The Hardcore Diaries (29 page)

“Really?” I said flabbergasted. “Why me? Haven’t you guys been rehearsing that thing for days now?”

“Yes, that’s true,” the senator admitted. “I believe I know the issues, but after seeing you in action at your debate, it occurred to me that you might be able to help in the presentation department.”

Little Mick and the eyes that God gave him.

Courtesy of the Foley family.

“You saw me? You were there?”

“Well, I wasn’t there. ABC News. You know, it’s tough to sleep with such a big debate tomorrow.”

“Okay, I understand,” I said. “And I’m flattered that you would come to me. But I’m afraid you’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“Well, remember when I said that I voted
for
the war spending bill before I voted against it? It turns out a lot of people don’t like what
I
have to say. Be honest with me, Mike.”

Sure, he’d just called me by the wrong name, but I let it slide. After all, this debate was probably the first time he’d seen me, unlike the president, who had modeled his entire foreign policy around one of my wrestling promos.

“Well, Senator, you’re much more intelligent than the president…”

“But then again, aren’t we all?” the senator said with a hearty laugh. I reached up to give him a high five, but Kerry left me hanging on it. I’m not sure he even knew what the hell I was doing.

When the laughter subsided, I said, “You’re boring, Senator. You know your stuff, but you’re boring. If you go out there with that same dull demeanor, the president is going to look like the winner, even it he doesn’t know Dick.” A reference to the vice president, which I will admit was slightly confusing.

“Well, what can I do?” the senator asked, clearly dejected. “I am as God made me.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But then again, we show up at WWE as God made us, and then Vince changes us around, he give us gimmicks.”

“Gimmicks?” the senator asked.

“Yes, gimmicks. Look, I’d been Cactus Jack for eleven years when I showed up in Vince’s office. He thought I looked sleazy, like I wasn’t a star, so he put a mask on me, and as Mankind, I went on to be a WWE legend, one of the biggest stars the business has ever seen.”

“Do you think a mask would help me?” he asked, confused.

“Of course it would. Look what it did for Tim Woods as Mr. Wrestling II, or Bill Eadie as the Masked Superstar, or Al Snow as Avatar?”

“You mean I’ll have to change my name?”

“Well, sure, but just for the debates. Besides, everyone will know it’s you. We’ll make you a mask that augments your really big chin. We’ll make it purple, call you the Purple Heart, really play up your wartime heroics.”

“I don’t know,” Kerry said. “I don’t want to draw too much attention to my three—count them, three—one, two, three—purple hearts. It might seem gratuitous.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said.

Suddenly Kerry snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it,” he said. “America needs a straight talker, a guy who calls them like he sees them. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Then why beat around the Bush? No pun intended.” Kerry let out a little chuckle. “I’ll be debating in a mask, right?”

“Right.”

“So, I’ll call myself just that!

“Tomorrow night, I will do verbal battle with President Bush, but not as the old, boring, monotone, soup-at-Wendy’s-ordering John Kerry. No, tomorrow night, right here, at the University of Miami, will mark the debut of—”

“Of who?” I asked. Kerry had me hooked. Who would he be? Who would he be?

“I’ll be THE MASKED DEBATER.” Kerry paused. “Do you think it will work? Do you think I’ll be popular?”

“Senator, I think the Masked Debater will be beating people off with both hands.”

June 7, 2006
12:02
A
.
M
.—Zanesville, OH

Dear Hardcore Diary,

I should have written this entry two nights ago, following my visit to Walter Reid Army Medical Center. But I ended up spending several hours at my friend Marissa Strock’s apartment, eating dinner and just hanging out with her and her mom, Sandy. Marissa, twenty-one, an Army PFC (private first class) had both her legs amputated following an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in Iraq.

The imminent dinner had been the subject of a slight debate between me and Colette, who was still mildly upset about the Christy Canyon interview. She was, however, not upset in the least at the prospect of me having dinner with an attractive young lady and her attractive mom at their apartment.

“So what you’re telling me, Colette, is it’s okay to have dinner with one woman at her apartment, but it’s not okay to do an interview with another one at a radio station. Right?”

“But that’s different, Mick,” she said.

“Why, because one of the women had her legs blown off?”

“Yes.”

“Well, isn’t that kind of a double standard?”

