Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (16 page)

When the time was right, he called for the finish. I reversed him into the ropes and he dove over top of me attempting a simple sunset flip, but I fought off falling backward and dropped to my knees.

I?hooked his legs and there was no escape. What a beautiful finish, one that I would keep in the back of my mind forever for something special.

In the dressing room afterwards, I looked in the mirror and saw that my top lip was detached from my mouth on the inside. I was worried that I’d lose my front teeth. The commission doctor was useless. He was a little old German guy who picked his nose until his fingernails were caked with blood, and yet he thought wrestlers were uncouth. All he ever did was take your blood pressure to make sure you were fit enough to get in the ring. How you came out of the ring was no concern of his.

At the show in Calgary the following Friday, my eyes were circled with black rings and my lips and nose were puffed out, giving me the profile of a B-52 bomber. It hurt like hell.

I was supposed to have a match with a guy I’d never met. When I first looked at Duke Myers, from Portland, he struck me as a big Elmer Fudd, sitting there smoking a cigarette, wearing some old beat-up white boots and a pair of blue trunks that looked like old underwear. He had a beer belly and a head like a watermelon. When I asked him how long he’d been working, he confessed that he’d recently got out of prison. As it turned out, he was a good worker, with just a bit of ring rust, and we did just fine. I had him in an abdominal stretch, with Sandy Scott ready to ring the bell, when, right on cue, Kas charged in wearing his street clothes, viciously attacking me and slamming me to the mat. He hit the ropes to deliver his flying elbow drop, but his foot caught in his pant cuff and he crashed down, right on top of my face! By the time I was helped back to the dressing room, there was Kas hanging his head while Stu berated him in front of all the boys for not being careful enough.

In Kas’s defense, I said it was an accident. Stu left it at that. Kas felt awful. A few days later he confided to me that he was having a hard time working; his kidneys were getting worse and he might need to return home soon for a transplant. I was worried about him.

When the van pulled up to the back of the building in Regina, I noticed that Julie’s sister, Michelle, was working security for Gil. She was tall and looked way too appealing for her age—she wasn’t even eighteen yet—as she opened the big sliding doors at the back and waved us in. Tom mumbled,

“I’d shag that.” With Tom, it was easier to let remarks like that pass.

Julie and I were at the point where we couldn’t stand seeing each other only once a week, and I’d just talked her into moving in with me. I had no idea whether it would last a day, a week or forever.

Living with me in my little house in Ramsay didn’t mean she’d see me all that much more, when you got right down to it. And Stu had just booked Keith and me over to Japan; I may have been doing well by the family business, but Stu would sacrifice his own interests if there was a chance for his sons to earn more money and make their mark.

I never met a wrestler who didn’t believe that the big break was just around the corner, even though for most of us that break would never come. I believed that my best chance was waiting for me in Japan, where it didn’t matter how good you were on the mic.

And I guess I hoped that Julie would be able to handle my being gone so much.

8

JAPAN AND THE RISING SON

KEITH AND I WERE PICKED UP at Narita airport in a sleek blue bus emblazoned with a lion’s head, the logo of New Japan wrestling. On the bus already was Tiger Jeet Singh, a Punjabi wrestler with menacing eyes, a trim beard and a turban. He was carrying a sword. Keith and I also met a bald-headed black wrestler from New York called Bad News Allen Coage. He’d won a bronze medal in judo at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976, but he was more famous for once stopping the New Japan bus after André the Giant made an off-color racial remark and calling André out. The Giant looked out the window and never made a move. Bad News had been trained in Japan and worked there exclusively. He had no sense of American-style wrestling, but there was no denying that even at forty-five years old, he was a lean, mean fighting machine.

We tripped along for an hour in the heat and exhaust fumes, and finally arrived at the Keo Plaza Hotel. The lobby was swarming with reporters and teenaged fans, mostly boys, who seemed terrified of us gaijin. Nevertheless, they managed to bow and politely ask for photos and autographs on placards of white cardboard.

My room was on the thirty-second floor and had a magnificent view of the Shinjuku district, Tokyo’s bustling center of business, shopping and entertainment. I slid Julie’s picture out of my wallet. She had also given me a small, plush Pink Panther doused in her perfume. I didn’t feel the least bit awkward about pressing my face into it every chance I got.

