Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (93 page)

I’m sorry, Bax, I thought, I should have been there for ya.

When I arrived at Hart house after the service, I was simmering with a lot of pent-up emotion. It was extremely hot in the kitchen. When I asked my dad how he felt, he told me he was tired and he didn’t feel up to going to the WWF show. But then Ellie came in, and I could tell by the way he pursed his lips that she was dragging him down to the show.

I told Ellie, “He’s tired. Clearly, he doesn’t want to go. Look at him.”

She snapped that Vince had invited him, like that was more important than his health.

In a flash, we had broken into a vicious yelling match, where I ripped into her for embarrassing the whole family at Davey’s funeral. “We were supposed to pay our respects, not take shots,” I said.

Soon my sister Georgia and Ellie’s eldest daughter, Jenny, took up for Ellie and while I was arguing with them, Ellie dragged Stu down the steps and zoomed off.

I felt terrible about the fight, realizing that the stress of everything was getting to me. Harry, now a strapping six-foot-five with Davey’s dimples, came up to me then, thanked me for my words at the funeral.

I was carrying around anger, torment, regret and grief like a big bag of heavy rocks.

I’d been asked to dress like Mordecai Richler’s character The Hooded Fang and deliver a monologue from his children’s book, Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang, on a CBC special celebrating Richler’s life. On Thursday, June 20, I brought Julie to Montreal with me for the show. I was happy to be part of a cast including Richard Dreyfuss, Montreal Canadiens legend Jean Beliveau and several prominent stage and literary notables, but I’d let myself get really worried about how I’d do. I still had a thick, fuzzy head and concentration problems, and this show was live to tape. I studied the script for weeks.

I slipped a black wrestling mask over my head. When I looked in the mirror, it seemed like I was living my dream of working a crowd as my childhood cartoon wrestling character The Cool Cool Killer—or close enough anyway. Despite a last-second glitch with my mic as I walked on stage, I carried the role off. Halfway through my monologue I pulled off my mask and got a pleasant pop of recognition from the crowd. I bowed, and my smile was a dead giveaway of how proud I was of myself. Maybe my concussion was finally behind me.

Afterwards, I got slaps on the back from Dreyfuss and Beliveau. To top off the evening, I had a terrific time wining and dining Julie in old Montreal.

I flew home carefree and raring to go. This performance was going to mark my turnaround. I was going to get back on my feet, be me again, train and get my body back. Just maybe I could finally break free and clear of the heartaches and headaches of the last five years.

A day later, Julie was furious with me again. Jim had called me while I was riding my bike and he rode downtown to meet me. It was a beautiful, hot Saturday afternoon and we stopped to wet our whistles and catch up with each other. He had a big gut now, and a long red goatee. Both of us still agonized over Davey’s death. It was like our lives had become this cartoon show, except in this cartoon all the characters were being killed off for real. Jim was drinking harder than ever and I was in the mood to celebrate after doing The Hooded Fang, so the beer went down easy. It was a long uphill ride back home, and it felt good sweating out the alcohol. But I was two hours late for dinner with Julie, and that was all it took to derail the progress we had been making.

On Monday, June 24, I woke up determined to make some serious changes. I called my divorce lawyer, who joked about my divorce taking the longest amount of time in the history of divorce negotiations. I told him I wanted to put the divorce papers through immediately. I’d had enough of the back-and-forth game with Julie. While I was at it, I didn’t like how Bruce Allen had sided with Carlo, talking to him behind my back about how they could get me to take part in WrestleMania XVIII when he was supposed to be representing my best interests. So I penned Bruce a handwritten fax letting him know that I didn’t need him any longer.

Since it was another beautiful sunny morning, I decided to ride my bike to the gym. I stopped at a bike shop to see if they could repair my helmet because one of my kids had monkeyed around with the clasp on the chin strap. They didn’t have a piece to fix it and offered to sell me a new helmet instead. I decided to take my chances for one day.

Just before noon I was pedaling nice and easy along the Bow River. I realized I needed to relieve myself, so I veered off the bike path. I was coasting slowly toward a clump of trees when my front tire dropped into a grass-covered hole nearly stopping me cold. I bounced out, but the bike was off balance when the back tire hit the same hole. The bike wobbled and then tipped, sending me tumbling sideways. I got my hands up to protect myself, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to break my sunglasses or the cellphone in my pocket.

