Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (91 page)

But all of it seemed irrelevant in the face of the fact that Antoine only had a few days left to live.

He’d bravely accepted it and smiled when he told me the first person he’d look for in heaven would be Owen. He joked about delivering any messages I might have and I told him, “Just tell Owen I miss him. Oh . . . and tell him I know it’s him ribbing us all.”

For three nights in a row, I visited Antoine in his hospital room until late in the evenings, talking about his girlfriend, the world and wrestling. When I told him stories about Owen’s pranks, he laughed until he cried and it really filled my heart.

Everywhere I went, the people of Montreal apologized for what happened to me with Vince in their city, but they had nothing to apologize for. Montreal had always been very good to me.

Death and sadness weighed me down, and for no damn reason at all I ended up at a strip bar.

Montreal’s beautiful and skillful nude dancers were without a doubt the best in the world, and I lost myself in their moves. The boss welcomed me and played Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best” as a compliment. I smiled at the memory of how Jim and I had hung our tag belts over the perfect breasts of two French beauties back in our old Hart Foundation days.

A few days later, back in Calgary, I got the call that Antoine had died. I was only privileged to know him for a short time, but I’ll never forget him.

Ellie and Jim were making headlines of their own, with the police now breaking up their shouting matches; she had served him with a restraining order. Jim had been hired on by Vince as a talent scout, and sometimes we’d meet up to drink a few beers and I’d help him fabricate names for the scouting report he’d send on to Jim Ross. There were many who wondered why I never had any problems with Jim after Owen’s death. Why would I have had problems? Jim never once made any comment about Owen’s case, which is all that Martha ever asked of the family.

My mom, who’d only just recovered from a blood clot and an irregular heartbeat, told me that tragedy and greed were what made some of my siblings react irrationally. To my mind, the Hart family had turned into The Jerry Springer Show: Davey, whom Bruce had taken in, had just become involved with Bruce’s wife, Andrea, who’d feuded with Diana for years. Poor Bruce was now having loud shouting matches with Davey, with the police never far behind.

The stress of it all took its toll on Stu. He was soon hospitalized with pneumonia. Then Davey overdosed on morphine. Then one of the grandkids accidentally burned Katie’s place behind Hart house down! Even Lana, the old, crippled pit bull, keeled over dead. The Harts were simply drowning under waves of grief.

Martha was anxious to put all the heartache behind her and start a charitable foundation in Owen’s name. Then Ellie admitted in her deposition in the lawsuit that she did, in fact, take legal documents from my mom and dad and faxed them right to Vince’s lawyers, including the allocation agreement.

No one knew what the ramifications of this would be, and there was concern that the trial could be delayed because of it.

Of course, this led to another furious meltdown between me and Ellie, especially when my mom tearfully told me that my dad had given $6,000 of the money I’d given to help them out to Ellie. My temper got the best of me and I hurled one of Stu’s antique chairs into a wall, shattering it to pieces.

After that blowup, Ellie left me a phone message. “I haven’t done anything, Bret. You won’t get the satisfaction that you ultimately wanted from Vince over Montreal and a bunch of lawyers are getting the money. Mom and Dad should be able to get on with their lives. I don’t know what makes you think that you’re such a genius. Maybe you need to rethink things, Bret. I know it will never be right between me and you and I don’t really care, but the one I do feel bad about is Martha, but I’m sure all of this will work out for Martha and I pray to God that it does. I haven’t done anything except stand my ground and what I said right from the very start, that we should try and work this out, because the only ones that are going to win are a bunch of lawyers and it’s going to rip the family apart, and it has. At least you know my point of view and respect it.”

I was asked to show up at Nitro in Las Cruces on August 28, where I saw Bill Goldberg for the first time since he nearly cut his own arm off breaking that car window. He hugged me and told me how sorry he was about my concussion. I had no doubt about that—Bill was a good man. Unfortunately, he’d been pushed too fast and didn’t understand his brute strength.

That night we both followed the insane booking angles: I hit Goldberg with a rubber shovel and pretended to bury him alive in the New Mexico desert. Maybe he should have been burying me for real: Dr. M called to tell me the verdict was in. It was official: I’d never wrestle again.

