Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (8 page)

That same trip, a new wrestler from England was making his first loop around the territory. Bruce had discovered Tom Billington, raving that he was the most incredible wrestler he’d ever seen.

Billington called himself The Dynamite Kid.

At that time, the business was filled with big, heavy men. Dynamite stood a mere five-foot-eight and was lucky if he weighed 170 pounds. He was two years younger than I was, with a pale, angular face and sandy blond hair. Out of the ring, he wore mod Brit clothes. In the land of ring giants, he suffered from small man’s complex, which would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was clean cut and he didn’t smoke or drink, yet. None of the big heels wanted to work with him, let alone put him over, and he looked like he was sorry he’d ever let Bruce talk him into coming to work for our dad.

But he said nothing.

Always the professional, The Cuban finally obliged and put Dynamite over for his debut week, a favor Tom would never forget. I watched him do a match filled with fancy flips and rolls, stuff that I doubted I could ever do, and thought I’d like to work with him one day and learn what I could. But he kept his distance.

A week later, Keith made the trip to Regina and asked me whether I could fill in again, working a simple babyface match against Paddy Ryan. Knowing Paddy’s experience and style, I had little to worry about. But the card was switched around at the last minute because Dynamite’s opponent, Steve Novak, a big, bearded 280-pound slob, refused to work with him, let alone put him over. Keith had no choice but to match me up with Dynamite. I had already worked out a nice paint-by-numbers match with Paddy and knew I was nowhere near experienced enough to go out and do Dynamite’s Brit style of flips and rolls. “Keith, you promised me Paddy. Maybe you should wrestle Dynamite. You have a lot more experience than I do.” Dynamite took it the wrong way, thinking I didn’t want to work with him either. And Keith stood firm.

I laced up my bright red boots and pulled on my red trunks, all the while talking to Dynamite about the one or two things that I did know how to do. If I thought he was grateful for my honesty, I was wrong. Dynamite stiffed me from bell to bell, to the delight of the fans. For no apparent reason, he elbow-smashed me in the face and broke my nose. The blood probably saved the match. I blamed the bad match on the situation, not on myself, but I also felt that he was less than professional and vowed to be a bit more careful the next time we worked together.

A couple of days later, Smith and Bruce were talking over their upcoming trip to Puerto Rico. Bruce suddenly had a change of heart about going with Smith, but the plane tickets had already been purchased by the promoter, and they were both expected to be there.

What I didn’t know was that my parents had arranged the trip to get Smith out of their hair for a while. A few years earlier they’d sent him off to Japan to learn how to wrestle; they thought a good dose of Japanese discipline wouldn’t hurt either. He lived in a dojo and was forced to train hard: The Japanese were the toughest, most serious teachers in wrestling. He was ordered to clean and scrub down the mats and to wash the backs of his superiors, who beat the backs of his legs with a bamboo stick when he failed to do a thousand squats as ordered. Every time he called begging to come home, my parents told him to hang in there. Nine months into it, Smith had got really drunk on sake and run buck-naked through a Japanese hotel lobby and crashed right through a plate-glass window.

The Japanese police were looking everywhere for him as two equally crazy wrestlers from New Zealand, known as The Kiwis, hid him in their hotel room. Smith was shipped home the next day. He couldn’t have been happier. My parents couldn’t have been unhappier; they’d wanted Smith out of their hair awhile longer.

I think that one trip to Japan destroyed what little spirit was left in Smith’s tortured soul. He was never really the same after that.

Bruce didn’t trust the setup in Puerto Rico. So he suggested I take his place. Times were simpler then and the plane tickets simply said S. Hart and B. Hart. I’d heard the Puerto Rican horror stories. A kid from Edmonton called Kim Klokeid, who broke in with my older brothers, had a black belt in karate.

He went to Puerto Rico as a big, blond 250-pound heel, and when he made his debut, the crowd went berserk and rioted. Kim wasn’t afraid of much. He climbed the corner post and dove into the fans only to have one of them carve a giant L in his guts with a knife. He was lucky to leave there with his life, and he never wrestled again.

Smith pleaded with me to go. A few hours later we were on a plane heading for Puerto Rico.

