Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (38 page)

21

“MORE MAIL THAN HOGAN”

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT THINGS WERE GETTING GOOD for The Hart Foundation, I was completely caught off guard when Dino Bravo, a big, bleached-blond wrestler from Montreal who was chummy with Pat Patterson, let slip to me and Jim that Vince and Pat were taking the belts off us at the next TV taping, which was only seven days away. Dino seemed to enjoy the crushed look on our faces, even laughing at us because we didn’t know.

When I called Pat, he confirmed we’d be dropping the belts to a newly formed team called Strike Force, Rick Martel and Tito Santana. I told Pat that we’d be more than happy to put them over, but I didn’t think it was right that I had heard about it second-hand from Dino Bravo and with so little notice. Losing the belts meant we’d be making considerably less money.

And so it went: We gave up the Tag belts on October 27, 1987, in a short but feisty TV match with Martel and Santana taped in Syracuse. In those days, if you lost a belt in a match that hadn’t aired yet, you continued to wrestle as champion at house shows until the title change was broadcast. So, for the next few weeks, that’s what Jim and I did.

Life on the road gets to you. This one night in Phoenix I was actually the last to leave the Rodeway Inn lounge, which is saying something, given the rough old wrestlers and heavyweight boozers, such as André, Harley and Jim, who were my competition. As I was heading to my room a plastered Princess Tomah threw her arm around me in the lobby and offered her services. When I told her I had to get up early, she looked at me with pitying eyes and said, “I remember when the boys used to have fun!”

-Fun?

I picked up the house phone and called Tom. “I’ve got a real babe here, and I’m not kidding. What’s your room number?”

A few minutes later I knocked at his door, covering the peep hole with my finger. The chain rattled and the door swung open. Tomah was standing next to me, stark naked, wrapped in a sheet from my bed, which she threw off, exposing droopy tits that hung down to her belly button, as she let out a war cry. She then threw herself into the room on all fours saying, “Give it to me the hard way!”

“Oh fookin’ hell!” Tom groaned.

I closed the door on them, laughing all the way back to my room. I kept waiting for Tom to kick her out, but when she didn’t come back to get her clothes I tucked them into a pillowcase and left them outside his room. Tom remarked to me the next morning that it didn’t matter to him that Tomah had spiderwebs on her fanny, and just like that I had my next blackboard drawing and caption!

I still had my SNME match with Randy Savage to look forward to, not that we got to do it our way.

On the afternoon of November 11, we met and worked out a great match, but less than an hour before showtime, Vince summoned us to his office. He wanted a completely different match, tied to a TV storyline around me working Randy’s ankle. When I explained that working Randy’s ankle would limit his mobility and take the speed out of the match, Vince cut me off: “You’re the great worker, figure it out.”

Randy and I lit into each other right off the bell and, even with the changes, it went great. At one point he catapulted me off the apron onto the floor and I spiked my heel into the cement, cracking the bone. I painfully worked around it. For visual effect I pulled his boot off and stomped and kicked his ankle, which hurt my foot more than it did his. Then I whacked Randy’s leg on the ring post and heard it go bong. I didn’t mean to, but I ended up giving him the same heel injury that I’d just sustained myself, one of my rare accidents. Randy never said a word about it, just kept working like the pro he was. Both of us in excruciating pain, Randy finally small-packaged me when I tried to slam him from the ring apron for the victory. Vince congratulated us as we came through the curtain, and Randy gave me a pained hug before limping off with his arm over Liz.

Vince kept coming up with new ideas to feed his wrestlers to the media and fan maw. On American Thanksgiving weekend 1987, he launched a new pay-per-view event called the Survivor Series.

The taping of the first Survivor Series turned out to be Bundy’s last day. He’d saved up enough money to go home. As a parting laugh I carefully drew Bundy on the blackboard, on all fours, violently gagging and puking up a pile of various shapes, sizes and colors of bitten-off penises. I wasn’t sure what I was implying, but it broke up the locker room, with Bundy laughing the hardest.

Never to be outdone, he labeled the penises with the names of all my brothers. Amazingly, he got them all right.

Another friend gone.

