Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (2 page)

Tex was a handsome, dark-haired cowboy. I loved cowboys, and I was wearing my Roy Rogers holster and six-shooters at that very moment. Killer Kowalski was an agile, bald-headed brute with an angry scowl on his face. Just as I was wondering what kind of man calls himself Killer, Kowalski climbed to the top of the corner ring post and leaped off, high and hard, driving his knee into Tex’s neck. Now Tex lay there quivering, his cowboy boots shaking and kicking.

We watched the ambulance attendants load Tex tenderly onto a stretcher, sliding him out and under the bottom rope. Manecker said Tex might be paralyzed. I asked my ten-year-old brother Bruce, my most reliable source of information, what that meant. Bruce stared hard at the television. “It means he’ll never, ever walk again.”

Suddenly Killer was back up on top of the turnbuckle, and he jumped off and landed on Tex, knocking him off the stretcher and onto the floor. The audience screamed, and the stretcher-bearers ran for cover. I was terrified. Kowalski really was a damn killer!

It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Smith, my oldest brother, who was twelve at the time, had such a big grin on his face. He remarked on how well Tex was selling it. From what I could tell, poor Tex wasn’t selling anything. And I couldn’t understand why my tender-hearted mom seemed more concerned about how well the match came across on TV than whether Tex would ever walk again.

Only much later did I realize that she was happy my dad’s TV show was back on the air; they could catch up on the bills again.

That night the Hart brothers stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, talking about the match.

Even though it was all so frightening, it was very exciting too! I was relieved to hear my older brother Dean say that my dad was not only the toughest, greatest wrestler of them all, but that he could tie that Killer Kowalski up into knots any time he wanted. Our dad was utterly invincible.

I shared a bed with Bruce, who looked after me most of the time back then. When he got up early every morning to milk Daphne the cow, I’d sit on the warm radiator and watch him from the big picture window of the boys’ room, walking down past the front of the house in his blue-checkered flannel jacket, swinging the milk pail. In the distance, I could see the sprawling city of Calgary glinting in the early-morning light and the Bow River winding through the valley. I knew even at that young age that way out there past those lights was New York City, where our mom came from. New York City was where our mom met Stu.

My dad was born in Saskatoon in 1915 and grew up in Edmonton in extreme poverty. He managed to lift himself up out of poverty through his drive to succeed and his athletic ability. He spent a lot of time hanging around the YMCA in Edmonton and got into amateur wrestling and football. He was a kicker and defensive tackle with the Edmonton Eskimos in the late thirties. But what he really excelled at was wrestling.

When the Second World War broke out, Stu Hart was the undefeated Canadian heavy-weight amateur wrestling champion, and if the war hadn’t intervened, he might have won an Olympic medal for Canada. Instead, he joined the navy. When the war ended, he went to New York, where a tough old promoter with cauliflower ears by the name of Toots Mondt hired him to wrestle in the New York territory. Being an Olympian was a dream he had said good-bye to for-ever. But Stu never said good-bye to his dreams easily.

He was thirty-one years old when he met Helen, on a beach on Long Island in the summer of 1946.

She was one of the five daughters of Harry J. Smith, a famous 1908 Olympic marathon runner, and his Greek wife, who was known to us only as Gah-Gah. Helen married my dad on New Year’s Eve 1947, even though her mother didn’t care too much for him. It didn’t help that all five of her girls paid Stu a lot of attention, which he enjoyed. Helen was beautiful and intelligent and could have married someone of higher social standing, but she was smitten with my dad, even though he was a little rough around the edges and she thought wrestling was a dirty business. She’d quip, “We got married in a snowstorm, and I’ve been snowed under ever since!”

My dad saved his money, and he and Helen left New York in 1948, headed for Montana, where he started a pro wrestling circuit. During the next few years he bought out and took over all the wrestling businesses around him. Then in 1951 they sold their house trailer in Great Falls, Montana, and moved to Calgary with everything they had, including their two boxer dogs, Bing and Demitasse, and their three young sons, Smith, Bruce and Keith.

