Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (25 page)

Meanwhile, Kevin the midget actually wiped tears from his eyes when I explained to him that we simply couldn’t have a midget babyface match: “One of you guys has to be a heel.” Kevin had a terrifying mouth full of teeth that looked like giant crooked spikes, while Coconut Willie was so cute and adorable you’d want to take him home: It was pretty clear who would have to be the heel.

When I heard Kevin singing “Monster Mash,” it dawned on me to call him Little Wolfie. “C’mon, it won’t be so bad.” Kevin stood blinking at me like a ghoul and blubbered right up until match time, even as J.R. dragged him out to the ring by a long chain. The second he was in front of the crowd he was fine though, and he played the role perfectly. Afterwards, in the bus, he acted like it never happened, and sang all the way to Regina.

The next night, when Wayne and I cut through the horse stalls in the back of the venue, I noticed a spray can that read “horse hair adhesive” and turned to Wayne with a playful smirk. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? It says it washes out with water.”

In the dressing room Wayne and I stood over Kevin as I chided, “You know that little wolf-man gimmick is great, but something is missing, don’t you think?”

Kevin perked up, hoping we might change it.

Wayne offered, “The teeth are great, but you’re just not hairy enough. If there was only some kind of way we could glue hair to you . . .”

Eager to please, Wolfie absent-mindedly blurted out, “Well you know, I’ll do anything to make it work.”

Wayne held up the can. In seconds we’d sprayed Kevin’s back and chest with the glue and stuck clumps of horsehair that we’d picked up from the floors of the stalls all over, even on his face, where we glued hair to his eyebrows. When he innocently asked me how he looked, I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to answer him.

Kevin climbed up on a chair to look in the mirror and broke down crying again, same as the night before, right up until match time.

“I wonder if he’ll sing on the bus tonight,” Wayne said.

“It’s a good thing it’ll wash off,” I replied.

But, it didn’t! Whoever wrote that on the can must have been an even bigger ribber than we were.

After his match Little Wolfie scrubbed for more than two hours, but those black smudges just wouldn’t come off. For the first thirty miles out of Regina, he sulked with his arms crossed, looking like a cartoon character that’d been singed in a fire. We all began calling his name, whistling and clapping, “Wolfie! Wolfie!” I even gave him a big send up, and in no time the mini wolf-man was back, slapping those bongos and giving us the show of his life.

13

THE DEEPEST POCKETS

IN THE TENTED BARN behind the pavilion, the bleachers were full for our Stampede show as I laced up my boots. I looked up to see Bad News approaching, with Bruce close behind.

In a stern, almost argumentative tone, News gave me a speech about not letting my ego stand in the way of what would be good for Stu’s business, while Bruce stood behind him smirking. News’s idea was that I should drop the championship belt to him and then chase him for it, not the other way around. Before I had a chance to say that I had intended to do that all along, News went on to tell me that all our previous, terribly one-sided matches were, in his view, beneficial to me. “All that sympathy,” he said, “that’s all Bruno Sammartino ever did, and he sold out Madison Square Garden for years!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! News slaughtered me every night, which was not good for Stu’s business at all, since there was a difference between a beloved underdog and a doormat. And Bruce, not my biggest fan lately because I objected to a lot of the calls he made about the business, couldn’t wipe the smile off his face.

“Fine, News, you want the belt, you can have the belt.”

As a reward for being a good sport, I guess, News suggested that in the match I grab the bamboo stick from his spastic Japanese manager, Wakamatsu, and whack News with it. “But don’t touch my head!” he warned.

As instructed, during the match, I flattened Wakamatsu and picked up the bamboo stick. Instead of backing away as if he were afraid, News looked more like he was going to burst out laughing. I had bladed again, and blinking the blood from my eyes I looked for a place to hit him that wasn’t his head, but he put his arms up defensively. Since he had left me no other place to hit him, I cracked him right on the skull. He stood there frozen and, in that split second, I felt like Bugs Bunny in that old cartoon where he hits a daddy gorilla in the head with a baseball bat.

News took me down with a judo leg sweep and gripped me by the throat—and he wasn’t working!

