The Hardcore Diaries (16 page)

My Sandwich with Candice

I suppose it all started with the sandwich. You see, it was a very special kind of sandwich. A sandwich to make the happy happier, and the giddy even giddier. A sandwich to make a homecoming homier, and natural enemies…friends.

Does that last paragraph seem familiar? No? Not even a little? Okay, go back and substitute the word
snow
for
sandwich
in every sentence. Does it seem familiar now? It should. After all, it’s the introduction to
Frosty the Snowman,
the children’s animated classic that I just put into my DVD so I could start this unique, heartwarming story out in a unique, heartwarming way.

But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure where the hell the sandwich came from. I mean, I know I was at Landstuhl Air Force Base in Germany. I know we’d just flown the first eight-and-a-half-hour leg of a seventeen-hour flight, and that we were relaxing for a little while before embarking for Afghanistan, where we would try to spread a little holiday cheer, WWE style, for thousands of our service members who would be spending the holiday a long, long way from home.

We had split into two groups at Landstuhl; one group visited with an enthusiastic throng of military families at a large on-base gymnasium. The other group, our group, visited injured or sick service members at the nearby hospital.

It was upon our return from the hospital that the sandwiches appeared, courtesy of WWE Diva Trish Stratus. As you may recall, Trish is someone I like a lot, someone I feel pretty close to. Someone thoughtful enough to make sandwiches for several beautiful women…and me. For you see, as odd as it might seem to comprehend the following scenario, as difficult at it might be to digest the following food for thought, I was virtually surrounded by every WWE Diva on the tour.

Trish Stratus? Check. Candice Michelle? Yup. The 2005 Diva Search winner, Ashley? Ditto. Maria? Present. Lilian Garcia, the world’s most beautiful announcer? Yes. They were all there. But why?

Why? I could almost see MSNBC host and correspondent Rita Cosby, who was along for the tour, asking herself that very same question. Rita has interviewed many heads of state and various world-class luminaries, but even she seemed baffled as to why exactly all the women would hang around a not particularly handsome guy like me when there was such an abundance of appealing males from which to choose. Not counting Coach, of course.

The answer is actually quite simple, I’m the safety valve. At least, that’s what Trish calls me. The guy they feel free to talk around. I guess if it wasn’t for my superdeedooper heterosexual lifestyle, which produced four children—count them: one, two, three, four—I’d be kind of like the gay friend.

But that still doesn’t explain where the sandwiches came from. Yes, I know that Trish brought them. But from where? Did she make them on the plane? At the hospital? In the lounge? If it wasn’t so late, I’d call her and ask. As you might recall, she’s on my speed dial. But safety valve or not, that would be kind of a weird question to ask. “Yeah, Trish, it’s Mick Foley. Good, thanks, how are you? Oh, that’s good. Listen Trish, do you remember where you got those sandwiches in Germany back in December 2005? Hello, Trish? Hello? Hello? Damn!”

So, we’ll just have to forget about the origin of the sandwiches, and just accept that they were there. Six of them. Peanut butter and honey. And Trish was dispensing them with great care to the unlikely assemblage of Mick Foley and the Divas.

I wolfed mine down in about a minute, maybe less. The girls were a little less voracious. A little more aware of things like chewing and swallowing.

After several minutes of the tiny bites and polite chewing, I heard it. It?! Candice’s voice. Heralding forth an offer that was the stuff of dreams. Or at least a visualization all but realized. “Would anybody like the rest of this sandwich?” she asked.

I turned to see Candice Michelle, the dispenser of hugs, she of the large assets, holding aloft half a sandwich. But it was no ordinary sandwich. It had two bites taken out of it. I let out an audible, yearning, mournful sigh. A sigh loud enough to draw the attention of the Divas, who sensed something might be wrong with their beloved hardcore legend.

“Mick, what’s wrong?” Lilian asked.

In truth, I thought it was my heart. It had just done a big flip inside my chest.

I hesitated, trying to figure out how best to explain my odd reaction to a seemingly innocuous question.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that this is almost exactly like a scene out of my last book.”

The girls seem transfixed as I told them the story of Scooter Riley, age nine, growing up in the Highbridge section of the Bronx back in 1969, a period of great transition for the neighborhood.

Young Scooter is invited into the home of Nina Vasquez, a beautiful Puerto Rican girl, a few years his senior, new to the United States. Her English is weak, but her manner is warm, and she asks Scooter to watch game three of the World Series with her. Once inside, she makes Scooter a sandwich, peanut butter and banana (not exactly Trish’s creation, but close enough), and after allowing Scooter a couple bites, asks a fateful question.

