Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (32 page)

Rosemary was a twenty-one-year-old Puerto Rican bombshell.

I told her I had to go to Poughkeepsie that day for the TV show but that with some luck I could be back early enough to give her a ride home if she liked. She said okay.

The Hart Foundation worked a TV match, but Jim and I were disappointed, yet again, to not have any interview time. The Bulldogs sure did though, and they were horrible. When Vince saw Tom and Davey stumble and trip through their interviews, he immediately put them with old Lou Albano, a hard-drinking blabbermouth manager. Lou was roly-poly, with a mop of curly black hair and a gray beard. Real diaper pins poked through and dangled from his cheek. Without Captain Lou, The Bulldogs would have been lost.

When we got back to Newark that evening, Jim went to the bar, and I went looking for Rosemary.

We sat parked in my car behind the hotel just talking. It was a little after two in the morning when I drove her home through rundown neighborhoods marked with graffiti. A rat as big as a cat scurried across a deserted crosswalk.

She lived above a bodega. When I parked in front, she leaned into me and we kissed. It gave me butterflies. She slipped me her phone number as she got out of the car, smiling. “Call me, okay?” I saw her mom in the window.

Back at the hotel I found Jim and André still in the bar. I felt like celebrating, but I’d missed last call. I left Jim to settle his tab and went up to the room, tying a T-shirt over my eyes so Jim wouldn’t wake me up when he got in. Soon I was in a deep sleep but thought I heard the distant sound of running water. Nah, on second thought, it sounded more like . . . someone pissing on the rug! I pushed my blindfold up. The room was still dark, but I could see Jim’s silhouette, casually leaning on the TV

stand, a hand on his hip, swaying as he emptied his bladder for what seemed like an eternity. I was not amused.

That morning, as we packed our bags in a hurry to catch the airport shuttle, Jim seemed to sense I was a bit uptight. Maybe it was the way I banged my suitcase on the bed. He innocently asked,

“Something wrong?” The happy look on his face made me hesitate, but then it just came out. “As a matter of fact, Jim, I woke up this morning and saw you standing at the foot of my bed pissing on the rug. I walk around in my socks and . . .”

Jim cut me off. “What are you talking about? Show me!” He dropped to his knees and ran his hands through the carpet. “You dreamed it!” He laughed, “I think you owe me an apology.”

I looked closer, even running my foot over the rug. Damned if it wasn’t completely dry. Maybe I did dream it. “I guess I do owe you an apology, Jim.”

“Accepted!” he declared as he pulled his suitcase up off the floor and a flood of piss poured out of the corner of it.

I broke up laughing!

“I’ll be goddamned,” Jim muttered over and over, while I laughed all the way onto the plane.

I slept all the way to Kansas City. The rumor had gone round that Harley Race was threatening to show up with a shotgun when the WWF came to town, because the Missouri territory was his, and everyone, especially Hogan, was anxious about it. Harley simply walked into the dressing room and held his finger up to his lips, signaling everyone to be quiet as he snuck up behind Hogan and then slapped him as hard as he could on the short ribs. Hogan turned around wincing, and seeing Harley, he turned white as a ghost. Hogan had to be thinking, Oh my God, now what the heck do I do? Then Harley smirked, extending his hand in friendship, and Hogan seemed more than a little relieved.

After he peed in his own suitcase, Jim and I had decided not to room together anymore. But when I tried to go to sleep simply staring at the ceiling, I knew for certain that this was going to be a long road ahead. I was twenty-seven, and I was never going to survive it if I didn’t find some female company or human touch along the way. Sometimes when I called home I wouldn’t get an answer.

That night in Kansas City I broke down and called Rosemary instead. I knew it was wrong, but it was either that or night after night of booze and drugs with various wrestlers, or climbing the walls in my hotel prison cell.

I was parked behind the HoJo’s in Newark in early June, after fifty-four days on the road. I was relieved to be going home in the morning. Rosemary was pressed in close, her lipstick smudged, and I finally had to come clean with her. “I have to tell you the truth. Rosie, I’m married.”

She stiffened and moved away from me.

“I’ve got a little girl and a little boy, under two years old, at home. I understand why you’re angry with me, but I’m just very lonely down here. I guess you won’t want much of anything to do with me, but then again if you did . . . I like you a lot.”

