Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (60 page)

Within a couple of days, I was back in Frankfurt, Germany, one of my all-time best towns in terms of fan reaction. After the match I climbed onto the babyface bus and flopped down into a plush seat.

The driver answered calls from the back to turn on a porno movie for the short ride back to the hotel. Scotty Steiner was picking on Tiger Jackson again. The Steiners wouldn’t be gone soon enough for poor Tiger, who meekly pulled his cap off and tucked his chin in, like a sad little ghoul, so that Scotty could slobber on two of his fingers and slap Tiger hard on the top of his bald head. Tiger had learned from too much experience: If he didn’t cooperate by taking his hat off, Scotty would hit him in the head ten times. Tiger was thirty-five years old, proud, with a lovely wife at home. He took his punishment without saying a word. I had told Scotty he was a better man than to pick on a midget.

He always agreed, but that never stopped him. The wrestling business was and always will be filled with bullies, who stripped down and dressed right beside the backstabber, who was next to the clumsy oaf who didn’t mean to hurt you, next to the worker you could trust with your body and your life.

Someone interrupted the porno movie and popped in an Ultimate Fighting tape. Most of the boys got to comparing Ultimate Fighters to pro wrestlers. The UFC guys pounded each other’s face and snapped limbs for real, all for a measly $50,000 grand prize. I was proud that wrestling was a work.

I got to thinking what a strange life I led. I’d said I’d get out of wrestling after five years to go home and be normal, but that was twenty years ago now, and this vagabond odyssey had long since become the only normal I knew. My house was bought and paid for, and there were two new cars in my garage. The thought of my kids growing up so fast made me promise myself I’d get home in three more years. By then I’d be forty.

It was hard to believe that in a few days I’d be back in Calgary. I envisioned myself pacing around the pool with the stereo blasting and a tape of my matches on with the sound turned down. I didn’t need to hear the hype, I just needed to think. About everything.

WrestleMania X was less than a month away.

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REL WORL SIMPION

OVER THE NEXT WEEKS, as I drove seemingly endless miles of highway between smaller venues from New York State to Wisconsin, I occupied my mind by studying all the angles to my upcoming match with Owen at WrestleMania X. Being Vince’s top seller in merchandise was rewarding me with an extra $200,000 per year in royalties, so whatever I did, I had to be careful not to jeopardize that. I thought that Owen’s prospects as a cute, bad-tempered underdog, much like the original Hitman character, were really looking up. I couldn’t go too soft or too hard on him; I’d need to devise spots that would highlight his high flying while still keeping him heel. I’d have to cleverly outwrestle him, with a tinge of reluctance and regret.

On any given night my view from a bar stool was much the same. Taker was never far off, tipping back a shot of Jack Daniels, his big arms blue with tattoos of skulls and crosses in the dim bar light.

Referee Joey Morella would be off in a corner doing his imitation of Freddie, the gay ref from Boston, bugging his eyes out, arching his back and sticking out his butt, much to the amusement of the ring crew, refs and agents. Yoko usually sat at the bar puffing on a cigarette and stirring a vodka and Diet Coke. Never far away were his two fellow Samoans, The Headshrinkers, Samu and Fatu.

They were said to be related to Yoko, but the joke was that all the Samoan wrestlers claimed to be bruddas. They were worried about Yoko’s weight. Since winning the belt, he’d gone from 450 to 600

pounds. He’d stuff his face with hot dogs and candy bars in the dressing room, but then, like a hot-tempered hippopotamus, he’d kick over tubs of iced sodas because there was no Diet Coke left.

Shawn, Razor, 1-2-3 Kid and Diesel often asked me for advice, on anything from their matches to life on the road. I guess they thought I was a good guy to talk to because I never had any axes to grind.

But I was more than a little pissed off when Shawn went to Vince and stole my idea for a ladder match, proposing that he try it on at WrestleMania X with Razor. It was hard to complain since I was getting the belt back, but that didn’t make it right.

With house show business down across North America, Vince was setting up more foreign tours than ever before to many countries we’d never visited. The wrestling phenomenon was reborn in places such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines, the Middle East and India. The future was calling for me to be a real World Champion, the first one actually to wrestle all over the world, even in Japan, where the WWF would soon go head-to-head for the first time with the deep-rooted empires of New Japan and All Japan. I held no allegiance to either and welcomed the chance to return to Japan as the WWF Champion.

