Rumble Road (7 page)

So now we’re on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing around but highways. But I knew there were a few other guys driving in from Tampa, so I call Tyler Reks because I knew he was one of them. We were only half an hour outside of Miami, and luckily for us, Tyler Reks was only about forty-five minutes behind us. But as we waited for him to show up, Natalya and David walked down the road trying to find one of those emergency phones. While they were walking, some lady pulls over and offers to give them a ride to a gas station, so they tell me to stay with the car. So I stay with the car and after a while, Tyler shows up. Luckily, he tells me he’ll wait with me until they show up with the gas. Now, I’m assuming that this lady is bringing them back. But then Natalya calls me and says, “The lady just dropped us off.” She pulled up to some random gas station and told them to get out and drove off. So now they’re stuck at some gas station that we don’t even know where it is, and I’m stuck with my car—this wasn’t even a rental car—and I’m stuck there with Tyler Reks and the guys riding with him. So I jump in their car to go get some gas in a jerry can, drive back to my car to fill it up, and by this time it’s already after ten thirty. Now I’m filling up the car and gas is spilling out all over the place. Natalya had just bought me a pair of brand-new Puma shoes for my birthday, and when I get to the hotel at eleven thirty at night, I realize that my shoes are completely ruined from the gasoline. All because I tried to drive with no gas. It was a long, long, long, long drive to Miami that night. Then I went on to wrestle Cryme Tyme twice the next night, and that’s even worse than the drive.

The Bicker Twins

Nikki Bella

One time Brie and I were driving through Reno, and we love to sing and dance in the car, and we were blasting songs from the eighties. I had an open water bottle and some of it got on Brie while I was dancing, so she turned around and poured her whole water bottle on me. All of a sudden, I’m dumping the rest of my water bottle on her, and we got into this full-on water fight while we were driving. By the time we made it to the gas station to fill up, we were both dripping wet and it was freezing cold. We were already in our Diva outfits, lace and heels, so we had people staring at us. Here we are, twin Divas walking up to the gas station attendant dripping wet on a cold night. He was just staring at us, like, “What the hell is happening?”

But Brie and I always fight when we’re on the road. We’re like husband and wife the way we bicker the entire time. That’s why people like The Miz like to travel with us. I remember this one time I had the GPS in my hand and Brie was driving. So she asked me, “What am I going to make?” And I told her, “Make a right.” Two seconds later, she’s like, “Wait, what am I going to make?” And I tell her again, “You’re going to make a right.” Two seconds later, I swear, she asks me again, so I start yelling, “YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE A RIGHT!” And what does she do? She makes a freakin’ left! I was like, “Bri-anna!” and I just started yelling. So now The Miz, all the time he walks up to us with this voice that he does and says, “Bri-anna! No way! Just shut up, just shut up.” He does all these impressions of us all the time, and it’s all because Brie doesn’t know her rights from her lefts.

Living “The Life”

Cody Rhodes

Three in the morning, can’t sleep, sometimes you have those long, three-hundred-mile drives and you’re on the road at all hours of the night. One game we like to play is with the iPod receivers inside the car. We call it “The Life” game, where you turn the radio all the way down and one person shuffles the iPod until someone shouts stop. When someone says stop, you turn the radio up and whatever song that is playing, that is the song that describes your life for that day. It’s always funny. The last time for me, I turned it down and as I cranked it up, the song was “You Belong with Me,” by Taylor Swift. So it had no actual reference to my life, but it was my Life song for the day.

This is a game that Ted DiBiase, Randy Orton, Beth Phoenix, Santino Marella, and I like to play. I think the best of the best is when Randy got an instrumental once. We were all like, “Uh-oh, that’s the most ominous song that could play.” It was so ambiguous, no lyrics or anything . . . it was just an instrumental for Randy Orton. But the way he played it, he said luck was on his side. Since there weren’t any lyrics, you could make it anything, and he flipped it into a positive. But for me, keep me away from those instrumentals. I’ll take Taylor Swift for my Life song any day.

