Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (57 page)

Owen had given up all hope of ever making it as a top wrestler and was anxiously awaiting news about getting on with the fire department. I reminded him that being a firefighter carried certain risks and that maybe if he hung on a little longer things would improve; I’d nearly thrown in the towel back in 1984, when my fate suddenly changed and the wrestling business saved me. He gave me his little-kid grin and said, “Nah, I’m ready to go home.” I told him to hang on until after SummerSlam ’93, when I thought I’d be in a better position to speak up for him. That was when I expected to play my hand with Vince and press him to re-evaluate and renew my contract. I was going to gamble that he couldn’t afford to lose me, especially since WCW was the last place I really wanted to be.

I often spoke to Roddy Piper on the phone. He told me that, although it was clearly a long shot, making action films in Hollywood was the next plateau for me to hit. He stressed to me that I should pressure Vince for control of my Hitman name while I could. I was one of the few wrestlers who actually performed using my birth name, and nobody could ever take that away from me, but Vince could afford to fight for years over my ring name if I split from the WWF.

With the long buildup for me and Jerry Lawler at SummerSlam ’93, I was disappointed to hear that Stu and Helen would be unable to attend the pay-per-view. Stu had finally relented to undergo long-overdue knee surgery. He’d never had bad knees, but in a bizarre mishap, while receiving a lifetime achievement award from WCW in Atlanta, he tripped getting into the ring, blew out his right knee and had to be carried back to the dressing room!

After a show in North Tonawanda, New York, near the end of July, I walked into a trendy bar with Carlo and stumbled right into Shawn Michaels, who was busy insulting a young woman. When she answered him back, he grabbed her face and gave her a good shove, which triggered a bunch of guys to surround him, jostling for the right position to kick the hell out of him. Diesel, his pretend bodyguard, stepped in for real. One guy held a broken glass and another inched in closer, hiding brass knuckles behind his back. Neither Shawn nor Diesel had seen the brass knucks. I stepped in right behind the guy with the knucks and calmly said, “What do ya think yer gonna do with those?”

Eventually, Diesel, Carlo and I backed the unruly mob away from Shawn. He had clearly been way out of line. Shawn’s lip had sparked numerous dust-ups over the years. I remember him telling me how once he had been in a drunk tank down south mouthing off to a bunch of cops, who then proceeded to open the door of his cell and beat the hell out of him.

These days, things were wearing on Shawn. He’d gone through a divorce, and on top of that he was worrying about an upcoming court case, resulting from when a TV jobber named Chad Austin was paralyzed in a match with The Rockers in December 1990. Unlike his cocky, boy-toy persona, the real Shawn was often insecure and emotionally fragile. I could tell by the bloody tips of his fingernails, which he nervously chewed on, that he was heading for a breakdown. Shawn’s problem (as with so many other wrestlers) came when he mixed downers with alcohol and either forgot who he was or thought he was somebody else. Luckily for him, Diesel, Razor, a host of fellow wrestlers and I were never far away.

I was never sure whether the routine mixing of downers and alcohol was a case of wrestlers trying to kill their pain with drugs or kill their drugs with pain so they’d have an excuse or justification. Shawn and Razor were among the worst, but in those years they also lured into their fold Sean Waltman, a young up-and-comer known as The 1-2-3 Kid. Seeing them wasted and passed out in bars and restaurants after the shows made me fear one of them would be the next Rick McGraw. Razor noticed that more and more I preferred to go off on my own and nicknamed me The Lone Wolf. I didn’t want to travel the road they were on.

On August 12 in Calgary, I ran into Davey at B.J.’s Gym and I was taken aback at how huge he was.

Obviously WCW wasn’t drug testing at all. He happily told me that there was a good chance WCW

might put the World belt on him soon.

Later that night, Davey and Diana were at a Calgary rock bar, where an obnoxious drunk was going around goosing women. He’d been told twice by the bouncers to stop. When he groped Diana, she warned him that her husband was The British Bulldog, but it only seemed to egg him on. It wasn’t long before a rocket-fueled Davey had snatched him in a front face lock and choked him out by leaning back and lifting him right off the ground. When Davey released the hold, the drunk fell backward, smashing his skull like a glass jar of pickles on the cement floor. There was a flood of blood. The bouncers, who knew the guy had been asking for it, ushered Davey and Diana out the back door, and they fled the scene. The guy from the bar was in a coma for thirty-two days and was never the same after that. And Davey found himself embroiled in a costly legal battle just when things were starting to look up for him.

