought, ‘I’ve found my magic remedy.’ I wanted more.

I was still enjoying the effects of the Vicodin when I got back to the hotel apartment in the early hours and it felt good. In fact, for the first time in
months I felt happy. When I woke up the next morning, the effects had worn off, but I’d taken the number of the guy who’d given it to me so I called it from my bedroom on my mobile phone. Straight away he agreed to meet me and I waited for him on the street.

I only bought two or three pills and planned to take them the next time I went out. They cost me about twenty dollars. I kept the Vicodin pills I’d bought in my bag and took them the following week. I swallowed one with water before going out. The effects of one tablet lasted the whole night and made me feel more confident. Soon my life was going to change and I’d come to rely on Vicodin more and more.

A
BOUT
a year after we’d moved to LA in 1999, MTV visited our house on North Beverly Drive to record an episode of
Cribs
. It was a TV show that had been running for some time. They went into the home of some celebrity and filmed inside and then always made a big issue of their huge fridge and their fancy cars. Mum wasn’t in it, but Jack, Dad and I did it and it was cool, but we didn’t give it much more thought and a year passed.

MTV had contacted us because a few months earlier, a production company had come to film us all for a one-off documentary-style show called
Ozzy Osbourne Uncut
. It went on to win the Rose d’Or at the Montreux International Film Festival. Then came more interest in my family from other production companies.

After the MTV show had gone out, we found out that our episode had become the most requested show on MTV. I knew people would love my dad when they saw it. It had been an opportunity for them
to find out what we’d known all our lives: my dad is fucking funny. At home, my dad would always be coming out with stuff that’d make us stop in our tracks and say in harmony, ‘What?’ and then we’d all just piss ourselves laughing. Yeah, my dad is famous and yeah, he’s successful, but he’s also just a working-class lad and always will be. I was so happy that people had loved that episode. Afterwards, my mum had a whole bunch of meetings with MTV, but we didn’t take much notice. Then she said she wanted us all to meet the crew.

One night during the summer of 2001, she took us for dinner at Ivy at the Shore, which is the beach version of the famous Ivy restaurant in London and overlooks the sea in Santa Monica – just a few miles from Los Angeles. We’d go there a lot and it’s a real family place. There’s the pier where Forrest Gump ended his famous run across America and Muscle Beach where all the buff boys work out with weights on the sand. Arnold Schwarzenegger used to train there when he was bodybuilder.