Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (19 page)

Then Stu came in wearing his baby-blue wool trunks, and his eyes lit up like an old lion seeing his quarry. The kid called out with a goofy grin, “Ready for me, Stu?”

Soon they were bulling around on the mat. “Drive!” Stu ordered. The kid pushed as hard as he could, but Stu was still pretty tough to move. Then suddenly Stu pulled him down to the mat with a thud and a groan. Even at sixty-six, Stu still weighed easily 250 pounds, and once he was on your back, good luck getting him off.

Owen wandered in with an old tape recorder and recorded the young guy’s horrific pleading screams. The tape remains as a testament to how real it was down in Stu’s basement. To say that Stu was annoyed with this pushy kid would be an understatement. He punished him so severely that when the bawling started, I’d seen enough and went to chat with my mom and Diana. We could still hear the screams from Mom’s office, two floors up, though Diana seemed oblivious to them. She was shuffling through photos of a hand-some young wrestler from England who wanted to come over, mesmerized by the sight of him.

“He’s Dynamite’s cousin,” she sighed, a teenager with a crush. “I can’t wait until he gets here!”

When the screaming stopped, I went back down to the basement and found only Tom, who’d thoroughly enjoyed the show.

“So, your cousin is coming over?”

“Is he what? If you got that fook comin’ over here, maybe you can do without me.” I was surprised that Tom was so opposed to Davey Boy Smith coming to Calgary.

When I went upstairs, there sat Heathcliff on the back porch, feasting on a mouse he’d caught. It struck me that his expression was curiously similar to Stu’s, who was at the kitchen table stirring a cup of tea. All that was left of that little mouse were the back legs. At least Stu let the kid crawl out on his hands and knees.

Tom phoned asking whether he could catch a lift from Calgary to Regina in my car, instead of us all going in the van. He was leaving for Japan soon, and he thought it might be nice if we brought Julie and Michelle along. On that thousand-mile drive, we all got a little closer, I thought. Michelle brought out a playfulness in Tom that I’d never seen.

When we pulled up to the back of the building in Regina, Tom ducked down and hid under our coats so none of the fans caught us together. There was going to be a decent house on hand to see me exact some revenge on him for costing me my belt. It would be our first “ladder match.” The concept was actually conceived by Dan Kroffat, a smooth-talking protégé of Stu’s who had Robert Redford looks. He and Tor Kamata, a pearshaped wrestler who was born in Hawaii and whose parents were Mexican and Chinese, sold out the pavilion with the first ever ladder match in the summer of 1975.

The current storyline between me and Dynamite was that J.R. had wagered the sum of $5,000, which would be hung in a canvas bank bag high above the ring. Whoever could climb the ladder and grab the money first would be the winner.

When the bell rang, Dynamite and I tore into each other so ferociously we soon spilled out onto the floor. I slammed his head into a steel chair, and although he had his hands out for protection, he hit that chair a lot harder than I thought he would. His head bounced back. I tried to turn away, but our heads smashed together, splitting open the back of Tom’s head and shattering my face. I knew it was bad when I was able to poke my baby finger through a gaping hole in the side of my nose!

Dragging him by the hair, I tossed him back into the ring and pounded him down to his knees with my fists. He clung there, like in a real fight, helpless and reeling. I always thought I threw realistic working punches, but the art was also in the believable way Tom sold them.

I asked him how bad my nose was as I pulled him up from the floor.

“Ooh fook, it’s bad!”

So much for my promise to my poor mother that’d I’d never break my nose. The wrestling business was filled with broken promises.

Both of us were covered in crimson, and the frenzied crowd was filled with blood lust. I remember Tom jumping up high, gripping that heavy steel ladder and coming straight down on my head. I froze. The crowd gasped. Tom was such a pro that the ladder had only lightly brushed my forehead.

Naturally I sold the hell out of it. Over and over we tried to climb up the ladder only to come crashing down. Finally, I had him right where I wanted him. We timed one of our collisions with the ladder to knock out the ref. I struggled up to my feet ahead of Dynamite, but then Foley whacked me across the back with his heavy walking stick. The ref came to as Dynamite crawled to the ladder. The crowd noise was earsplitting. Tom climbed to the top, his fingers about to grab the money, when I threw a perfect desperation drop kick, just like he’d asked me to do. “Just barely touch the ladder with your toes, I’ll control how I go over.”