The following day, I had a long meeting with Vince at Madison Square Garden. While I thanked him for my WrestleMania IX payout, I told him I felt frustrated with the direction I was going in. Lex was never going to get over, especially with The Wrestling Observer ripping him apart for his mechanical work rate. In Vince’s usual evasive way, he switched trains on me, telling me that he needed both Owen and me to work a couple of shots down in Memphis for Jerry Lawler’s struggling Mid-South promotion. I pointed out that Vince had refused to allow me to help my father when Stu was in the same situation, saying he couldn’t afford for me to get hurt. Vince assured me that if Owen or I were injured in any way he’d take care of us as though we were working for him. I only agreed because I needed Lawler to work with me at -SummerSlam.

On August 16, Owen and I arrived in Memphis. As our plane landed, I thought back to the day that Elvis Presley died, when I had a dream that the world was ending. In my dream, I sat on the back steps of Hart house with Owen, Ross and Georgia, all of us serene as we waited for the end. The western sky, in front of us, was lit with a deep red mushroom cloud that drifted toward us. Behind us, framed by a pale blue sky, lay the quiet innocence of Calgary.

Owen and I headed down to the Mid-South Coliseum, where we were to work a tag match against Lawler and Jeff Jarrett, the son of wrestler Jerry Jarrett. Jeff was about Owen’s age and size, with long blond hair and thick legs; he was working a gimmick for Vince as a rhinestone cowboy country singer called Double J. Despite all the dirty deeds the fans had seen Lawler do on WWF TV, in Memphis he was still a beloved babyface. Memphis had always been the most insane outpost of the goofiest and phoniest types of wrestling and wrestlers, going back to the 1960s, when promoter Nick Gulas and his son, George, ran the territory. (George was the all-time worst example of a promoter’s kid going over all the time, beating everybody when he couldn’t beat his own pillow at night. He’d cry out, “Daddy says go down!” )

Jackie Fargo, Mr. Pogo, Lawler and Honky Tonk were all born from this hillbilly territory. Jeff Jarrett was one of the rare exceptions from Memphis who could work. Lawler had the biggest crowd in years, more than five thousand rasslin’ fans hollerin’ and hurlin’ garbage at us. Owen and I saw a whole new relevance to the old joke: “What has a hundred legs, three teeth and an IQ of thirty? The front row of the Mid-South Coliseum.” The ring made the worst rings I’d ever been in seem like featherbeds. It had wired garden hoses for ropes, and sharp bolts jutted out beneath the pad-less, cloth-covered turnbuckles. The patchy old ring canvas had little or no padding underneath.

As heels, Owen and I snatched the house mic and borrowed from a combination of Cool Hand Luke and Deliverance—“What we have here is a failure to communicate”—followed by me twisting Owen’s ear while he squealed like a little ole pig, spoofing the hillbillyness of it all. We had a great time working the fans up and went on to have a fabulously phony match with Lawler bleeding, pleading and crying in desperation, reminding me a lot of the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Owen and I made faces, cussed and wiggled our asses as we wound up our punches like Dusty Rhodes. By the end the fans were fixing to fetch ropes to string us up.

Lawler was more than grateful. Owen and I actually looked forward to going back two weeks later for a return cage match. The day after that cage match, I’d work with Lawler at SummerSlam ’93—if I didn’t trip and kill myself in his pathetic ring or get lynched by hillbillies in the parking lot. Those two Memphis shows would end up being some of the most fun that Owen and I ever had in the ring together

I had a bad flu when I worked SummerSlam ’93, but there’s no such thing as too sick for a pay-per-view. Everything was centered around Lex and Yoko’s American hero angle. Undertaker was expected to carry Giant Gonzales again, and like with so many horrible workers he’d been saddled with, he made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. As for me, the Hart family had now been written into my storyline. My mom and dad had been in the audience at Monday Night Raw, and Lawler took to ridiculing them with a series of one-liners: “Hey, Stu, I heard you wrestled when the Dead Sea was only sick!” By the end of it, my mom pretended to be in tears. Even Stu’s legit knee surgery was said to be the result of Lawler having shoved Stu in the stairwell as he was leaving the building.

