My Life Outside the Ring (28 page)

I found myself wishing that Linda and I could be happy again, praying almost—even though I hadn’t gone to church or spent any time praying for years.

I thought about how crazy my life had become.
What am I doing in a twenty-thousand-square-foot house?
I think I was happier when I was living out of a van by the beach in Pensacola, just waking up and feeling the wind on my skin.

How can Linda say that she hates the wind?

I felt sick to my stomach as I got back in the car. I wanted to stay lost in happy childhood memories forever.

There had to be some way that we could be happy again. There just had to be.

Father of the Year

The very next day, Linda, Brooke, Nick, and I all flew up to New York City, where I was set to accept the national Father of the Year Award from the Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council. It was a huge honor.But all I can remember about that night is how unhappy and miserable my wife was, and how much she had been drinking.

She drank so much wine in the hotel room as we were getting ready, even Brooke was afraid what might happen once she got into the ballroom. “Oh my God, Dad,” Brooke whispered as we looked at Linda putting her lipstick on crooked in the hotel mirror.

Up at the podium when I accepted the award, I told the audience that Linda deserved to be sharing it. She was the one who taught me how to be a parent first and not just a friend to my kids. I wouldn’t be the father I was without everything Linda had taught me. All of that was true.

In my mind, though, I just couldn’t figure out where it all turned, and how she had gone down such a different path in the last few years.

I tried my best to enjoy that moment. Despite what my critics might say, I think I deserved that Father of the Year Award. A good father is one thing I feel like I can say with 100 percent certainty that I am. Even though the rug had been pulled out from beneath everything else in my life, I can’t think of how a father could be any more present than I’d been for my kids—especially as we’d gone through all these difficult changes in the last three years. The only part I felt horrible about was that Nick and Brooke had been forced to witness so much fighting between Linda and me. I told them that in the hotel room after the ceremony—as Linda looked on with her half-cocked smile.

It all wound up captured on film in the final moments of the finale episode of
Hogan Knows Best
—including my hope that by next year I might be eligible to win a Husband of the Year award, too.

That was more of a stretch than anyone could have imagined.

Linda had already started packing up her things at the house in Miami. She had a big 18-wheeler in the driveway filled with boxes before the cameras even wrapped for the season.

Without my knowledge she had gone and rented a house in Brentwood, California. We had just sold our house in California a few months earlier, right? That didn’t matter. Part of Linda’s frequent disappearing act had been making trips to L.A. to get this new home all furnished. And as soon as the season wrapped toward the end of spring 2007, she headed out there to live for God knows how long. She told me flat out that I wasn’t allowed to come visit her. I just plain wasn’t welcome.

But Linda wasn’t the only one who had been keeping a secret.

It was right around this time that my affair with Christiane Plante ended.

I was still married. Even though Linda was in the process of moving three thousand miles across the country just to get away from me at that point, I still had a wife. I had a family. I had every intention of making my marriage work. When I prayed to find happiness again, in my mind I was praying for Linda and me to get back to the way we once were.

So divorce was not an option for me.

But that night, as I sat there in that tuxedo and that black bandanna making proclamations in front of the TV cameras about wanting to become Husband of the Year, I knew in my heart that I had failed.

The Unraveling

Chapter 15

Cruel Summer

By the summer of 2007,
the rug had been pulled out so hard from under me that the floorboards and support beams and foundation went with it. I felt like I had nothing to stand on.

I moved back into the big house on Willadel Drive up in Clearwater and put the Miami house on the market. So at least I was home—but even my home didn’t seem the same.

My body wasn’t the same, either. I was just too old. I was just too tired. I was just in too much pain. I felt like I was dragging myself out of bed every morning. The pain in my lower back was so bad I had to sit in a chair to just brush my teeth. I knew it was all just downhill from there. Some days I wondered why I even bothered getting out of bed in the first place.

After the mess of the last season, and the mess that my family was in, there wasn’t a chance in hell that we’d land a fifth season of
Hogan Knows Best
. So for the first time in my life I felt unemployed. At the age of fifty-three to suddenly not have a job to look forward to left me wondering, just a little bit, what on earth I was good for anymore.

I tried not to focus on that. I tried to spend my days focused on my kids’ careers instead. Even that wasn’t easy. Brooke was spending more and more time with her mother in L.A. and was looking for an apartment in Miami. The one good upshot of the
Hogan Knows Best
fiasco season was that Brooke was in the process of getting her own spin-off show, but it kept her so busy she just wasn’t around very much.

Even Nick seemed to be a little bit tired of having his old man around all the time, which I thought was just typical sixteen-year-old behavior. He was seriously into motor sports now, and spending lots of time with the buddies who made up his racing team: John Graziano, Barry Lawrence, and Danny Jacobs.

One of the best things about that was they were all spending lots of time at the big house. John, who grew up just north of Clearwater, in Dunedin, Florida, was pretty much living with us that whole summer. I loved having all of that young energy around. It wasn’t what I so desperately wanted—the sound of a home filled up by my happy family—but at least I wasn’t alone.

I just don’t do well alone.

