A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex (9 page)

Despite getting tips from the pros, the guy I learned the most from was Lance. He was a tremendous athlete and as much of a wrestling fan as I was, and we pushed each other to the limit on a daily basis. He was also my personality polar opposite, as I was loud and friendly, while he was stoic and slightly stand-offish. But we got along well because we knew that almost everyone else in the camp sucked and we only had each other to work and grow with. To this day we both admit if one of us wasn’t in the camp, the other one wouldn’t have made it.

Ed knew that we were his star students and began treating us as such. He showed up at the hotel to talk wrestling, took us to dinner to tell us about the upcoming shows in the area, and began letting us train in the ring by ourselves on our off-days. That’s when we really started making giant strides as workers because we could polish our skills at a faster pace without the other students slowing us down.

I held an advantage over everyone at the start because I already knew how to do body slams and suplexes from my years of doing them in the BTWF. But Lance was a quick study and surpassed me quickly. While everybody else was still learning how to give simple arm drags, Lance and I were giving each other intricate moves like head scissors and Frankensteiners.

Lance wasn’t only pushing me physically, but mentally as well. He was such a great athlete and it pissed me off when he outperformed me. If he could stand in the ring and jump straight up to the top rope, that meant I had to do it too. I was furious at myself when I tried and failed miserably. He could do a picture-perfect leg drop after the first day of camp and I still can’t do one to this day. Every time I tried, Lance would give me this smug little grin that made me want to knock his fucking block off. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the best student in the camp was and it drove me nuts.

About a month into the camp my dad came to visit. He understood what it was like to leave everything behind to follow your dream because he had done the same thing at nineteen to play pro hockey. No matter how much flak I received for wanting to wrestle, I always knew that my dad stood behind me 100 percent. I don’t know what he thought when Ed and Brad stretched the shit out of my groin and hamstrings until I screamed, but he respected my decision all the same.

After observing the session he said, “You sure are lucky that Lance is here.” He thought that we were the best two in the class by far, but then again he also loved Vic when he showed up wearing a stethoscope and a smock in his new gimmick of Dr. Love.

I guess there’s no accounting for taste in my family.

When we started working short matches with the other students, Lance and I shamelessly showed off. Lance decided that he would be an evil Russian (I guess he was looking to exploit the Cold War of 1990) and wore a black singlet with CCCP written on the straps. I sported a pair of gray gym shorts as we ran through our roster of Moves for the Advanced Student stolen from Shawn Michaels and Owen Hart. Meanwhile the rest of the guys still couldn’t take a hip toss.

Ed worked a lot of matches with us too, and if you’ve ever heard the theory that some people are better teachers than performers, well, that was Ed. He would get in the ring as the Goto Hills Savage, dressed in a costume that included furry checkerboard boots and a matching furry vest that looked like they were made out of toilet seat covers. Whenever he did a move he would yell, “Hyaa!” Once when he hip-tossed Dr. Love, he said “Hyaa!” and his false teeth flew out. Nuff said.

Hyaa!

When we weren’t in class, Lance and I spent a lot of time watching videos in his room at the Willy since he’d brought a VCR and his extensive wrestling tape collection with him from Ontario. He was a big NWA fan and I really wasn’t, but I soon became quite familiar with the work of Ric Flair, Sting, and Lex Luger. Right away I noticed the major difference between the two companies. The NWA favored wrestling while the WWF favored showmanship. That’s also a good analogy of Lance and my respective career paths.

As the camp neared completion, Ed and Brad gave a speech to the remaining survivors similar to the one Catfish Charlie gave me. They’d waited until they’d weeded out the pretenders to fill in the remaining blanks of how wrestling worked. I learned a new rule when Brad explained that in the ring it was up to the more experienced worker to control the flow of the match and to decide what was or wasn’t done. Some of the depleted Apple Dumpling Gang reacted to the speech with the same denial that I did when I learned that wrestling wasn’t a real contest.

After the speech, Lance and I worked each other to a ten-minute Broadway (draw) and I overheard Deb say with a confused look on her face, “I thought Lance could beat Chris, he’s so much better.” Even after eight weeks of training she still had the IQ of a kumquat. But kumquat or not, her statement hurt my feelings and increased my jealousy of Lance.

Our graduation from the Hart Camp was nothing special. Those of us left at the end graduated with no ceremony, no diploma, no square hat; just a half-assed congratulations and a guarantee of nothing. While I was proud of myself for making it through the camp, I now had to contend with the more difficult task of finding a job.

PART THREE WICHITA AND ELSEWHERE

CHAPTER 8

IRON WILL

I
was feeling uneasy about my future and my only plan was to stay in Calgary to try and get work. Thankfully, Ed erased some of the uncertainty when he allowed Lance, Victor, and me to continue training at the Action Center free of charge.

I was thrilled to have a place to continue training, but that didn’t solve my more pressing problem of running out of cash. Luckily, I had some extended family that lived in Okotoks who knew a lady named Bev Palko and her husband, Jerry. She and her family lived outside town and were looking for someone to paint the fence in their backyard. It didn’t sound like the most exciting of jobs but I was thankful for the chance to make some money and I accepted the offer.

The next day I drove outside Okotoks until I saw a distant farmhouse surrounded by what seemed to be a five-mile long fence. Not only was this the Palko house, but the Palko FENCE as well. Instead of painting a little old lady’s picket fence, I was going to have to whitewash the Great Wall of Alberta.

