My Life Outside the Ring (17 page)

It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about it now, thinking about my kids and what a bad example that is, but that’s just the way it was. It was a different era.

It doesn’t mean my kids should follow my example. Just the opposite. We’re all smarter than we were then. We know more about what drugs can do to you, and how dangerous they can be. I want my kids to learn from my mistakes so they don’t make the same mistakes I made, you know? And I’m certainly not gonna lie about it.

It’s also weird to think about the fact that I was doing all of this—and the steroids—while telling all of my young fans week after week, “Train, say your prayers, and take your vitamins.” That line was like my own Bob Barker catchphrase. I threw that sentiment out into the world day after day after day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that message. It’s a great message. It was just a little bit hypocritical that my activities behind the scenes didn’t match the role-model persona I was putting out there.

I’m glad I did it, though. Putting that kind of positive message out there to millions of kids is one of the least self-centered things I did in all those years. I put it right up there with visiting kids for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and other charity work I did. Throwing that kind of positive vibe out into the universe can only bring positive things in return.

Plus, there was almost no chance that any kid would find out about what I was doing late at night. There weren’t packs of paparazzi everywhere like there are today. There weren’t all these celebrity magazines and entertainment-show videographers stalking you everywhere you went, either. If you partied with fans, they certainly weren’t forwarding embarrassing photos to some Internet blog—that whole culture just didn’t exist. Instead the fans would just brag to their friends about whatever happened that night. Unlike today, it was actually fun for everyone involved—on both sides of the equation.

I can’t even describe to you how much fun it was to wrestle Madison Square Garden and hear that crowd, with those twenty-two thousand people making my jaws water, and to come off of that high and head over to the Ramada on 48th Street with all the other wrestlers and drink in that bar with all these fans going nuts and then head up to a hotel room for more drinks and a couple of lines.

But the side effects and the whole crash of that next day just wasn’t worth it. By late ’85, I threw more coke away than I snorted. It got to the point where I’d buy an eight ball, which is three grams, and I’d do a little bit of it and have a few drinks, and get so wired I’d start grinding my teeth, so I’d drink a little more to take the edge off and then go to bed and wake up feeling like shit. So I’d get and I’d flush the rest of that eight ball down the toilet.

Next thing I know I’d have one of the other wrestlers callin’ me up, “Hey, man, you still got that eight ball?”

I’d tell ’em what I did.

“How the fuck could you flush that down the toilet?!”

It was easy. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to keep having that feeling. But flushing it wasn’t enough. There was always more of it around the next night. And even though I never did more than a line or two at a time, and I never did it on a daily basis, I’d find that I kept going back for more.

Like I said, a rat to poison. Until I finally had a wake-up call in ’86.

Alan’s End

Was it fate or a big coincidence that Studio 54 got shut down for good in the spring of 1986? I think the collective party in this country had just gone on for far too long and got far too crazy. I mean, life has a way of slapping you in the face when things go too far, and I think that can happen on a grand scale as easily as it can happen in any one man’s life. We had all been on this party train since the ’70s, and all of a sudden it was running out of track.

Early that year, something terrible happened to my brother Alan’s ex-wife, Martha Alfonso. While he had gone on his odyssey—through Texas, and riding with the Hell’s Angels up in Frisco—and had remarried this lady named Marsha and started a new life in L.A., Martha stayed back in Tampa and raised their three kids on her own.

Martha was making a decent living managing a hotel by the Tampa airport. For a while she was dating a guy who had a whole lot of money, yet who never seemed to have a real job.

Well, one day Martha and her boyfriend got in a real big fight, and after work she went into the hotel bar and wound up dancing with one of the employees there. Her boyfriend walked in and shot her twice—killed her right there on the dance floor.

So all of a sudden I have two nieces and a nephew who lost their mom. (My nephew is Michael Bollea, who would eventually wrestle as Horace Hogan in the National Wrestling Alliance and over in Japan. He grew up thick and strong, like Alan.)

So these three kids started bouncing around between Martha’s side of the family, the Cuban side, and my parents. I did whatever I could to send money back to try to help them out. But just a few months later we were knocked out by another wave of bad news.

Alan started showing up to my matches in L.A., the same way he used to show up in San Francisco and Oakland a year or two earlier. Only now, instead of having the Hell’s Angels in tow, he’d bring his new wife, Marsha.

I knew that drugs were still a big part of Alan’s life. He hadn’t turned his life around as much as I thought.

It wasn’t long before my brother came right out in the open with it. “I need pain pills, man. Can you help me out?” He knew that I knew a doctor named George Zahorian back in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—this doc that would hook me and all the other wrestlers up with steroids and other stuff if we needed it. It wasn’t like I was giving him LSD, so I probably didn’t think much about sharing a few pain pills with my brother.

This one day in 1986, though, I went back to L.A. and met up with Alan and Marsha, and something had shifted—like someone had pulled the rug out from under their whole world. The two of them started giving me this crazy fuckin’ story. “We can’t pay the rent on the house. We’re behind on the van payment. Our carpet company’s goin’ under.” They were late on Alan’s motorcycle payment, they were out of groceries, they were desperate and needed my help. It was this, that, and the other, nonstop.

So I wrote ’em a check. I can’t remember if it was for five grand or ten grand. I was making enough money that it didn’t make a difference at that point. Anyway, as soon as I wrote that check, the two of them just started arguing like hell in this restaurant we were in.