My dad had given the Puerto Rican promoters, Carlos Colón and Victor Jovica, their first break in the business, and they’d stayed with him for five years. Colón was a great worker and had a good mind for the business. Once upon a time he’d been a hand-some kid; now his forehead was scarred with thousands of razor cuts, and he was as ugly as they came. I vividly remembered the great bloody matches he had with Abdullah The Butcher.

Colón’s business partner, Victor Jovica, was a horrible wrestler, but he’d built up a nest egg from various investments. The two of them had put their heads together and hatched a dream of opening their own wrestling company in Puerto Rico, Capital Wrestling. They were on the brink of folding for good when they shot an angle using a veteran Stampede wrestler from Thunder Bay called Bad Boy Gilbert Hayes, pitting him against Terrible Ted, the wrestling bear. To their utter amazement it popped the territory, and Bad Boy Gil became their hottest heel. They never looked back after that, and Puerto Rico became a gold mine. Once they started making money, the WWWF tried to steal the territory away from them, but eventually they feared no one, not even WWWF owner Vince McMahon Sr. Then Gil, who had more balls than brains, had a falling out with Colón and threatened to walk. Carlos beat him nearly to death in the dressing room.

Puerto Rico was a dangerous place to work if you were a heel because the fans were so hot-blooded.

The promotion employed mostly Latin American and American wrestlers who couldn’t get booked stateside, or anywhere else, along with the occasional big-name WWWF headliner. Stu often traded talent with Jovica and Colón because neither he nor the Puerto Ricans paid much; Puerto Rico could be murderous, while Calgary could be murderously cold. But we thought Carlos and Victor would take good care of Stu’s boys.

There was no one to greet us when we arrived in San Juan. We had little money and no idea where to go until the Capital Wrestling office opened in the morning. Smith and I slept on the filthy airport floor using our bags as pillows.

Once we checked in with the office, we ended up at the Tanama Hotel, a dump where only the bottom-end wrestlers stayed. Smith and I were each making U.S.$300 a week, and I was intent on getting back to Calgary with enough money to put a down payment on a house of my own.

The Tanama was a real shithole, situated across a river from an overcrowded prison full of violent criminals. The air-conditioning in our room didn’t work, and we were too naive for it to occur to us to change rooms. We relied on the ceiling fan, which didn’t work too well either, so we opened our windows and slept fitfully every night in the sweltering heat, listening to sirens from the prison and vicious fights among the prostitutes on the street below our windows. The very first night we heard what sounded like gunshots and somebody groaning—I was too scared to look. All the while the steady thumping beat of salsa music and Barry Manilow singing “Copa Cabana” drifted up from the disco joints. What had I got myself into?

My second mistake, after the one about agreeing to come, was thinking I should stay away from Latin food and water. I walked down to a Burger King to get some American food, where I met a friendly Puerto Rican kid who introduced himself as Kikay. He spoke good English and he wanted to take me to a fiesta. I told him I couldn’t leave my brother behind, so he came back to the Tanama with me. Off we all went to a small carnival with Ferris wheels. Smith said Kikay was dying to get into my pants, but I should be nice to him because it might be useful to know someone who had a car. I didn’t believe it.

Our room was an oven, and by morning I was drenched in sweat—and sick with the runs. By the time our ride picked us up for our first show, I was weak and dizzy. Luckily, Chief Thundercloud and his son Chewie both spoke English and had a cheap but reliable car. Chewie was a few years older than I was, but he was too small to wrestle. All the way to Ponce I fought not to shit my pants right there in the car. To my dismay, the highways were littered every hundred feet or so with dead dogs that had their legs pointing straight up in the air. The narrow, winding road added to my nausea.

My match was with a big American by the name of Mike York, a heavyset clodhopper of a wrestler who had a thick, black beard and hair all over his body. The ring wasn’t covered with canvas but with cheap, slippery blue vinyl, made more hazardous by puddles of sweat mixed with baby oil, the residue of previous matches. Mike was a clumsy freight train, but he did all he could to take care of me. Hito had been right. I just started doing all the moves I’d seen, including an explosive comeback.

But as I found myself jumping up to hit Mike with a drop kick, my feet hit a slippery spot and I crashed down on my shoulder. “I’m hurt, Mike,” I said. “We better go home.”