Owen and Bruce sat in the front row, representing the Hart family, dressed in their finest Western wear. Owen was bummed out because he’d just learned he’d been rejected by the fire department.

His dream of a happy home life was put on hold, and again wrestling was all he had.

My match had a great storyline that Pat put together, only he didn’t tell Bruce about a rib they had planned for him. As I stood in the middle of the ring, Lawler hobbled out on crutches, grimacing with each step. Bruce and Owen did an interview from the front row, blaming Lawler for Stu’s knee injury.

Lawler explained that he was on crutches because he’d hurt his own knee in a car accident, and as badly as he wanted to whip me, Doink the Clown (Matt Bourne) would wrestle for him. Of course, The Hitman went ballistic when Doink came out. He was carrying two pails and made out to the fans that they were filled with water, but when he hurled one at the crowd, they were relieved to find it was filled with confetti instead. As Doink got closer to where Owen and Bruce were sitting, it looked like he was going to dump confetti on them too. Totally caught off guard, Bruce took a pail of water right in the face while Pat and Vince rolled with laughter backstage.

Owen had caught wind of the rib before the match and had warned Matt that if he got a drop on him he’d rib him back for the rest of his days. This was a serious threat because Owen was a serious ribber! Matt managed to soak only Bruce.

Matt could work when he wanted to and built up terrific heat. Soon enough I had him twisted into the sharpshooter, with my back to Lawler, who crept up behind me, revealing to the fans that he really wasn’t hurt at all. He hit me across my face so hard with his crutch that I was worried he’d split me open! I was furious that, once again, he seemed to enjoy being dangerous. Writhing on the mat in real pain, I decided to make him pay for every bit of it. Lawler knew he’d hurt me and gave me some working kicks before fleeing the ring. Jack Tunney, who was still playing the role of figurehead president of the WWF, appeared in the aisle to tell him that the people had paid to see him wrestle me and that since he wasn’t really hurt he had to turn around and have a match or face permanent suspension.

The crowd was on fire as I busted my way past a half-dozen refs to get my hands on Lawler. It was payback time and he was in trouble! It’d been two and a half months since he’d jumped me with the scepter at King of the Ring, and it still hurt me to take a breath. I unloaded on him, potatoing him with every punch, and soon he was jabbing me in the throat with a piece of broken crutch, working, building his heat better than any heel in the business at that time. He punched and kicked me, pulling every dirty trick he could think of, until I rallied with another stiff, full-force comeback. When I stepped into the sharpshooter I almost bent him in half—for real. He begged and pleaded for me to ease up, but it was payback time.

The ring filled with referees and agents who pretended not to be able to pull me off Lawler; many of them had trouble keeping straight faces as they actually leaned their weight on me—they didn’t like him either! After subjecting him to four minutes of excruciating agony I released Lawler, who was so pained he couldn’t move. Keeping to the storyline, the ref announced that because I wouldn’t release the hold, I’d been disqualified. Of course I became incensed and attacked a groaning Lawler as they carried him off on a stretcher.

When I came back through the curtain I smiled as I watched Lawler crawling like an alligator to his dressing room. Singer Aaron Neville, who was there to perform the national anthem before Lex’s match, laughed, shook his head and said to me, “You did a job on him, man!”

As I drove up to Grand Rapids TV with Owen and Bruce, I was in a good position to negotiate. I’d been subpoenaed and I knew it wouldn’t sit well with Vince to have me testify while there was animosity between us. The first thing I asked him was why he couldn’t do more with Owen. I pointed out that he’d never come through on his promises to Owen and that with the shortage of talent, it would be a damn shame to see him quit the business. Vince feigned surprise at the directness of my remarks, but after a few minutes he promised me he’d come up with something for my brother in the next few weeks.

Then I told him I didn’t like anything he was doing with me. I pointed out that as hard as he tried to paint over me with Hogan’s and Luger’s colors, the pink and black kept coming through: The fans weren’t going to let me fade away. It wasn’t fair that he still expected me to carry the shows and do the brunt of the work, while Lex got the belt and the top pay. If he didn’t have anything big in store for me, I said, I was thinking of taking a year off. The color drained from Vince’s face, and when I closed the door behind me, I knew I had him.