Bev met me at the door and she was one of the friendliest people I’d ever met. She was in her mid-forties with salt-and-pepper hair and an infectious laugh and I liked her right from the start. She took me out to a garage filled with gallons of whitewash and paint rollers and told me to get cracking.

After I loaded the trunk of the Volare it took me five minutes to drive across the field as my car bumped and lurched like a cheap drunk over the groundhog holes and rocks. Cows were grazing on haystacks while horses neighed in disgust and Lil Chris realized he wasn’t in Winnipeg anymore.

I reached the end of the field, popped in the new Anthrax cassette and began to paint...and paint...and paint. Four hours later I was totally exhausted, with only seven feet of painted fence to show for my efforts. I’d just finished two months of the most intense physical training I’d ever experienced and now I was reduced to this?

But there were benefits to painting the Palkos’ fence. Considering that I’d eaten most of my meals that summer at the Petro-Can (paying for them with my dad’s gas card), when Mrs. Palko yelled down the field that she’d made lunch, my stomach jumped for joy. The spread was basic but it was one of the best meals of my life. A thick ham sandwich served on homemade bread; fresh out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies, and an ice cold glass of milk. It was so heavenly it may as well have been made in the Vatican; or at least it seemed that way after eight weeks of burritos and Twinkies.

The Palkos had two sons: Brad, another friendly Palko who I met at lunch, and Tyler, who ended up becoming like a brother to me. You wouldn’t have guessed it the first time we met though. No one had told him that I was going to be painting the fence, so he was quite surprised when a strange longhair in a bottle green jalopy pulled up at his isolated farmhouse and began rummaging through the garage. I was loading up my trunk on the second day when he came outside and eyed me up.

“You must be Tyler,” I said. Then we both stood there staring at each other. After an eternity, he said “Yup” and went inside to ask his dad who in the hell I was.

The Palkos had taken in foster kids for years and when they heard my story and figured out that I was dying to get out of the Willy, they offered me their spare room. They suggested I could stay there in exchange for painting the fence, so I moved in with the intention of staying four months and ended up staying four years. They became my second family and were a blessing because no matter how uncertain my wrestling career was, I always knew I had a stable home to go back to. As broke as I was, rent was never a problem either because I only had to pay a scant $10 a day and pitch in with the chores. Since we were on a farm, those chores included chasing escaped cows off the highway, shooting invading gophers in the field, baling hay into the barn and stuffing chickens into coops to ship to the Colonel. But it was a small price to pay, as their love and kindness helped me to become as successful as I did and for that I’m eternally grateful.

Unfortunately, not everything in my life was going as well as my housing situation. In a botched attempt to make myself look like one of the Nelson twins (whether it was Gunnar or Matthew I’m not sure), I bought a box of cheap dye and ended up with a head of fried canary yellow hair. Then I hit a deer and totaled my precious Volare. But the worst was yet to come.

A friend named Shane Lanoway had moved with his family to Calgary the same time I did. I had spent the night at his house and was mowing their lawn as a thank-you for letting me stay, when Shane’s mom came out and told me that my dad was on the phone.

I felt my stomach step into a pothole because my dad had no clue where I was. Something very bad had to have happened for him to do the necessary detective work to find me.

I answered the phone and was chilled by the severity of my dad’s voice when he said, “You have to come home right now. Your mom has been in an accident.” My heart raced and I asked him if she was dead. “No, but you have to come home right now. She’s in the hospital. She’s in intensive care and she may not make it through the night.”

My dad picked me up at the Winnipeg airport and told me what had happened. A few months after my parents had split up three years earlier, my mom had started seeing her new boyfriend. Being a rebellious teenager, I was very cold toward them and whenever they came over to our house to swim or hang out, I split. I still hadn’t gotten over the splintering of my own family and wasn’t interested in trying to adopt a new one.

I was pissed when they first started dating and after countless fights between my mom and me, she finally said, “I’m not expecting you to accept this right away but I have to go on with my life. I want to be happy and you should want that for me too.”

I drove her to her boyfriend Danny’s house every Friday and then got her car and our house to myself for the whole weekend. Not a bad consolation prize for a teenager living in a broken home I guess.

My mom was in the ICU because the night before she and Danny had gotten into an argument on the front lawn of our house. During the fight, my mom charged at him and was accidentally back-dropped onto her head when she landed. She instantly became a quadriplegic. She told Danny that she couldn’t move, but he didn’t realize what had happened and he picked her up, put her on her bed and left the house.
Hours
later when he realized how serious the situation was, he finally called the ambulance.

The last time I had seen my mom, she was walking up the driveway after seeing me off to the Hart camp on a sunny day in late June and all I could smell was the sweet scent of summer flowers. The next time I saw my mom, she was in an intensive care unit two weeks after I’d graduated from the Hart camp on a gloomy day in mid-September and all I could smell was the sickening scent of hospital disinfectant. Since then, whenever I smell that distinct hospital odor I get transported back in time to that exact moment.

When I walked into the room I didn’t recognize the frightened person with the swollen face lying there and I thought I was in the wrong room. Then I realized that the face belonged to my mother. She gave me a faint pencil line of a smile and I completely fell apart. All of the hard work that I’d done, my dream of making it into the WWF instantly evaporated when I saw her in that bed. My number one priority was now my mother and I didn’t give a damn about anything else. I sincerely hope that none of you sharing this with me right now will ever experience the feeling of seeing one of your dearest loved ones lying motionless in a hospital bed, with a medical halo screwed into their head so tight that you can see the drops of plasma (not blood) creeping down their waxen forehead.