Countdown To Lockdown (11 page)

Maybe a swarm of rabid Mick Foley fans would descend upon my table, eager to purchase each slight variation of an eight-by-ten photo depicting me with my thumb in the air, the classic pose I stole from the Fonz … or Siskel … or Ebert. It would take the decision out of my hands. I simply would be unable to go. That swarm never materialized. I push back from the table, take a deep breath, then begin the long journey, a pilgrimage of sorts, to Tori’s side of the massive convention hall.

What exactly was her reaction supposed to be? As far as I could guess, there wasn’t any really good choice. It was either:

A. She’d never heard any tale of a wrestler preparing for matches by listening to her music. “Hi, I’m Mick and I’m a wrestler, and I used to listen to ‘Winter’ before some of my matches.” I’d get a polite but wary “Hello,” maybe even a mildly amused “Thanks,” and I’d be on my way.

B. She’d heard about the wrestler and didn’t really care much one way or the other. A polite but wary “Hello,” a mildly amused “Thanks,” and I’d be on my way.

C. She’d heard about it, and didn’t appreciate the odd paradoxical beauty of the situation. In that case, I might be the recipient of a mild Tori Amos reprimand, maybe even a stern finger wag.

If I was a betting man, I’d have gone with A, although all of them seemed like distinct possibilities — each of them sending me back to my table in worse condition than I’d left it.

I’d been a big Jethro Tull fan for many years before meeting Ian Anderson backstage at the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island. Ian seemed slightly underwhelmed by my presence, polite but apparently not impressed by my legendary status. Which was fine, because I can still enjoy “Locomotive Breath” without any palpable reduction in listening pleasure. But “Locomotive Breath” wasn’t “Winter.” And Ian wasn’t Tori.

Bruce Springsteen once said “Trust the art, not the artist” in response to fans who seemed to expect too much from Bruce, the person, when he was selling out football stadiums in two hours, on the heels of “Born in the U.S.A.,” back in the mideighties. I wondered perhaps if I should have heeded Bruce’s advice as Tori Amos came into my view. There she was — bright orange hair, high distinct cheek-bones of a Cherokee ancestry, and a warm smile for each fan who posed by her side. Maybe I, too, could get one of those smiles even though I had no book to sign, and I’d be cutting in front of her line, several hundred fans strong.

“Okay, your turn,” I’m told, and suddenly I think of Burgess
Meredith in the first
Rocky
barking out “Time,” indicating that it’s uh, you know, time for Rocky Balboa to hit the ring for the inevitable beating at the hands of Apollo Creed. I also think back to 1976, the championship game of the Northern Brookhaven Little League. Not quite eleven, I was scheduled to bat in the final inning, our team down by two, the bases full, two men out. Man, that was one long lonely walk from our bench to home plate. I swung and missed badly on the first two pitches. Then choked up on the bat, like our coach Will Grey had taught us to do, and with a short, compact swing, doubled in two runs to tie up the game. Over the past thirty-two years, I’ve thought of that game a bunch of times, pausing to wonder how life would have worked out if I’d missed that third pitch. Life is like that, I think — made up of moments that interconnect, a fast-moving spiral that somehow helps shape the people we become. I don’t mean to suggest that I would have become a predestined loser if I’d gone down on strikes, but I do think there are special moments in life that, for better or worse, go on to define the people we are.

I’m about ten feet from Tori, when she looks over at me … and gets up from her chair … and extends both her arms. I have to admit, I never saw this one coming — never considered the chance that there might be a choice D, the possibility of Tori hugging Mick. It seems so far-fetched, even a mere second before contact, that my official first words in the presence of Tori Amos are in the form of a question.

“I can hug you?” I ask, in almost total disbelief (
not
“Can I hug you?” which would have been a request), and then Tori puts her arms around me, and though I tower over her and probably outweigh her by close to 200 pounds, I feel very much like an innocent child in the arms of an angel. Hey, I’m not making this up. This is how I remember it. I was a child and she was an angel.