I went home and waited for Dr. Johnston to second Dr. M’s opinion before I said anything to WCW.

As Bob Dylan wrote, It’s when you think you’ve lost everything that you find out you can always lose a little more. He was so right.

WCW had me show up on September 4 for Dallas Nitro just to slam Goldberg’s head with a cage door. The following night at Thunder, a WCW angle reduced my very real concussion into a silly storyline when they had me go face-to-face with Goldberg in the middle of the ring. I was slurring my words for real, following the script to whine about how he hurt me, when a wave of emotion came over me as I realized that nobody was getting it: Everyone, including all the fans, thought I was just acting like I was concussed. Then the big screen played the definitive camera angle of Goldberg’s foot plowing into my head, one that I’d never seen before. The crowd laughed and jeered me as Goldberg dressed me down verbally. Afterwards, I felt like a whore as I remembered the devastating impact of Goldberg’s foot connecting with my head, reinforced by what I’d seen up on the big screen. And I’d let them exploit it for ratings.

At the end of the month, I returned to Montreal for more brain injury tests. When I was done, Antoine’s bereaved parents picked me up and had me over for a home-cooked meal.

46

PISSING GOD OFF

I’D BEEN A STEADY HORSE all these years. Since being hurt, I’d done everything WCW asked of me, yet they’d cut my pay, then cut it again. Now, like a limping circus pony, I waited for the end. It came on October 19, 2000, when J.J. Dillon called with the bad news. His voice cracked, and I knew it hurt him to tell me, though I could still feel the stick gently prodding me out the flap at the back of the circus tent. Twenty-three years and it’s all over.

FedEx delivered my termination letter: “Based on your wrestling incapacity WCW is exercising its right to terminate your independent contractor agreement effective October 20, 2000. . . . Your contributions to the wrestling business are highly regarded and we wish you only the best in the future.”

Then I read a letter I’d just received from a young fan by the name of Rosalie. I’d received thousands of fan letters over the years, many similar to hers. Maybe it was the timing, but none quite touched me like this one did:

I’m writing a letter to tell you how much you have meant to me. I want to tell you that you were the reason I first started watching wrestling and I basically grew up watching you. . . . It’s unbelievable how much of the Hitman character helped shape the person I am today. . . . I saw how you never, ever gave up. . . . What I learned from The Hitman was to work hard, to never give up and most importantly to have confidence in yourself. Those beliefs may sound corny but when you are a ten-year-old kid growing up in a broken home where you are constantly being told how worthless you are those beliefs can be a positive thing. I remember looking in the mirror as a teenager and saying, Rosalie, you are the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. . . .

I’m in third-year university, studying chemical engineering right now. . . . The Hitman was the catalyst that has got me where I am today. . . . I heard somewhere that celebrities shouldn’t be a child’s hero, that heroes should be people who are real. Well, sometimes the people in a child’s life can’t be heroes. The child may have to look else-where. I’m not ashamed to say that you were my hero. It just breaks my heart to hear the rumors about you retiring soon. I don’t want to believe it because I don’t want to let you go. I have been watching you wrestle for as long as I can remember and it’ll be so strange when you’re gone. Seeing you retire, letting you go, would be like saying good-bye to a very dear friend who I will never know if I will see again. . . .

I plan to make enough money one day to buy a house. I’ll hang my framed autographed picture of you and when friends and family come over I’ll tell them about you. How much I respect you and when I’m old and gray I will still remember you and I’ll tell my grandkids how you were my hero.

Wrestling will never be the same without you but on a positive side, I wish you all the happiness in the world. You will always hold a special place in my heart. Yours Truly, Rosalie On November 3, an elated Martha called to tell me that, after the many bumps in the road caused by Ellie, she had settled with Vince. I have to admit I was more than a little hurt when she told me she couldn’t tell me the amount because she’d sworn an oath not to reveal it. When I asked her if she ever found out exactly what happened and who was responsible for Owen’s death, she meekly offered up, “He just fell.”

