THE STONE COLD TRUTH (21 page)

It happened so fast, out of the blue, that you couldn’t anticipate it. I’d kick you in the gut, and you’d bend over in pain and sell the gut shot. And then I’d put the Stunner on you and drop you, one-two-three.

It was Michael Hayes who helped me come up with the gut shot and then the Stunner. Thanks, P.S. And by the way, the old Freebird still has the number one mullet in WWE!

20
DTA—
Don’t Trust Anybody

I
’ve always been real shy. I don’t know why. I get along well with people and am polite to everyone, but to this day I’m extremely private. I have very few true friends. I have acquaintances or whatever, but there aren’t a whole lot of people I hang out with, even if I’ve lived somewhere a long time.

Here in San Antonio, I have my beer-drinking buddy, Ricky Fisher, my personal doctor, Jimmy Baros and Skyler Craig, my training partner. That’s it. There are people I talk to at the gym, but I don’t really know them. I’m just a little leery about trusting people. You always wonder if people are just coming up to you and saying things because you’re Stone Cold Steve Austin.

I say to myself,
Okay, what do you want?
That type of thing.

I’m usually good at reading people. The people I end up hanging out with are people pretty much like me. We just like to have fun, and we have a helluva sense of humor. I just want to laugh all day—just rib on people and laugh, that’s what I like to do.

One of the catchphrases I used in WWE in the late nineties was “Don’t Trust Anyone.” That comes from my experience in the wrestling business, and from being shafted along the way. It comes from being manipulated, watching the political scenes and not being part of certain circles. It’s like that in the wrestling business, and in life in general.

You can always find another reason not to trust someone. That’s just the way things are. I mean, how many people do
you
really trust? So that whole deal was pretty much the way I truly feel.

But it did add to the mystique of Stone Cold’s character. My character’s personality was as solid as stone—which was more than I could say for my personal life …

21
Stone Cold, Lady Blossom, the IRS and Howard Stern

W
hen I first met Jeannie in Dallas, I was dirt poor. We used to go for Chinese food together and she would spring for the bill every time. She even bought me my first pair of wrestling boots.

A few years after Jeannie and I started in WCW, she got pregnant with our older daughter, Stephanie.

Jeannie and I weren’t married at the time. One Christmas I gave her a beautiful bracelet. I thought she would be excited as hell about the bracelet, but what she really wanted was a wedding ring.

I did love her, so I thought, Why not? So we got married in a church outside of Douglasville, Georgia, near Atlanta. I married Jeannie, we had two wonderful daughters and we were together for almost eight years—many good, some not so good.

We moved into a log cabin house—a beautiful little house—on ten acres in Atlanta. But because I wasn’t working for WCW in Atlanta anymore, and because I was on the road so damn much, I decided I wanted to live back in Texas. I didn’t want to live in Houston because I had grown up a hundred miles south of there and Houston is a monster, traffic-wise. Dallas was maybe a little preppy for me. Austin is a great town, but it’s got a lot of college kids.

My mom said she and Dad always liked going to Boerne, right outside San Antonio. It’s a nice small Texas town with a lot of antique shops. So Jeannie and I flew into San Antonio and my mom picked us up at the airport, and we drove down to Boerne. We stayed at a hotel and drove around and I liked it. We found a place to rent.

About this time, I got a call from the government telling me that they had audited my back taxes for some reason. It turned out that Jeannie had turned me on to some incompetent accountant, and I was $360,000 in debt to the U.S. government for back taxes! I never, ever did anything wrong. I never tried to screw the IRS. Everything I did was on time and I never even had to file an extension.

I just sent the tax guys my forms and stuff like that, and I didn’t know he was making up these bogus figures. But all of a sudden, Steve Williams owed the IRS $360,000.

Hey, when I screw up, I take responsibility for my actions, but for once this wasn’t my fault. I had no idea how I was going to pay off that kind of debt. I thought I’d be making payments to Uncle Sam for the rest of my life. I lost a lot of sleep thinking about that.