“You know who I am?” I say, unable to grasp that this beautiful woman, this sensitive soul, whose music has meant so much to me over the years, not only knows who I am but apparently finds me worthy of hugging.

And then Tori Amos looks straight at me and, moving her hands in small, majestic opposite arcs (think Mr. Miyagi teaching Daniel-san to wax on/wax off, but with far more pageantry and beauty), says six simple words: “I know exactly who you are.”

Tori, it turns out, has a nephew who is a big wrestling fan, and he apparently had clued Aunt Tori in about the wrestling guy who used to get motivated for big matches while listening to her music. I’m not trying to claim that she was a fan. In fact, I just can’t seem to get a clear mental image of her on a couch watching
Impact
or
Raw
with a beer in one hand, a remote in the other, and a bowl of chips in her lap. But she definitely knew, and she seemed kind of flattered.

I return to my table, almost impossibly happy, maybe even giddy, thinking about that hug and those words. I think of the old Jim Croce song “Time in a Bottle” and can’t stop wishing that such a thing could exist. And no, I’m not talking about taking those lyrics too literally — no saving “every day till eternity passes away just to spend them with you.” I just want to have a way to keep that special moment, to think back to it, to remember how it made me feel. I also think about writing a little note. A simple one. I thought I had some appropriate words:

“If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget how special you made me feel.”

Pretty nice, right? Except I never wrote it.

I returned home from the Con, still high on my meeting, a feeling I’d keep with me, at least in small part, for months afterward. I even treated myself to a little Tori-themed expenditure party. I bought a couple CDs, a DVD, and her book, an autobiography so honest I felt fully secure trusting the artist as well as the art. I even promised myself I’d donate the money I made on the day I’d met her to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), the foundation she’d helped found in 1994, to offer invaluable aid to victims of sexual abuse.

Wouldn’t it be cool
, I thought,
if Tori looked at my books?
I didn’t expect her to run out and purchase one, or to pick up a T-shirt, or start
watching our show. But maybe, I thought, the impression I made was just good enough to merit a brief bookstore visit or a quick Google search.

I flipped through the pages of
Have a Nice Day!
There we go, page 306. Oh no! Look at the words: “As the beautiful images in her song peaked, so did my ability to see brutal images in my mind.”

“Brutal images”? I sound like a psycho! How about
Foley Is Good
? Try as I might, I couldn’t find her in that one. But I knew she was in
Hardcore Diaries
, near the end, where I wrote about psyching myself up for my big match with Edge. Yes, there it is, page 341. Come on, Mick, let it be nice. Oh, no, please, don’t tell me! This one is even worse: “I had found a private corner of the building and rocked back and forth for minutes, listening to ‘Winter’ by Tori Amos, a beautiful, haunting song that for some reason continues to give rise to goose bumps and thoughts of hardcore destruction, thirteen years after first being touched by it in Maxx [Payne]’s car on a long-forgotten WCW road trip.”

“Hardcore destruction”? Good grief!

Remember that high that I wrote of? The one that lasted for months? Well, that may be true, but from the moment I read my own words, that high I felt had emotional company. Guilt. In my first book, I’d borrowed a line directly from Tori’s song “Crucify”: “Got enough guilt to start my own religion.” Which is basically true. If somebody, somewhere, is suffering somehow … I’m pretty sure I’m at least partially responsible. Homelessness on Long Island? Should have sent some more money. Fifth grader bullied in Bellport? Should have talked at more schools. That second Bush term? Should have knocked on more doors.

I didn’t want to go down in musical history as the guy who ruined “Winter.” What if Tori herself stopped liking the song strictly because of the words I had written? What if she got only as far as “Snow can wait” and broke down onstage, thinking about that guy at the Con with the flannel and tie-dye? Hey, it could happen.

Look what happened to “I Love,” the Tom T. Hall song about “little baby ducks, old pickup trucks, slow-moving trains, and rain” (my wedding song, no less). It’s now the basis for a beer commercial, a seeming endorsement for not only getting hammered at a football game but also harboring a thinly veiled fantasy of a possible tryst with identical twins.