To end the match, he got me onto my feet, grabbed me, spun me upside down and gave me a shoulder breaker across his knee. I knew I was in good hands because he dropped me on my good shoulder. Then he covered me and panted in my ear, “Sorry, brother, thanks for the match.”

I headed back to the dressing room, holding my shoulder, as the crowd gave me a round of applause. Dammit! What lousy luck to get hurt my first night! When I told Carlos, he simply said,

“You’re tough,” as he chomped on a cigar. He expected Smith and me to hit the ring in the main event that night to help save him and another Puerto Rican wrestler from some heels. I said I’d do whatever I could, and I wandered out to the concession stand to find some ice for my shoulder.

Stu Hart’s kid or not, nobody gave a damn about me here. I clamped a leaky bag of ice to my shoulder and was standing in agony next to Smith when somebody yelled, “Andale! Andale!

Andale!” The place suddenly went insane. I started for the ring, and then I stopped. “I’m not getting killed out there!” Smith agreed.

The arena floor was a tangle of rioters and police beating them back with batons. Chairs flew through the air like rain, and Carlos and his partner were covered in blood, begging for mercy as they were clobbered by two heels, Frenchie Martin and Fidel Castillo, who had steel chains wrapped around their fists. People were crying real tears. Finally, to everyone’s relief, The Masked Invader arrived on the scene, and in seconds he was helping Carlos and his partner fight their way back through the sea of people.

As Frenchie and Fidel came toward me, their eyes were wild and filled with terror. They held metal chairs over their heads like shields as irate fans lunged at them. I didn’t see any knives, but I knew they were out there, and I could hear metal clanging off the chairs as the fury of the fans boiled over.

In the midst of the riot, I noticed a young, blond American couple wearing Bermuda shorts and golf shirts, and holding hands, immobilized by the fights raging around them. The referee, a quiet little fellow called Hammer, was also fighting for his life, blindly swinging a steel chair, deflecting unidentified flying objects and attacking fans. He was backing his way toward the two Americans. My first instinct was to intervene, but they were more than thirty feet away, and I would never have made it. Hammer swung full force as he turned, smashing his chair over the blond man’s head. The man fell to the floor, his girl beside him, helpless and terrified. Now I understood why Bruce had stayed home.

Back in the hotel room, Smith was sick too, and we took turns racing to the toilet and sweating on our grungy beds. My shoulder was killing me, and I couldn’t raise my arm. Tiny gnats landed on us incessantly; they seemed harmless enough, so we just rubbed them out. The street sounds filtered up, sirens wailed, and it turned out the little gnats weren’t so harmless after all: For weeks we were covered in festering boils. Smith and I took turns with a pair of tweezers plucking at the eruptions on our arms and chests, leaving big pink craters.

Because of my shoulder, I had no choice but to miss a full week of bookings until I recovered. Smith went on alone. I went one more time to the farmacia. I’d already tried everything they’d told me to do, and I pleaded with the chemist, saying that I was very ill. I was skin and bones compared to when I’d left home. He felt sorry for me and gave me some white pills in a small paper bag, enough for Smith and me. I thanked him and paid him. I have no idea what kind of pills they were, but I was so desperate I took them anyway.

When the week was over, I had no choice but to go to work again. I told Smith to let Jovica and Colón start booking me, but only in tag matches for now. Smith found some marijuana, which helped our dysentery. High as a kite, I drew caricatures of some of Smith’s fucked-up friends from back home; it felt good to see him laugh.

We hit the beach in our free time, and stayed in the sun too long. We were ill, we were taking bumps every night, we couldn’t sleep; the sunburn was just one more thing.

But we didn’t take any more chances with food. The upscale La Concha Hotel, a few blocks away, catered to American tourists. They had an all-you-can-eat buffet that opened at noon. At U.S.$18 a head, it was pricey for us, but the food was worth every penny. Every day, we’d wait until they opened, and we’d gorge. Smith would stuff himself. For my amusement he’d struggle to his feet holding his hand to the seat of his pants, then stagger to the men’s room while the tuxedoed waiters fell over laughing. He would come out smiling ten minutes later, flailing his arms and doing deep knee bends, and then he’d grab another plate, load it up and head back to our table. The waiters and I would be in tears.