“Can I have a bite?”

Here’s a little passage, direct from my novel
Scooter,
which explains just what happens to young Scooter, and how much the incident meant to him.

I handed her the sandwich. I could have sworn her thumb touched mine when the handoff was made. I looked at her mouth as she took her bite. Oh, my God, it was more than I’d dared dream. I had just assumed that she’d bite down on virgin bread, but that was not the case at all. Nina Vasquez chose instead to journey down the road that I’d just traveled. Her mouth clearly touched the bite I’d made—she was almost kissing me by proxy. She knew it too, I could tell—the way those big, dark soulful eyes looked at me as she chewed.

I don’t think she knew my life had changed as she swallowed the bite. I wondered if this was one of those moments Grandpa spoke of, where one transcends or whatever. Because I thought I’d just transcended.

I took the sandwich from her hand—the one with two bites missing. I put our special sandwich on the paper plate and placed the plate onto my lap. Where it covered my first erection.

A couple of the Divas had tears in their eyes upon hearing of young Scooter’s emotional attachment to the sandwich. Candice Michelle realized she now held more than a simple sandwich in her hands. Indeed, she held the fulfillment of my dreams.

So did I take the sandwich? You’re damn right I did. I took it and journeyed directly down the road that Candice had just traveled. And I really enjoyed the trip, too. I’m pretty sure I didn’t break any of my marital vows or any of the commandments, either. The girls really seemed to enjoy the unique culinary adventure I’d just taken them on.

“This might sound weird,” Ashley said. “But that was kind of hot.”

“Wow!” Candice said, in her otherworldly way. “I feel like I just made out with Mick Foley.”

Trish Stratus, as kind and thoughtful as she may be, had lacked the foresight to bring along some paper plates. I really could have used one.

Afghan Diary

As much as I like that story (and I hope that you did, too), I can’t help but think that I would eventually come to regret mentioning Afghanistan only as an interesting side note to my somewhat strange sandwich situation.

When I was originally asked about writing this book, I readily agreed, thinking in truth that it would be fairly effortless. After all, I would simply be putting my
Foley Is Blog
Web entries into book form. As it turned out, I abandoned the prefabricated Web log rehash in favor of
The Hardcore Diaries.
Much as I feared, my enthusiasm for the weekly Web format fizzled quickly, but not before I had a chance to do some work with it that I am very proud of. Perhaps the piece I am proudest of is my December 10, 2005, entry written on the long plane trip home, after a very emotional visit to the Bagram base hospital.

I feel strange, however, about asking readers to dive headlong into such a heavy story immediately after spending such a pleasant pit stop with Mick Foley and the five dazzling Divas. So think of the December 9, 2005, entry as a buffer zone; a way to slowly get your feet wet, before diving headlong into the deep end of the pool.

December 9, 2005

5:15
A
.
M
.,
local Afghan time: Let me state for the record that Gene Snitsky can snore louder than any man on this planet. Perhaps somewhere on the plains of Africa there lies a pregnant rhinoceros, making more offensive, guttural sleeping noises than Mr. Snitsky…perhaps. But as far as people go, Snitsky gets the nod. He’s the loudest there is, the loudest there was, and the loudest there ever will be.
*

Several of us are scheduled to appear on Rita Cosby’s live MSNBC show this morning. Rita’s show airs live at 9:00
P
.
M
. (ET), so due to the fact that Afghanistan is somewhere in the vicinity of way the hell over on the other side of the world, I knew our wake-up call would be coming at a very early hour. I did not know, however, that Gene Snitsky’s own, personal alarm clock would see to it that no other wake-up call would be needed.

I think we’re all very excited about Rita’s show. Not only has she treated us very well, but through adventurous and memorable days, she has become almost like one of the gang. I am truly thankful for her decision to take the trip with us. Most of us in the wrestling business accept that the mainstream news media is either going to ignore us or knock us, and I think most of us understand that Rita’s show will allow people back home to see us in a different, far more positive light than the one they’ve previously viewed us in.

