Fierce (26 page)

We were still filming the third series of
The Osbournes
so all the MTV crew were still with us and they were hanging around the house. They had been with us long enough to know when it was wise to turn off the cameras. They had always been respectful in that way.
The show was still at the height of its popularity, so we were being followed everywhere by photographers outside the house as well as those inside for the show.

Mum and Dad caused a bit of a distraction when they pulled out of Doheny to go to the studio, so quite a few of the photographers followed them. My parents had come into my bedroom before they left. They both looked so worried as they kissed and hugged me goodbye. Dad was hovering behind Mum with a look of terror on his face. I didn’t really know what was going on. The whole thing had been a whirlwind and if it hadn’t been for the photographer who had shopped me, I would have been busy getting ready to go out with my friends to pop a load more pills that night.

Mum had spent the morning putting calls into rehab facilities – she had done it so many times before for my dad and once for Jack. I felt fucking sorry for my mum. It was agreed that I would go to the Promises facility on the coast in Malibu, which is a twenty-one-mile strip of coastline west of Los Angeles. A lot of Hollywood actors live there with their homes overlooking the beaches.

To stop the photographers following us, the MTV guys said they would take me in the back of their van. The paps who were permanently camped outside our house were used to seeing them coming and going, so they wouldn’t suspect anything different. I needed that. I couldn’t have coped with a load of photographers and their camera bulbs flashing in my face as I walked into the rehab clinic. I felt bloody humiliated.

Jack came and sat in the back of the van with me. He was the best
person to accompany me to the facility. It had been nearly a year since he had checked into Las Encinas Hospital, Pasadena, California to get treatment for his drink and drug addiction. He had stayed clean ever since. Around the same time, my dad had made a pact with Jack that if he got clean, Dad would try too. He had also kept his promise.

Do you know how my father apologised to my mother for all of the drugs he’d taken? I think it’s an important part of recovery to say sorry to everyone who has been affected by your actions. My mum was taking a shit one afternoon at Doheny and my father walked into the bathroom and said, ‘Sharon?’

‘Yeah, Ozzy,’ Mum said.

‘I love you and I’m sorry.’

My mum was wiping her fucking arse. I’m not fucking lying.

Dad now wears his circular sunglasses out of habit – they’re his trademark – but originally he used to wear them so people couldn’t see his pupils and know that he was high. Not any more.

As Jack and Dad were celebrating their one-year anniversary of being clean, I was checking into rehab for the first time on 2 April 2004. At the time, I was so wrapped up in myself that I wasn’t even thinking about how Jack and dad had stayed clean. I was lost in myself. I didn’t believe they would stay sober, if I’m honest. But my God, I’m so fucking proud of them.

As I was about to discover, it’s the hardest thing you can do. For both of them to stay sober is just amazing. Especially Jack. He was just seventeen when he got clean and he stuck to it through his most impressionable years, when it would have been so easy to relapse
because all his friends were drinking and smoking. But he didn’t, and that says a hell of a lot about his strength of character.

As we pulled out of the drive, I was crying my eyes out. I just didn’t know what I was going into. There had been many times when I’d gone with Mum to take Dad to rehab, but it ended at the door. This time I was going to be walking through those doors and I really didn’t know what I was going to face. I was terrified.

Jack sat in the van next to me and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. I sobbed during the entire forty-minute journey. I had felt so unbelievably miserable being addicted to Vicodin that there was part of me that was relieved and thanking God it was over. I kept repeating to myself: ‘I’m going to get help. I’m going to get help.’

But stupidly there was another part of me that thought, ‘OK, I’ll do the thirty days, get out and go back on them and hang out with my friends.’ None of it made any sense.

As Jack checked me into Promises, Mum and Dad were about to appear on
Larry King Live
.

I saw them on the TV in the rehab facility as I was being checked in. It broke my heart. I saw it as them trying to get themselves out of trouble. I knew I was in the public eye and there are very few secrets when you are, but I still didn’t understand why they had to go on TV. They didn’t want people to write bullshit, I get that now. But I didn’t then.

After Mum had been tipped off by the newspaper, they’d both gone through my bedroom. They had found five hundred pills scattered around the room – under my bed, in my handbag, in bottles by my bed.

‘The amount of pills I found in Kelly’s bag was astounding,’ Dad told Larry.

‘Literally, a couple of hours ago she was admitted into rehab,’ Mum added.

M
Y
first impression of Promises was that it looked like a bit of a joke. It was a fuck-off mansion on the cliff on the Malibu coast. For a lot of people checking in there, it’s a lot nicer than their own homes.

It might work for some people, but for me it was like a villa you stay in on your holidays, but there isn’t any alcohol to drink by the pool. The facility prides itself on being designed for clients who are accustomed to luxury but as I was going to find out, I needed to be taken out of my comfort zone to be able to fight my addiction to drugs.