Sure enough, the ladder wobbled and tipped, and with perfect timing Dynamite leapt off, straddled the top rope and bounced up and out of the ring, landing right on top of Foley. I stood that big steel ladder up and began my slow climb to the money, wondering why I was doing all this for a lousy fifty dollars. With every step I realized that the blurred mass of faces screaming as one truly believed in me, and that’s when it struck me—this is why I do it. With blood dripping from my nose, I yanked the sack down and blew the roof off the place. It was so loud that I could not hear a single sound but the beating of my own heart. People forever ask me what my greatest match was. It may very well have been the night of the ladder match in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1981.

Tom and I got stitched up at the Pasqua Hospital, which was only a block away. Then we drove home with the radio down low so Julie and Michelle could sleep in the backseat. Each time I glanced into the rearview mirror, the black around my eyes was bigger and darker. Every once in a while Tom and I would look at each another with a silent acknowledgment that we had just worked our greatest match. When I think of it now, a quote from Georges Braque comes to mind: “Art is a wound turned to light.” To my mind, that is also the beauty of pro wrestling.

When I went to pick up my weekly check from my mom the next day, I was doing my best to hide my face, keeping my baseball cap pulled low. But she broke into tears, “Oh, dawling, not your nose!” All I could do was wrap my arms gently around her and promise that it would be all right.

The New Zealand promoter Steve Ricard had seen a tape of the one match I had in Hawaii and had raved about me, back in December, to Leo. Leo thought it would be a good place for me to go to work, and said he could get me a guarantee of U.S.$1,000 a week, with all my transportation paid.

He said I’d stay in the same hotel in Wellington the whole time I was there and that the longest drive to each of the venues was no more than a couple of hours. Part of me longed to get Julie away from Calgary to someplace where we could spend more time together, and I thought in New Zealand I could make that happen. I’d asked Leo to call Ricard on my behalf, and then I bought Julie her plane ticket; she’d arrive two weeks after me, giving me enough time to find us a little apartment and scope out the scene. I was booked for six months.

The night before I was to leave, as we lay together in bed, she kissed the stitches on the bridge of my swollen, puffy nose. My eyes were encased in black fading to purple and yellowish brown. Dried blood soaked through a bandage covering that night’s razor slice on my forehead, like an empty box frame for X’s and O’s. I had this fantasy that maybe Julie and I would never come back from New Zealand.

In the dressing room in Wellington, just off a twenty-one-hour flight, I met Steve Ricard, a stocky, middle-aged man with curly orange-and-gray hair. “I know you’re tired,” he said, “but I need to see how good you are, mate, now, before I do my TV.” He said I’d be wrestling him for a one-hour draw in that evening’s semimain event; like my dad, he liked to assess his talent first-hand. By the end of the match, a beaming Ricard hugged me and welcomed me aboard. He told me I was going to be a top babyface and that they’d build their TV shows around me. Ricard was the only promoter who ever saw anything in me the first time he laid eyes on me, and, strangely, he’s the only promoter I ever walked out on.

A week into the tour, I realized that I’d seriously misunderstood Leo and that, though the drives between venues were never more than two hours, there was no home base, no place where I could come back every night and be with Julie. I called her and told her to forget it: I had to be there for six months, but there was no point in her even making the flight. “Just stay home,” I told her, and listened to her stunned silence.

Would she even be there by the time I got back? Who could blame her if she wasn’t?

A week later, the tour came through Auckland. I pulled aside a bushy-haired Greek kid named Con, who wrestled for the promotion, and asked him to drive me to the airport. He hesitated, fearful he might get fired, but we piled into his car and I made my escape just as the door of the plane was closing. I hated to run out on Steve, but I decided to put my love for Julie first. I left him my check for the two weeks work I’d done and hoped he’d understand.

I rang my front doorbell. When Julie pulled the door open, she wore the biggest smile I’d ever seen and wrapped her arms around me like she’d never let me go.