I worked hard in the Survivor Series and surprised myself by being pleased that I got raves in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter for being the best performer. (Dave Meltzer wrote, “Hart was fantastic.”) This was long before the Internet, and the sheets were the way fans, and even promoters, got their info about the business. But I had a problem with anyone who wasn’t in the business writing about it as if they knew what they were talking about. I’ve always maintained that the only way to really know who is a great worker and who isn’t is to have wrestled him. My usual attitude was that Meltzer, and others, were making a living off other people’s sweat and broken bones by exposing a business they really had no part of. But then I’d come home to find my mom reading the sheets with Stu. Promoters were so tight-lipped that the only way anyone in the business could learn anything about what was going on in other territories—and sometimes even in their own territory—was from someone outside the business. That was the ultimate irony: Most wrestlers hated the sheets, but they were the first to flock around if someone brought one into the dressing room.

I was looking forward to getting home for Christmas, but my last stop was another command performance for Vince in Atlantic City: the Slammy Awards, Vince’s high camp version of the Grammys. Worn out and weary I dragged my suitcases through the lobby of the Caesar’s Palace hotel, laden with toys I couldn’t wait to take home to my kids.

The night before the show there was a rehearsal. Under the guidance of a choreographer who’d been with the now defunct 1980s troupe the Solid Gold Dancers, all of us had to sing and dance, which clearly wasn’t our forte. She wanted Jim and me to dance across the stage during Honky’s performance of his theme song, but I offered that it might look better if Jim went to throw me and I reversed, sending him sliding across the stage on his knees. From there I could run and jump neatly over top of him, and together we’d come up snapping our fingers and coolly dance off stage. She loved it.

From nine to noon the next day, we did a rehearsal. Then we did the whole show without an audience in the afternoon, so if there were any screw-ups in front of the crowd they could edit them out. As a rib, during the actual performance that evening, when I sent Jim sliding across the stage on his knees, I threw him as hard as I could, launching him like a giant, out-of-control pink tumbleweed.

Jim ended up rocketing across the stage on his ass, trying as hard as he could to put the brakes on so he wouldn’t crash on the tables down front. He came to a stop on the very edge of the stage, and then I realized I somehow had to jump over top of him with less than a foot to land on! Feeling a bit like an Olympic long jumper, I ran and jumped, my boot barely grazing the top of Jim’s head. We came up smooth, snapping and dancing, and exited the stage. Dick Ebersol loved it.

Then we changed into pale pink tuxedos and took our seats in the audience to watch The Emperor perform. Vince gave his all to a WWF-created rock song called “Stand Back,” confidently gyrating his hips like Tom Jones. But the message of the lyrics he belted out—all about how no one could stop him as he headed for the top—wasn’t lost on wrestlers who had rehearsed and then performed a show for him three times in the space of twenty-four hours, with no food or drink provided by the management. Was he singing about all the promoters he’d wiped out or the wrestlers he was wearing out?

The topper was the last number of the night, also written especially for Vince and the Piledriver album that the Slammys were designed to promote. Vince had all the wrestlers assemble on the stage to sing “If You Only Knew” in unison, and there we were, actually singing about how our destiny belonged to Vince.

To the best of my knowledge, no wrestler was ever paid one cent for anything having to do with the Slammys or the Piledriver -album.

“You’ll be rich and famous in a far-out profession.” That’s what the fortune cookie said when I cracked it open at the end of a Chinese meal at Christmas. On January 1, 1988, I lay in a cold, lonely room at the Knights Inn in Lansing, Michigan, listening to Mikhail Gorbachev on TV talking about perestroika and an end to the nuclear arms race and taking stock of 1987.

I’d had a good showing at WrestleMania III, with a payoff of U.S.$15,000 (only a disappointment when I thought about the fact that Vince had drawn that record crowd of 93,000 to the Silverdome).

Jim and I had won and lost the World tag titles. Julie and I were still holding on to a fragile dream with the big house, and our third child on the way. I guess I had no right to complain, because not everyone in my family was doing so well. Smith, without Maria, was more bitter and miserable than ever. Dean’s life now consisted of getting high and simply existing. He made it look like he earned his keep at Stu’s by tinkering around on old Cadillacs and moving piles of bricks and debris from one end of the yard to the other for no apparent reason. Bruce and Ross lived and breathed for Stampede Wrestling, Ross taking no pay and living on what he earned as a schoolteacher. Wayne still refereed and served as a driver; I could never figure out why my parents never gave Wayne, who was so reliable, a larger role. I guess it was a case of the squeaky wheels getting all the grease. Not that any of their sacrifices and obsession made that much difference: Even the local Calgary fans now regarded the dying embers of Stampede Wrestling as small-time compared to the WWF.

