Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (4 page)

I’d learn years later that Marciano was a horrible cheapskate; when he left town he intentionally misled Stu into writing him two checks, each for the whole fee. Even knowing how badly my dad needed the money, he cashed them both. Despite my dad’s attempts to get him to send the money back, he never did. About a year later, Marciano died in a plane crash. My mom didn’t shed any tears.

That year my dad gambled whatever savings he’d scrimped together to purchase a hundred-and-sixty-acre man-made sandbar called Clearwater Beach, seven miles outside of the city. The idea was that it would help him make ends meet in the summers, when he shut down his wrestling territory.

Clearwater Beach consisted of two man-made lakes, picnic tables, barbecue pits, a canopied dance floor and one concession building. The idea was that the Hart kids would work out there in the summer, and then a new and better batch of wrestlers would arrive to turn things around when my dad’s circuit started up again in September.

The beach became a horrible place for me. Far too often, it was my responsibility to man the dreaded toll booth, no wider than a telephone booth. I’d sit out there for countless hours, barefoot, in cut-offs, swatting horseflies and collecting five bucks a car. I often had three or four hundred bucks crammed into my pockets, and it’s no small miracle that I wasn’t robbed, out there all alone.

Sometimes it was just too much for me to take, sitting all day in the heat with no bathroom, water or food. It was about a five-minute walk to the concession building and the lakes, where I’d find most of my older brothers swimming and splashing around pretending to be lifeguards, flirting with girls, never once giving any thought to their promise not to leave me out at the booth.

One morning Stu loaded us all up in his latest acquisition, a beautiful round-curved purple 1959

Hudson, and drove us out to the beach, and I complained all the way there that I didn’t want to go back to the booth. Of course, when we got there, Wayne immediately ordered me back to the booth. When I angrily refused, Stu grabbed me by the hair and flung me into the backseat of the car, busting my forehead open just above my right eyebrow. On the drive back home, I pressed my Tshirt to my eye to stop the blood from dripping all over his new car. He asked me to please not say anything to my mom, and, feeling sorry for him, I promised I wouldn’t say a word. He asked me what he could get for me to make up for splitting my head open. I told him a bike; I was the only brother who didn’t have one yet. As soon as we got home, he told my mom exactly what had happened anyway. As always, there wasn’t a bandage to be found, so my dad used Scotch tape to hold the two-inch gash on my forehead together. Then we left to go to the doctor.

On the way, Stu stopped at the house where the producer of his TV show lived and said he had to go in to talk to him. So I sat in the hot car, hanging my head out the open window. Three hours later Stu came out and took me for my stitches. As for the promised bike, he bought it for me—seven years later. Tough times were ahead, and after his meeting that day, I was the least of his problems.

Life at school was an entirely different, drearier kind of hell. Hart house was a terrible environment for studying. Because Smith was so much older, my mom would volunteer him to help me with my homework. He was no scholar, so his method consisted of him knuckling me hard on the head when I didn’t know the right answer, which was more often than not. In time, I realized it was smarter to follow Dean’s approach and lie to my mom about even having homework. In fact, I learned to just lie whenever it made things easier. At Hart house, a lie was only a lie if you got caught.

My dad was generally late for everything, and he passed that trait down to us kids. When we missed the school bus, which was most of the time, he would load us up in the transport limo and race us off to school, skidding to a halt on the gravel parking lot of Wildwood Elementary. All the doors would fly open and a handful of Hart kids would pile out just as the bell was sounding. Then the car would take off again, throwing more gravel on the way to the next school, and the next.

My Grade 2 teacher, Miss Mitchaluk, reminded me of those pretty ladies at the wrestling matches.

She wore nylons and dresses, and even at that age I felt an uncontrollable urge to look up her skirt.

One day she announced to the class that there was going to be a school play and we would dress up as elves. She told us to bring green leotards to school. Now I had a kind of phobia not only of leotards, but of bras, panties and stockings. Whenever my pants were intertwined with Ellie’s or Georgia’s leotards in the big clothes dryer at home, I cringed at the thought of even touching them. I was sick at the notion of pulling those horrible things on.

