Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (23 page)

The day they picked was March 25, 1982—Julie’s birthday. I had told Julie I didn’t intend to follow Tom’s example any time soon, and it was a bit awkward as I drove the four of us down to city hall. In the parking lot a bum drunkenly challenged Tom, who bristled to put him in his place. Michelle pleaded, “Please, Tom, not on our wedding day!” He smiled and laughed it off. A small victory for Michelle in a war that was already lost. I was relieved, but I thought she had better get ready for a lifetime of collaring this bad dog.

I knew it hurt Julie to see her younger sister married while she and I floated along on a sea of uncertainty.

Though Tom was still hampered by his knee surgery, in April he decided he would come to the Middle East with me anyway. After a day-long layover in New York, we boarded a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Dubai. When I looked closely at my ticket, I realized we’d be making stopovers in Paris, Frankfurt and Cairo: Shimma had purchased the cheapest coach tickets possible.

Tom was furious. We stayed on the same plane through all the stops. It was packed, and my seat didn’t recline. For sustenance, we were served only a small paper cup of Kool-Aid and some pasty curried chicken. By the time we stopped in Cairo, I was deadtired and drenched in sweat.

Then the plane sat on the runway for four hours for security reasons; armed soldiers would not allow anyone to disembark. Finally, we were permitted to take off, but as we neared Dubai, the pilot announced that there was a sandstorm obscuring the runway. We were diverted to Karachi. Two full days of flying to end up—where?

At 2 a.m., Tom and I got off the plane delirious with fatigue. He limped, favoring his sore knee. We found a lone baggage office employee, who told us we couldn’t get to Dubai until the ticket counter opened in the morning. We were hustled off in a tin van to the Karachi Airport Hotel, and we checked into the only room they had.

I lay awake for a while on my half of the bed while Tom snored like a chainsaw on his. My eyelids grew heavy and soon Julie was in my arms, her head on my chest, and I was telling her about a nightmare in which Tom and I were stuck in Karachi, Pakistan, and—wait a second. We were in Karachi, and the morning sunlight was streaming through the windows! I blinked my eyes open to find Tom cuddled up next to me. I started to laugh. He opened his eyes, blinked and I gave him a light elbow to the head. “What are you doing, Tom?” He was back on his side of the bed in a flash.

The International Hotel in Dubai was better than a mirage in the desert. Tom emerged from Mr.

Shimma’s palatial suite with a cold look in his eye. “He wants to see you.”

Shimma explained that the tour had been shortened from five days to three, and he could only pay me half the money he’d offered. I closed the door as I left him, cursing under my breath. I told Tom I’d been short-changed, and his eyes got wide. “He just gave me your $1,500 as a bonus.” I marched right back into Shimma. “If you can afford to give Dynamite a bonus, then you can afford to pay me as promised.” The nervous worm acted like it had been a joke and paid me in full.

I was surprised to find that I had some degree of notoriety in Dubai; apparently, Stampede Wrestling had been the highest-rated TV show there for years. At the press conference the next day, I answered several questions about my famous father, and when attentions turned elsewhere, I casually doodled a cartoon of Mr. Azeem, one of the promoters, a small man with a big, long nose and huge bulging eyes who looked like an East Indian version of the Pink Panther. I slid the doodle to Tom, who buried his face in his elbow to hide his laughter. It was passed around and soon every wrestler was laughing, even Inoki. Somehow it was passed to Azeem while he was standing at the podium addressing a reporter. He stopped mid-sentence and held it up, asking, “Who is this?” The wrestlers exploded in hysterics, and the reporters never knew why.

Later that day, I sat around the hotel pool watching the Japanese wrestlers having piggyback fights in the water. With no Japanese media to impress, they were actually laughing and goofing around: It was the first time I saw them as just young men, like me.

That first night of the Grand Prix—a special tribute to Inoki at Al Maktoum Stadium, where the promoters were expecting at least 30,000 people to attend on each of the three nights—the ringside seats were filled with billionaire sheiks. They’d paid fortunes for huge reclining leather easy chairs, each equipped with a small, closed-circuit TV and a tray of cold cuts and fresh fruit. But, by show time, it was clear the event was a disaster: There were fewer than five hundred people in the stadium.