But getting back to those long drives, one thing that should be established as a major faux pas of road tripping is, don’t be a phone-talker. Do not get on the phone with your wife, your girlfriend, or your buddy and talk for thirty minutes. That means the music in the car needs to be turned down when you’re on the phone, conversations in the car can’t take place, and it makes the trip seem that much longer.

Ted DiBiase is a notorious phone-talker, and that is the worst. And he’s never talking to anyone important. It’s Jimmy from Iowa who he met at church when they were eleven, and they’ll talk for half an hour. Never anyone important. Never.

No Driver Necessary

Goldust

What people don’t realize is that us wrestlers are professionals when it comes to stunt driving.

I remember a long time ago I was driving from Fort Lauderdale back to Tampa and I was trying to catch up to Barry Windham. Barry was my mentor. He was in a car up ahead of me, and I was driving by myself in a big Lincoln Continental. So I’m driving and I see his car, then I slide over into the passenger side while keeping my left foot on the pedal and holding the steering wheel with my left knee. I’m going like eighty-five to ninety miles per hour, and I’m leaning my head against the passenger-side window with a newspaper in my hand while I pass him. I’m looking at the newspaper while trying to watch the road at the same time, and when I pull up beside him, Barry gave a double take because he couldn’t figure out who was driving the car. You had to see his face to believe it. It was really cool. I used to do that all the time and I always loved it. It used to freak people out. They’d be like, “If Dustin’s reading the paper, who is driving his car?”

The DibiDot

Beth Phoenix

In the attempt to entertain ourselves, we’ve gotten into the habit of raiding local gas stations for the most bizarre items we could find. It’s all about buying the most random stuff we could find at gas stations and rest stops. I don’t know where or how they got this, but Ted and Cody bought this rubber Koosh ball that looked like a dot with little eyes on it and some little rubber hair sticking out of the top. If you poke or punch this thing, a light starts to flash in the middle. So they hung this ball from the rearview mirror for this long loop we had, from Friday to Monday night, and it got lovingly named the DibiDot. It was in reference to DiBiase, and I don’t know why, but this strange rubber Koosh with little eyes and hair sticking up became the DibiDot. So then each weekend after that, we were on a mission to find more of these Koosh balls to hang from our mirror. But there were times when we bought cowboy hats and the weird Hawaiian bobble-head ladies for the dashboard, and maybe a pirate’s hat on one side and a buccaneer’s hat on the other. I remember this one time we found a Jeff Gordon air freshener. That was my favorite, because Jeff Gordon had this really strange look on his face and it was quite an interesting smell. And when we looked on the package, it didn’t even say what the smell was supposed to be, so I was like, “Hey, this smells like Jeff Gordon.”

That’s Not All We Buy

Ted DiBiase

Actually, when it comes to buying the most random item from a gas station or a truck stop, John Cena is the best. We’ll go to these huge truck stops where all the truckers stop and sleep, and you can find the strangest things you could ever imagine. Cena bought this massive Elvis painting one time, and we just put it in the front window of our rental car the rest of the weekend as we drove. We buy cowboy hats, Koosh balls . . . if it’s weird and they sell it, we’re buying. What’s funny is when you go to return the car to the rental agency and you just leave all of that stuff in there. One time I would love to see the reaction of the guy who has to clean our car out. I wonder what they do with Elvis paintings and piles of McDonald’s bags.

Get On the Bus

Big Show

I was so sick of all the problems associated with traveling that I went out and got a tour bus. You see, Big Show now rides around in a million-and-a-half-dollar tour bus with a driver. But the young Big Show, that was a different story. The young Big Show one time had a Tuesday-night TV taping in Rome, Georgia, but I had an 11:20
P.M.
flight out of the Atlanta airport that I wanted to make. Now, Rome, Georgia, is about an hour and twenty minutes away from Atlanta on a normal drive, and we had to go through Atlanta to the other side to make the airport. But like I said, I really wanted to make my flight. “Mean” Gene Okerlund lived in Tampa as well and was also on my flight, so he wanted to catch a ride with me to the airport. I said, “Sure, Gene, no problem.” But then we wrapped up from TV a little late, and Gene didn’t think we’d be able to make it to the airport on time.