Every day Miss Mitchaluk reminded me to bring my green leotards, and every day I purposefully forgot. Finally, she ordered me not to dare show up without them. The next morning when my dad herded us into the limo, I lagged behind, pretending to be sick. Stu demanded to know what the hell my problem was. I broke down in tears. “I don’t want to wear leotards!” I pleaded my case on the way to school with little hope, but after we pulled up, my dad climbed out and came with me to see Miss Mitchaluk. When he told her how strongly I felt about wearing leotards, she said, “You’ll regret this, Bret. You’ll have to sit out the entire play.” I was happy my dad stuck up for me. Little did I know that someday I’d make my living wearing leotards—pink ones at that!

It was around that time that I took up drawing cartoons, probably the only constructive thing Smith taught me. If I couldn’t have the toys I wanted, I’d draw them instead. With my tongue twisting up over my top lip, I drew Frankenstein versus Werewolf, and Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, but what I always drew best were the ugly faces of my favorite wrestlers. I was torn between Snoopy and the Red Baron, between Hogan’s Heroes and Waldo Von Erich, a bald-headed wrestler who was terrorizing my dad’s territory as a pretend Nazi thug. Waldo billed himself as a brother of another supposed Nazi, Fritz Von Erich. Thirty years later, Waldo laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world when he told me about a joke he’d pulled on my dad. He’d stolen Daphne the cow and sold her to a slaughterhouse. Then he generously presented Stu with a rack of beef, saying a farmer friend had given it to him. With my dad having so many kids, he said, he wanted him to have it instead. Poor old Daphne. Some joke.

In 1963, my sister Diana was born, a breech delivery that was really rough on my mom; the doctor had insisted that Diana be Helen’s last child. But my mom was as stubborn a Hart as there ever was and made up her mind to have just one more, to make it an even dozen. In May 1965, my mom came home from the hospital with the last Hart baby, my youngest brother, Owen.

Ellie and Georgia raced to get home so they could see him first, but I overtook them in the final half mile, bounded up the steps and was the very first Hart kid to welcome Owen Hart into the fold. From the moment I saw him, I wanted to be the best brother to him he’d ever have.

As soon as he was out of the crib, Owen was taken in by the girls, and he lived in their room until he was three. He looked like the little bird Woodstock from the Peanuts cartoon, with a beaky nose, a tuft of blond hair and big blue eyes. Living with Ellie and Georgia, Owen became quite the tattletale, telling on the boys for everything.

Then one night my mom casually announced that Owen would be moving into the boys’ room. Panic washed over his face, and his eyes grew wide. Dean and I glared over at him, and he knew exactly what those glares meant. A few hours after Owen’s bed had been moved, a heated argument broke out between Dean and Ellie. Stu was out of town, so my mom intervened, demanding to know who started it. Little Owen stood, holding his blue furry blanket, and said matter-of-factly, “Ellie started it, Mom.” It was true, but more importantly it was smart: he won over all the boys in an instant.

Welcome to the club, brother. Much like Bruce had taken care of me, it became my responsibility to dress Owen, comb his hair, tie his shoes and teach him how to be a Hart.

That summer of 1965, at my dad’s Stampede show, I’d watched the smooth and graceful former champion Pat O’Connor take on Gene Kiniski, a wrestler whom Stu had started out years before and who was the current National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) World Champion. Since 1948, the NWA had been an affiliation of North American wrestling promotions who voted every year to pick one wrestler as the NWA champion—a fellow who could really draw—and then let him defend the title in all the territories. I was fascinated by how real the match seemed, but at the same time I wondered how it was possible for someone to do this or that move or break that hold. Without knowing it, I was making a thorough study of pro wrestling. But I was failing at just about everything else.

Once my dad had shut down for the season, my focus became surviving another summer out at Clearwater Beach. Dean had an extra bike, obtained through questionable means, that he let me ride on my own, as far as I could go. After we got back home from the beach, or on rare weekend days at home, I’d get on that bike and take off. It was my first taste of freedom, my escape from everybody at the house. I found that I enjoyed being alone with my daydreams about cowboys, soldiers, girls and wrestling, away from the noise and fighting.

I generally did all that I could to avoid Ellie and Georgia. The biggest problem in my life at that point was how easily I was drawn into Ellie’s ongoing quest to see Stu punish me for being born. Feisty and hot-tempered, Ellie regularly managed to provoke fights with me in which Stu usually intervened on her side and administered a shitkicking to me. On top of that, Georgia, her loyal supporter, couldn’t resist tattling on me, which also got me into trouble with Stu.