Colette admitted that it was, indeed, kind of a double standard, but the truth is, most wives wouldn’t let their husbands do either thing—the interview or dinner. My wife gives me an awful lot of latitude to do things she knows are important to me, including my fairly frequent Washington, D.C., road trips.

It’s kind of hard to explain exactly why a guy like me who has so many reservations about the war in Iraq feels so compelled to visit the troops who are doing the fighting. Perhaps a psychologist might be able to shed some light on the subject, but I’m guessing a good professional could shed light on a lot of the subjects I’ve covered in the course of this book. I do know the reason I took my first trip to Walter Reed in November 2003: sheer guilt.

For a full year, I’d seen images of the war on television, but had remained oddly detached from it, as if it was some movie or fancy video game. The war really hit home with the injury of a Long Islander, Lieutenant Fernandez, a recent West Point graduate, who had lost one leg and part of another foot. I didn’t know the lieutenant, but some of my friends knew him from his lacrosse-playing days at Rocky Point High School, about fifteen minutes from where I grew up.

A short while later, I read a
Washington Post
article about the injured troops at Walter Reed. Sheryl Crow had been there, singing a song in each wounded service member’s room. Hulk Hogan had been there as well. Maybe I wasn’t quite Hulk Hogan, but nonetheless most of the injured troops I read about were young—nineteen, twenty years old—and would therefore have been impressionable high school kids back in my WWE heyday. I felt the guilt start to mount. Were there injured troops who might actually like to see me? Could I actually make a difference?

I called Sue Aitchison, who handles a great deal of WWE’s community relations work. Even when I’d been estranged from WWE, I’d kept in touch with Sue, and would occasionally represent the company at different fund-raising events. Did we have a connection with the USO, who arranged these hospital visits?

I was put in touch with Ellen Brody of USO’s Washington Metro office, and was in Washington, D.C., two days later. Ellen made everything so easy for me, and she and USO’s superwoman Elaine Rogers have become valued friends during the course of my two-and-a-half-year association with their group.

“Slim Jims and wrestlers,” Ellen said on the phone prior to my first visit. “I don’t understand either of them, but that’s what our troops like. So that’s what we try to give them.”

“How long do these visits usually last?” I asked.

“Oh, they vary,” Ellen said. “But on average I’d say two hours. Of course, Wynona was here last week, and she stayed for seven hours.”

“Is that the longest visit?”

“I think so,” Ellen said.

“Then I’m going to stay for seven, too.”

With Chris Nowinski and General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Courtesy of the Foley family.

I did stay for seven hours on that first visit—a visit I really felt would be my only one when I embarked on it a night earlier. I thought the trip would be depressing. Instead, I found it inspiring. Soldiers and marines who’d left arms or legs in Iraq or Afghanistan talked of returning to be with their unit. At first I assumed they were kidding, but found out I was wrong—they simply had a dedication to their country that was inconceivable to an outsider like me.

As I finished my visit, I thought of all the hours spent, all the rooms visited, all the photos taken, and realized I hadn’t even talked all that much.

Instead, I’d done a whole lot of listening; to stories of their injuries, their families, their fallen brothers and sisters in arms. They’d felt comfortable with me around. I guess I’d been a part of their lives for so long that I seemed like someone they knew.

I prepared to leave, but was told I needed to visit one more room, which had not been on our list. The USO is great about letting troops know who is coming by to visit, so they can get an accurate idea of who actually wants to meet certain guests. It really eliminates the guesswork so that I wasn’t just walking blindly into rooms. Everyone I met had actually expressed an interest in meeting me.

The soldier I was to visit last had been in a bad accident, having lost a leg extremely high on his hip, almost at his midsection. His name was Josh Olsen, a young staff sergeant from Washington State, whose devastating injury had caused his body weight to drop almost in half, from a rock-solid 190 to slightly over a hundred pounds.

I talked quietly with the young man for a few minutes, and noticed his mother was crying. I didn’t know at the time that she wasn’t the only one. I found out later that his nurses had been crying and holding each other during the course of my short visit. It seemed that I was the first person Sergeant Olsen had shown any interest in talking to during his month-long stay in the hospital.

