Countdown To Lockdown (19 page)

“So Olaf,” I said. “You’re a wrestling fan?”

The woman who was with him, a worker at the home he lived in, quickly cut me off in the nicest way imaginable.

“He’s not a fan of yours because you are a wrestler,” she said. “He’s a fan of yours because you were his lifeguard.”

Cool, huh? Let me see, what does any of this have to do with wrestling? Oh yeah, the stuff on the wall, my workout routine. As you know, I originally wrote
stuff
throughout that whole story, but it just didn’t seem that funny without the real S word in there. Which, by the way, is a word I rarely if ever use in real life. It doesn’t even have a meaningful action-verb application like the F-bomb does when used
correctly and in moderation. Besides, I’ve seen plenty of PG-13 movies that sprinkle the S word around. But I will do my best to keep this book F-bomb free, regardless of whether or not it’s used as a meaningful action verb.

So I put in about twenty minutes on the bike, watching
The Making of Eastbound & Down
on HBO on Demand, probably the best five-dollar monthly expenditure I’ve ever made. Watching the special got me curious. Were those really April Buchanon’s (Katy Mixon’s) boobs we saw in the season finale? Or were they stunt boobies?

I figured I could work in a couple hundred hindu squats — deep knee bends without weights, although I don’t personally do them deep enough to qualify as such. Still, about twenty-five in, my thighs are burning. Fifty in and I’m really hurting. Wait, there they are, Kenny’s unhooking that bad boy, a quick-release, front-loading bra that simply wasn’t available back in my clumsy going-for-second-base phase. I don’t have too many examples I can mentally cite, but I think the majority — two out of three, maybe three out of four — ended with a female voice saying, “Maybe you’d better just let me do it.”

Go, Kenny, go! You can do it! The sparse material gives way and there are April’s boobies springing forth like a wire snake from a salted peanut can. Yes, I know I used that exact simile in
Tietam Brown
to describe a similar breast-releasing incident, but that was my book and my simile, and I’ll use it however often I want to. And I want to use it now. Because that’s what they looked like — a wire snake springing from a salted peanut can. Besides, I’ve seen the sales figures — not likely many of you actually read
Tietam Brown.
So it’s a fresh simile to you.

Wait a second, though. Let me go back, watch it again. I think I saw an edit there. Time for more hindus. Twenty-five, there’s the burn. Let’s get fifty. Wait, here it is. Medium close-up, that’s definitely Katy in her bra. I can see her breasts, heaving, yearning to be set free. Here’s Kenny, going for the release. Forget about those hindus, Mick, this is science. There it is, edit. Close-up. Release.
Boing!
Wire snake
springing from the can. Hard to tell, almost impossible. Let’s get twenty-five more hindus in before doing a before-and-after freeze frame.

I squeeze out twenty-five at 2:30 in the morning. I’ll need to leave for the airport at 4:00 a.m. for a 6:30 flight. These hindus are difficult and I’m sweating. I’m going to try to get another fifty, but not before getting to the bottom of this April Buchanon situation. Freeze-frame before photo. Note the faint pattern of freckles and the pendant resting comfortably in the cleavage. There was a time, during the heyday of “the Godfather” in WWE, when I was so inundated with cleavage that I thought I was forever numb to its charms. Apparently, based on this
Countdown to Lockdown
chapter, those days are over.

Edit. Close-up. Are those freckles really the same? The pendant. Wire snake.
Boing!
I review it one more time, like a Super Bowl referee on a critical fumble decision. Is the evidence conclusive? Or does the decision on the field stand?

In the end, it’s inconclusive. But I’m leaning toward stunt boobies. Otherwise, why cut at all? Why not just roll tape, show April, pan down, same shot,
boing!
Like a good chair shot with no hands-a-blocking or a Jackie Chan stunt filmed in its entirety, so we know Jackie’s still the man. Eventually, I’ll get the answer. How? By tracking down Kenny Powers and asking him my question personally.

Until then, I’ll accept that those boobies weren’t really April’s but wish they were. And wonder what they’d feel like if they were crushed against my body during a prolonged hug.

I’ve got to get to sleep. I’ll tell you about that Legends Convention tomorrow. By the way, before I took that shower and got ready for the airport? I reeled off fifty hindus. Bang! That bang’s for you, D.D.P.!

April 5, 2009

New Orleans International Airport

New Orleans, Louisiana

11:03 a.m.

Layovers, delays — they’re all part of life on the road. My flight to Atlanta is delayed an hour, which is no big deal, but that one-hour delay complicates my flight to Milwaukee, requiring an additional two hours of sitting around. By the time I get to Milwaukee for my prestigious
appearance tomorrow at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino, it will be almost seven; time for
WrestleMania.
I may just have to pass on
’Mania
this year in favor of some sleep and for the good of this memoir.

I caught that 6:30 flight on April 3 and did something highly unusual for me: I slept for the entire flight. It’s a frustrating thing, not being able to doze at will when so much of this lifestyle involves traveling. Some of the guys are like little cats; they can curl up and catch a napple (my own word for
nap
for the last seven years) just about anywhere; on a plane, a car, a bus, a couch, the floor, during a Jay Lethal match. Hey, I remember Curtis Hughes used to be able to take a nap at ringside while he was playing the role of the menacing enforcer. He’d just close his eyes behind those dark sunglasses he wore and take a little siesta.