On March 12, Hogan showed up, sitting in the front row of WCW’s Saturday-night TV show. Vince was hurt but told me that he was going to let Terry go: The real war between the WWF and WCW

started right then and there. He also told me he’d rather have ten Bret Harts than one Hulk Hogan. I didn’t know how to take that, coming from Vince.

Three days before WrestleMania X, Owen and I met in Stu’s dungeon to construct an entirely different match from the one we had planned. We sat on the old, frayed medicine balls and cleared our heads. I looked at Owen and said, “We’re changing everything. This is what we’re gonna do . . .”

When I set my bag down in the dressing room at Madison Square Garden on March 20, The Wrestling Observer was being passed around. Even before I got the belt back, Dave Meltzer was predicting that my days as champion were numbered. I’d been in New York for a few days already doing media and appearances, and with two big matches, it was going to be a long day. I had the heavy responsibility of opening and closing the pay-per-view in what was expected to be the biggest grossing show of the year.

Julie, Carlo and Gord Kirke had all come to New York to celebrate the big moment, along with New York film agent Michael Frankfurt, whom Carlo was wining and dining. My parents couldn’t be there because my mom was having problems with her heart and had been in the hospital. Lawler was back, the heat from his statutory rape charge being judged to have cooled off enough (the charge was eventually dropped), and he used my mom’s illness as part of the storyline, saying that the stress of her two sons doing battle was too much for her to bear. I have to say that of all the celebrities Vince hired over the years for WrestleMania, none was more co-operative and happy to be there than Burt Reynolds, who was our guest announcer that night.

My music played, and as I made my way to the ring the noise of the New York fans was like fuel in my veins. I kept repeating to myself, Keep Owen heel. He and I clicked perfectly. He played the nasty little brother, cheating viciously at every turn, and I kept outsmarting him, but never in a way that made me look overconfident or cocky. It was a real back-and-forth struggle, and led into working the match around me injuring my knee. Owen went at my leg like a cat attacking a crippled bird. We had the greatest hall of them all coming apart at the seams, twenty-three thousand fans locked into every move. I slammed Owen’s thick chest with some hard lifters. He swung for my head with a fist, but I slipped under it. Sleeper! Owen desperately fought his way to the ropes, forcing me to break the hold. He kicked his leg back for a vicious ball shot that left me writhing on the mat. This really got the crowd hot. I was so happy for him that they hated him. He dragged me to the middle of the ring, twisting me into the sharpshooter. The fans suddenly realized that Stu must have taught it to both of us! Nobody had ever got out of the sharpshooter, there was no known escape! I twisted, reaching around to hook Owen’s ankle, and pulled his leg out from under him, sending him toppling chest-first to the mat. The fans were standing as I rose from the ashes like a Phoenix, having somehow maneuvered Owen into the sharpshooter instead!

But Owen clawed his way to the ropes again. With the crowd hanging on every move, he charged me in the corner, and I caught him square on the chin with a boot, spinning him completely around. I climbed up on his shoulders and dove forward for a victory roll, but in a split second, Owen collapsed in a squat, on top of me, pinning my shoulders to the mat for the one . . . two . . . three! We came back to the dressing room to backslaps and congratulations from all.

Yoko was walking around like he was on death row. It was just dawning on him that he was about to lose the top money spot. I knew how it felt; like all ex-champions, he was immediately uncertain of his future. He went on to have a horrible match with Lex, who was unable to garner much sympathy.

In a lame finish, the guest referee, Mr. Perfect, disqualified Lex for touching him, and the fans seemed glad when it was over

Not surprisingly, the ladder match between Shawn and Razor stole the show, and why wouldn’t it?

Even though I’d asked Shawn not to use my original finish, where the heel falls off the ladder and crotches himself on the top rope, he went ahead and crotched himself and tied his foot up in the ropes, while Razor climbed up and took the Intercontinental belt. I watched it on the monitor in the back thinking, You thieving bastard.

Finally, Yoko and I enacted our usual David and Goliath story. Soon I was dragged to a corner so Yoko could squash me like a grape for his finish. He climbed up on the second rope, then slipped and toppled backward. I was quick to move out of the way, because if he landed on me for real he’d most certainly kill me! I was on him like a monkey on a beach ball, hooking his big leg to reclaim the WWF World Heavyweight title!