My comeback went straight out the window, as did our match, and as a result, all the business we were expected to do for the rest of the summer.

Too many times that summer, I’d walk back to the dressing room and see the disappointed look in my dad’s eyes. I felt like everything was spiraling down around me, and Stu was losing everything too. Also too many times that summer, in the wee hours of the dejected mornings, blood seeped through the bandages on my forehead and dripped onto our bedsheets. And often I could hear Julie sniffling, worried about the toll the business was taking on me, and I’d lie there silent: I’d never really come clean with her as to all the ins and outs of keeping the wrestling “real,” and my silence stood between us like a wall. Finally, one night I sat up in the dark and told her everything there was to tell about the business. Julie felt better knowing the score and was finally able to sleep at night.

With Jade on her hip, Julie hugged Michelle in an emotional good-bye on the street in front of our house. In the dry August heat, I leaned against the fender of Tom’s loaded-down green Eldorado, while Duke, his bull mastiff, hung his head out the back window. Tom took a last drag of his smoke and tossed it out on the road. He was huge, bigger than ever before—his skin looked ready to burst.

His head was shaved again, and he had deep razor marks on his forehead from his matches with News. They were headed to Portland—his way into the lucrative American market, and a place where he could get his green card—and my gut told me Tom might never be back this way again.

In a serious tone, Tom warned me that I had to watch my back when it came to some of my siblings.

Bruce, he said, had sold Diana a story that I was doing all I could to keep Davey from getting ahead, and had warned her to keep an eye on me. He apparently had told her that it was more than a coincidence that I made a point of booking myself with Davey, and that I had wanted to beat him because I thought he was getting over too strong. For Tom to be telling me this, it was clear that Davey had bought into Bruce’s interpretation too.

I was disappointed, but I couldn’t say I was really surprised. Davey had lived with me rent-free for more than two years. After Jade was born, since I now had a family to support, I had asked whether he’d mind chipping in. He promptly moved into a spare bedroom at Stu’s place, where he could continue to live for free. But it hurt to realize that he had turned against me. I always tried to pass on to him any wrestling wisdom I could, and for him to believe otherwise was due to his own poor judgment.

It felt like we were all breaking up. Big Jim had just got booked to work for Bill Watts in the Louisiana territory. Jim now weighed about 285 pounds and was strong as an ox. At the Stampede, he competed in a strongman contest and managed to throw an anvil twenty-two feet, setting a rodeo record. He, too, would soon be loading up the Eldorado that Stu gave him as a wedding present; Jim, Ellie and their three girls would make the long drive south to Bayou country.

Before he left, though, Jim The Anvil worked one last match with Bad News, which got completely out of hand when News used a dinner fork on Jim’s already bloody head to get more heat. The wrestling commission was furious and fined both Stu and News for excessive violence and levied a six-month suspension on News.

My boyhood enigma, Archie The Stomper Gouldie, now fifty years old, was coming back. Bruce discounted him as too old, but Leo said he was fit as ever, and Stu had great faith in him. Ross came to me and said that what with Bad News being suspended, they’d have to rely on me and Archie to carry the territory. I told him that it wouldn’t be easy now that News had practically killed me off.

Davey, Jim, Tom and I—all of us were now signed on for the whole ride down the rough roads of pro wrestling, a pack of wild stallions, each taking chances and praying we wouldn’t get lost along the way. At that time I had no way of knowing that we’d end up together again, in a completely different place. And in this stampede of wild horses, it felt to me like I was the darkest one.

On Sunday afternoon, when I walked into Stu’s kitchen, the house seemed oddly quiet and empty.

Stu was bent over the sink scouring one of his cooking pots, and he stopped long enough to ask me how the show went in Edmonton the night before. I never lied to my dad, especially about his business. The boxing and wrestling commissions in both Calgary and Edmonton were coming down hard on him for the shows being too violent both in the ring and with the crowd. Reluctantly, I told him that yet again almost every bout concluded with some sort of a low blow to the groin. Stu slammed down the pot, splashing himself with water. “That damn Bruce! Why can’t he ever listen?”