Still, Tiger Mask and I had a terrific match: realistic, tight and fast-paced. When it came time for the finish, he dove off the turnbuckle on top of me. Peter Takahashi signaled for the bell, and I exploded into a temper tantrum, complaining that it was only a two-count. The small crowd rose up in my defense, booing Peter, the biased Japanese referee. I was cheered all the way back to the dressing room. There was such a protest in the newspapers the next day that Shimma altered the final night’s lineup to give us a rematch.

That last night, Inoki was going to dispose of the top American on the card, Dirty Dick Murdoch, whom I hadn’t seen since he dropped a knee on Bruce back in Odessa, Texas. Dick had a fat face, no chin and a much-loved golly-gee sense of humor. “Hey, I’m a goin’ out there and work New York style,” he joked as he walked past me toward the toilets, buck-naked except for high black socks and dress shoes, a new color newspaper called USA Today tucked under his arm.

As the wrestlers made small talk, I noticed a pair of shit-stained white underwear under my bench, long abandoned by one of the young soccer players who also used the stadium. Dick’s clean, white briefs were hanging from a hook by his bag. For Tom’s amusement, I switched them, tweezer-like, with the dirty ones. After I came back from another good match with Tiger Mask, I stood with Tom and Dick to watch the matches from the dugout. Dick was looking around anxiously. Finally he blurted, “All I know is there must be a shit freak running around here, because somebody shit in my underwear, and I’m dang sure it wasn’t me!” When he walked off scratchin’ his butt, Tom and I collapsed laughing.

Before we left for home, Tom and I visited the “gold mine”—tented shops where gold jewelry and keepsakes glittered everywhere. The proprietors had no fear of shoplifters because if they caught you stealing they’d chop your hand off. Tom loaded up on gold trinkets for Michelle. I bought Julie a gold medallion with a map of the world on it and a set of white gold puzzle rings.

Our love was a puzzle.

12

MARRIAGE AND FATHERHOOD

SINCE TOM AND MICHELLE HAD TIED THE KNOT, I felt subtle but constant pressure from Julie to do likewise. But I resisted: Being a wrestler meant being away from home a lot, and the temptations on the road were too great for me to withstand. Maybe I’d have felt differently if Julie hadn’t spent too much of what little time we had together being angry at me; most of the time I didn’t have a clue why. But when I got back from the Middle East that spring, she’d clearly lost hope that our relationship would grow into more than what it was and gave up. She said she needed a bit of time to get a job and arrange to move in with a friend but that she would be gone by July 1.

I got back from a night drive from Saskatoon at dawn on June 30, 1982. The sky was already blue and smeared with white clouds. I sat on the edge of the bed watching Julie sleep. The window was propped open, and a soft breeze stirred. What did I really have to lose by marrying her? A shitty house in Ramsay and an old Caddy? If I promised to do my best to care for her, could I somehow be forgiven for knowing already that on the road, I would be unfaithful? I didn’t know the answers, but in that moment I felt that God was giving me permission to do whatever was necessary to be myself.

Mind you, if I asked her, I’d also have to deal with Stu, who’d slammed his fist down on my mom’s desk and told me I was too damn young when I’d first approached him on the subject. But one step at a time.

I gently shook Julie awake and asked her to marry me. She hugged me and pulled me down into the bed. And she didn’t move out the next day.

On July 8, 1982, we were married at city hall. Just before the service, I discovered we needed two witnesses, and I quickly recruited Wilk and my friend George, who operated a Greek restaurant just down the street. For the time being, I asked Julie, Wilk and George to keep it a secret.

It was Stampede week, and that night the pavilion was sold out for what was billed as a world title double main event; my match was, once again, with reigning AWA Champ Nick Bockwinkle. Near the end of a long, hard-fought classic, I spilled out onto the floor, and out of the shadows came our soon-to-be top heel, Bad News Allen, who attacked me and ran my head into the dressing-room door. I coughed out the blade I was carrying under my tongue and cut. The thought struck me that I’d had to give less blood to get married to Julie; I was already married to the business. But which was my mistress?

After the show Julie and I celebrated at our house. To our unknowing guests, it was billed as a week-late party for my birthday.

Some honeymoon. For the next few weeks I rode buses and trains all over Japan. Nobody there knew my secret, not even Tom.