I tucked and rolled on the hard grassy field. The thought crossed my mind that anyone watching would probably get a good laugh. The second my head hit the ground, I’d be sorry for the rest of my life that I ever hit that hole.

I thought I’d get up red-faced and dust myself off. I was wrong. I lay there groaning and badly winded, writhing around in terrible agony like a speared fish. I saw those same silver dots again, but this time only in my left eye and they moved toward a cone-shaped point. For several minutes I couldn’t get up. I desperately grabbed clumps of prickles to pull myself up to my knees and then struggled to do a right-legged squat to get to my feet. Using my bike for support I stood there, thinking, What the fuck happened to me?

A man jogged past and yelled to ask if I was okay. I waved him off, but seconds later I realized that my left arm was hanging by my side and refused to work. I finally grabbed my left hand with my right one and placed it on the handlebar, but it fell off and just hung there. With my weight on my right leg, I leaned my chest on the seat and, with my right hand, I somehow maneuvered my bike back to that damn hole and stared at it, unable to comprehend what had happened. I couldn’t believe that fucking hole had done this to me!

I tried to swing my left leg over the bike and keep going because I didn’t want to be late for my work out, but I fell over in an embarrassing heap. As I lay there sweating and drooling, taking in the smell of fresh-cut grass, the sun beat down on me as dragonflies and bumblebees buzzed by. I managed to reach Jade on my cellphone, only to find that my tongue and lips weren’t working right and my speech was slurred. Having no idea what I was talking about, Jade put Julie on the phone. As best I could I explained what had happened and that I was a few feet from a little hill where we had sat down to read paperback novels one time.

About ten minutes later, Julie and Beans were racing up to me. I told them I was okay, that I’d just banged my head. “Just get me out of here!” Julie didn’t tell me that the pupil of my left eye was big and black. I told them to pull me up to my feet and we’d all just walk to the car, but at my first step we all fell over. A roller blader raced off to call 911 while a nurse from Toronto who happened to be jogging by splashed me with cold water and told me to stay awake.

Soon paramedics were strapping me into a cervical collar. Beans rode with me in the ambulance while Julie followed behind in the car. I wondered what I did to piss off God.

Hours later, at the Foothills ICU, the nurses were trying to persuade me that I’d feel better if I peed.

Every hour on the hour, they’d come by to tell me that if I didn’t pee soon, they’d have no choice but to insert a catheter. I assured them they’d have to kill me first. I could hear them tell the same story to some guy behind the curtain in the bed next to me. He finally gave them permission, and his blood-curdling screams sounded as if they were amputating his leg with no anesthetic. The poor guy died the next morning.

I have blurry memories of Julie and my kids gathered around me, and of Blade holding my hand in tears telling me, “You’re the best dad there ever was!”

At one point, a Dr. Watson showed up and asked me if I could move my fingers and toes. It took every ounce of strength I had to ever so faintly twitch the very tips of my toes and fingers. Dr.

Watson flashed me a hopeful look, saying, “That’s a really good sign.”

I was wheeled away for an angiogram, where they rammed an ice-cold golf-ball-sized camera on a tube the size of a garden hose down my throat. My gag reflex was so extreme they ended up sedating me. When I came to, they did an MRI, using some sort of dye that I can only describe as making my head feel like my veins and arteries were carrying gasoline and some-body had lit a match. My ears got so hot that I thought they were going to melt off. On top of everything, I could barely breathe from the unrelenting pain in my back.

At three in the morning, Dr. Watson showed me the images of my brain. Pointing out a small jelly-bean-shaped spot on top of my head, he told me I had suffered a stroke. I wasn’t quite sure what the ramifications of having a stroke were. Dr. Watson explained that nobody could make any promises about how much I’d recover, but if I was lucky and I worked very hard, I might get some of my mobility back.

But he told me that they couldn’t give me the miracle drug TPA because they feared my brain was hemorrhaging. If they’d only known sooner that my stroke had been caused by a clot, TPA would have blasted through it and I might very well have got up and walked out of there.