The following night I decided to drop in at the pavilion while the show was on to say hello. To anyone who asked, I simply said that things didn’t work out for me. Smith appeared in the dressing room with Charlie Buffong; the poor guy had wrestled with Dynamite a couple of weeks back, and Tom had soccer-kicked his head for real and broken his jaw. Charlie had just had his jaw wired and was out of commission for a while. He was carrying a strange little figure with him. It had red sewing pins stuck in the eyes and bits of actual hair, clothing and wrist tape stuck on it—all Dynamite’s as it turned out. Charlie had wrapped bright orange electrical wire around the legs, and impaled one knee with a giant diaper pin. He painfully mumbled to me that this was a voodoo doll and he’d put a curse on Tom to injure his knee.

The next morning, Tom called from Japan looking for Michelle, and was surprised to hear my voice on the line. “What are you doin’ back so fast?”

I told him it was a long story and asked him how things were going for him in Japan. I could hear the pain in his voice when he told me that he had blown his other knee out the night before. I decided not to mention Charlie Buffong’s voodoo doll.

10

THE COWBOY SEES THE WORLD

TOM DIDN’T GET BACK FROM JAPAN until May 1, 1981. He not only managed to finish the tour, but he stole the show. He worked on live TV with a small, sensational masked wrestler, Satoro Sayama, known as Tiger Mask. Between the two of them they set new standards of fastpaced, high-flying razzle-dazzle. Shimma not only gave Tom a nice fat bonus and booked him for more tours, but he also paid him in cash for his knee surgery (which Tom then had done for free in Canada). Compared to the rest of us, Tom was rich.

A few days after Tom got home, Julie and I looked out the front window as a not-quite-new olive-green Eldorado pulled up in front of our place. Out stepped Michelle, decked in black leather boots that came to midthigh and a mini skirt. She was growing up fast.

Tom’s cousin Davey had arrived from England and was staying at Tom’s place. When Michelle told me that Tom was shoo-flying Davey and all he did was run to the toilet, I knew that I had to go rescue him. Davey was a shy, skinny, simple-hearted kid with big dimples. Only eighteen years old and lucky if he was 170 pounds, he was handsome; I could see why Diana gushed all over his pictures. His first mistake was assuming Tom would treat him like a little brother. When I got over to Tom’s place, I told him that Stu wanted Davey to stay with me since he and his cousin would be working together and they needed to kayfabe.

That Sunday all the wrestlers played a charity baseball game with a local radio station in exchange for a couple of free plugs. Tom explained it as best he could to Davey: “It’s, erm, like rounders, Bax,”

calling the kid by his childhood nickname, short for Baxter.

Tom, not surprisingly, played well while seemingly not even trying. Davey blindly struck out every time up. It would have been hard not to notice Diana cheering him on from the bleachers, and when he glanced up at her as he came up to bat the next time, I realized he really didn’t want to strike out in front of her. Davey looked down at the bats lined up on the grass, unsure which to choose. Bruce raised an eyebrow and in an encouraging voice said, “Why don’t you try one of these left-handed bats, Davey,” as if there was a difference because of the way they were facing. Davey grabbed one of the bats, thinking he finally had the right one, marched up to the batter’s box and blasted the first pitch out of the park! As he rounded third grinning from ear to ear, he yelled in amazement, “It was the fooking bat the whole time!”

That was just how Davey Boy was.

But one thing was for sure; you only had to show him how to do something a couple of times for him to get the hang of it. He was an excellent athlete and a fast learner. Now that he was living with me, his weight was coming up, and he was smiling all the time. This naive little kid from northern England had found a home.

“Hey, Bret,” he said after the game, “I’m goin’ to catch a lift with yer sista, Diana.”

At the end of May, Davey Boy was to wrestle Dynamite for the World Mid-Heavyweight title in Regina. Though Davey was living with me, Tom had earned Davey’s trust by giving him some old gear he didn’t need anymore, and as the days had gone by and Davey saw what his cousin could do in the ring, he was more and more in awe of him. Sometime during that month, Tom also turned Davey on to steroids.

Tonight Tom decided it was Davey’s time to get some juice.

Davey said, “I’ve never done it before.”

Tom blew him off like it was no big deal. “Fook, I’ll do ya. You’ll not feel a thing, just a pin prick.”

I pulled Davey aside and said, “Never let anyone cut you, ever. Do it yourself, or don’t do it at all.