The first show was to be broadcast live on TV all over the country. When we arrived at the venue, which was located many floors above a big department store, the mob pressed in for a closer look.

Suddenly Tiger Jeet and Bad News charged the fans and reporters. Tiger Jeet was smashing people over the head with the flat part of his sword, and Bad News was knocking down anyone and anything that stood in his way. No one was actually hurt, though a few cameras got knocked over, and some reporters had to look around for their broken eyeglasses. I got the feeling this scene wasn’t unusual, and that the reporters loved their part in the drama because it would be a good story, which was the whole point.

While few of the Japanese wrestlers I met could speak any English, they all understood the English terms for moves and high spots, and they could all call a drop kick or a sunset flip in English; if they had worked with Mexican wrestlers, they could even do it in Spanish.

Peter Takahashi, the Japanese referee in charge of foreign crews, was thick and stocky, with a fish face and a flat-top. He was almost obsequious with the big names such as Tiger Jeet and Bad News, but he seemed mildly annoyed by the rest of us. I felt unmistakable dislike for me, or maybe for all big, white North Americans, emanating from behind his eyes as he took me to meet my opponent, a very short, five-foot-three, thick-legged wrestler named Hoshino. Even though I was going over, Hoshino seemed friendly enough. Takahashi told me to go as heel as possible.

Just before the first match, a group of young girls in kimonos climbed into the ring to present us with flowers. Peter ordered me to charge over, rip the flowers apart and chase the girls out of the ring. I did as I was told. And I’d just fallen for an old Japanese ploy designed to tire me out before I’d even started my match. I looked out at the hushed audience, sitting there in silence. Tough crowd, I thought.

I found out in short order what the Japanese wrestlers were all about: Give them an inch and they’d take a mile. Hoshino didn’t sell anything for me, and he didn’t cooperate with me on anything either.

The crowd barely made a sound other than the occasional cough or yell from way up high. I could hear the TV announcers talking a mile a minute at a long table right in front of me. At the end I was so blown up I thought I’d trip over my tongue as I struggled to get Hoshino up for my pile driver. I was merely the first of the sacrificial lambs that night. With the exception of Bad News, the rest of the foreign crew didn’t fare any better than I did. I knew I was in for a long six weeks.

The rivalry between the two major pro wrestling companies in Japan—New Japan, headlined by Antonio Inoki, and Giant Baba’s All Japan—was fierce. They timed their TV and house shows to compete with each other, and with both promoters in starring roles as top babyfaces, they contracted monster heels from around the world at unprecedented salaries. Both men were considered good and fair promoters. Baba, who was seven feet tall, was a wellloved but terrible worker, but I never met a classier wrestler than Antonio Inoki. He was a legitimate tough guy, respected by fans and wrestlers alike.

Keith breezed through main event six-man tags working with the top Japanese wrestlers, men who did understand that it was much easier to work with their opponents. I had to deal with the less experienced hands, in Japan collectively called Young Boys. They sported their cauliflower ears as if they were a badge of honor and thought it was good business to break some teeth or wrench a knee. All the better if the broken bits belonged to a gaijin like me.

I soon began to catch on. I approached every match as a half-shoot, refusing to sell, and I’d make them look stupid by moving if one of them threw a big drop kick. I was as stiff as I could be. The problem was that the Young Boys were in superb condition because they trained year-round, like members of a professional sports team. Even their sparring sessions were closely covered by the media.

That first week, John Wayne’s recent passing was still big news in Japan. They were playing a lot of his movies on TV, and as I watched him swagger across the screen speaking perfect Japanese I wondered what he would have thought of that. One night the phone bleeped. It was Yani, a young friend of Hito’s. “Hito ask me show you Tokyo,” he said. I grabbed my black cowboy hat just as The Duke was firing back from behind a wagon wheel.

