Savage (29 page)

QUESTION 2:
In the winter of 1986, Andrew came over along with my other friend, Eric. We made a tape-recording of us wrestling. I told Andrew I was Macho Man and Roddy Piper put together, and he started singing, "Put together as one, there are people dying..." imitating the song "We Are the World." I cracked up so hard. We took turns doing play-by-play as we wrestled. Andrew said, "Oh my God, he's juggling with a saw blade. They seem to be calling wrestlers in from all over the world to try and stop this...They say they'll be here tomorrow morning?!
What the heck, where are these people
!?" Years later, I used sound bites from the tape for the friendship memorial VHS I made for Andrew called "The Death of the Mega Powers."

On this same VHS tribute, I made another montage with a George Harrison song, "All Those Years Ago" that had clips of me and Andrew playing hockey in our driveway and the Mega Powers (you and Hulk) kicking ass in the ring. Also around this time, Dad started working at Andrew's father's funeral home; I think it sort of made Andrew think our family was desperate, or that we were beneath not only his family, but virtually every family in the community. My father became The Undertaker, grew pale and smelled of deadly chemicals. I wrote a lot of strange notes to my good friend Andrew at this time issuing challenges and questioning loyalty. No one really understood what I was going on about. Andrew was avoiding me at all costs, started playing squash all the time with his new best friend Alex from California. I felt that Andrew and I had been friends for so long that the end of our friendship had to be at some sort of blowout pay-per-view spectacular. Towards the end, whenever I spoke to him, he would shake his head. He would shoot down every idea I had for us: going to a movie, playing road hockey, going shopping and going to the park on our bikes. Around that time, I also turned my jean jacket into a Macho Man Randy Savage ring jacket. I added bright colours along the arms, wrote out "Macho Man" in glittery paint on the back, and from the arms added long streams of bright material (yellow, orange and pink). I was going to wear it to school for Halloween along with a cowboy hat I'd spray painted orange but chickened out at the last minute. I didn't have a beard or sunglasses; mainly, I was afraid of being ridiculed. How did you feel wearing that stuff at the time? Did you ever wear it out in public? Outside of wrestling? It's not very practical attire.

QUESTION 3:
Going back to 1994, you were working for the WWF but not wrestling, doing play-by-play. It was near Thanksgiving. On this night, I locked my mouth up with fork and gristle for the last time at the twentieth annual Thanksgiving dinner. That's when I found out our home was being sold and that I would have to find my own place to live. It's a shame that things happened the way they did, but in the end, I think people have always respected me for being someone who always stood behind his beliefs and stood up for himself. In the closing Moments of the meal, it was revealed that there was no plan on using me in a domestic sense any longer. Though I never surrendered a tear during the meal, history was made and a new era began. Confusion, anger, betrayal, embarrassment, disgrace, disgust—all compounded and formed a kind of squall in my pharmacy belly.

Leading up to Thanksgiving, I had attempted suicide twice, I mean not officially, how do you really define an officially licensed suicide attempt? Have your parents treated your personality like it was a dead corpse? For how long now? I cut myself with a steak knife. There were a lot of elements that worked during that period, a lot of political jealousies and rivalries...for years I didn't forgive anybody involved in that—from Dad to Holly to Mom...even our cat. But at the same time, I realize that life's too short to carry around hard feelings on an everyday basis.

Aware of my freshly inked contract with GOING INSANE AT TWENTY, my family devised a plan to call for the signed real estate deal to drop on the family table just as dessert was served. However, as despicable of a scheme as it was, many argue that it was a necessary act for them to concoct. I take issue with anyone who ever suggests that there was no other choice. But, Diane was under a fair bit of pressure financially back then. I can feel for her a little. I think Diane has told me herself—and I believe her—that she wishes things had been done differently and has regrets about it. In one evening, my family screwed me not only out of family status, but also my childhood bed and my dresser. Around this time, you left the WWF for WCW for a $400,000 contract. There's a rumour you called up Vince McMahon drunk the night you signed with WCW to tell him you were leaving him. Is that true?

QUESTION 4:
I've edited about forty wrestler interviews since I started working here. Mostly guys who were mid-carders for a while in the late '80s or early '90s. But since a lot of them had key matches with bigger stars, we can attract visitors because they talk about these types of matches with bigger stars, and people are interested. But you would be a dream interview because you haven't made any public appearances or gone on the record since you released your rap album Be a Man. I feel like I'm drunk dialing you; anyway, the first year I knew you, that Christmas I asked for a set of workout weights and I studied photos of you and your forearms, the way your muscles formed along your triceps and biceps, even your leg muscles. I figured somehow I could resemble you in one way or another, I even thought of buying a small swimsuit and getting the stars and "Macho Man" on the back like you had, but the only colour they seemed to have at the local Eaton's was this bright baby blue, a colour you never wore in the ring. In late June 1988, I christened my Spanish-Canadian classmate Juan Miranda the Juan Man Gang, after your opponent at the time, One Man Gang. After weeks of build-up, we had a cage match during the last week of school that consisted of us wrestling beside a linked fence, and the first person to reach the top of the fence won. Macho Madness was at its peak. I lost when Juan's friend, acting as his manager, held onto my leg, preventing me from climbing the fence. After the match, people said, "That's it?" I guess we could have thought of a way to make the match more interesting. About a month before, at an inter-school track meet, Juan had been throwing me around on the lawn, when Andrew kicked the fence and told Juan to stop it. And Juan did. It was just like when Hogan saved your ass all the time.