Television, a recent invention, was just starting to become widespread. Since wrestling (along with boxing) was easier to light and film than team sports such as football or baseball, it was suddenly very popular on the tube. Across North America, wrestlers such as Gorgeous George Wagner, Lou Thesz, Whipper Billy Watson, Pat O’Connor, Argentina Rocca and Verne Gagne became household names. Mirroring the tensions in the world at the time, the villains were called the Kalmikoffs, Fritz Von Erich and Shinji Shibuya. There were midget wrestlers such as Sky Low Low and Little Beaver, a French Canadian with a Mohawk who wasn’t even a real Indian. And there were the giants: Haystacks Calhoun, a big, fat farm boy, and the former World Heavyweight boxing champion Primo Carnera. There were lady wrestlers too. I remember one called The Lady Angel, who was bald and had her teeth filed down to points. In those days most of the ladies of wrestling were anything but beautiful. I never found much enjoyment in watching them drag each other around by the hair.

With TV, and the start of his Big Time Wrestling show, my dad had fallen into a gold mine.

Throughout the 1950s the Hart family prospered and he bought land. We grew up in a big, red-brick, twenty-one-room Victorian mansion high on a hill in the desirable southwestern outskirts of Calgary, with pointy-finned Cadillacs parked all over the yard.

In Calgary, Helen had another baby boy, Wayne, and then another, Dean, before my dad finally got what he wanted most of all—a baby girl. Ellie was followed by Georgia, and then me, on July 2, 1957.

My dad said that when he saw me for the first time, he looked at my hands, with long fingers like my mother’s yet thick like his, and knew I would be the biggest of his sons. I lost my glow as the new baby pretty quickly because Alison soon followed, and then Ross. Ross once climbed all over my mom’s desk while she was working and tipped over a bottle of ink, earning him the nickname Inky.

Ross never strayed very far away from my mom and that desk. After him came another sister, Diana, and finally my baby brother, Owen.

By the time I was born, interest in wrestling had waned, and things weren’t quite so rosy at Hart house anymore. My dad had made some poor investments and was barely making ends meet. Then wrestler Iron Mike DiBiase said something bad about Canadians on my dad’s TV show: “If nickels were brains and ten cents could get you around the world, the average Canadian wouldn’t be able to get across the street.” That was all it took for the TV bosses to take Big Time Wrestling off the air. By 1962, the days of the Hart boys wearing new Hush Puppies and matching sweaters embroidered with our first names were over. My parents endured, running live wrestling cards throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan and down into Montana, working a thousand-mile circuit out of Calgary. But without TV, it was all they could do to hang on.

I was four when I learned about death for the first time. I was in the kitchen with my mom when someone knocked on the door to tell her that a wrestler called Riotcall Jim Wright had died. Riotcall had looked like a giant version of Walt Disney, and I’d liked talking with him whenever he came to our house.

My mom was upset by the news and, while I tried to comfort her, she explained what death was.

She told me Riotcall had gone up to heaven and would never be back again, and that sooner or later everyone dies, including her and even me. God decides when your time is up. Good people go to a good place called heaven, and bad people go to a bad place called hell. She said nobody was really sure that heaven or hell existed. Maybe when you died, it was just plain over. She said she believed in heaven, but that I could believe whatever I wanted.

My parents were free thinkers; they never tried to force religion on us kids. Once, when we were given some hand-me-down dress clothes, my parents rounded us up and herded us off to church on Sunday morning wearing suit jackets and ties. It was a parents’ night-mare: kids teasing, fighting and crying throughout the service. They never tried it again. I’ve had little or nothing to do with organized religion, although I’ve always felt God’s presence.

Hart house was a cross between a big hotel where the housekeepers had quit, a cat and dog refuge and an orphanage for troubled children. My five older brothers spent a lot of time toughening me up for my life ahead. Bruce guided me along, but the biggest influence in my life was the runt of the litter, Dean, who was three years older than I was. We nicknamed him Bizz because he was always up to some sort of business. He was as mischievous as he was dishonest, but I loved him; he was my hero. He taught me to stand up for myself and, above all, to remember that I was one of the Hart boys. All my brothers were handsome, but Dean was the best looking, with a big white smile and dark brown eyes. I was proud to be his sidekick, especially in the never-ending guerrilla war with the two sisters who were right between us in the sequence of Hart kids.