In the wee hours of the morning, a kind young nurse finally wheeled me into a shower. I cried like a baby out of gratitude as this sweet girl washed me clean. It’d been about sixteen hours since I pulled off the bike path to relieve myself, and with the water running, I pissed for a very long time.

47

GOING HOME SONG

AFTER MY STROKE, I woke up every day feeling sorry for myself, even though I knew I was lucky to be alive.

I was a wreck. I couldn’t whistle anymore so when the nurses doted over me, I hummed “Amazing Grace” in my head. My smile curved south on the left side and stayed that way, a cracked sneer. My left eye was stuck wide open, and my vision was poor. I couldn’t stop having emotional meltdowns.

Everything made me cry as I struggled every day to find my way back to where I had been. It got to be downright embarrassing, until I found out that emotional instability was common for stroke patients and that everyone on the ward was crying all the time.

I remembered when Shawn Michaels said he lost his smile. Well, I had lost my smile, my ability to wink, and I was paralyzed on the entire left side of my body. At first, I kept waiting to make a Hitman-style comeback, but after about four days I asked Dr. Watson if I better get used to the idea that I wasn’t just going to walk out of there. He told me I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a long time. But I still didn’t realize what I was dealing with.

I watched the Mordecai Richler special from my hospital bed, and seeing my big smile at the end, so relieved and happy to have beaten my concussion, when only a week later I would be paralyzed by a stroke, made me remember Vince’s comment: “Life’s not fair.”

I couldn’t pick up a toothpick. I choked all the time because my lips and tongue were only half working. I was told that the best part of my recovery would come in the first six months and that the first three were critical.

On July 1, Canada’s first Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, my friend Daniel Igali, and his coach, Dave McKay, came to visit me. Just as I was being loaded into the ambulance in the park, Daniel had been leaving me a phone message inviting me to dinner with him, Kofi Annan and the African leaders who were attending a G8 summit in Kananaskis, near Calgary. Daniel was kind enough to wheel me down to the basement, where I sat parked in my wretched wheelchair listening to a sweet old gal named Miriam, also a stroke patient, telling me she was sure I was going to beat this thing.

My brother Bruce showed up unannounced in my room with a TV news camera crew. Luckily I was spared the humiliation of being seen at my lowest point because I was out of the room at a rehab session. After that episode, I made a short list of friends and family who I was comfortable seeing and gave Marcy the unenviable task of enforcing it; those who couldn’t get in blamed her. She coordinated a uniformed security team that was posted at my door 24/7 and I felt safe knowing I was protected.

Ellie tried to use Stu to get in to see me, but was told by a guard that she wasn’t on the list. Ellie then led Stu to believe that I didn’t want to see him either, and she took him home. That evening Keith called to tell me how much this had upset Stu, and I was furious. I don’t think Ellie could have done anything more hurtful at that time to me, and to Stu. Knowing how upset I was, first thing the next morning Marcy picked Stu up at Hart house and brought him to see me. When she wheeled him into the room, I used every ounce of strength I had to stand up out of my wheelchair and take three or four unsteady steps toward him to squeeze his big, fat hand. He smiled so huge he got tears in his eyes.

One day, after coming back from exhausting physio, I was slumped in bed ready for a nap when my phone rang. I couldn’t have been more flustered at hearing Vince’s voice. He gave me some kind words of encouragement while I resisted the urge to slam the phone down. My voice cracked as I struggled to tell him that I really wanted to clear the air with him, and that one of the most important things to me was that I didn’t want my career to be erased.

We talked about resurrecting that anthology of my career that didn’t happen because of Survivor Series and about the idea that maybe someday I’d be inducted into the WWF Hall of Fame. When I finally set the phone down, I broke down into tears because I realized at that very moment I’d just dropped one of the heaviest rocks I’d been carrying around.

Every morning, Julie brought me breakfast and a coffee. She helped me in ways I can never forget. I would never have recovered as well without her love and support.

After Julie left, my orderly would come to get me for physio again. As he wheeled me down the hall past my fellow patients, all of whom couldn’t stop crying, I’d have to remind myself that today I was going to gain some ground.