Then he noticed Diana, eavesdropping behind me. When she raced off, he cautioned me that she’d been singing Bruce’s praises all morning. He was almost whispering, and when I asked him why, he said he didn’t want my mom to hear. They’d had a monumental blow-up a couple of days earlier that was still cooling down. But Stu couldn’t help himself, and soon he was ranting about how Bruce was going to cost him his license and put him out of business. Then Bruce appeared out of the shadows of the basement steps, glaring at me, not his father. “You don’t have to talk behind my back, Bret. You can say it to my face!”

“Bruce, I say it to your face every night,” I replied, “and Dad says it to you every week, and I’ll say it to you again. Why were all those matches ball shots last night? You don’t have enough respect for Dad to simply do as he asks, whether you like it or not!”

It soon erupted into a heated shouting match, with Stu pleading for us to quiet down: “I don’t want to upset your mother!” But it was too late. Suddenly, my mom was in the thick of it, tired, fed up and so right.

“Stu! Please, please I’m begging you to get out of the lousy business; every damn week we’re losing everything we worked so hard for!” And she stormed back up to her bedroom, Stu trailing her, calling back to Bruce and me, “I hope you’re both happy!”

Just then Diana slipped by, making her getaway out the back door. I decided I wanted to know what her problem was with me, direct from the horse’s mouth, so I raced down the back steps and caught her by the sleeve. I started to say, “Do you see what you started . . .” but she spun around and punched me square on the chin! With tears streaming down her face, she kept on punching me. I had no intention of hitting her, but I was still holding her by the arm as she kept crying and hitting me. Out of nowhere Ross appeared, yelling at me to let her go, and then he tackled me around the legs. I could easily have pancaked his face into the pavement, but at the last second I surrendered my legs to him: How could I hurt Ross for trying to protect his sister? Then Ellie was into it too, screaming at me to let Ross go, right fucking now. I was too busy to tell her that she had it backward: Ross was the one who needed to let me go. Then Jim came charging out, beating his chest like Tarzan, with Davey right behind him. I was surrounded, and could easily end up fighting everybody.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bruce’s Riviera burn rubber down the front driveway. Then came Stu’s booming voice, more than a tinge of heartbreak in it: “Break it up!” All of them backed away as he gently pulled me by the arm back into the house. With an expression that was both sad and somehow fearful, Stu told me he’d never seen any situation among his children with the potential to get that ugly. Then he patted me on the shoulder and told me that I was right, that he appreciated all I did for his business, and that he especially appreciated my restraint. As I left, I could hear my mom behind their bedroom door wailing like she was at a funeral.

Las Vegas was some kind of a strange dream illuminated in flashing neon. I flew down on August 22

to attend the thirty-fifth National Wrestling Alliance convention, an annual ritual that my father relished. This year Bruce was going with him, but, perhaps as a way of saying sorry about what happened to me in the driveway a few days earlier, my mom had insisted that I should go too.

Professional wrestling promoters throughout North America had founded the National Wrestling Alliance in 1948 in order to avoid stringent U.S. anti-trust laws. Since then the organization had expanded to become international in scope. Although promoters ran their own territories, which had their own borders that all the other promoters respected, they agreed to work with one another under the NWA banner. Each territory had its own champion, but every one of them recognized the NWA champion as the one true World Champion. Ideally, the idea was that the NWA World Champion would visit all the territories and take on the top guys in hot main event matches everywhere. There were agreed-upon exchanges of talent to keep the cards fresh, but nobody ran in another man’s backyard.

The alliance had worked surprisingly well until now. What was shaking it up was the advent of cable TV. Suddenly, the local wrestling shows that served each market were popping up everywhere.

Promoters who had got along on mutual respect and a handshake were now competing with one another, unintentionally, because their shows aired in whatever markets the cable systems happened to expand into. In 1982, Vince McMahon Jr. bought his father’s promotion and then, despite his father’s warnings, began an expansion process that fundamentally changed the business.

Though his base was the northeastern U.S., Vince Jr. syndicated the WWF TV shows to markets across America and then used the profits to raid the talent rosters of the regional promotions. By 1983, it was a serious enough problem that every promoter from every territory around the world descended upon the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas to hash it out. It was like a meeting of Mafia dons protecting their turf.