“Take me home!” she said, her eyes hurt, wet and angry. But when she got out in front of her parents’ place, our eyes met, and she seemed to soften. Maybe she needed me as badly as I needed her. “Call me when you come back.”

I was home for three days and then I was on the road again, and it wasn’t Julie I was dreaming about.

At the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Jimmy Hart grabbed me and Jim. “C’mon, hurry up! We got interviews!”

Suddenly it was The Hart Foundation standing with Mean Gene Okerlund, and my frozen stare was fixed on the camera. Jimmy rattled off most of the interview, with Gene playing a great straight man.

Anvil gruffly barked a few lines, and then it was my turn. I said a couple of words into the mic and passed it back to Anvil. The cameraman played the promo back on a tiny monitor to see if it was a keeper. I watched as my eyes darted every which way—clearly I was terrified! If Vince were to see that, it would be our last interview! I tore off down the hallway to the dressing room and returned in a flash with my mirrored shades.

We cranked out our promo again. Not bad. Not great. I vowed to get better. From that day on I wore sunglasses—to hide the nerves that showed in my eyes.

During June and early July 1985 we mostly worked with the Bulldogs, who were the talk of the territory, stealing the show every night. The Foundation was getting some recognition, mostly from the boys and sometimes the agents, but never from Vince or George.

After a singles match between me and Dynamite in Denver, Chief came up to me, beaming. “You’re really startin’ to get it, Stu!” Chief had started calling me Stu, after my dad, which I took as a huge compliment. “You keep this up,” he said, “and they’ll have to do something with you.”

Chief had taken a shine to all of us by now, especially Tom and me. He had a genuine love for the business, and he knew better than most who was doing the work night after night. It also didn’t hurt that Chief secretly loved my blackboard drawings. By now he’d discovered that I was the artist. Like a political cartoonist, I drew depictions of sordid stories involving the boys and whomever, enhanced solely by my imagination. Whenever I drew anybody with clothes on, the cartoon didn’t seem funny, but the orgies, usually with Princess Tomah at the center of it all, were hilarious. The wrestlers would fall over laughing, André the loudest. Chief would stand staring at them with his hands on his hips trying not to laugh. “That damn Stu,” he’d say.

More and more it seemed that the Stampede boys were beginning to pick up the pace of the territory. There’s no argument that big men, such as Hogan and André, were over with the fans because of who they were. They drew the house, but the truth is that they never worked the kinds of fast-paced, beautiful masterpieces we did.

After a match at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, Terry Funk pulled me aside to tell me, “I’ve been watchin’ you guys every night. That match between the four of ya’ll is the best damn tag match I’ve ever seen anywhere since I been in the business! Nobody can touch it!” But the one comment from this time that made the longest-lasting impression on me came from the legendary Pedro Morales.

The former WWWF champ was a kind, almost shy, Puerto Rican wrestler who rose to equal the fame and legend of Bruno Sammartino. “I’m a goin’ tell ya somethin,’ Hitman. You always hear ’bout guys in the business who tell you they never got a break, or the promoter screwed them, or they got hurt, all kind of excuses, good or bad. But you remember this, remember it was me who told you: You cannot stop talent! No matter what, sooner or later, it proves itself. You, my friend, have talent!

Someday you’re gonna be a big star in this business.”

And then there was Jesse Ventura, Adrian’s former longtime tag partner. Jesse had been a bodybuilder and, in the Vietnam War, was a decorated Navy Seal who came home with more than his share of demons. To forget them he lost himself in the surreal world of wrestling. Jesse was an extremely sharp guy who spoke privately, and in an articulate way, about why wrestlers should unionize. He knew any attempt would be a waste of time unless Hogan and the key guys got behind it, which they didn’t.

When a blood clot in his lung retired him as a wrestler, Jesse became a color commentator, providing analysis that added realism to the matches, but tinged with sardonic wit. He had respect for Jim’s college background as a shotputter and mine as an amateur wrestler. He always managed to take the heel’s side, finding sometimes farfetched rationalizations to justify our deplorable behavior. Sitting alongside the straight-faced Gorilla Monsoon, or Vince himself, Jesse wore fluorescent feathered boas, huge sunglasses and a tiedyed bandanna to hide his balding blond head.