Booker had an RV set up outside the convention center, for the guys to hang out in before their appearances. There had to have been ten different events going on at the huge center, most of them simultaneously. There’s a Ring of Honor show later on, an 8:00 p.m. bell time, which should result in one of their largest crowds of the year. I still keep in touch with ROH owner Cary Silkin, and though I will not see him on this particular day, he did offer me a ticket to see Leonard Cohen at Radio City on May 17. There’s a religious revival taking place, right next to the gun show. Not just any gun show, either, but a “High Caliber” gun show, although I’m not sure if the name is indicative of the type of people or the type of weaponry involved in the show.

Now I don’t want to raise the ire of the gun lobby. After all, I was probably treading dangerous waters with the Ted Nugent line, but I’ve got to think that if we could somehow go back in time to visit little James Madison, the principal framer of our Constitution, and Patrick Henry, the main proponent of the Bill of Rights amendments, and explained the twenty-first century to them, they might just have added a little amendment to that Second Amendment, explaining that rifles with calibers high enough to take an airplane out of the sky might not be such a good thing.

Sorry, guys, but with four police officers gunned down in Pittsburgh
yesterday, thirteen killed in Binghamton, New York, two days ago, and, perhaps most shocking of all, eight people senselessly slaughtered at a nursing home in North Carolina just a week ago, my sentiments are going to be with the victims, their families, and all those out there wondering what could possibly be next.

And in this economic environment, with so many losing so much so often, does anyone doubt that there’s going to be a next time, or a time after that, or a time after that?

I know there’s going to be a vocal minority who will disagree, some vehemently, with any suggestion that might possibly make their quest to procure firearms more inconvenient. But I’d like to see those same people explain their opposition to registration, gun locks, background checks, and legislation to the families of the victims in Pittsburgh, Binghamton, North Carolina, or the town after that, or the town after that.

I stepped into Booker’s RV and was met with the unmistakable grin of Stan “the Lariat” Hansen, one of the all-time greats in the business and a veritable legend in Japan. Hansen was a brawler, as realistic as they come, and his matches for All-Japan Wrestling during that promotion’s glory days, from the late seventies through the midnineties, are among the hardest hitting and most exciting in the history of the business. Certainly, he was a big influence on me long before I met him, and an even bigger one once I did.

Stan took me under his wing during my one and only tour for All-Japan in 1991 — showing me the ways of the Japanese wrestling world, allowing me to tag along for meals with sponsors that I could have never afforded on my own. He spoke of the joys of fatherhood, the importance of saving money, and offered up the single best piece of advice I’ve ever heard: “If you’re married, nothing good can happen to you in a bar.” Think about it, all you married guys, or any of you out there thinking of giving it a shot in the future.

At that time, going out after the show was still the in thing to do; to not go brought on the risks of social isolation and/or downward career momentum. Hey, the bookers, the guys who made the decisions, were
often at the forefront of the party environment. Of course, they were going to hook up their buddies from time to time and forget about the faces they seldom saw, except when they were, you know, doing their job in the ring.

I was lucky in a lot of ways, breaking in. I mean, I met a few pricks along the way, but by and large I was largely accepted, if not completely understood, by the boys. I was thought to be a little strange for never smoking pot — never tried it, never inhaled it — but no one ever pressured me to take anything.

Even in ECW, I was blissfully unaware of the copious amount of drug use that was going on all around me. Hell, I didn’t even know the Sandman was loaded during our matches until he told me months later. And by the time I got to WWE in 1996, the atmosphere was changing. Guys still went out, but it was no longer a prerequisite for social acceptance. The Internet was becoming big; video games were showing up in wrestlers’ suitcases, first in full-console form, later in personal-sized PSPs or Nintendo DSes, sometimes a combination of both. TNA has kind of become like Nerd Central with all the video games, iPods, smart phones, and DVD players. Last night in New Orleans none other than
Eastbound & Down
became the central focus of the conversation, with Jay Lethal — the man of a thousand voices — offering up his imitation of a forlorn Stevie Janowski after being told by Kenny Powers that his personal assistant services would no longer be required:

“I hope we get in a car accident and die right now, so we can live together in heaven.”

Hartsfield-Jackson Airport

Atlanta, Georgia

2:53 p.m.

This could take awhile. I’m at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. I arrived just as my scheduled flight to Milwaukee was taking off,
sending me off to the nearest Delta agent for rebooking. I’m on standby for both the 3:58 and the 6:40 flights before finally having a confirmation at 9:30. In which case I’d only show up in Milwaukee seven and a half hours later than scheduled. I really wonder if this appearance is worth the hassle it’s caused. It’s already upended my little Williamsburg, Virginia, vacation with Mickey and Noelle, forcing me to book flights for the whole family and three different hotels for what will amount to a couple of days at Busch Gardens and a couple-hour visit to the Colonial Williamsburg attraction, where U.S. history buff Mickey will be in all his glory, observing all the researchers wearing the shirts “with the tissue in the front,” his take on colonial attire.

Anyway, Stan and I hit it off, talking family, wrestling, Vince, and baseball until it was time to do the autograph thing for Booker. I was kind of sequestered behind a curtain, visible only to those willing to fork over a little extra money to take a peek behind the curtain for a little face time with the HCL — Hardcore Legend — me.

There wasn’t a particularly long line to meet me — I saw maybe sixty or seventy people during my two hours behind the curtain — but man, it was a pretty expensive peek. Granted, all the money was going to Booker’s foundation, but I really doubt I would shell out that type of cash to meet someone like me.

Of those sixty or seventy people, I saw maybe ten Americans, tops. The rest of the people I met were like an international coalition, a United Nations security meeting or something. Let me see, in no particular order, I met fans from Ireland, Scotland, England, New Zealand, Belgium, Australia, and France, all in town specifically to meet me … and maybe to watch
WrestleMania
, too.