I also tried to stay clear of Ross, who was a strange little fellow. He had problems with his ears and had to have tubes put in, which automatically excluded him from Stu’s punishing left hand. He was very smart and could read the entire lineup on the back of the programs when he was still in diapers.

He had a stubborn temper and hated to lose at anything, which was tough on me, because when I was growing up I’d been made to understand that little brothers were supposed to do what their big brothers told them to do. Ross wouldn’t answer to me or to anyone else, and if you got into a conflict with him, he would never back down.

Dean felt much the same about Ellie and Georgia as I did; a fight with either of them would cost us severely. We distracted ourselves by playing a lot of football and baseball with the McDonald kids—

Johnny, Karen and Cameron—who lived next door. The hatchet was much easier to bury when we needed the girls to help make up teams. These games are easily my favorite memories of growing up—an escape where I found team spirit, order and rules that made sense.

The last weekend of the summer before school started, my dad arrived home with boxes of apples, bananas, oranges and all kinds of vegetables tied to the roof of the car. Safeway regularly gave him all the distressed produce he could take. I eagerly helped unload the heavy cardboard crates, stacking them under the porch where the bear used to live. I couldn’t have been happier lifting all those boxes of nice yellow bananas. I loved bananas.

When we grumbled about hand-me-downs and such, my mom would speak of how tough times had been for my father when he was a kid living in poverty with his two sisters and his parents on the unforgiving Alberta prairie, sometimes with only a canvas tent and an open fire to keep them warm, eating rabbits and birds that Stu hunted with a slingshot. My paternal grand-mother had died before I was born, and Stu never talked about his sisters. We never met any of our aunts. The only link to those times on the prairie was Stu’s father, Edward, who’d had nowhere to go and had recently moved into a room next to the gym in our basement, together with his Dalmatian, Zero. My grandfather was nice enough to me, but he was a religious zealot and perhaps a bit nutty: He used to take his dog on long walks of thirty miles or more. His attitudes and habits drove my mother crazy.

Stu kicked off the new wrestling season with a better crew than he’d had for a while and with a new TV show, Wildcat Wrestling, which aired on Saturdays. He had started major renovations on the house, but they were left unfinished when the money from Clearwater Beach fell short that summer.

The brickwork around the big picture windows was missing and the old house grew colder as the days grew shorter. At night I’d go looking for one of our many cats to put under my blanket as a way to keep warm.

There was a new villain working the territory, one who would make a lasting impression on me.

Sweet Daddy Siki strutted into the ring with snow-white hair and white sunglasses, a black Adonis in white trunks with red pinstripes and a fancy red-sequined robe. He carried two white hand-mirrors just so he could admire himself. He was too handsome, too smart, too cocky and too cool. He was also an innovator and a great showman. Regi Siki, out of Houston, Texas, was probably a bigger influence on Muhammad Ali than Gorgeous George, whom Ali would later credit as being his greatest inspiration. But Sweet Daddy Siki was also deeply influenced by Gorgeous George, so I guess it all comes to the same thing.

Later, Sweet Daddy would tell me that he was the first black man to wrestle for the NWA world title, against Nature Boy Buddy Rogers in Greensboro, South Carolina, back in the 1950s. The Ku Klux Klan had ringside seats for the fight. They all stood up in unison, arms crossed, letting Siki know he’d never walk out of the building as world champion. Sweet Daddy feared for his life that night. He was wrestling as the babyface, or good guy, and the ref told him not to even think about closing his hand into a fist. Siki let Rogers call every move and take the whole match too. This wasn’t just wrestling, it was a matter of life or death.

I remember crowding close to our old black-and-white TV, which had a bent coat hanger for an antenna, watching Stu’s new ring announcer, Ed Whalen, introduce Siki. Whalen was tall and slender, balding on top, wearing black-framed glasses and a nice suit and tie. “Ladies and gentlemen, do not adjust your sets,” he said dryly. In the interview that followed, they both played their roles brilliantly. Siki talked about driving all the ladies insane, then denounced a local favorite named Dave Ruhl, a black-bearded, pot-bellied version of Ulysses S. Grant, who was the territory’s version of a Canadian champion. Ruhl was billed as being a farmer from Hanna, Alberta. He was as respected as any wrestler who ever worked for my dad, not so much for his mat skills, but because he came across as a salt-of-the-earth guy in whom fans in Alberta and Saskatchewan desperately wanted to believe.