There were wooden balconies overlooking the ocean with green cushioned recliner chairs. The sun was shining and I felt like I was on the first day of my holiday. That soon changed, I can tell you.

I’d had times when I was starting to come down from Vicodin, but I’d always been able to take some more pills to stop the withdrawal.

This time I was going to have to detox my body off the drug before I could start my treatment. I was put in a room on my own – a scenario I would have to go through a few times in the future too. It was like a hotel room with a big bed and white linen. It was what it said on the tin. It was luxurious.

Because I had been heavily addicted, the doctors gave me some drugs to help take the edge off my withdrawal. It was still the worst thing that I’ve ever been through.

I
LAY
in bed with the sun streaming through the wooden blinds at the window and my whole body just seemed to go through some sort of shock. I was shaking uncontrollably, my joints ached. They really fucking ached. I was sweating and I felt sick. I couldn’t sleep at all. I felt fucking awful. Really fucking awful. If someone had said to me,
you can take some Vicodin now, I would have jumped at the chance. I would have done anything to stop that withdrawal. I was crying with the pain and there was nowhere I could go to stop it. There was nothing I could do to stop it apart from roll around in bed and suffer the agony. It was like the worst flu you’ve ever suffered.

It took me nearly a week to detox from the drugs and every bit of it was hell. Once I’d got through that, it really did feel like I was on holiday. I had acupuncture, I was given a personal trainer and I had a massage every day.

But even though I’d gone through the pain and horror of coming off the drugs I just didn’t feel I had tackled the underlying problem of my addiction. I left there after thirty days thinking, ‘This is bullshit.’

But I started to get my life back together. I wanted to concentrate on my music career and I felt really clear-headed. Despite my earlier reluctance when I’d checked out of Promises, I felt like I was doing really well. ‘One Word’ was going to be released in the April. I recorded a really cool video for that song. I loved it. It was shot in black and white and was based on scenes from the French cult sci-fi movie
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
, which was about a secret agent. It was so much fun.

But after the single came out, I suffered a severe setback. Something I’d said in private had got leaked to the press. Looking back it was so bloody stupid, but at the time I felt I couldn’t trust anyone any more. I can’t even remember what it was that was said. I started taking drugs again. Pills were just a phone call away. All I had to do was dial the number.

I was staying at Welders in May 2005 while I was promoting my new album, but I wasn’t really in a fit state to be doing it. Mum and Dad had work commitments in the UK too and one Sunday we were at home together. I had taken a load of Vicodin when I’d woken up that morning and I was pretty out of it. The three of us were having a Sunday roast and I just nodded off at the table. I woke up to my parents looking over me in floods of tears. They were thinking, ‘Here we go again.’

Mum said, ‘Oh, Kel, what are you doing?’

Dad had his arm around her and was saying: ‘Kel, listen to me, man, you’ve got to get help. You’ve just fucking nodded off on us.’

I had a flight booked to go back to LA before returning to the UK to continue promoting the album. On the plane I started to detox. The problem was that the Vicodin usually lasted between six to twelve hours, so whenever I used to fly from America to the UK – which is an eleven-hour flight – I’d often fall asleep and wake up on a come-down that meant I’d shiver and feel sick and my whole body would ache.

I wrapped the flimsy airplane blanket around me and rested my head on my own pillow – that I took on every flight – but I felt terrible. I was just curled up, waiting for the plane to land. But for some reason,
I didn’t take more pills to relieve my come-down.

As I stood shivering at LAX Airport waiting to go through passport control, I knew I couldn’t do it any more. I owed it to myself and my family to try and get help.

When I walked out of the airport I got the driver to drive me to Las Encinas Hospital – the same facility that Jack had gone into.

After checking me in, the facility called my parents and told them I’d gone into rehab for thirty days. Just over a year after my first visit, I was in rehab again for the second time on 2 June 2005.

Las Encinas was completely different to Promises. It certainly wasn’t as luxurious. When I walked in it smelt like a hospital. The rooms were really basic. Some of the rooms were similar to something a grandma would have in her home – red curtains and flowery sheets on the bed.

They put me on a medical detox for three days, which meant all my belongings were taken off me. I was left in bed to go through the horrendous side-effects of cold turkey again. This time I had such bad night sweats. Every part of me was sweating, but at the same time I was shivering – really, really shivering.

The one thing that Las Encinas taught me was to be humble. Drugs had made me so selfish. They were all-consuming. All I thought about from the moment I woke up was when would I need to take my next Vicodin? Would I have enough Vicodin? When would I need to see my dealer to buy more Vicodin? When you look at it like that, it’s fucking ridiculous to fill your head with just that. But when you’re an addict, you do. After a week I moved into a room with another girl and I got my belongings back. It wasn’t the cleanest room and my mattress
was dirty. The girl I was sharing with was self-harming and cutting herself.