John

John Graziano first came into Nick’s life because of their mutual fascination with Toyota Supras. They actually met at one of those Supra meets that Nick and I went to before he got his license—one of those events where enthusiasts get together in a parking lot to talk about the cars, and look at the cars, and show off their cars.

John was about five years older than Nick, but that common bond seemed to erase the years, and it wasn’t long before they became best friends.

When Nick finally got his license, he was constantly at the track. He was out there before the track even opened and would stay until they kicked him off at night. He was changing his own tires and getting behind the wheel taking turn after turn to get the feel of it down. He loved drifting—the form of precision racing in which drivers slide their cars sideways around the corners—and I would be there as much as I could to help Nick push the cars on and off the track. John was usually right there with us.

When they showed Nick racing on
Hogan Knows Best
, they made it seem like a celebrity thing—like he got a couple of quick lessons and was racing all of a sudden. It wasn’t like that. He was as dedicated as any professional athlete to becoming a driver. He took it real seriously. John was like his right-hand man, pushing him and supporting him when he needed it. I loved the fact that my son had a friend like John to bond with, given everything else that was happening in our lives. In some ways it was like watching me and Brutus in the early days—just bonding over mutual interests, and knowing someone’s got your back, is so important in life.

John started sleeping over at the house a lot so he’d be there first thing in the morning to head to the track—or to catch a workout with me. He seemed to get a kick out of working out with Hulk Hogan in the morning, and unlike my own kids, who liked to sleep in, he was right there pushing me at like 7:00 a.m.

So John became a real fixture in our house. Even in Miami. He was around so much, the editors had a tough time cutting around him on
Hogan Knows Best
—because he’d always wind up in the shots and was never miked.

Nick really looked up to John. He viewed him almost like an older brother. Because of that bond, Brooke sort of treated him like a brother, too. Things were real bad in the Graziano household. Real bad. That’s one of the main reasons he found peace hanging out at our house.

It’s hard to explain, but John seemed real lost at times. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. When he joined the marines in 2005, I got real scared for him. While he was over in Iraq in 2006, he would always manage to get to a phone somehow. I thought it was amazing that he would trek out to make a call under those awful conditions, and when he did, he would call us. We loved hearing from him. He said his own parents wouldn’t accept collect calls, so he just called us instead.

We were so happy when he got back safe and sound in the spring of 2007, we took him into our home pretty much full-time. He really was a part of our family.

But John was real uneasy when he got back. He seemed more lost than ever in some ways. He had seen some pretty rough stuff in Iraq. He was in a transportation unit and in charge of driving vehicles over there, and at one point a roadside bomb had gone off right in front of the vehicle he was driving. Members of his company died. I can’t imagine going through something like that, and how much that must mess with your head. Especially at twenty-one years old.

From the moment he returned, John kept talking about death. He kept saying he was sure he was gonna die. It freaked me out. The rest of the family, too. Even with all the chaos we had with Linda, we all tried to support him and be there for him. He jumped right back into Nick’s racing team, and I just thought he’d work through whatever issues he had right there in Florida.

Then he did something unexpected. Just a month or so after he got back, John reenlisted with the marines. That summer, we got word that he would ship out to Iraq again that December.

Part of me wanted to find a way to stop him from doing it. I was just so scared about what might happen to him if he went back over there. But there was no stopping John. He was an adult. He made his own decisions. For some reason, he had made up his mind that going back to a war zone would be better than the situation he faced at home.

August 26, 2007

August 26 started out like a typical Sunday. I went out to the gym that morning, came back, and decided I wanted to go out on the boat—this offshore cigarette boat we kept docked right off the backyard. Any day on the water was a good day as far as I was concerned. I really needed a good day, too.

I thought I’d take that boat out for a good run, maybe thirty miles, head down the beach, stop by and see who was around, maybe pick up some of my buddies and just cruise. Your basic Florida Sunday. I figured I’d bring a few six-packs with me for anyone who came along to enjoy, but we were completely out of beer, which was really strange, because there are like ten refrigerators in the big house: Sub-Zeros in the kitchen and the pantry off to the side of the kitchen; a smaller refrigerator in the wine room; a refrigerator up in our bedroom; a refrigerator in my gym, in the guesthouse, in the boathouse. All those refrigerators and no beer. Once every couple of months our caretaker, George, would do a run and stock all the refrigerators. I guess he forgot.

I was hungry, and so were Nick and his pals. So we all piled into my four-door yellow pickup that morning, and we grabbed breakfast at the little restaurant we always went to. As we were leaving, I said, “Guys, I gotta pick up some beer.” So we stopped by the Albertson’s liquor store.

While Nick and Barry waited in the truck, I went in with John and Danny—who were both of legal drinking age. I was buying, of course, and I knew I’d be buying a lot, because John drank like a fish. I mean, when we were on the road with Nick’s team, one of the things John would brag about was “I can’t get drunk.”

I remember one night I went out to a bar with John and Danny, and John must have bought eight, nine, ten shots in a row. I drank one or two of them before saying, “That’s it for me, man. I’m not really good with drinking shots.” He wouldn’t have it: “No, no, man!” In the gym, John was always giving me shit—he loved that back-and-forth of trying to push each other to the next level—and this was that same sort of thing. John was bragging that night, “I can’t get drunk.” You could see he was drunk off his ass!