Ellie, the first-born daughter, was the apple of my father’s eye. She was small, like Dean, with the same dark hair and eyes, and she had a ferocious temper. Georgia bore a striking resemblance to my dad, with blond hair, blue eyes and strong chin. Georgia took up for Ellie the way I took up for Dean.

You might figure that, with so many unruly brothers, the girls would have had a tough go of things, but my dad thundered to their rescue like an angry bear at the slightest sound of a wail. I spent a great deal of my young life sticking up for Dean, standing my ground against Ellie and Georgia and answering to my dad for it.

My dad was a shooter, or submission wrestler, and he loved to stretch anyone who dared to show up at his door. I remember him stretching the daylights out of Father Roberts, the Catholic priest who baptized all the Hart kids. Father Roberts got closer to God in my father’s basement dungeon than he felt comfortable with. But Stu was nondenominational; he stretched a rabbi once too.

The dungeon was a cramped room with sweat-and blood-soaked canvas mats covering a thinly padded floor. There were big holes in the low ceiling made by the heads and feet of wrestlers. Stu trained and broke in his wrestlers down there, hooking on like an octopus, squeezing hard enough that the screams of his victims would echo eerily through the rest of the house. I used to wander outside on Saturday mornings with Dean and peer into the window to watch a dozen or so big-necked Goliaths sweating and groaning while they lifted weights and fooled around on the mat, testing each other, until my dad finally came down and pulled on his black trunks. Soon enough they’d be gawking in amazement as he stretched them, one after another. When they were done, they’d shower and drink bottles of the homemade beer Stu stored in the fridge next to the basement shower. He rarely drank himself but made beer for his wrestlers.

My mom was tiny, just five-foot-two, but she was the only one who could make Stu run for cover.

She took out her frustrations on him constantly. Sometimes when they’d argue she’d break down in tears and threaten to leave him and go back to New York. This, of course, meant that she was leaving all of us. She’d pack her suitcase while my dad repeated submissively, over and over, “Please, dear, please.” I’d go to bed crying, afraid that she’d be gone forever. My older brothers, long used to these fights, would tell me not to worry, it was just a big act. By the following morning my parents would be drinking coffee in the kitchen and laughing like nothing had happened. This scene played out so many times that I sometimes found it hard to forgive my mom for making such threats when she didn’t mean them. At least my dad never talked of quitting on us kids.

By the time I came along, my mom had given up on housework. There were always mounds of clothes, broken toys and old sports equipment scattered everywhere, and the kitchen was always stacked with dirty cups and dishes. She was pretty reclusive, I realize now. You could usually find her in one of three places: her bedroom, the kitchen or the office, where she worked all week preparing ads, doing the payroll and answering the never-ending ring of the two black phones on her desk.

Stu was almost always out of town on the wrestling circuit, gone every night of the week to Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Red Deer and into Montana. Friday night was the Calgary stop, and Saturday morning was my parents’ one day to sleep in. When my dad did work at home, he was usually leaning back in his leather office chair with his big forearm across his forehead, talking to some promoter or wrestler on the phone while my mom toiled away at her typewriter.

Stu did all the shopping, a little cleaning, most of the cooking, and all of the driving. When my mom was pregnant with Bruce, my parents were in a car accident in Montana that made her afraid to learn to drive. An escapee from an asylum was driving down the wrong side of the high-way and crashed into my parents’ car. My mom went teeth-first into the dashboard and head-first into the windshield, shattering her Rita Hayworth looks. It took some time before she recovered, and she was so afraid she’d lose her baby that when Bruce was born, safe and sound, she forever had a soft spot for him. Stu survived because of his big, thick chest.

Our backyard was an obstacle course littered with old cars, ancient farm equipment, wrestling rings and junk. Wandering around in the midst of it all were Daphne the cow, two goats, hundreds of hens and Mighty the rooster, named for the Mexican wrestler Mighty Ursus.

Crew cuts, brown shorts and T-shirts were standard summer issue for all the boys. I wore a straw cowboy hat that I rarely took off. Most of us went barefoot, at least until school started. We were always cutting our feet on broken glass, and we were lucky if we were able to scrounge up a bandage; such things were considered extravagant at Hart house. And we rarely had luxuries such as toothbrushes, unless you count the two crusty ones in the boys’ bathroom cabinet, along with the tin of tooth powder that’d been around longer than I had. I brushed my teeth with my finger.