Countdown To Lockdown (18 page)

I rolled into my driveway around 5 a.m. and was woken by Hugh’s predawn declaration — “I’m awake, Dad” — about a half hour later. I felt weary, hungover, though I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol.

My wife wandered in, taking note of my precarious perch atop a child’s bunk bed.

“Oh man, I feel so guilty,” I confided in my wife.

“What did you do, Mick?” Colette said, knowing that from time to time during the course of our marriage I’d sought solace in the arms
of bored housewives, grieving widows, adventurous grandmothers, defrocked nuns, and sexy Republican women.
^*

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” I assured her. “It’s just that I talked to Paul Wolfowitz last night.”

“Wolfowitz?” Colette said, shocked. “You hate that guy! But that’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

“Yes it is,” I said. “Because I really enjoyed it.”

April 3, 2009

New Orleans, Louisiana

Finally, the end of a long day. A long, long day. It’s
WrestleMania
weekend in Houston, site of the event’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It has that Super Bowl atmosphere — events all weekend long, wrestling fans making the trek to Houston from states all over the country and countries all over the world. Until a few days ago, I thought I’d miss out on all the fun.

My first
WrestleMania
weekend was 1996 — the first time I saw the grandeur, pomp, and circumstance of the event; families flying in either to bear witness to their loved ones battling it out on their biggest night of the year or, in many cases, families bearing witness to their loved ones’ being witness to other families’ loved ones battling it out on
their
biggest night of the year. Does that make any sense? Basically, it’s a three-day party, a time of great excitement, even for those wrestlers not participating.

My family only came to one
WrestleMania
, back in 2000, for the match that I firmly felt would be the last of my career. The night that my wife said Macaulay Culkin kept checking her out, and the night that I almost called my manager, Barry Bloom, with the sad, untrue news that his tickets weren’t available simply because I’d heard that Anna Nicole Smith and her son needed a pair, and there was no pair to be found. Barry later told me that I should have gone ahead and ditched him for Anna Nicole.

In all the years I worked for them, my wife never felt completely comfortable with WWE, dating back to the time in Bangor, Maine, summer of 1996, when a WWE road agent told me my family wasn’t allowed backstage and ushered them into a dingy bathroom with an exposed sewage pipe, enabling the pleasant scent of human excrement (referred to as “poopee” and “peepee” at the time) to become part of my family’s first collective WWE memory.

In November of that same year, I was specifically told that no family members were allowed backstage at Madison Square Garden for
The Survivor Series
, which my wife and kids had specifically flown in for from Florida. So they stayed at the hotel all day, away from a dad they didn’t get to see all that often back then, while the backstage area filled up with fiancées of other wrestlers, girlfriends of other wrestlers, casual romantic flings of other wrestlers, and a host of college buddies/workout partners/guys who knew somebody who used to work security.

A year later, when negotiating a new contract — by myself, before Barry Bloom started making my professional life a lot easier — I brought
these issues up with Vince, who gave me his personal guarantee that nothing like that would ever happen again. It didn’t, but after hearing Vince compare her to Robin Givens in a radio interview, Colette never felt comfortable at a WWE event again. Maybe that’s why nobody in the company has had my home telephone number these past ten or so years. Oddly, I gave the number to TNA owner Dixie Carter the very first time I spoke with her.

Dixie has turned out to be a wonderful boss to work for — warm but wise, understanding but tough, in some ways kind of like an anti-Vince (and that’s coming from someone who actually likes Vince). Through what can be seen only as an amazing coincidence or an act of God, Dixie was TNA’s original publicist and had the financial means to bail out the fledgling wrestling company when its original sponsor bailed out with little warning. Her decision allowed both wrestlers and wrestling fans an alternative to WWE and has turned out to be the best possible scenario for everyone involved, myself included.

Anyway, I was content to spend the big weekend away from all the action, appearing at a couple of untelevised TNA house shows a few hundred miles away in Louisiana. But I couldn’t help but notice a look of sadness on Booker’s face at the
Impact
tapings prior to ’
Mania
weekend. Booker doesn’t usually look sad — he’s generally an upbeat, funny guy. I’ve seen him angry a few times, but even then he looks like he’s having a good time. I won’t go so far as to say he looked distraught, but he was noticeably down.

For months Book and Sharmell had been planning a Legends Convention for Houston, their hometown, for
WrestleMania
weekend. I think WWE looks at any outside event as an intrusion, kind of an invasion of the creative space they carved out for themselves twenty-five years ago. I can understand that. But in truth, fans who travel from around the country and the globe are going to be, inherently, really into wrestling. They’re already giving WWE a ton of money. Injecting it into the city of Houston, too. Sure, some of them will want to make their visit a WWE-only event, the same way some Disney
fans want to make their Orlando visits Disney only: Disney hotels, Disney parks, Disney restaurants. But a lot of people want to go to Universal, visit Sea World, maybe even take in a feeding at Gatorland. My eight-year-old, Mickey, really wants to visit Holy Land Experience, the religious theme park that re-creates biblical Jerusalem right in the heart of central Florida.

But some fans want more. They want to attend a Ring of Honor show, or watch an Astros game, or attend a Legends Convention whose participants aren’t dictated by WWE. Perhaps out there, somewhere, is a child who wants to meet D.D.P., a child for whom the word
legend
doesn’t carry too literal an interpretation. Just kidding. Longtime readers of these memoirs will recognize D.D.P. as one of my good buddies, and the guru behind YRG, Yoga for Real Guys.