Owen was carrying the territory, having incredible matches with a round, heavyset wrestler named Mike Shaw and that big old biker, Karl Moffat, who was now Jason The Terrible, wearing white coveralls and a hockey mask and wielding a chain saw. Karl had actually turned out to be a decent worker but had become a juice freak, addicted to cutting himself every night. Stu had also attracted Chris Benoit, out of Edmonton, who was like a carbon copy of Dynamite, but without the meanness; an ex-CFL linebacker named Flyin’ Brian Pillman; and some great, but small, Japanese wrestlers, Hiroshi Hase and Fumihiro Niikura, who went as The Viet Cong Express. Owen had also become a star in Japan and won the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, the top singles title of New Japan—no small feat.

My mom was constantly miserable because the so-called family fortune was still being blown on Stampede Wrestling and all their hangers-on. Whenever I showed up at the house with Julie, Jade and Dallas, she kind of clung to me like I was a level-headed bastion of sanity. She and my dad would pull up chairs in the kitchen, lower the volume on the TV and, as Stu put on the kettle for tea, they’d eagerly listen to my latest stories and news about the business.

I’ll never forget Stu watching a video of the Slammys at Christmas, laughing so hard at Vince’s singing that he had tears in his eyes. He asked me over and over with a huge smirk on his face, “So Vince is actually out of the closet, is he?” Vince wasn’t gay, but in Stu’s world, only a gay man would have camped it up like Vince did.

The schedule had become merciless, with double shots every weekend, a show in two different towns on Saturday and then again on Sunday. My life was a whirlwind of airports, second-rate hotels, gyms and dressing rooms. It was slightly more tolerable because Hulk was back from his vacation and the pay was better; between him and Macho, we now had two top babyfaces for the buildup to WrestleMania IV.

Every morning I’d feel all those head-snapping turnbuckles I’d now become famous for, and my knees were permanently stiff from jumping off the middle rope. Every day it took me fifteen minutes in a hot shower to be able to make myself stand upright. I was always in pain; one day a shoulder, the next a knee, an ankle, a split lip, a real cut, a shiner and always my aching back and what seemed to be a permanently hyper-extended left elbow from being whipped into the ropes by incredibly strong men. Tom and so many others tossed a couple of Percocets into their mouths before every match, and all too frequently I’d begun to do the same. I hurt.

After my matches the agents would happily give me a swat on the ass with a clipboard, saying,

“Helluva match!” I’d return to the dressing room with the fans’ spit all over me, to the point where Tom would get violently ill at the sight of the goobers and throw up in the sink. Still, I loved the energy, the feeling of being totally spent, undressing in a puddle of my own sweat.

The Bulldogs were suffering. Davey was the star now, and he was getting tired of doing everything Tom demanded of him in the ring and then babysitting Tom every night. It also got back to Davey that Tom openly complained that it was Davey’s fault he’d injured his back in the first place.

Perhaps as a distraction from their mutual discontent, Tom and Davey hit the gyms as hard as ever, but with two new workout partners, The Warlord and The Ultimate Warrior (formerly The Dingo Warrior). Some of the WWF wrestlers now looked so freakish from steroids it appeared they might explode. The self-injected load of testosterone or God knows what in my butt cheeks made me think, long and hard, about why I stayed in the business. No one seems to know if Hunter S.

Thompson actually wrote these lines often attributed to him: “The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.

There’s also a negative side.” But in my opinion, the world of TV wrestling was in a dark closet at the end of that hallway.

Survivor Series had been an overwhelming success, so Vince decided to go for a third pay-per-view a year, dreaming up the Royal Rumble, to take place every January. It would be like a battle royal except that it would start with two wrestlers in the ring, and then someone else would come out to join them every two minutes. The winner would be the last man standing. The first one was timed to air the Sunday before the Super Bowl, when the NFL was off. I was chosen to be the first guy into the ring, and I wrestled for thirty-six minutes in an all-out effort to get Vince’s attention, with the hope of landing a decent spot for WrestleMania IV. It didn’t work: All I was offered was a spot in the thirty-man battle royal.