Yani was in his late twenties, and thin with neatly permed hair. He was wearing a dark blue silk suit, and he bowed slightly as he greeted me, then opened the door to his black Mazda sports coupe. In Japan, the practice seemed to be to drive tiny, shiny cars, very fast in heavy traffic, on the left side of the road. I felt like I was on a spaceship in a Jetsons cartoon as we flew past trucks and small taxis, whose drivers wore white masks over their faces to protect them from exhaust fumes. We drove past the Imperial Palace of Emperor Hirohito, a beautiful gray brick castle with a moat, which stood out in stark contrast to the neon that was everywhere. Yani took me to a sushi bar, where we watched sumo. As I watched, I realized it was about more than two fat guys pushing each other out of a circle. It took more skill that I’d thought. For the first time since I got to Japan, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself. I thanked Yani for his generosity by giving him my black cowboy hat.

We were heading north toward Sakata on the bullet train when Bad News announced, “That’s Mount Fuji.” It was sort of a shock to hear his voice, he was such a loner. I don’t think he isolated himself for racial reasons, although he made it clear that he was very black in his politics and orientation.

Some of the wrestlers were having a kind of cultural discussion across the aisle from me. “I heard they have these bath houses where these gorgeous geishas soap you down and wash you clean with their pussies. They’ll suck you and fuck you and do whatever you want.” Somebody else added that they were very expensive; whether that knowledge was from personal experience, we didn’t know.

After we checked into our hotel, Keith and I went with a Japanese heel wrestler named Waida to a noodle shop. The proprietor was a friend of his, and all the chefs and mamasans fussed over us while we autographed their white cardboards. There were some turtles as big as army helmets in the restaurant’s aquarium. As the owner proudly showed them off to us, I wasn’t quite sure what he was saying, but I assumed he was asking me which one I thought was the most beautiful, so I pointed to the biggest one. When we were seated, the beautiful turtle was brought to our table, its legs and head tucked inside its shell. The owner coaxed the turtle to stick his head out, and then, quick as lightning, a cook seized the turtle’s head with a pair of tongs, yanked its neck out as far as it could stretch, and cut its throat.

Then the owner tipped up the creature and poured warm turtle blood into shot glasses, edged them toward me and Keith and said, “Kampai.” I said, “No, thanks.” The cooks and the owner laughed and said it was good for “fuckie-fuckie,” and they raised their forearms with clenched fists.

“A lot of good it’ll do us over here.” Keith shook his head.

But Waida smiled, hoisted the glass and downed the blood in one gulp. As for the turtle, they pried it open right in front of us, cut it up and slapped the slices on the grill. I declined my portion.

When I turned twenty-three that July in Japan, Keith told everyone it was my birthday, so all the boys took me out. Tiger Jeet knew a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel, a cozy little place. Before long Waida had the staff surround me, clapping and singing “Happy Birthday” in Japanese. Tiger Jeet handed me a warm, clear drink. It went down easy. My first sake. They told me it wasn’t as strong as beer, and so I had another, and another, tossing them back until all I could see were the brown, yellow, and white laughing, spinning faces of Tiger Jeet, Waida and Keith. The next morning I woke up with all my clothes on and my head pounding. An angry Peter Takahashi stood over me telling me I was holding up the whole bus.

We celebrated my birthday four nights in a row.

Every night we worked in a different town, some big, some small, but always sold out. The Japanese I met on the main island were leery of North Americans. If a wrestler asked for directions, people would turn and run away as if he were Godzilla.

We took the ferry to Hokkaido, the north island. Not only were the people there much bigger, they weren’t nervous about us in the least. The countryside was also different, with such thick forests that it reminded me of Canada.

We pulled into a tourist stop where they sold carved wooden bears, which are considered to be a sacred animal in that part of Japan. I wondered what they would have thought of Terrible Ted.

Outside the shop, I stared into the sad eyes of a miserable Asiatic black bear confined to a small cage. He certainly wasn’t being treated as sacred. I also noticed a totem pole, and I felt a kind of kinship with the angry face on the bottom: I was the low man on the pole in Japan. I was glad for Keith when he got the world title shot with Fujinami, in Sapporo, but every night I had my usual struggle. I still couldn’t understand why the young Japanese boys couldn’t just work. On top of that I was so homesick I was going out of my mind.