I finally pulled my brother aside and said, “Alan, look. Why don’t you just come with me to San Francisco tonight?” He looked real stressed out, and I told him it was only an hour flight up there. I was scheduled to wrestle at the Cow Palace. “We can just hang out and talk and, you know, maybe we can see some of your old friends. Then we’ll just fly back. We’ll be back by midnight tonight.” The last flight out of San Francisco airport’s an eleven o’clock. I was happy to pay for it. It was no big deal.

“No,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t. I gotta stay here. I wanna do this, I wanna do that.”

I really thought he should get away from the craziness. Catch a break for a night. But he needed to go pay those bills right away and get everything taken care of, he said. So I gave up. “Okay. I’ll call you when I get back.”

That night I flew up to San Francisco and wrestled as the main event at the Cow Palace as planned. As I came out of the ring, Blackjack Lanza, this old-time wrestler who worked as the on-site agent, who always stayed in back and dictated who would win or lose the matches, came up to me looking real serious and handed me a note. “It’s an emergency,” he said.

I open the note to see what the hell he’s talking about, and all it says is “Call Marsha, it’s an emergency.”

Fuck,
I remember thinking.
What now?
Who knew what Marsha’s idea of an emergency was? I mean, I don’t know what I expected other than another crazy sob story about how the money I gave them wasn’t enough and how they were in even more trouble or whatever. But she’s my brother’s wife. So I called her.

“They found your brother dead in a hotel room.”

Apparently Alan took all of that money I gave him and rather than paying off bills or getting a handle on all the shit in his life, he went out and bought a boatload of whatever his drug of choice was. Then he overdosed and died.

I guess I’ll never know if it was on purpose or not. Whatever it was, he did it with my money. The bread that I gave him. My big-time wrestling career and big fat wallet made it possible for my brother Alan to die that night.

That’s not what I thought about when I first heard the news. That sorry fact would hit me in the middle of the night sometime later. No. When I hung up with Marsha, all I could think about was my mom and dad. I was so worried about how they would react. I knew they were going to get that phone call, and I knew how crushed they would be.

“One day, we’re gonna get a phone call about your brother,” my mom had been saying for years. Her nightmare had finally come true.

Even with all the problems, all the hell he put them through, Alan was still their favorite son. That’s just my opinion, of course. My mom will totally disagree. Every time I see her she says, “Terry, you’re my number-one son.” I don’t want to seem mean or anything, but there are times when I’ll be sitting there with my mom for an hour, watching TV, and she’ll want some water and she’ll still say, “Alan, get me some water.” She doesn’t even know she does it, and I don’t ever feel the need to correct her.

“Okay, Mom.”

My dad was the same way. It was always “Alan this, and Alan that.” I never had anything against it. I just knew that Alan was his favorite, too. As a younger brother you can just tell.

Even right before my dad passed away, whenever he would talk to me he would always start with “Alan—I mean, Terry.” So I knew this news was gonna crush them. Not to mention those three kids who now had lost both of their parents in the course of six months. Even though they hadn’t lived with Alan since they were little, can you imagine the pain they must’ve gone through, knowing that the possibility of ever seeing their father again was gone?

I quit using cocaine right then and there. After seeing what drugs could do to a person, and do to an entire family like that? I was done. Smoking pot was one thing, and drinking beer was another, but I was done with any kind of hard-core drugs. There was no way I would ever meet an end like Alan’s.

As for how his death made me feel? My emotions? I guess I didn’t really have any.

Emotions were one of the things I didn’t have time for back then.

Comfortably Numb

I don’t know how to explain this really, ’cause I’ve never really talked about it before, but the weirdest thing about wrestling was how numb it kept me.

I worked so much, and worked so hard, there just wasn’t any time for personal feelings.

In those days, there was no Rock. There was no Stone Cold Steve Austin. When this thing took off, I was the main event seven days a week—twice on Saturdays and twice on Wednesdays—and never at the same venue. Even on those double-match days, I would hit the Philadelphia Spectrum for a 1:00 p.m. match and then wrestle up at the Boston Garden that very same night, or wherever.

And it never stopped.

I got on planes an average of three hundred days a year.

I’d hear flight attendants on the old Eastern Airlines complaining endlessly, “Oh, they’ve kept me running for nine days straight.” And I’m sittin’ there thinking,
I’ve been going for ninety-one days and I haven’t had a day off yet!

To really blow your mind, think about this: If I say I wrestled four hundred days a year, it’s no exaggeration. My years were actually longer than 365 days.

The American audience had no idea that I was wrestling in Japan during the whole Hulkamania thing. There were times when I’d fly back and forth to Japan twice in a week just to wrestle. I used to complain about driving nine hours between matches in the Memphis territory. Now it was nothing to wrestle in Madison Square Garden one day, then fly all the way to the Egg Dome in Tokyo on the same day, ’cause you’d gain fourteen hours, and then fly back to the West Coast and hit San Francisco or L.A. before getting right back on a plane to fly to Narita International Airport before jumping on another plane to fly back to Boston.

So I could wrestle in Japan today and then fly back across the international date line and land in another town
yesterday
. I was constantly adding days to my years!

The thing was, in my mind, I couldn’t slow down. Just like when I was working for peanuts back in Memphis, this job still had no security. There was no retirement plan or medical benefits. More than that, I was the top of the food chain, and every wrestler coming up wanted to dethrone the king. If I broke my leg tonight in Madison Square Garden, not only would I be left to tend to it at my own expense—and simply be out of a job until I could get myself back in the ring—but someone would try to replace me as America’s big hero the next day.