Forgiven: One Man's Journey from Self-Glorification to Sanctification (9 page)

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to clarify one point. Even though I’m a Christian, I am not “religious.” In being a Christian, I am simply saying that I’m a follower of Christ. I read his word, study the Bible, pray on it and attempt to walk this earth in the manner that he did. Religion to me means rules and regulations. You can do this, but you can’t do that.

Religion is man-made, while Christ is the
real
magilla. Remember, there is only one God. No religion is necessarily right or wrong — it’s just an interpretation of God’s word. That’s why I was turned away from religion, and turned toward God — I just didn’t realize it at the time. The difference between these two schools of thought is crucial. Don’t let religion scare you. Rather allow God, himself, to enlighten you.

Despite the religious differences between Alta and myself, the truth was I loved Amy for who she was, not what she was, I just wish that her mother had understood that. But the harder Alta made it for me, the more determined I became. I wasn’t going to lose Amy, regardless of the circumstances.

So the struggle continued. Alta would pull Amy one way, while I yanked her in the other. It went back and forth this way for awhile, until Alta gave me the motivation I needed. I’ll never forget it — one day during one of our “Coming to Jesus” conversations, Alta looked 49

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me square in the eye and said, “I just don’t see your point, Vin. When you graduate college you’re going to go back to New York anyway.” Without hesitation, I replied, “How do you know that? How do you know I won’t marry your daughter and take her with me?” Alta laughed confidently and said, “Oh, I doubt that.” Without even realizing it, Alta had lit me up like wwf pyro. That one response gave me all the incentive I needed. From that point on I knew I wasn’t going to lose, I wouldn’t allow it. How dare she! Did she have any idea who she was dealing with? I was from new yawk!

From that point on I was on a quest. I knew that I was going to have to eat it for a while, being that I was on Alta’s turf, but at the end of the game, after graduation, Amy was coming home to Yankee Stadium. Once that diploma was in my hands and I was out of

“Evanspatch,” victory would be mine!

In my mind I knew exactly how it would play out. Alta was no longer a threat. I kept my cards close to the vest without revealing my hand. But I knew that when the final card was played, I would be rak-ing in the entire pot. As graduation grew near, I knew I had to pop the question to Amy. Regardless of what her mother thought, I was truly in love with her. I just couldn’t see waiting to get married. That would have meant me just seeing Amy on holidays until we were ready. No way — I was ready now. Like everything else in my life up to that point, I was going all the way with this. So one night, in a Chinese restaurant, I proposed. She accepted, and we set a date: September 10, 1983. Now the pressure was on. I was graduating college in May and getting married in September. I had to get a job and prove to Alta that I could support her daughter. In the meantime, I knew Alta would be working on Amy, trying to change her mind, while I looked for employment in New York.

Just to set the record straight, so there’s no heat, no misunderstanding, let me publicly state to the world that, today, I wholeheartedly love my mother-in-law. Why? Because not only did I grow up, I now also have a little angel of my own. Her name is Annie.

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In my early twenties, I couldn’t understand Alta’s point of view and I didn’t
want to.
But, as they say, God works in mysterious ways. With the unconditional love I have for Annie, I can only imagine, 10 years from now, her bringing home a 20-year-old Vince Russo. At that age, I was a rebel, and Alta saw right through me — as any good mother would. Vince Russo was ready to take over the world and go through anybody to get there

— including her! That’s all Alta was trying to do — protect her daughter.

To her credit, Alta had enough love for her daughter to let Amy go, and find out for herself. I think in her God-loving spirit, Alta may have also believed that this kid from New York really
did
love her daughter.

Today, Alta can know she did the right thing by allowing her daughter to grow up, even though it might not necessarily have followed her time frame. That’s love, and that’s why, after being married to her daughter for 21 years, I now feel proud that I didn’t let Alta down.

You know, I always used to tell people that my mother-in-law and I had nothing to talk about. We lived in different worlds, with different morals, different values and different ideas. For the first time, a little while ago, Alta and I sat down and opened up a bit to each other. This time, what was different from all the other times was that we had God in common. It took me 21 years to see where Alta was coming from, and as I listened to her words of wisdom, I could only say to myself, “What was I thinking?” But then again, I also realize that I wasn’t ready. At that point in my life it wasn’t all about God — it was all about me. After a 21-year journey, on a very dark and desolate highway, my heart changed. God was now first in my life and Vince Russo was bringing up the rear.

As I sit here thinking about my marriage to Amy, I actually can’t understand how it’s possible. For 20 years I just wasn’t there — not just physically, but spiritually, mentally and emotionally. I can remember Amy’s infamous battle cry, “We don’t communicate!” My response was,

“I don’t want to communicate — I want to watch the game.” So we didn’t communicate — we were just kind of there. Looking back, I just didn’t know how to be a husband, and once the kids were born, I didn’t know how to be a father. I was so young. I didn’t know who I was, or who I was supposed to be. I now know for a fact that God was always there —

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always. There is just no other reason why this woman would have stayed with me. God gave me the greatest gift of love in Amy, and he gave her to me for a reason. For 20 years, Amy tried to lead me to God, but I wouldn’t listen. There were just too many other things that were more important to me. I don’t know how, but Amy never quit and never stopped believing.

So here we are today — communicating — with the topic of discussion usually being God. To make you really understand how profound that statement is — I’m going to reprint a paragraph from the original manuscript which I wrote two years ago, so you can experience, firsthand the psyche of the old Vince. The exact paragraph — word for word: Can you believe when Amy gets hot at me she says, “We have nothing in common?” How many guys have heard this line over and over again? I say this — we have nothing in common, so what? Do I expect Amy to be a San Francisco Giants fan? Do I expect her to watch girls show Howard Stern their boobs every night on E? Do I expect her to stay up until 3 a.m. with me in hopes of catching Shannon Tweed naked on Cinemax? These are the things guys do — they’re guy !@#$

things. I mean, think about things women like: Oprah and that goof she has on her show — Dr. Phil — Martha Stewart, the !@#$ Lifetime Channel. Please! Any guys who have things in common with their wives aren’t guys. They’re . . . well . . . they’re “women!” Now, you’re going to read that and tell me God doesn’t exist. I actually thought that was funny when I wrote it — now I see it as one of the sad-dest things I’ve ever read.

