Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (88 page)

I was dazed and glassy eyed and my neck was killing me. The dressing room was almost empty because the boys had rushed to beat the crowd out of the building, except for Roddy and the WCW

trainer, Danny Coach Young. I told Danny I had hurt my neck, and he apologized because all he could do was hand me a few packets of Advil. I was in such a fuzzy state of mind, I barely remember handing Marcy the car keys because I knew I wasn’t capable of driving back to the hotel. As we made our way through the dark, in an icy rain, I was slurring my speech and Marcy was very worried. She wanted me to see a doctor, but I thought—in the way you think when you’ve just suffered a severe concussion only you don’t realize it yet—that I’d just take it slow and see how I felt in the morning.

When I staggered through the sliding doors of the Marriott, the fans, who usually stampede over top of one another to get pictures or autographs, stopped in their tracks. Clearly something wasn’t right about me. The lobby was a blur, and the walls of my room were spinning when I dropped my bag and passed out on the bed.

I woke up around five the next morning still in my clothes, drenched in sweat, with a pounding headache and an aching throb in the back of my neck. I slept miserably for a couple more hours and when I checked out, the front desk gave me a message from that crazy Nasty Girl. Her note said that she’d caught a bus all the way up from Detroit after I supposedly stood her up the second time and included an even more disturbing death threat than the first one.

It was ingrained in my nature just to keep on going, so I showed up at the building in Baltimore, still too out of it to know how out of it I really was. I went over everything with Russo as he set the stage for my heel turn. After the horrible finish the night before, I forfeited the World title on Nitro and gave Goldberg an immediate rematch. It was a total farce, with Nash and Hall hitting the ring and me double-crossing Goldberg again for a flat ending.

The next day in Salisbury, Maryland, for Thunder, I told Russo that I was badly hurt from Goldberg’s kick and that I thought I might have a concussion. He still wanted me to work a match with Benoit, with Jeff Jarrett coming out to double-team him. Goldberg would charge out and spear Jarrett while I fled the scene with cameras following and Goldberg coming after me in hot pursuit. I’d race to my rented Cadillac, which would be parked on the back ramp with the keys in the ignition, and just as Goldberg reached my car I’d zoom out of the building. We’d go off the air with a seething Goldberg punching out the windows of a limo, a sharp steel gimmick hidden in his fist.

While Russo went over everything, I reasoned (in the foggy way a concussed person reasons) that I could do all that easy enough. All I could think about was getting home for Christmas. That night I had a good solid match with Benoit, who did his best to take it easy. Jarrett came out and then the one-man tank, Goldberg. When Goldberg speared Jeff, I ran down the aisle, jumped in my car and floored it out the back ramp just as Goldberg caught up and pounded furiously on my car windows.

What nobody noticed was that as I pulled out, my car hit the icy pavement and I skidded out of control, having had no time to put on a seatbelt, so there I was with a concussion, barreling head-on towards a huge TV production truck! I thought of Owen in that instant. What would the world think if I got killed plowing my car into a TV truck for some stupid stunt? People would say, “You’d think Owen’s stupid brother would know better than that!”

Luckily the tires hit a patch of dry pavement and I burned rubber past the truck to safety. Even with my head full of fuzz I was plenty pissed off and came steaming back to blast Russo, but I completely forgot about it when I saw a worried Goldberg holding his arm in the air with blood pouring everywhere. The gimmick he was using had failed to break the window, so Gold-berg decided that he’d simply break it himself. He did, but he sliced a twelve-inch gash the length of his forearm all the way to the bone. Paramedics tried to staunch the flow of blood and raced him to a hospital. I felt terrible for him; for the first time this big brute of a man looked very afraid as he was loaded into the ambulance. I showered and then left, not even remembering what it was that I’d been so livid about only minutes earlier—that I’d nearly got killed doing some stupid shit from the same screwball who scripted the stunt that killed Owen.

I bought Julie a ring for Christmas, which she unfortunately took to mean more than I intended.

When my mom called to congratulate me, I downplayed it. When it became clear that the ring was just a present, Julie’s disappointment put a damper on everything.

