Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (61 page)

It was a long call, but we patched up our battered warship and sailed on—again. I told her if things went right for me as champ I really could be home in only three more years and asked if she could last. She said she could, but I heard the sob in her voice and felt like a real bastard as I smelled the Israeli girl on my fingers. The world was my cage, and home was a dream that I wet my lips on.

At the end of April, I called my mom to tell her some good news: Because of the success of the angle with Owen, Jim and Davey were going to be hired back, that is if Davey could get out from under his assault charge. From the lilt in her voice, I could tell that the jolt of joy was as good for her as the electrical one the doctors had given her heart. I told her I’d come up to see her and Stu that Tuesday to wish Stu a happy seventy-ninth birthday before I left for a tour of Japan.

I arrived at Hart house around four-thirty with Julie and the kids in tow and parked beside Owen’s new van. I couldn’t help but smile at seeing one of my mom’s crayoned signs taped to the outside of the kitchen door. “Happy 79th birthday Grampy!” She’d hang a perfectly lettered sign with the relevant details for birthdays and other occasions because with such a big family, it helped everyone to keep track. We barged into the kitchen, and I could see Stu’s tattered ostrich-skin cowboy boots sticking out of the stairwell where he was sitting talking on the phone. He put his huge hand over the receiver and bellowed upstairs to my mom, “Tiger, there’s someone here to see you.” Jade clamped a large toy tiger in her arms, and Beans carried a small gift box in tiger-striped wrapping as I heard the flip-flop of my mom’s slippers coming down the stairs. Stu wasn’t so big on receiving presents but loved it when we brought something with us for my mom.

Over the years, Stu affectionately modified my mom’s nickname from Tiger Belle to Tiger Balls. She let out her gorgeous laugh when she saw that the box was filled with tiger-striped Ping-Pong balls.

Soon a pot of coffee was brewing. Stu was still trapped on the phone. My mom explained, “It’s Diana. She and Ellie call him every single day about Jim and Davey.” She cupped her hand over her mouth to whisper, “They’re losing everything now.”

I wanted to wish my dad a happy birthday. My mom pleaded with him to get off the phone, but Stu had a hard time saying no to his daughters, and the conversation stretched on. Stu finally told Diana that he just wanted to say good-bye to me before I left, and she took offense. With a pained look, he sighed, “She hung up on me!” I shook his hand, but the phone rang again. This time it was Ellie. Stu put his hand up, signaling me that he didn’t want me to go, so I chatted with my mom a while longer. After a few minutes he set the phone down to tell me Ellie wanted to thank me herself for the new break for Jim. But Ellie was cold and distant as she went on a bitter rant about how Vince McMahon owed her and Jim a living, conveniently overlooking the fact that it’d been Jim who’d got himself fired in the first place and that he was lucky to be hired back at all after throwing that TV

monitor at Chief. As far as I knew, Jim hadn’t paid Vince back for the lawyers who’d won him the settlement, which was all gone now anyway. When I hung up, I realized that she hadn’t thanked me for anything.

There was a lot of doom and gloom at WWF headquarters. Vince had to pay out two huge settlements: one to Jesse Ventura for $810,000 in back royalties and a staggering $26.7 million to Chad Austin, the jobber paralyzed by The Rockers. Not to mention that Vince’s trial was fast approaching. Bam Bam and Yoko, who kept up with the business in Japan, warned me that the WWF

tour was going to bomb big-time.

That first day, the Japanese press was mostly interested in the impact of Hogan going to WCW and Vince’s legal woes rather than the tour itself. Nonetheless, when I peeked through the curtain at the crowd in Yokohama, it wasn’t such a bad house after all. I was working a title match with Macho Man. Although he’d never worked Japan, his exposure on Vince’s TV had made him a legend over there. He saw me as the ideal opponent to, in a sense, restore him to his proper place: Vince hadn’t done anything with him for so long that it was beginning to eat at him. All Randy wanted was a little respect. When Jack Lanza came to us and flatly said to me, “Catch something quick on ’im,” it wasn’t hard to read the dejected look on Randy’s face. It showed Randy how little the office cared. Not so long ago, Lanza would never have spoken to Randy like he was a jobber. So I told Randy, “Let’s just do it for us.” We went out that night and had a beautiful match, although I did give him a small spud when he caught a boot in the face, opening a gash in his eyebrow. The blood only added to the drama, and the usually somber Japanese fans came to their feet when I slapped on the sharpshooter and Randy tapped out.

