Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (92 page)

it was me hating him. Aside from sticking it in my eye every chance he got, he’d destroyed the harmony of the Hart family, for which I was being blamed.

Carlo then asked me about Stu’s health, saying that Ellie, Diana and Bruce desperately wanted Stu to be on TV to show the world that the Hart family had made peace with the WWF. He said that they had requested five hundred free tickets to the show—they didn’t get them, of course—and didn’t seem to see the absurdity of the situation. As soon as I hung up the phone, I drove down to Stu’s. I was relieved when he told me through gritted teeth that he didn’t want to go to Raw, but that he was being made to go.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, and I’ll be here to make sure of it!” I said. But Ellie, Diana and Bruce were more than determined to see that Stu should go. Meanwhile, in another chapter of our public soap opera, Martha told the media that she would be deeply offended if any of the family went to the WWF show, which only put added pressure on my parents to fix something that couldn’t be fixed.

May 28, 2001. If the show is to start in the evening, the talent usually arrives at the building in the afternoon. When I got to Stu’s house at ten that morning, I thought I was in more than enough time to spare him from going to the Calgary Raw. But I was too late: Ellie and Bruce had dragged him off at eight o’clock in the morning. I’d hear later that Diana and Bruce wheeled him into Vince’s office like a battering ram, then commenced a heated argument over who could make their pitch to Vince first. But Vince was so busy with TV, he soon had them cleared out of his office.

As upset as I was, I told my mom that it would do Stu good to see the boys in the dressing room. But I thought it would break my heart if they paraded him out on Raw—the public would think that Stu had forgiven Vince for everything.

I didn’t go down to the Saddledome. Tears came to my eyes as I watched the opening of the live show at home on TV: there was a clearly tired, deflated and demoralized Stu sitting in the front row with Ellie, Diana, Georgia, Bruce and Smith, who grinned as he held up a big sign that read, HA HA BRET.

At the end of the show, Vince stuck his big, fat, salty thumb in my eye as far as he could by reenacting the Survivor Series screwjob finish, in Calgary, right in front of my father, as he played the corrupt promoter who rang the bell as Benoit had Stone Cold in my sharp-shooter. I drove down to Stu’s and burst into my mom’s bedroom. Rage filled me as I denounced every single one of them for doing this to me—I was through with them all. I didn’t know how to forgive any of them. I stomped down the stairs and took both Owen’s and my childhood photos off the wall, leaving two white dusty blanks. I slammed the kitchen door as I left and burned rubber out of the yard, feeling every bit as betrayed as I did the day Vince ordered poor Mark Yeaton to ring the bell.

The next morning, Bruce drove an eighty-six-year-old Stu three hours north to the Smackdown taping in Edmonton and put him through the whole thing again. Both Benoit and Jericho called me, concerned about Stu’s health and state of exhaustion.

Even though I’d looked forward to going to Ottawa to see Stu receive the Order of Canada, I was so offended by everything that had happened I chose not to go. As a result, I missed something that I had my heart set on. By June, I realized how it was wrong to punish my parents for being used by my brothers and sisters. Stu and Helen were both broken-hearted by my absence so, after a couple of weeks, I showed up and put the pictures back up on the wall. Then I went upstairs and wrapped my arms around my mom and, as I felt her shake with emotion, I silently loathed my brothers and sisters for doing this to her. I felt so sorry for all of us. I couldn’t help but feel as though I was free-falling into a bottomless pit of despair. If I’d had to write a will, it would have been a few lines, but if I’d had to write a suicide note, it would have been a thousand pages long.

Throughout that summer, whenever I pulled into Stu’s yard, Ellie and Diana would race out of the house and flee in their cars. But in a lot of little ways, I told myself, things hadn’t changed too much.

There was always a ring full of grandkids wrestling out in the yard, dogs and cats everywhere, a fresh pot of tea and five or ten young wannabe wrestlers taking bumps in the dungeon.

On a hot July afternoon, I opened my car door, my sidekick Coombs jumped out and together we went in search of my mom. I followed his snorts all the way into her office and gave her a big hug.