By the way — today, I never miss
Dr. Phil.

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Chapter 9

EVERYTHING YOU EVER

WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT COLLEGE

PROFESSORS BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

I graduated from Indiana State in May and went back to New York on a full-time job hunt. I made
New York’s Job Bank
my bible, and was determined to get a position in publishing. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in publishing, but I did know I didn’t want to write every day, as in journalism. For some reason — I guess my age — it never dawned on me that journalism didn’t necessarily mean writing for a newspaper. I could have written for a magazine, perhaps a column a month. But what did I know? I was only 22.

In a matter of months, after literally sending out hundreds of cover letters and resumés, I finally bagged a job interview with cbs Publishing. Of course, all I looked at was the “cbs” — who
really
cared that it was their publishing division? It was cbs, and as far as I was concerned, I was in television.

What a dope.

I tap-danced my way into the job, getting it on the strength of the 53

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boss’s assistant thinking I was hot. So, what do you do as a sales representative for cbs Publishing? Get this — I had every college in the Long Island–Queens–Brooklyn–Staten Island area, and my job was to sell the professors the textbooks that they were going to use for class.

Do you get that? No, I mean —
do you fully understand?
My job was to call on college professors in all disciplines and sell them books in areas I knew
nothing
about. I’m talking calculus, chemistry, art, abnormal psychology — every subject known to scholars. I didn’t have a clue, nor did I want one. You want to talk about arrogance —

meet the college professor! What a pompous bunch of “authorities” they were, and I do mean all of them. But hey, I had an expense account, a company car and was making a whopping $14,500 a year

—
plus
a bonus if I met my quota. The question was, how was I going to meet my quota when I didn’t have a clue what I was doing? The answer was easy. Do what I did best in high school — cheat.

When you get placed in a situation you have no business being in, you just need to survive. That was my strategy, because praying was something little kids did before they went to bed. Again, Vince McMahon’s law of the jungle — “Eat, or be eaten.” Was I going to allow some holier-than-thou, glasses-at-the-end-of-your-pointy-nose professor beat me? No way! In my mind, not only was I better than them, I was smarter. There was a way around it, I just knew it —

all I had to do was figure it out. Enter Howard Weiner.

A red-headed, spectacled, hip Jewish salesman, Howard could sell you both the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge in a two-for-one deal. This guy was far and away the best I have ever seen, and that says a lot, considering I’ve worked with wrestlers for 12 years.

Howard was as smooth as the belly of a pup, he was the “true” game

— he knew how to play it, how to talk it and how to make money,
big
money,
from it. Being a street-smart kid from the Island, I hit it off big-time with Howard. As a matter of fact, we got along so well, he decided to take me under his wing. Howard became my mentor years before
Seinfeld
made it cool. And, in taking the responsibility, Howard taught me not only how to play the game — but how to mas-54

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ter it. There was a definite shortcut to this business, a shortcut that would make my job easier — and my wallet fatter.

At that time, I felt as if all college professors had something in common — they all appeared to be bitter. I also felt that every college professor thought they were worth more than they were actually making. Many felt the job was beneath them, as most seemed to either want to be world-renowned authors or Pulitzer Prize winners. Very few I sat down with seemed to actually care about their students —

and I broke bread with hundreds. It just appeared as if they wanted to get their tenure, then get out. Do you really think they cared about the textbook they were going to use for class? First off, what really is the difference between calculus books — when you get past all the X’s and O’s, calculus is calculus. College professors could teach from any book

— they were all quite similar — so the question was, what book were they going to choose, and more importantly,
why?

I’ve got to be honest with you — as quick as I was on my feet at the time, I don’t know if I would ever have picked up on this if it weren’t for Howard. In my most corrupt nightmares, I just would have never thought of it. I mean, we’re talking about some big-time colleges here — Queens College, St. John’s, Stony Brook, Brooklyn College — this was the world of higher education, it couldn’t be

“dirty.” But it was; it was pigsty filthy. It was all about money, and how much of it you could put in the professor’s pocket. And, it was as simple as no blood, no foul.

In the textbook business, there’s a term called “desk copies.” If a professor chose to use your company’s book in his class, he would require a few desk copies from you — one for the office, a back-up for home and perhaps an extra one just in case. You starting to get the picture? The “extra one” was the key. Many times those few extras would equal a case of 24, or even 48. Now then, what would a professor do with 48 extra desk copies, you ask? Let me do the math for you: 48 books at $40 a pop at the college bookstore equals $1,920. Multiply that by two semesters, perhaps a summer course or two, and you’re looking at $5,000 extra income per year for that professor. You get the 55

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picture —
free cash!
You grease my palm, I grease yours. I was blown away by the lack of integrity of the professors. Howard had been making a killing using this system for years. Year after year, he was the number one salesman, and it seemed that everybody knew but me.

The office knew what was going on — there was no doubt about it.

But once again — no blood, no foul.

My first two years as a sales rep I successfully made my quota, and then some. With the Weiner Principle, it was fairly easy. Was it a shortcut? Yeah, it was, but the way I rationalized it was there weren’t any victims. I didn’t screw anybody, and I didn’t take anybody’s job. I just did what I had to do to make a living. Did I regret it? How could I? All the sales reps from all the publishing companies were doing it.