Now, back then, we used to rent Cadillac DeVilles, and those Cadillac DeVilles, their speedometers shut down at 112 mph. So I set the cruise control at 110 mph and headed to the airport. We go through Atlanta, stop at the Omni hotel in downtown Atlanta so Gene could grab his suit bag from the concierge. The bellman handed it to Gene as he jumped out, then he hopped back in the car and we hauled ass through Atlanta and got to the airport with enough time to drop off our rental car at the Avis return. We made it from Rome, Georgia, to the Atlanta airport in fifty-eight minutes with a stop in Atlanta to pick up the suit.

“Mean” Gene never said a word the entire trip. We go through check-in, get on the plane, and we’re sitting next to each other when “Mean” Gene orders two drinks back to back. He slammed them both and looked as white as a sheet. He looked right at me and said, “Well, if I ever need to get somewhere in a hurry, I know who to call.”

I never even thought anything about it. I was just trying to make our flight. But I guess I completely terrified “Mean” Gene Okerlund and took a few years off of his life with that one car ride.

These days, though, like I said, different story. I ride in Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” bus, and I have a driver to take me wherever I need to go. The bus has a big king-size bed in the back, fifty-inch plasmas, Michelob Ultra Light on tap, Bud Light on tap, full bar . . . I don’t even drink that much, but every now and then, it’s great to have a cold beer. I’ve got wireless Internet, DIRECTV, and I even have an Xbox 360 hooked up so I can play all of my first-person shooters, like
Rainbow Six: Vegas, Call of Duty
, and
Wolfenstein.

I like it because I never have to look for hotel rooms. I always have a locker room to get dressed in, I always have my own shower, and since I have all of my clothes in the back, if I need a suit or something special to wear, I have it with me accessible at all times. About the only bag I bring with me to the airport is the one holding my computer and my wallet. That’s about it. So these days, in the States, traveling works out really well thanks to the bus.

Driving up and down the road two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles every night, I did it for twelve years and it’s just too much for me. So the past couple of years I’ve been on my bus and it works out so much better. I’m done with hotels. I’m done checking into hotels at three in the morning. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve checked into a hotel, they see how big I am, but then they give me a room with two double beds. Give me a break.

Something Everyone
Should Strive For

Randy Orton

Show, Hunter, and Taker all have these tour buses that they travel on, and now that Hunter is getting a new bus custom built, I’m taking his old bus off his hands. So many guys don’t realize how great these buses are. Stone Cold, The Rock . . . these guys never did it. I think Hunter was the first one to do it, and it costs some money, but in the long run, we pay for our own rental cars and hotel already. That’s not taken care of. It’s a write-off for us, but we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on rental cars and hotel stays each year, and that cost will be erased by having the bus. Sure, the bus is a little more, but the benefits are unbelievable. Now when I fly into a town, that bus picks me up and I don’t need to worry about a rental car. My driver will take me to go eat, and inside the bus I have a fridge, an oven, a microwave, a washer, a dryer, bathroom, shower, king-size bed, a crew bunk, a bed for my baby with a crib, and even a little lounging area with two flatscreens. It’s like a traveling apartment.

So while I’m at the show, my driver can leave and go pick up some Outback or something to eat at the grocery store and make sure I have something for dinner. After my match, instead of hitting the showers in the locker room, getting dressed, and going out in the rental car and finding something to eat, a process that can take up to two hours before we even start our three-hundred-mile drive to the next town, now I can just go straight on the bus, eat dinner, and shower. And by the time I’m showered up, I’ve already eaten, and now I’m relaxing and playing video games on the bus or watching TV or sleeping, and we’re already in the next town . . . or at least halfway there. Then I get better sleep. And to top it off, I’m not sitting in the front seat of the car for hundreds of miles, which is horrible for your back, especially with what we do. I’m able to lie down, relax, and I can even bring my wife and child whenever I want.