QUESTION 5:
The story I am about to tell you is of historical fact that took place in Leaside between the years 1981 and 1992. I arrived in Leaside after moving from North Toronto. It was in Leaside where I first met Andrew Murray Beverly. He was a funny guy with a wit for insults and jokes.

During the early '80s, I became good friends with Andrew.

We went to the same church, located conveniently across the street from his house. He'd invite me over after church sometimes, and before you knew it, we'd become close friends. But not best friends.

A few years later, I found myself on a bus every morning going into East York to my new school, Cosburn.

I soon learned that Andrew was attending a school in the SAME area as I, and we frequently met up on the bus. One time I recall, on our way home from school, we decided we'd stay on the bus and go to Broadview Station. It was a very cold day, slowly turning into a blizzard. We made it onto the Bloor subway line, where we waited for twenty minutes in a delay of some kind.

Finally we made it to Eglinton Station, where we hopped on a bus heading for Laird. We got as far as just past Mount Pleasant when we decided the bus was taking too long. We walked in the snow through the high school field and saw people that were smart enough to actually get off the bus instead of doing our shortcut, tobogganing.

The next year was the commencement of our final year of public school. After the September strike, of which almost every day was spent with Andrew, I slowly began to take command of my status in my school, and by October, I had my first girlfriend (Corry). Andrew knew this, and whether he liked it or not I will never know, but what I did know was for the first time I saw the true nature of evil power that he so proudly possessed. Andrew went out of his way to make certain that my relationship with Corry would end in ruin. He managed to talk to one of my friends who also knew Corry, and whatever he said did something, because she dumped me like battery acid.

I did not talk to Andrew for a month.

The night he did this was just before Halloween. Andrew and I were preparing for Halloween, Friday, October 30th, 1987. At a party in another part of Leaside, I was losing my first girlfriend. Ninety percent because of Andrew, ten percent because of this guy named J.P.

I had a few other girlfriends that year but I never told Andrew about them.

Although at this time in our friendship, I did not particularly like him, Andrew and I realized we were best friends.

Spring 1988: A track-and-field meet at East York Collegiate for all East York public schools. I was sitting on the hill with some people from my class when my friend Juan (The Juan Man Gang) began to throw me around like a rag doll. My friends begged Juan to stop. He wouldn't. Crash. One giant kick from my 6' 2" friend on the nearby cage ended Juan's onslaught. Did you think you needed Hogan during that big run on top in 1988?

QUESTION 6:
I'm jumping all over the place here! It's all coming out in a gushing wave. Around
Wrestlemania II
, March 1986, at school all the Greek boys were wearing your classic purple Macho Man T-shirt. Our school wasn't really full of Hulkamaniacs; it was a bit of an alternative school anyway. Later on, it reminded me of Roch Carrier's "The Hockey Sweater," which is a story about a boy who loves Maurice "Rocket" Richard, and his Montreal Canadiens sweater gets worn out, so his mother orders a new one from Eaton's, and when it arrives in the mail, it's the wrong jersey, it's a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, and all his friends ridicule him, and he's so ashamed and has problems during a game of hockey with his friends, and the ref tells him to go to the church and pray for forgiveness, so he goes and prays that moths will come and destroy his Maple Leafs jersey. The image of all the boys wearing the Montreal Canadiens jersey reminded me of the hallways of my middle school, which, as far as I can recall, were full of Macho Man T-shirts, and not the yellow-and-red Hulkamania shirts. That summer, I watched you wrestle live for my birthday at Maple Leaf Gardens along with my sister and my dad. There were these boys that sat in front of us who were huge fans of yours. I was rooting for Steamboat, but these guys insisted that you would win. Over the next few months, I studied your matches more closely. When you crushed Ricky's throat with the timekeeper's bell, I just started thinking that you were the greatest. I admired you; I thought you got the job done. I thought you were likable even if you were doing bad things. I wanted to see more, highly anticipating your next moment of controversy.

QUESTION 7:
In the beginning of 1996, that's where I'm next on the journey of our entwined lives, um, I had been on medication for nearly eighteen months, and after dropping out of university once again, began couch surfing, mainly at my dad's place which was on top of a funeral home where he worked. The funeral home was not Andrew's father's company, though my father still worked there from time to time. Holly was in her last year of university. My mother lived alone. My father was studying to become a funeral director, and I helped him every once and a while deliver bodies to the morgue or pick up flowers for a service. I'd tune in to see you on Monday Nitro feuding with Ric Flair over the WCW world title, but my biggest memory from this period was definitely the pharmaceuticals. It was March 1996, a cold evening.

My father had the night off or was on call, and I was joining him for a drink or something when I decided I would take all my Epivals. It was one of three pills I was on. So while he was on the couch in his living room, I lined them all up on his kitchen table. I had a tape recorder with me and was slurring as I did a running commentary of my actions. I just kept saying, "I'm going to do it," or "I've got to do it." The next thing I remember was being strapped to a table in the emergency room, a nurse telling me I threw up on her and the taste of charcoal in my mouth. My mom picked me up from the hospital, and I stayed with her for two days. This began the wilderness years. Ten years after first seeing you on television, there I lay, recovering from an overdose, the television screen off, the world stopped dead in its tracks. February 1986–March 1996: a decade of watching your Technicolor peacock meltdown, your voice gravelling away, colours fountaining out of you and that was it, 12–22, the complete seasons of my life, our life our various haircuts, mine moving from Hitler (like my Dad's) to Elvis or George Michael and yours with a dark dye tint, Photoshopping the grey out with a glossy brush of glistening chemicals.

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Atmosphere

Friday, December 24th–Sunday, December 26th, 2010
Christmas Eve