“Sorry ’bout your eye,” I said back in the dressing room. It was a deep cut, but he smiled and said,

“That’s okay, it’s good for the business.”

Lanza came up to us, his bad eye looking like a burned-out headlight, and swatted us on our asses with his clipboard, “Great, guys!”

Randy shot back, “Save it, Lanza!”

I thought the Japanese media would appreciate how I worked completely different matches with Macho, Yoko and Bam Bam, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to them. I thought back to Puerto Rico and couldn’t believe it’d been sixteen years since I was a naive kid sitting out on the rocks in the ocean promising myself that I’d make my mark in this crazy wrestling business. I owed so much to my old teacher, mentor and friend Mr. Hito. Upon arriving in Osaka, Owen and I went to visit him at his restaurant. He looked thin and beat up and I could see every dent and scar, but he was just as sharp as ever.

He cooked us up a Korean barbecue and while we talked I thought back to when he taught me the art of wrestling; how to fall, how to protect myself and how to protect the guy I worked with. When I thought about The Rockers breaking Chad Austin’s neck, it dawned on me that thanks to Hito, I’d never seriously injured a single wrestler. From what he said, it seemed Hito was wise enough to be content being an old dog chained to the porch, yet I sensed he really missed the way things used to be.

The night before the final show of the tour, I sat with a dog-faced 1-2-3 Kid in Sapporo. By the end of our one day off, we had grown tired of samurai soap operas. Restless at the hotel, we had ended up at a sleazy fuck show. Only a little while back I was bobbing around in the Dead Sea—how did I end up here?

Pretty Russian girls were lying on the stage rolling condoms over tiny thumblike dicks, getting fucked and giving blow jobs, while Japanese businessmen fingered them and laughed. It’s strange where people end up in life. A voice in my head reminded me that once upon a time I cut my head with a razor for $50 a night and thought nothing of it.

After the last show, we were bused straight from the arena to a chartered plane for an eight-hour flight to Guam. We all slept on the plane and ate only dry cucumber sandwiches that we washed down with beer. When we landed we were sent straight to the building like cattle. In the dressing room, wrestlers were flopped out on dirty floors, too tired to chow down on pizza. Owen and I spotted a fully stocked gym out back, and as wiped out as we were, we squeezed in an intense workout—we hadn’t seen a gym in two weeks.

More than once that night, I felt my legs buckle and go out from under me, but the crowd was so pumped up we couldn’t help but work hard for them.

After the show, we went straight back to the airport. All I remember of Guam is a few palm trees.

Back on the chartered plane, the only thing to eat was more pizza, with plenty of beer to wash it down. Like hungry animals we obliged. We crossed the International Date Line, and when we landed in Honolulu we lived the entire day of May 12, 1994, all over again—like Guam was just a dream.

Owen had turned twenty-nine a few days earlier, so I suggested to him that he stay over with me to celebrate in Hawaii. My two surfer dudes were waiting at baggage claim, only now there were three of them. Tate’s younger brother, Todd, had come along. While Owen and I always made a point of kayfabing, today would be a rare exception because the surfer dudes couldn’t care less about our storyline. We went straight to the beach, where we strapped on some life jackets and took off in a six-man rubber dinghy. The sun was high and bright, and waves splashed my hand as it hung over the side. Owen and I each held a beer, and he was as purely happy as I’d ever seen him, and then maybe so was I. After about a half hour we coasted close to the shore, ready to get back on land, when Chris decided he wanted to show us the barrier reef, where the ocean floor drops off a couple of miles off shore. A few minutes later he idled the dinghy and pointed to where the blue water fades to black and said, “That’s hundreds of feet deep.” Then the motor cut out. From the worried looks on the surfer dudes’ faces, I realized we were out of gas.

Tate kept asking Chris whether he thought he could swim ashore. Chris stood on his tiptoes and peered out at Waikiki, a couple of miles away. No sooner did Chris decide that he could do it than he changed his mind. He explained that there had been shark attacks in the area recently. We had no flares, no food, no drink, and we were drifting farther and farther out to sea.

Owen thought it was all a rib and just smiled at me.

“Owen, I’m not kidding.”

“Good try, Bret.”