She was never that crazy about dogs, but her mother, Gah-Gah, absolutely adored pugs. I soon had her laughing, and telling me stories. One of her favorites was about the time I lost my hug. One of her childhood friends from New York, who went by the name Little Helen (because she was even tinier than my mom, which wasn’t that easy to be), came to visit when I was about three. She was getting hugs from everybody, but when it came to my turn, I was too shy to hug a stranger. She jokingly asked, “Where’s my hug?” My eyes got big and I told her, “I lost it.” For the whole week she was there, I pretended I was still looking for it. Luckily for her I found it on her last day!

Despite these attempts to cheer her up, I could tell my mom was really upset. Finally she told me that she’d read a draft of a tell-all book that Diana had coming out soon. Diana had got Stu to write the foreword without him reading the manuscript. My mom was so upset because, unbeknownst to Stu, he had endorsed a book that trashed his own family. She was trying desperately to cheer herself up, thinking of the reunion she was about to have with her sisters in California. I was thinking, Diana, what have you done?

In September, I went to Australia to promote a tour for a fellow named Andrew McManus who had a new wrestling outfit called WWA. He asked me to help put them on the map by playing a non-wrestling role as their figurehead Commissioner. I enjoyed helping out the smaller promotions whenever I could, as a way of giving back to the business that’d given me so much. It did give me the opportunity to visit Australia, though; I’d never been there before, and I was having a great time.

My concussion was finally beginning to clear, though I still wasn’t allowed to lift weights or do any other form of exercise. On September 12, 2001, in Australia I’d just done a live night-time talk show with a host named Rove and was thrilled with how it had gone. I headed back to my hotel room and met some of the wrestlers from the tour in the elevator. They told me somebody had flown an airplane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. When I got to my room I watched in horror, with the rest of the world, as the second plane hit. I stared at the TV all night with a deep sadness that heaped itself on the pain and hurt I already carried around.

I loved New York. She’d been good to me. I always thought of the New York skyline as a beautiful girl smiling at me. Now she had broken teeth; they’d really done a job on her. It was still hard for me to imagine a horror and sorrow beyond Owen, and I wondered what he’d have thought. I thought of home and how devastated my mom would be watching this on TV. She and Stu still remembered the impact of Pearl Harbor, and how out of that catastrophe and the war that followed, they met and fell in love on a beach on Long Island, New York.

Being in Australia made it all so surreal, as if it wasn’t surreal enough already. I was stranded in Melbourne until there were flights to take me back to North America. I remember walking over to the Melbourne Aquarium, where I watched sharks and stingrays float over my head in giant glass tanks.

I couldn’t help thinking that if anything ever happened to me, I’d still want it known that I wouldn’t change anything about my life. A voice in my head kept telling me to live and live and live.

When I finally got back to Calgary, a week late, I learned that my poor mom had been delayed at LAX

for an entire day because of the heightened security, and that her diabetes medicine had been in her checked luggage. The way I see it, Osama bin Laden also caused my mother’s death. After getting home exhausted, she collapsed into a coma that she never really came out of. Poor Stu was distraught over not calling an ambulance for my mother as soon as she got sick. I don’t think he ever got over that. He had been too weak and disabled to pick her frail body up from the floor.

Diana’s book came out at the same time. The opening paragraph described Davey drugging and sodomizing her, and it went downhill from there. Diana told ridiculous stories about there being a wrestling alligator in the basement, about her friendship with André The Giant and her stardom in the WWF. She even ripped into close family friends such as Ed Whalen, saying he was no good at his job and stole Stu’s thunder. When Diana hit the talk shows promoting her book, even the affable Mike Bullard, who referred to me as a Canadian hero, treated her with sarcasm. When I realized how truly clueless Diana was about the way people were reacting, I actually felt sorry for her. I’d later hear that Diana was misled by the woman who actually wrote the book, and embroidered Diana’s stories. Was I to assume that Diana was not even capable of reading her own book to approve its release?

Meanwhile in the ICU, my mom’s baby sister, my aunt Diana, told my sister she didn’t appreciate some of the remarks in the book. My sister snapped back at her, “My mother never even liked you!”

Meanwhile, thirty feet away, my poor mom lingered on.