The foreign crew on this trip was mostly from New York, and they were a new breed. Vince McMahon Jr. had now taken over from his father and was moving away from the slow, ponderous giants and to wrestlers who had a faster, harder style.

Greg Valentine bore a striking resemblance to his legendary father, Johnny Valentine, having the same blond hair and turtlelike face. Broad-chested Adrian Adonis stood on two thin legs like a June bug. His face, which often bore a sneaky grin, looked like Grandpa from The Munsters, and he was always up to something. He was also one of the hardest-working big bump men in the game. Classy Freddie Blassie, an old-timer about Stu’s age, managed Adrian. Freddie had been one of the great wrestlers of his day; in Japan he’d become infamous in the 1950s when he filed his teeth into points and bit the heads of his opponents. The sight of blood on TV caused a startling number of deaths among the elderly throughout the country. Almost a quarter-century had passed and Freddie, this smiling old man with white hair combed straight back from his tanned and leathery face, was still remembered by the Japanese fans as a terrifying wrestling legend.

Rick Quick Draw McGraw stood only five-foot-four, but he was thickly muscled. Seconds after they met for the first time, Quick Draw and Tom were trading pills like kids trading candies on a playground. I’d been concerned that Tom might be developing a drug problem—but Q.D. clearly already had one. Every night he’d swallow a handful of Placidyls and wind up passed out face down in his dinner. Peter Takahashi hated him on sight.

Just before I had my big match with Tiger Mask at the end of July, I called Julie: All I could think of was getting home to her. She sounded nervous and excited, and what she had to say caused my head to spin. “Bret, I think I’m pregnant.” I’d always been in love with the idea of having a child with her, but not this soon; we’d only been married three weeks. I didn’t know what to say.

And then she broke the news to me that Kas had died on the operating table during the kidney transplant. Jimmy Banks, the kid from Akron with the big smile and the big heart, was gone. God opens one door while closing another, I thought.

Back in my hotel room after my match with Tiger Mask, I thought about Kas. And I thought about Julie. A baby would change everything. The marriage couldn’t stay our little secret for long. I’d have to think of a way to tell Stu. I was putting the finishing touches on a letter to Julie when Tom called and invited me to Rick McGraw’s room. Rick had taken enough downers to tranquilize an elephant, and he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, his eyes half open, cutting his forehead with a razor blade as Tom laughed and egged him on.

I felt sad for Rick. I wasn’t worried about the cuts, I was worried that he’d overdose on downers.

When Rick eventually passed out, Tom dumped him outside Peter Takahashi’s room in a wheelbarrow, and then had the front desk call Peter to say there was a problem with one of the wrestlers. Rick never got booked to Japan again. Too many times Tom didn’t take into account the consequences of his ribs.

We weren’t going home just yet. Stu told me that he needed Tom and me to fly directly from Japan to Antigua, where Smith was putting on a show. I pointed out that this was not necessarily a smart thing to do, as Smith was unlikely to pay us. My dad said he’d pay us himself. I never knew whether he was still trying to give Smith the benefit of the doubt or whether he was willing to pay to get Smith out of Hart house and out of his and my mom’s hair for a while.

I was surprised when hundreds of smiling fans greeted Tom and me at the airport in St. John’s, Antigua. We were whisked off to a second-rate deserted resort that had a flickering black-and-white TV and a fully stocked self-serve bar in the lobby. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, visions of Japanese neon vanished, replaced by the absurd sight of poor old J.R. Foley, whom Bruce had ordered to shave his mustache so he looked like Hitler. There he was in Antigua, wearing boxers, a white undershirt and a yachting cap, standing between a couple of palm trees, surrounded by turquoise waves and white sand in the blazing Caribbean sun. He chuckled, saying to Tom, “Fookin’ hell, Tommy, what am I doing ’ere?”

At the stadium there were fifteen thousand cheering fans: It looked like Smith was really going to pull this off. Tom and I were the main event, and I had to laugh at both him and J.R., so drunk that they could barely stand, holding each other up. For the finish I saw J.R. on the apron and took a wild swing at him. He ducked and grabbed me. Dynamite charged with a high knee and I moved and out of the corner of my eye I saw J.R. sail upside down into the front row. Tom was laughing uncontrollably as I covered him for the pin. Then J.R. and Tom staggered for the dressing room, an old pug and a pit bull, an over-the-hill bully and one in his prime.