Over Christmas at Stu’s, Ellie and I had another shouting match with Stu in the middle again. Stu was far more deaf than he was blind and he felt obligated to defend her, as he always did. I’d about had enough of Ellie. The way I tore into her put a scare into Stu. I shouted, “Ellie, this has nothing to do with you or me! This is all about Martha’s decision to sue Vince for killing her husband! Your brother! How in the hell can you work hand-in-hand with Vince against your dead brother’s wife and kids and your very own parents? How can you sleep at night?”

“Real easy,” Ellie shot back.

Stu, who couldn’t hear anything, kept defending her. “I don’t believe Ellie is doing that!”

“Dad, she’ll tell you herself!”

My mom took up for me, telling Ellie that she and Stu chose to support Martha and it had nothing to do with me. Ellie lashed out, accusing her of always taking my side. I’d had a nonstop headache from hell ever since Goldberg’s kick and by the end of this scene my head felt like it was going to explode.

In Houston for Nitro on December 27, I went looking for Bill Bush and Vince Russo. I could barely remember Christmas, despite how crappy it was. I still wasn’t sleeping well, and my head was pounding with the constant pain in the back of my neck. I told Bush: “I’m not a stuntman, I’m a pro wrestler, and from now on everything I do needs to be done in the ring.” They both apologized profusely for the circumstances that put me in the state I was in; yet not ten minutes later, Russo told me that he needed me to drive a giant monster truck over the top of Sycho Sid’s rental car, with Sid in it! As out of it as I was, I looked at Russo and said, “Are you guys for real? I just told you that I don’t do stunts. I’m a goddamn wrestler.”

On top of everything else, Russo was putting me with Jerry Flynn, an ex-kickboxer with limited pro wrestling ability. That night, while brawling out on the floor, Flynn leaped up with a spin kick and hit me so hard in the guts that I crumpled to the mat. I struggled to recover because either I had to or take more of the same. I finished the match, but I wondered why WCW thought the best way for me to get through my concussion was to work with a stiff rookie. Then I watched a fully loaded Cadillac with eleven miles on the odometer get crushed by the monster truck—all for a thirty-second ending to Nitro. Stu would’ve cried if he’d been there.

The first night I was at home again, I had a fantastic dream. I was sitting with Owen at my kitchen table. He had on his favorite baggy blue sweatshirt, and we actually laughed and talked about all the problems in the family since he died. He shook his head as though we both knew this would happen and told me he never had any doubts that I’d be fending off various siblings. In the dream, I got to tell him how much I loved him and he seemed at peace, which did a lot for me and my shattered heart and battered brain.

As the dream began to fade, I could feel myself pleading for it to keep going—don’t let me wake up, I have so much left to tell him—but it dissolved and Owen was gone. I woke up with the sense that we’d really talked. That morning I found a thank-you poem from Martha tucked in my front door.

Bret’s Poem

Let it be you

who comes to bring the light, who

guides me with his hand held tight

let it be you

who navigates through all the gray

to help me see a better day

let it be you

who listens endlessly of broken lives

and shattered dreams

let it be you

who sees the ugliness of people’s

souls in times like this

let it be you

who’s tall while others fall, whose

heart is purest of all

let it be you

whose love and tenderness will not

let me slip into this great abyss

let it be you

who stands by faithful friend

until the bitter end

(written with love by Martha, December 29, 1999)

As the millennium came to a close, I was relieved that 1999 was over. What a horrible year for me and all the Harts. At least Bill Bush called me at home to thank me for all I was doing. He asked me how long I could keep going and I told him: “I still have a few good years left.”

Then my old friend Wilk called and told me to turn on the TV. So there I sat, at first amused but then disgusted, watching the embarrassing conclusion to Bruce’s Stampede Wrestling show. Diana did a run-in to save fourteen-year-old Harry, who’d been dragged into his first angle. Soon, even Ellie was in the ring taking a bump. I could only roll my eyes in disgust. A farce like this made all of us Harts look bad.

45

THE LAST DANCE

PEOPLE WITH CONCUSSIONS are the last ones to figure out how badly hurt they are. I was more responsible than anyone for downplaying my condition to myself and everyone else. Somewhere inside me, a fearful voice cried out that I was seriously hurt, but that same voice warned me to quit listening to my brain because it was my brain itself that was damaged. So I let myself go on believing that the problem was a sore neck.