After a half hour, when we really started to cook in the hot sun, it dawned on Owen that this was no joke. All we could do was hope that someone would rescue us, maybe the coast guard. Finally, Christian decided that waiting wasn’t going to get the job done and dove into the water. I feared for him, but he was a terrific swimmer. I reminded Owen of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets lost at sea, but Owen was in no mood for humor. Then I joked about what would happen if Owen and I were lost for several weeks. Perhaps we could even upstage the negative headlines about Vince and be seen as a welcome diversion! The whole wrestling world, along with our friends and families, would search everywhere for us and finally when we were rescued, when we would meet the onrush of reporters, Owen and I would kayfabe like the pros we were and persuade them that despite being lost at sea in a dinghy we still weren’t talking to each other! A smile started to break on Owen’s face, and we were both grinning as we caught sight of a motorboat speeding toward us carrying Chris waving a gas can. In no time we were safe on Waikiki beach.

Afterwards, Owen and I went back to the saltwater pool and gorged on fried chicken and cold beer.

That night, Taker was back on the card. He’d been home for a few months, and it was great to see him. After the show, Owen and I went back to kayfabing because there were too many fans around, but later on, like two colliding marching bands, the babyfaces and the heels ran into one another on a Honolulu street corner. Lost wrestlers. Ones like Owen, who were out long past their bedtimes.

Ones so cheap they wouldn’t blow their dough on beer or girls or expensive hotel rooms. And, of course, wild ones, who lived just for moments like this. Nobody had slept yet and delirium was setting in.

Taker had a grin on his face like Jack Nicholson when he got returned to the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We soon sat at a crowded strip bar with beautiful, naked girls prancing around us. Everyone was doing shots in honor of Owen’s birthday and Taker’s return.

I hugged Owen on a street corner just before he left for the airport. It was one of the few times I ever saw him celebrate; he was drunker than I could ever remember him being, smiling his face off, sunburned and swaying. I slapped him on the shoulder, “I’m happy for ya. Oje! ’Bout time you let your hair down.”

“I had such a great day,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.” And neither would I.

Hours later I lay in bed, the room spinning just a bit. I wasn’t expecting anything as the China doll I’d brought back to my room stared at the ocean from my balcony. She turned around casually unbuttoning her white blouse. I was captivated by her shy smile. As she worked my jeans off I looked deep into her catlike eyes. My lust was always stronger than my guilt.

I felt like I was being carried by a strong current in a fast river. With Owen and me headlining, Anaheim, San Jose, Chicago and New York did the best house show business since the glory days of Hulkamania. We were each making $7,000 to $10,000 a week. Even Martha stopped hating wrestling for a while.

We headed back to Europe at the end of May, landing in Nuremberg on May 29.

After the show that night, I asked one of the locals where there was a good rock ’n’ roll bar and he suggested a place called Lizard Lounge. I told Oscar, the manager from Men on a Mission, to meet me there, but when I showed up with Kid, my faithful sidekick of late, it turned out to be a heavy metal hangout with neo-Nazi skinheads guarding the door.

Then Oscar strolled through the front doors, oblivious to the slack jaws and scowls of the doormen.

When he said, “Wassup, Bret?” I told him to stay real close. Only then did he check out the place and realize he might as well have come to a Klan rally. But Oscar was a man, and he wasn’t going anywhere. So we had a few beers, and Oscar confided that he was afraid that something was going to go off between him and Shawn, Razor and Diesel, who’d made it clear that they didn’t like M.O.M. I told Oscar if it got serious to tell me and I’d keep an eye on things. Then Oscar shuffled out, nodding politely to the skinheads at the door, who nodded back dumbfounded, no doubt wondering whether he had brass balls or no brains!

By four in the morning, Kid and I were at the Green Goose, which was packed with American GIs and drunken WWF fans who spent every mark they had traveling from town to town partying every night with the touring wrestlers. Kamala’s former ring manager, Harvey Wippleman, had met an English fan in Germany and married her like she was a mail-order bride. Yoko, a big, fat bullfrog with a ponytail, sat perched on his lily pad, a cigarette hanging from his lips next to Mabel, black as coal and as big as a mountain. Which lucky girl would win their hearts? Diesel weaved his way toward me through the sweaty mob. Vince had just put the IC belt on him so he could work with me at King of the Ring. Since he’d come to the WWF, he had only been Shawn’s bodyguard, and he was worried about how he would handle our match. I liked Kevin and said I would do all that I could to make him look good. He told me that earlier that evening, Shawn and Razor got so wasted on pills and booze that some fans helped them back to the hotel and tucked them into their beds. The pill problem was getting dangerously out of control.