For days, the doctors pulled every trick in the book to bring her back to life. She suffered immeasurably with IV tubes in her arms and a respirator tube down her throat. She finally came out of it just enough to breathe on her own, barely. Too weak to talk, she could only squeeze my hand.

One time she came around enough to faintly whisper, “How’s Coombs?”

I knew she had to be hating all this, and was surely cursing the doctors for keeping her alive. At three-thirty in the morning of November 4, 2001, with Stu holding her hand, she slipped away and found the peace she so long deserved. At that very moment I was lying awake in bed. I said out loud,

“I’m so sorry, Mom, that the light grew so dim at the end.” I felt a soft breeze sweep over me and I just knew it was my mom saying good-bye.

Only weeks after Ed Whalen gave a heartfelt eulogy at my mom’s funeral, he also passed away.

In January 2002, Tie Domi came to town for a game and we headed up to Hart house to visit my dad.

Tie was a compact man with a head that looked like it was chiseled out of granite; he was generally regarded as the toughest guy in hockey. I called Stu to let him know we were coming, and when we got there, he was waiting for us all alone in his spot at the head of the dining-room table. Tie was dressed in a nice, neat suit. As we approached, Stu turned, stared at him and said, “You got an interesting head on ya.” We all burst out laughing. If anybody had seen a lot of strange heads, it was Stu.

A few minutes later, Stu had Tie bent back over the table, trying to show him how he could pull another player in close and stick his chin into the guy’s eye socket and trip him backwards on the ice.

Stu had Tie half twisted up with cat hair all over his nice slacks. After about an hour, I finally got Tie out of there. He told me later that the move Stu showed him would probably work in a hockey fight, if he dared take a chance on it.

On February 27, Carlo called me wanting me to do a trade-off: If I’d referee at Wrestlemania XVIII, Vince would give me some pictures to use for this book. This was only the latest in a constant stream of attempts to get me back on Vince’s TV shows. It was damage control; in the end, even guys who’d left on the worst possible terms always went back to Vince. I did want a truce with Vince, but I also wanted a public apology, one that Carlo told me I’d never get. I thought of my nephews, Harry and Ted, and even T.J. Wilson, who all dreamed about someday wrestling in the big time. I didn’t want my animosity toward Vince to jeopardize everything they dreamed of, but I had no intention of showing up at Wrestlemania as a referee. I told Carlo all I really wanted was a meeting with Vince to clear the air between us.

The following day Carlo and Bruce Allen got me on a conference call and did their best to bully me into believing that it would be in my best interest to referee at Wrestlemania. They set up a meeting in New York City a few days later, but when I was packing to leave, Carlo called to say that if I wasn’t going to agree to do Wrestlemania I shouldn’t bother to show up—I’d only be wasting his and Vince’s time. I asked him to tell me if he truly thought that refereeing at Wrestlemania was the right thing for me to do. He thought he had the hook in my lip as he went on about how this would be fantastic for me. Now I knew he was nothing but a company man. I refused.

On May 18 that year, the Grim Reaper of wrestling took Davey. He was vacationing in Invermere, British Columbia, with Andrea and died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. Andrea was Davey’s girl at the end, even though she and Bruce were still married.

There were two funerals for Davey. Diana called to ask me to give a eulogy at the one she organized and I agreed, but first I attended the service Andrea put together. Poor Andrea was crying hard, and I was glad I made it there for her. I saw some of the old Stampede crew, including Ben Bassarab, who was one of Davey’s closest mates, and his new wife, who was also very nice. But Bad News, Gerry Morrow and Gamma Singh snubbed me. They were all down and out, working security jobs together: None of them even talked to me. What did I ever do to them? I asked myself, and then I knew—I didn’t go broke.

Diana timed her memorial service for Davey for May 29, the same day the WWF was in town. Vince, Hogan and others came. Ellie, who spoke just before me, ripped into poor Andrea with a vengeance.

Wrong place, wrong time, awkward silence. Eventually one of the funeral home staff eased her away from the podium. I rose to clean up her mess and to give Davey a fitting send-off, which left both Harry and his baby sister Georgia smiling with tears in their eyes. I loved Davey like a brother. His biggest mistake was letting bad people influence his innocent heart. I spoke of how I remembered him best as that shy, handsome kid with the big dimples.