I drifted through every day in a pale-faced, sweaty, head-pounding stupor, pacified to the point of numbness by the four Advils I took every three hours. The turn of the millennium floated right past me. By January 3, 2000, I was in Greensboro, South Carolina, for Nitro, and in too much of a haze to heed my own vow to Bush and Russo one week earlier: that I’d only do wrestling and in a ring. I rubbed the back of my head as Russo laid out the script to hype my upcoming pay-per-view title match on January 14 with Sycho Sid. That night, Nitro opened as cameras caught Sid attacking me as I came into the building. I was thrown into backstage walls and knocked into a stack of steel trusses that broke apart, spilling everywhere, nearly clipping my knees and ankles and coming close to crushing all my toes. Working a backstage brawl was far more dangerous than an actual wrestling match. I was soon battered to the concrete floor, over thick wire cables and equipment boxes, where Sid stood pummeling me with a barrage of punches.

Only a few hours earlier, road agent Terry Taylor had successfully begged me to fill in for Kevin Nash for the rest of the week because Nash was out with a concussion, of all things. With nobody else to replace Nash in the main events, I said I would, even as I reminded Terry that I thought I might have a concussion of my own. Guys such as Taylor and Russo were quick to tell me how much this all was appreciated, assuring me that I’d be protected in every way possible. Unfortunately, this was a promise that neither one of them could keep or even had a right to make, because they weren’t the ones in the ring with me.

Every night I crawled into bed, my head pounding and my neck aching: my solution was more Advil and another fitful sleep. In Florence, South Carolina, for Thunder, I opened up the show standing glassy-eyed in my nWo T-shirt, along with nWo members Jeff Jarrett, Scotty Steiner and Kevin Nash, who appeared not to be suffering from a concussion after all. Russo’s new acting commissioner, Terry Funk, had just ordered me to face him in a hard-core match later in the show. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered having his retirement match with him back in Amarillo. With a scornful over-the-top sneer, I coldly cut a promo: “I think I just might have to kill you tonight, Terry Funk!” I laughed to myself at how ridiculous I sounded, but I gave Russo what he wanted because I’d all but given up. I also knew that I could trust Terry with my body a helluva lot more I could trust the other WCW wrestlers.

Terry did all he could to go easy on my head, even as we brawled around the ring and on the floor with chairs, rubber bats and garbage cans. I beat Terry hard, loud and mercilessly with a steel chair, right down to his knees, because he made me promise to lay it in. Terry was old school, the King of Hardcore for real. He spent most of the match selling for me, flopping around like a fish. When he finally charged me with a steel chair, I got my hands up and deflected it completely. So far so good. I staggered off in retreat, making my way up the aisle as Terry grabbed a fistful of my hair and tossed me into a big, rolling canvas laundry bin that just happened to be sitting right there. With my legs hanging over the sides, I couldn’t pull myself up into a better position. Terry spun it around and pushed it hard toward the ring. I braced myself by wrapping my arms around my head, but when I spilled out I whacked the back of my head on the heavy wooden lid of the cart, which made a sound like a dropped watermelon.

After the match, Terry felt terrible, but it wasn’t his fault—I shouldn’t have been in a hard-core match with a concussion in the first place. I gulped down another handful of Advils and didn’t give it another thought, but I sure wished my horrible headaches would go away. And when I finally called Marcy, back in Calgary, to set up a doctor’s appointment, it was because I thought I needed my sore neck looked at, not my head.

I filled in for Nash against Sid in Roanoke, Lowell and Utica. Each night I took a choke slam and a powerbomb. Sid did everything he could to set me down as lightly as he could, but it was nearly impossible. I took my lumps with little complaint.

In Utica, New York, I was needed to make a call to a radio station using the phone in an office across from the dressing room. I stripped down to my black singlet and left Doug Dillenger sitting outside my dressing room like a fat old sheriff to guard my stuff. Over the past year, Dillenger and his crack security team had allowed every one of my leather ring jackets to be stolen by fans until I stopped wearing them. After the call to the radio station, I returned to my dressing room to find Doug snoozing and all my wrestling gear stolen, except for one pink and white boot. Amazingly, the thieves never thought to grab my wallet, which was in the pocket of my jeans still hanging there, or my Rolex, which was tucked into my shoe.