The rafters shook when guest referee Roddy Piper proudly raised my arm in victory. The ring filled up with wrestlers—Lex, Tatanka, Razor, Kid—and then I saw Gorilla, Pat, Vince and even Burt Reynolds in the ring! Macho Man charged out and gave me a hug. He had tears in his eyes when he said, “I’m proud of you, brother! You deserve it!” Then Roddy and Randy, two legends, told all the boys to pick me up. Like in a dream, suddenly I was back in Grade 8 on my friends’ shoulders after I had punched out that bully Brett McFarlane. It’s curious that at WrestleMania X, a total work, I felt a similar kind of triumph.

I saw Julie, Carlo and Gord in the audience clapping. Owen stood in the aisle glaring at me with burning blue eyes. Despite how he pretended to seethe, he was so happy, he could have kissed me.

This was one of the greatest nights of my life, arguably the highlight of my career, and I was grateful that a beaming Vince had given us this moment. I was exhausted and dripping in Yoko’s sweat in the hallway when suddenly Julie was beside me. She was wearing a nice new outfit, and when I didn’t give her a sopping wet hug, she misinterpreted it. By three in the morning, the celebration canceled, Julie was gripping her suitcase with her eyes ablaze. “Bret, I want a divorce. We’re done! And I mean it this time!” She slammed the door behind her. I expected her to come back, but she didn’t.

When I showed up for TV in Poughkeepsie the next day, I was as deflated as I’d ever been. My heart felt abandoned and scorched, with bits of ash blowing around in it—and yet I was champion of the world.

For the next several days I toured England feeling so despondent about Julie that even being mobbed by fans didn’t make me feel better. I called home on her birthday, but the phone bleeped and bleeped. I could only assume that she was out with her friends. When I dropped my bags on the dressing-room floor at the Royal Albert Hall, I remembered the last time I wrestled there thirteen years earlier. It occurred to me that Julie was leaving me then too. Things hadn’t changed.

Every night Owen and I worked an even better match than the night before. It was always the pop of the night when I reversed Owen’s sharpshooter and came up with mine, with a remorseless Owen tapping out. We’d perfected the story of what a mean little brother he was.

Between matches Owen occupied himself with orchestrating ribs in the dressing room. One of his latest victims was Oscar, the fat rapper manager of a new black tag team called Men on a Mission, or M.O.M.Three-hundred-pound Mo was cool and mellow with a dyed-white buzz cut and carried the team. Mabel was a 450-pound mass with a white mohawk, who didn’t do much but stand there in hideous, baggy purple silk pants. But their gimmick capitalized on the new rap sound, and when Oscar came out shouting on the live mic, “Get your hands up in the air!” he really pumped up the crowd. Owen egged on The 1-2-3 Kid until he tried to seize the heavy, out-of-shape Oscar in close quarters. Kid expected to manhandle Oscar and jumped right on his back, but Oscar panicked, charging back and forth into the walls and knocking Kid silly!

Back in Israel, I was touched to see a street kid about eight years old waiting to greet me at my hotel.

He was wearing a crudely sewn pink and black replica of my ring outfit and holding a cardboard sign that read, HITMAN NEW REL WORL SIMPION. I put my arm around him and asked who helped him make his outfit. In broken English he proudly explained that he had made it all by himself and added,

“I don’t want to bother you. I just want to look at you. You are my hero.”

When the bus pulled away for double shots in Haifa and Halon, the boy rode his bike alongside, popping wheelies and giving me the bullhorn sign. At every traffic light he’d catch up and wait below my window so he could pull his Hitman shades down and pop another wheelie just for me. He kept up with us for miles. Soon the boys on the bus were cheering him on. Just when we thought he couldn’t keep up anymore, he’d come around a corner and give me the bullhorn sign, until he finally faded into the distance. I never saw him again. I loved that little boy.

I finished off the tour in Tel Aviv with Owen, on last in the main event, pro wrestling’s version of Cain versus Abel. Later that evening I strolled down the soft, brown-sugar sand behind the Holiday Inn in Tel Aviv. Another beautiful night, the black sky filled with stars and the red blinking lights of Israeli military jets fading in and out between clouds. The shore was still lined with barricades that looked like giant steel jacks glistening in the moonlight. The girl from last time gave me a long kiss good night and walked out of my life forever. The scent of her perfume lingered as I lay in bed tasting her on my lips. What started out as a slow tremor of guilt soon thumped in my chest, and like something had suddenly taken over my controls, I grabbed for the phone to call Julie.