When I was moving back to Texas and I was going to sell my house in Atlanta, I remember that whatever profit I was going to make was going to go to the U.S. government. It was a frustrating state of affairs.

Anyway, I finally found a house in Boerne that I wanted to buy, but in 1995 I didn’t have any credit. I had started with WWE and was already Stone Cold by this time, so I called Vince McMahon up and asked him if he would help me buy me a house if I promised to pay him back.

Without hesitation, Vince said, “Hell, I’ll be happy to help you buy a house.”

I said, “Well, how much can I spend?”

He said, “I don’t know, Steve, I’ll leave that up to you.”

The house Vince helped me buy was about six miles out of town. Jeannie and I both liked it. But after a while, it turned out to be a tough situation for her.

Because I was on the road with WWE 24/7, Jeannie was in the house by herself most of the time. And when I’d get home, I’d go straight up the hill to the house of my buddy, Ricky Fisher, who lived just eight hundred yards away. Ricky and I would sit there drinking beer and telling stories.

U.K.-born Jeannie never really fit in. She liked Ricky and his wife, Sandra, but she didn’t really get the Texas way of life. So the whole time we were living in Boerne, Jeannie and I were growing apart. She missed the Atlanta area we used to live in and felt isolated out there. I should have seen it. I should have been more sensitive about Jeannie feeling so isolated.

Our house in Boerne was on six acres and it cost only $165,000. That was the house I was in the process of paying Vince back for, and it was fine with me.

But I wanted to try and make the marriage work, so I asked Jeannie where she wanted to live. She said she wanted to live in San Antonio. So we settled on this nice gated community in San Antonio. The house was expensive, but she really liked it, so I put $50,000 down on it. It looked like things were going to work out, which is what I was hoping for.

A couple of days later, Jeannie called me and said, “Let’s meet at the service station.”

I got there and met her, and she said she wanted to get separated.

I said, “I just put fifty grand down on this house. If we’re going to get separated, hell, I’ll just file for divorce.”

I can’t remember what she said, but I drove off and started thinking, Well, if I’m getting divorced, the last thing I need is a big, expensive house.

I called the real estate agent and said I wanted to back out of the deal. I couldn’t do it for free, so I lost half of the $50,000 deposit. Then I went ahead and reluctantly filed for divorce.

At that point, I went back to the house in Boerne that was down the road from Ricky and Sandra’s house, and started to pack my stuff up. I had my taxidermist buddy come over and we loaded my guns, my stereo and my TV into my car. Ricky had another friend who lived about three miles from where I was living. The guy was a homebuilder and he had just built a monster-size house for himself, and he had a doublewide trailer he was living in while he built this house.

Ricky called him up and said, “Todd, Steve’s going through a divorce and needs a place to stay.”

Todd said that he had just moved out of the double-wide, and that he and his family were living in the big house now. If I wanted to, he said, I could stay in the double-wide out there in the front yard for a few months. So I moved everything in and got the phone hooked up.

I remember that living in that double-wide trailer was one of the happiest times in my life. I had a big ol’ fishing cooler as my “entertainment center” with a fourteen-inch color W and a VCR on top of it. My two little girls would stay there with me when I came home after being on the road with WWE.

I’d get up and take Stephanie to school and Cassidy to day care, then I would work out and do my errands and pick them up at five. When it came time to go back on the road, I’d take them back to Jeannie at the house. During this period of time, I was starting to really get hot as Stone Cold Steve Austin and was going what seemed like a hundred miles an hour.

Jeannie and I were going through mediation, and came to an agreement on a dollar figure and a monthly figure for the kids. Then we signed the paperwork. Two months later I was divorced and I was living
in the double-wide. In the divorce decree, Jeannie was ordered to live within fifty miles of my residence, so she ended up leasing a house in the same gated community where I was going to buy that expensive house for us.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, Jeannie and the girls have since moved to Jeannie’s home in the United Kingdom. My kids are my life, and I can’t tell you how much I miss them.