My enthusiasm for this whole Web log thing may fizzle over time, but until that fizzling process begins, I am determined to offer WWE fans not only a different perspective on the big WWE issues of the day but also a perspective on the smaller, sometimes overlooked moments that make the WWE experience so unique. After all, our WWE photographers and film crews do such a great job of capturing actions and emotions that describing them in words seems kind of unnecessary. I mean, fans can see in a heartbeat how excited the troops are about our trip. A vivid Mick Foley description of why the troops are excited probably doesn’t add a whole lot to the situation.

But by taking my pen and marble composition tablet behind the scenes of last night’s huge autograph extravaganza to reveal the clandestine and heretofore unreported note-passing process that took place between the table of Mick Foley/John Cena and the table of Ashley/Candice Michelle, I truly feel like my Snitsky-induced early wake-up will not have been in vain.

I have another statement for the record. At the time of the autograph session, I was tired. Really tired. Goofy tired. Understandably tired. We were finishing up our second nonstop day of visiting bases and were given the option of either eating at the mess hall or resting in our “hooches,” armyspeak for small wooden buildings where several large wrestlers all sleep—separated only by some plywood. Do you know how fatigued WWE wrestlers have to be to all bypass a free meal in favor of a nap?

8:00
A
.
M
.
We have just returned from Rita’s show, which went really well, with the exception of my having casually mentioned on national television that I was writing a Web log about passing notes to beautiful girls at our autograph session. In other words, my clandestine encounter is not so clandestine anymore. Even worse, my wife will now find out about her husband’s note-passing ways and expect a full explanation.

Well, here goes: with more than a thousand members of the U.S. military lined up in the cold to meet their favorite WWE Superstars (and Coach, too), you would surely expect each and every wrestler, Diva, and TV personality to be at their most fired up for the good of the fans. Not this WWE Superstar. For the first half hour of this extravaganza, I yawned, nodded off, and displayed so little charisma that I was mistaken for Al Snow. To make things even worse, I couldn’t help but notice that the reaction I was harnessing—even when seated at the same table as WWE Champion John Cena—was not what I was expecting or used to. What was the deal? Gradually, after careful study, I came to realize just exactly what the deal was.

Cena and I were seated at the second table from the entrance, with the other members seated two to a table for a total of ten tables that looped in a semicircle around the building. Now, in my mind, a good autograph session is like a good wrestling card. It should build slowly, travel a trajectory of brilliant peaks and gentle drops, and then climax with a crescendo. Therein lies the problem: Cena and I were basically the second match on the card, following the opening match…Candice and Ashley. What a predicament! The fans were going absolutely crazy for the girls, who responded in kind by really lavishing attention on the service members. The crescendo, the climax, was occurring immediately, and Cena and I were left to try to pick the crumbs from the girls’ plates. Fearing for my reputation, I fired off an angry note to the Divas. As a Foley Web log exclusive, here is the angry note in its entirety:

Dear Candice and Ashley,

The Hardcore Legend and the WWE Champion are sitting together, but by the time fans get to us, they couldn’t care less.I was so excited about this autograph session, and now you’ve ruined it. Thanks a lot; you guys are really great friends.

Yours truly,
Mick Foley (The Hardcore Legend) &
John Cena (The WWE Champion)

Really mature, right? But hey, it seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. Just seeing the two Divas laugh revived me in a way that a Red Bull, a Diet Coke, and a double shot of espresso had failed to do. We even got a note back—meaning that since for the first time since ninth-grade gym class, I was engaged in a full-fledged note-passing session. It was awesome.

So awesome, in fact, that there was only one way to top it: photo defacement. It started innocently enough with the blacking out of a couple of Lilian Garcia’s teeth on a “Tribute to the Troops” glossy photo of WWE Superstars and Divas. It graduated to drawing aviator goggles on Vince McMahon (a questionable move at best, considering that he signs the checks) before setting our sights firmly on the image of Coach. Time seemed to fly, as Cena and I directed our considerable artistic talents into as many Coach creations as time would allow. There was Afro Coach; Mohawk Coach; Hasidic Coach; Pinocchio Coach; Kung-Fu Coach; El Coacho (Mexican masked wrestler); Mickey Mouse Coach; and others too ridiculous to mention. We even tried to create “Helluva Announcer” Coach, but we gave up in frustration when we deemed the task impossible. Hell, Vince McMahon has been trying to do the same thing for three years, and even he can’t pull it off.

I went back to the hooch in high spirits. Our time in Afghanistan has not only been a time of accomplishment, it has been a time of extreme laughter, bonding, and even note-passing. It was a time to remember, a time to relive, which I was in the process of doing when Gene Snitsky’s snores ruined it all.