Within twenty-four hours of posting his Legends lineup on the web, Booker was faced with six cancellations: mysterious phone calls/texts/e-mails citing a cornucopia of cop-out causes. Double bookings, no-compete clauses, family commitments. Just a week out from the convention, Booker was faced with a few more key withdrawals.

I’ll let you guys make up your own minds, but I think the truth is that most former WWE wrestlers, no matter how tenuous the nature of their “departure,” all secretly (probably not-so-secretly) long for that phone call. That “welcome back, pal” call. That back-in-the-family hug. I can see why, too. Vince is a good hugger — firm but not too constrictive. Christy Canyon once hugged me so hard for so long that I almost had to ask her to stop. Even with the natural double Ds
^*
that had induced so many naughty thoughts squeezed against me, I felt kind of like one of Bruno’s old opponents at the Garden, trapped inside the Italian strongman’s iron, viselike grip, feeling both the wind
and will to live leave my body. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite so bad. Now that I’ve written about that hug I probably won’t be able to get it off my mind. It was like a two-minute hug, those natural beauties becoming like one with me, her breath hot in my ear, her “I missed you, baby,” nearly lost among the sounds a tongue makes when it’s flicking in and out of what used to be a guy’s ear.

What the hell did this have to do with a phone call from Vince? Oh yeah, very few people want to jeopardize that potential call from Vince — thus the multitude of mysterious cancellations.

I think I just hated to see Booker so down. Especially when I thought I might have the answer to some of his problems. “Hey, Book,” I said. “Do you want me to see if I can make the convention?”

“You would do that for me, man?” he said, seemingly unwilling to believe the sacrifice I was willing to make, the courage I was showing, the risk I was willing to take, the uncompromising decency that makes up the core of my character. In all honesty, it may have been the Chick-fil-A that swayed me. At each TV taping Booker presents me with a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich — possibly the best-tasting fast-food chicken sandwich on the planet. Primarily available in the South, they are to chicken sandwiches what Whataburger is to burgers — pure fast-food nirvana. Although, come to think of it, Backyard Burgers mesquite chicken with a double coleslaw sandwich might just edge out even the mighty Chick-fil-A. But they’re available in only a few states in the South — Tennessee, Arkansas, possibly Mississippi. D.D.P. actually turned me on to them when I lived in Atlanta (maybe there’s still a few left in Georgia, I don’t really know), singing the praises of the incredible sandwich right down the street from the gym that Sting and Lex Luger owned. I’m not sure exactly what D.D.P. may have said, but I am willing to bet it started with the words, “Bro, I’m telling ya.”

So, after arriving home from a night out with the four kids at an Islanders hockey game, I straightened out all my flight details, answered a couple e-mails (that line would have been unthinkable
even one year ago), and hit the stationary bike for a little meager workout time. I’d actually been to the gym earlier in the day, returning home to the surprise of my daughter, who couldn’t fathom how I’d left, worked out, and returned in less than forty minutes. She seemed so disappointed that I opted not to tell her that I’d also worked a visit to the bank into my forty-minute adventure.

I just keep trying to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks when it comes to these workouts. (I wrote “stuff at the wall” first, but in this case, the bad word really does works better.) That’s quite an ironic metaphor, really. Because back when I was a lifeguard for the mentally challenged, in the summer of 1985, there really was a kid who threw shit at the wall. You know, as in his
own
shit. I thought he was a great kid and inquired as to whether he might be granted a two-hour release from the facility to come over to the Foley house for dinner. There was a lot of paperwork involved in these things on all sides, but occasionally these visits would be allowed.

“You know, Mick, that might not be the best idea,” I was told.

“Why not?” I said, disappointed, kind of taking it personally.

“Well, Vinnie is a feces thrower.”

“A feces thrower,” I said, momentarily unable to put the noun and verb together in a way that made visual sense. Don’t worry, once the image hit me, it stuck around for a while.

Apparently one of Vinnie’s classic gags was to wake up from a “nightmare” screaming, begging for help. A well-meaning but ill-informed worker would charge to the rescue, flicking on the light switch, not knowing that the Vin-man had lathered up the switch with a little gift: a little homemade fudge, a little keepsake from the Hershey factory.

I know a few of my more cynical readers will feel like I included that story just to use the words
Vinnie
and
feces thrower
in the same sentence. They might be right.

But I saw Vinnie the feces thrower just a few years ago, and to the surprise of everyone in attendance I recognized him immediately,
even though he was now a man in his early thirties instead of a child.

I have another reunion story from my 1985 lifeguarding days. A few years ago at a book signing, I saw a young man with Down syndrome at the very end of a long line of fans. I mean this line went on forever. In the words of Ricky Morton, “Brother, you never seen so many people, tell ’em, Hoot.” A deep drag of his cigarette, take two steps back. If someone sees Chris Jericho or Steve Austin, please show them that line, as it’s highly likely that no one else will have any idea what I’m talking about.

Okay, so it wasn’t
that
long a line. But it was respectable. And that young man with Down syndrome was at the back of it, which just wasn’t going to cut it. Guys like that have probably had it tough enough without waiting in a ten-hour-long, three-thousand-person-strong line. Okay, hour-long, two hundred people. Happy?

So I summoned this young man to the front of the line and immediately remembered his smile, his laugh, the kindness in his eyes. “Olaf, Olaf Baez?” I said. And Olaf Baez nearly jumped into my arms, he was so happy to see his old friend. Little did he know that over the last twenty years, without fail, I had mentally changed the words of “Born on the Bayou” to “Born Olaf Baez” every time I heard that Creedence Clearwater Revival song.