His eventual stay lasted much longer—many months as an inpatient, followed by well over a year as an outpatient. Yet when I returned a month later, he seemed like a new man, buzzing around the hallways in his wheelchair, e-mailing his buddies back in Iraq, working incredibly hard at rebuilding his body and his life.

Over the months I saw Josh regularly, and each time, he was making great progress. His prosthetic was proving to be a very difficult situation, as even the surgeons and specialists at Walter Reed had never seen an injury quite like his, an amputation quite that high. So he made it a point to rebuild the rest of his body, tearing up the weight room, gaining back his lost size and strength with a determination I can’t really comprehend.

Ellen Brody gave me regular progress reports, prompting me to leave a late-night, drunken, teary-eyed message on his machine, telling him how much I admire him and how proud I was to call him a friend. Well, it wasn’t all that late, and I’d only had two beers, but I’m a lightweight, and two drinks is all it takes to send me into sentimental mode.

I had dinner with Sergeant Olsen’s parents about a year ago, at a casino out in Idaho, near the Washington State line, where I was part of an independent wrestling show put on by one of my old Texas wrestling opponents, “Maniac” Matt Borne.

His mom asked if I was still visiting the hospital regularly. I told her yes, I still tried to get down to visit the troops every month. I kept that pace up for about a year and a half, but have slacked off since, visiting only five times in the last year.

“Why do you keep coming back?” she asked.

I thought it over for a second. I knew the answer, but didn’t know if I could actually get it out in front of them. “Well, I think I keep coming back because of your son. Because he made me feel like I made a difference.”

My Dinner with Wolfie

As I sat down at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new amputee wing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I felt my blood run a little cold. Something was among us, some reptilian form, some snake or miserable air-breathing gill fish. I don’t know if there even is such a thing, but what better way to describe the man in front of me, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, but at his most influential, he was something of an architect of the Iraqi war. No, he didn’t draw up invasion plans, but it was his persistence, along with that of a few key others in the neoconservative movement, that helped President Bush make the decision to invade Iraq.

The meeting was inevitable. What was I going to say? If I said, “Nice to meet you,” I was a liar. But there had to be a way to say hello and be respectful, while still maintaining my integrity.

I needed to be diplomatic. Wait, I had it! My greeting. When he turned to me, I would simply say, “Hello, Mr. Wolfowitz, how are you? I know the troops appreciate your support.” Good, right? Polite, but true. For reasons I don’t quite comprehend, the troops not only appreciate his support, they actually like the guy.

I try to give credit where its due. Even if I don’t like the guy. Even if it’s Wolfowitz. But I’ll admit, the guy has been relentless in his support for the wounded troops. He is a frequent visitor to Bethesda and Walter Reed, and often hosts the Friday-night dinners for the wounded troops and their families at Fran O’Brien’s, a venerable steak house in downtown Washington.

During the course of my visits, I have often tried to gently dig up some dirt on Wolfowitz, whenever I discover he has made a previous visit to a service member I am speaking to. It would probably be inappropriate to ask leading questions like, “Isn’t Wolfowitz a dick?” Instead, I ask more open-ended questions, like, “Oh, you met Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, what’s he like?”

And damn, I hate to say this, but they all like him. They say things like, “He’s a great guy.” Or, “They don’t get any better than him.” I guess the closest I got to negative was one soldier who said, “Oh, yeah, he was nice, he should be—he’s the reason I’m here.” Which, come to think of it,
is
kind of negative.

Same thing with Bush. The troops love the guy. And he does seem to care. I’ve seen family photos of the president on visits, hugging the parents, sitting on patients’ beds, pinning Purple Hearts on chests. They all glow about Mrs. Bush, too. Especially about Mrs. Bush. Hey, who am I to argue? They’ve met the guy and his wife; I haven’t.

I managed to escape the groundbreaking ceremony without incident or Wolfowitz greeting but wondered if I’d be so lucky at Fran O’Brien’s later that evening. I imagined the scene at Fran’s—a long table in a back room, fairly intimate, maybe fifteen people, twenty tops. But as I made the rounds through the hospital, especially in physical therapy and occupational therapy, it seemed that everyone I spoke to was going to the dinner.

Fran O’Brien’s was packed. As I should have guessed, there were far too many injured troops to sit around one long wood table. There were troops everywhere, a hundred or so, in various stages of the healing process. Some sported new prosthetics, learning to walk on fiberglass legs instead of muscle and bone. Some were in wheelchairs, awaiting procedures that would help them to walk.