And then there’s Mick Foley, who took the most beautiful song ever written and turned it into his own twisted ode to suffering and woe. Okay, maybe that’s overdoing it a little, but I did feel kind of bad, did worry about what Tori might think, and did spend many hours wondering why such beautiful words could serve as such an odd motivation.

What was it about that song? The question gnawed at me for days, then weeks, then months. It never consumed me; I was never clinically obsessed with this quest. Instead, it would pop into my mind at various times — while reading, while driving, while watching TV. Sometimes the thought was just fleeting, other times it hung around for an hour or more. Always leaving me wondering,
What is it about that song?
So while it didn’t consume me, it continued to take tiny bites from my conscience for a very long time. Like I said, it gnawed at me.

I thought for a while I could boil it all down to simple emotion. That if I put all the factors into a metaphorical pot, those factors, or ingredients, would all boil down to a simple emotional connection. Indeed, when listening to “Winter,” at least a few hundred times over the last sixteen years, I have never failed to receive that tingling in the scalp, that sense of electrification, that magnificent rush. There have been times on long road trips when I’ve put the disc in the dash, that I’ve been slightly nervous, figuring this might just be the time when the magic runs out. But somehow, every time the rush is still there, the tingling remains, the magic lives on. Yes, it must be emotion.

But wait, other things in life make me feel that same way. Like that scene in
Rocky
when Adrian closes her eyes after watching her man
hit the deck in that big fourteenth round. Or when John Coffey brings Del’s mouse back to life in
The Green Mile.
Or once every year, for as long as I can remember, when that train with square wheels, the ostrich-riding cowboy, that annoying clown Charlie-in-the-box, and the rest of the gang on the Island of Misfit Toys hear that first jingle of bells in the distance and realize heroes do exist, that Rudolph has kept his word and that Santa has not forgotten them. Come on, admit it, that scene gets to you, too.

But I’ve never watched
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
and thought about barbed-wire barbarity.
Rocky
used to make me do weird things like go jogging at midnight, but it never inspired a single wild match.

Lots of music moved me; there have been hundreds of non-“Winter” musically inspired magnificent rushes while I logged so many miles in my car — over a million, by my own estimation. I’d listened to some of those tunes before matches, even before big Pay-Per-Views. I was never a guy who needed music night in and night out to get myself pumped. Still, I know there were songs other than “Winter” that I used for big matches — songs that gave me an emotional rush. “Copperhead Road” by Steve Earle, “Diary of a Workingman” by Blackfoot, “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins — all right, I’m kidding about that last one. But I specifically remember Nils Lofgren’s guitar solo on the live version of Springsteen’s “Youngstown,” and how after listening to it I felt like I could take on the world.

But, for the life of me, I can’t specifically remember the name of the city, or the guy that I wrestled, or the name of the show that I used “Youngstown” for. Same with “Copperhead Road” and “Diary of a Workingman.” I don’t have a clue. I’m sure if I puzzled and puzzled till my puzzler was sore, I might think of a few song titles — I might even eventually connect one of them to a specific time, place, or match.

“Winter” is different. I remember the times. I remember the places. I remember the shows. Every single move that took place. January 8,
1995, the no-rope barbed-wire match with Funk in Honjo, Japan. August 23, 1995, the infamous King of the Deathmatch tournament at Kawasaki Stadium in Yokohama, Japan — a day that left me with forty-two stitches (distributed over six separate body parts), second-degree burns, and hundreds of tack holes. April 26, 2004, my first singles match in four years, the best match of my life, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. And April 1, 2006, with Edge in Chicago — my favorite
WrestleMania
memory, the match that was voted by WWE fans as the best of the year.

That was it — only four matches. Yeah, I know, you might think given all of the time (about twenty-two hours so far on this chapter, on the first draft alone) that I’ve given this story, that I’d cranked up the Tori before every big show. And it would be easy to lie — how would anyone know? — and pick out some more crazy matches to add to my list. Just toss in Hell in a Cell for history’s sake.