What Jesse Ventura did for The Hart Foundation in our early days shouldn’t go unremarked. He was arguably our first real fan, the one lone voice singing our praises. He raved about The Hart Foundation in his TV commentary, calling us his favorite team and predicting greatness to come.

By July the paychecks for the first WrestleMania finally came. Word in the dressing room was that Vince had locked up the money in a highinterest account for ninety days so he could collect a little premium before paying the boys. Nobody was complaining, because the lucky few who were on the big card came into huge windfalls that left those who weren’t on it green with envy.

When I called home late that month, I was concerned by the disheartened tone in my mom’s voice.

She’d heard rumblings that Bruce was doing all he could to persuade Stu to start up Stampede Wrestling again. It’d been almost a year since Stu shut down, and he seemed aimless and restless.

My mom handed him the phone and I could instantly hear that the lion was back in his voice again.

Stu told me that he didn’t know what Vince would think if he opened back up, but being as Vince hadn’t run anything in Calgary in five months, and hadn’t paid Stu a nickel of their supposed deal, it might be worth finding out where he and Vince stood.

September 8, 1985. I was lined up waiting for Dr. Zahorian again. Seven days earlier, Ricky Romero Jr., who was working for the NWA as Jay Youngblood, died in his sleep. He was my age, twenty-seven, and he’d taken too many downers. Five months before Ricky Jr. died, Mike Von Erich, the second youngest of Fritz Von Erich’s five-son wrestling dynasty out of Dallas, committed suicide by overdosing on Placidyl. He left a note that read, “Mom and Dad, I’m in a better place. I’ll be watching.”

These deaths didn’t stop anyone from lining up to buy more.

The last I’d seen Ricky Jr. was when we teamed up back in Toronto when I was Buddy The Heartthrob and he was already on his way to becoming a star in the Carolinas. Mike had lost his older brother, David Von Erich, to an accidental overdose a year and a half earlier, in February 1984.

David was slated to be the next NWA world champion but instead he died, only twenty-six years old.

One by one I watched damn near everybody come out of Zahorian’s room with grocery bags full of drugs, even Vince. It often happened that wrestlers bought so many drugs that they couldn’t carry them in their suitcases and had to ship them home.

No one heeded the warning signs, though I tried really hard to be moderate. But the touring life forced you to alternate between running on empty, which wasn’t so bad because you were exhausted enough that you could fall asleep anywhere, to running on adrenaline, in which case you were too wired to sleep no matter how worn out you were. Wrestlers used drugs and alcohol to mediate the highs and lows.

On September 28, Jim and I appeared on Vince’s Tuesday Night Titans show, a campy takeoff of The Tonight Show, which was supposed to afford the fans a rare glimpse of the wrestlers out of character. I had rarely ever talked to Vince McMahon at the time, and when he turned to me, I blurted out a line from Robert Redford’s movie The Natural: “?‘We’re the best there is, best there was, and the best there ever will be!’?” Little did I know it would soon become my trademark line.

Ellie and Jim moved back to Calgary from Memphis in October. Ellie was quick to pick out a house on the Bow River, which she figured was perfect for Jim, as he fancied himself a fishing enthusiast. He could wade out knee-deep and pull in trout any time he liked. Jim was more than sold on it when Stu cosigned the mortgage. Stu’s kindness stemmed from his joy at having Ellie and their three girls nearby, but also because Stu liked to keep Jim pointed in the right direction. He’d long been the peacemaker in their marriage.

Vince had encouraged Stu to start back up again because he had no intention of bringing the WWF

back to Western Canada. Vince basically canceled their deal, but he did promise Stu that if the WWF

ever did return, Stu would get not the 10 percent to which they’d originally agreed, but 5 percent.

Vince had decided he wasn’t going to pay, and there was little Stu could do except sue, which would have cost me, Davey, Jim, and maybe even Tom our jobs. But the light was back in Stu’s eyes. When I called he gave me a sound argument that the business, if run properly, with minimal cost, could turn a profit. And Bruce wouldn’t be in charge—Cuban would be his righthand man, and that was final.

But after the debacle with Rasmussen and Vince, Bruce had lost his house and was forced into bankruptcy. No doubt providing jobs for Bruce and his other children was a factor in Stu’s decision to get back into business.