The more we talked, the more disappointed I became, especially when I remembered what she said in her eulogy. “There will be a day of reckoning and this is my final promise to Owen. I won’t let him down.”

I asked her if she and the lawyers at least tried to get back my photo and video archives from Vince.

She told me Pam Fischer said the issue wasn’t important enough even to bring up. When I hung up the phone, I called Marcy; she’d just heard the news through her media contacts that Martha settled for $18 million.

The next morning I read Martha’s comments about the Harts in the paper. “These people worked against me . . . I am removing myself and my children from the family. I carry the last name, but I’m not related to them anymore. People need to know that Owen was a white sheep in a black family.”

After that, she called me again, and I told her point blank that I felt she’d completely used me and I didn’t appreciate the way she painted us all with the same brush. I couldn’t see why Martha had to hurt my whole family. While she’d been quick to praise me, she was quite venomous to my mother, who’d stood by her throughout all the family struggles. It didn’t seem to matter to Martha that Owen was my mother’s son. When Martha started to cry I forgave her, because I knew she felt she had no choice but to settle after Ellie had derailed the case, but what she had said was not about the money ended up being about the money.

Just before Christmas I was called to testify in a court proceeding on Smith’s behalf. Over the years he’d fathered an unknown number of kids by different mothers, none of whom he took responsibility for. But he wanted custody of Chad, whose mother had died, and whom he was relying on Stu and Helen to raise. They were getting on in years and after twelve kids of their own, and forty-something grandchildren, they were burned out. My con-science told me it was more important to be a good uncle than a good brother, and sadly I couldn’t endorse Smith as a responsible father. Smith took this as an unforgivable be-trayal. So now I had one more estranged sibling out to get me. Christmas that year was probably the worst one my mother ever lived through: Everyone seemed hell-bent on making my ailing parents sorry they ever had twelve kids. Bruce had his problems; Davey, who was still with Andrea, managed to score more headlines when he supposedly made death threats to Diana. I, of course, had serious heat with Ellie, Diana, Bruce and now Smith. Ellie saw fit to blame the meltdown in the family on me, telling the media that she believed it was more important to me to make life unpleasant for Vince McMahon than to be loyal to them.

Then Carlo called to give me the big news that he had personally structured a WWF takeover of WCW. He laughed at how Vince got the organization, including the entire film library of not only WCW, but the NWA, for just half a million. I didn’t let on to Carlo how much it bothered me that Vince now owned every inch of footage of my career, with the exception of Stampede Wrestling. But the wrestling war that broke out in 1984 was finally over, and for all intents and purposes Vince now monopolized the business.

The Governor General’s office called on Valentine’s Day with the much-needed good news that Stu would be invested as a Member of the Order of Canada on May 31. My mom wanted me to accompany them to Ottawa for the ceremony, but when Stu’s pneumonia landed him back in the hospital for much of April, we wondered if he’d be able to make it. I did my best to avoid any more confrontations with opposing family members. I’d spent the winter coming back from my concussion, watching Blade play hockey; I also started working on this book. Ever since I’d gone to work for the WWF I’d carried a tape recorder with me all over the world, recording a diary of my life.

I just kept thinking, This will make a hell of a book some-day, and it seemed to me that the time had come.

One night I had a dream that I had WWF’s current World Champion, Kurt Angle, in a tight headlock.

In the dream, I asked myself if it was really happening, and to figure out if it was real or not, I stared at the sweat dripping off his head and then focused on the blue fabric of the ring canvas. In my dream I concluded it was not a dream, and when I woke up, for the first and only time I really missed working.

Carlo invited me to the WWF show in Calgary on May 28. I told him I’d like to meet Kurt Angle and Brock Lesner, but I wasn’t comfortable going to Raw so close to the second anniversary of Owen’s death. Why the WWF insisted on running shows in Calgary each May I’ll never know. It infuriated Martha and lit a fuse to the powder keg at Hart house.

Carlo knew I was still extremely sensitive about what Vince had done to me, but he passed on the message that Vince wanted me to know that he didn’t hate me: If I wanted to come down to the show he’d be more than happy to shake my hand. But the problem wasn’t him hating me anymore—