I had talked to a buddy of mine, Chris Walker, who I’d known since middle school, and I apologized for hitting D.C. so often without stopping by to see him in Baltimore. Like a lot of people, Chris felt detached from the war and wished he could somehow feel better connected to something other than CNN or Fox News. So he had jumped at the chance to go with me to Fran’s, to meet some of the men and women who had given so much, and, last but not least, to pilfer free food.

Chris and I were both surprised to find Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau at our table. Trudeau’s political satire can be razor-sharp at times, but the troops love the guy because he listens to them, values their feedback, and tells their side of the story in his Pulitzer Prize–winning work.

I got up to use the restroom and was introduced to Mark Bowden, a fine political journalist and author of
Black Hawk Down
, which was turned into a successful movie of the same name. “I can’t stand that guy,” I told Bowden, upon seeing Wolfowitz about ten feet away.

Bowden laughed. “I’m here with him,” he said. “I’m writing an article on him.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’t include that in the article.”

I did read the article a few months later in the
Atlantic Monthly
. As Bowden had told me, it wasn’t meant to be either pro-or anti-Wolfowitz; just a way for people to better understand a very polarizing figure. I really do understand him a little better now. I still don’t like him. But I don’t hate him either. He just happens to view the world in a way that I don’t. Not to mention the fact that he was way off the mark with his prewar assertions.

After my short bathroom break, I was introduced to Fran’s proprietor, who told me he wanted to introduce me to a good friend of his. I turned to see Wolfowitz. Holy crap! What should I do? Luckily, I was on autopilot. I’d played out this scene in my mind and knew just what I’d do. “Hello, Mr. Wolfowitz, how are you? I know the troops appreciate your support.”

The deputy secretary of defense opened his mouth and let loose a blast of bad breath that would have killed a lesser man. He mentioned meeting one of our guys (Batista) at the Pentagon and then tried to make some kind of joke about the Divas, but humor, I surmised, was not the guy’s strong suit. Neither is foreign policy, for that matter.

I got back to the table and was immediately questioned by Trudeau, who had seen the Wolfowitz incident in all its halitosic glory. I ran him through the dialogue, taking great care to note that no actual lying had taken place during the course of our short conversation. Someone from Fran’s came over to ask Trudeau if he too would like a meeting with Wolfie.

“You know, I think that I’ll pass,” said Trudeau. “And if he’s read my work, I think he’ll pass, too.”

I wandered off for a while, visiting tables, dispensing Cactus Jack T-shirts and
Wrescal Lane
copies to the troops. Suddenly, I felt a wave of excitement crash across the room. I turned to see Gary Trudeau and Paul Wolfowitz shaking hands, as if at some kind of peace summit, both of their bodies bathed in the bright lights of cameras. Then it was over. Just like that. Photographers retreated, and both combatants went back to their respective corners: Trudeau at my table, Wolfie raising hell at the bar, margarita in hand, licking salt off a barmaid’s bare boobs. Yeah, I made that part up.

I hit up Trudeau for some details. What had been said? What had gone down?

“Well,” Gary started. “I took your advice. I tried to be polite without lying.”

On the way back to Baltimore, my friend Chris started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“It just seemed so surreal, so bizarre,” he said.

“What did?”

“The conversation.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“The one with you and Gary Trudeau,” Chris said. “I can’t believe Gary Trudeau told a friend I’ve known for twenty-five years that he took his advice on how to talk with the deputy secretary of defense.”

A week later I received a call from Ellen Brody of the USO. “You’ve been invited to have dinner at the Pentagon,” she said.

“Wow, that’s exciting.”

“Yeah, but there’s something you should know,” Ellen said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s hosted by Paul Wolfowitz.”

“Oh,” I moaned, “I can’t stand that guy.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s a very big deal. All of the joint chiefs will be there. And…”

“And what?”

“And Mr. Wolfowitz asked for you by name.”

Update—On February 5, 2007, I had my third dinner with Wolfie. I’d like to report that Dr. Wolfowitz’s breath was minty fresh, and that our conversation was enjoyable and extensive. Honest. I am even looking forward to my fourth dinner with Wolfie.