Countdown To Lockdown (8 page)

Al Franken gave a nice speech, vowing that if his Senate confirmation process ever did come to completion (which it has since this writing) he would “fight to make sure the troops get whatever they need,” both during and after the fighting.

And Renée Zellweger gave a beautiful speech, noting how “trepidatious” (see, there’s that word, or at least the root word with a different
suffix) she’d been while waiting outside the door of the first injured service member she was scheduled to encounter.

Later, I congratulated her on a wonderful speech.

“Thank you,” she said, her Texas accent soft and sugary, like honey.

“You had me at
trepidatious.
”

Not much you can do after a line like that except go upstairs and write about it.

Young and innocent days.

Somehow the talk in the dressing room turned to tattoos. These days, a guy in wrestling is considered something of an oddity if he isn’t inked, but back when I was in high school, even college, a guy was really making a statement if he had the slightest little mark on his body.
An Officer and a Gentleman
even had Richard Gere’s on-screen dad, Robert Loggia, pleading, “Zack, come back … officers don’t have tattoos,” when given the news that Gere’s Zack Mayo character is off to OCS — Officer Candidate School — seemingly unimpressed with his dad’s graduation present of two willing women, still dozing peacefully in bed after an implied father-son tag team contest.

I once used a line from that scene with Al Snow in Las Vegas — consoling the Prince of Hardcore after a long line of embarrassing losses. “Kind of like that night we banged those two stewardesses in Manila,” I said to Al, as we rode the Big Shot roller coaster atop the Stratosphere Casino, one thousand feet in the air. Later, after giving the “Manila” line a little thought, I asked the WWE producer to put the kibosh on that particular piece of footage, just in case any members of our viewing
audience (my wife, Al’s wife) weren’t completely up to speed on Loggia and Gere’s unique brand of father-son bonding.

Years later that scene still resonated with me. Even after becoming an unlikely orange juice pitchman, all I could picture when I saw Loggia were those two stewardesses in Manila. I guess an actor could be remembered for worse … just ask poor Ned Beatty.

Anyway, Zack headed off to OCS with a big bandage on his arm, where his secret is discovered by Lou Gossett Jr., as Drill Sergeant Foley (no relation), who immediately recognizes the work as being from Subic Bay, in the Philippines.

Suffice it to say, the tattoo, circa 1982, my junior year in high school, was solely the domain of the bad boy, the badder girl, the drunken sailor, or the prison inmate. Of which, Diane Bentley was none.

Sting was the guy who asked me. “Mick, you don’t have one, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. “I have a black panther on my hip.”

A bunch of heads turned. This was a surprise to some of the biggest names in the business, including Kevin Nash, who I thought would have known, given his propensity for surreptitiously staring at me while I showered over about a two-year period — from early ’92 through the end of ’93, when he left WCW to become “Diesel” in WWE.

“Yes, it’s true,” I said, pulling my sweats down just a wee bit to show off a faded Huey Newton portrait on my left hip.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t
that
kind of black panther … and I’m pretty sure Nash never surreptitiously scoped me out.

How long had I had the tattoo? Oh, I guess, about twenty-seven years. Why had I gotten it? To impress Diane Bentley — what other reason could there possibly be?

To this day, I don’t think it was a romantic gesture. I’m not claiming I hadn’t at one point had a little crush on her, but I’m pretty sure it was
over by the time the tattoo tale transpired. Diane was like my super-cool friend. Not supercool as in cheerleader-type popular. I mean cool as in doing my math homework for me without even being asked, giving me free Carvel scoops, and absolutely loving Springsteen. In return, I would write humorous songs and poems about her (“Bentley and the Jets” being one of my best), and even did a few essays for her in Mr. Biggers’s poetry class, which received considerably better grades than the assignments I turned in under my own name. I saw Biggers last year at a local college basketball game and called him out on it, finally asserting my long-held feeling that he’d been judging a book (me) by its cover (my appearance). I even told him that the limerick he’d liked so much years earlier had not rolled off the pen of Jim Arceri at all, but off the pen of the Hardcore Legend.

In a little side note to that little side note (to go off on a tangent from the tangent I’d gone off on), Biggers’s wife, Miss Stefanic, had been my third-grade teacher in 1973, when I’d had my mouth badly busted in a friendly game of Kill the Guy with the Ball and realized I didn’t completely dislike the sensation of turning my white Chicago Bears sweatshirt an instant shade of red — a story I told during a famous 1997
Raw
interview with Jim Ross.

So, anyway, Diane Bentley paused from whatever pressing poetry need was at hand to tell me her intention of getting a tattoo. Like I said, back in ’82 only real bad girls got tattoos — and Diane, while being supercool, didn’t strike me as the type. Although, come to think of it, she wasn’t all that squeaky clean — smoked a little, gave out free scoops, and in the long run probably hurt me more than helped me by doing all my math homework.

I looked up at Diane and calmly informed her that I already did have a tattoo, which was absolutely not true. As a matter of fact, I’d never even thought about it. Not a single thought, ever. But that didn’t stop me from venturing out that very day, to a seedy part of Long Island, to one of only a few places in my county that dared to do such dubious work.

And I never even mentioned it to Diane. Certainly I didn’t mention how I whimpered in pain at the first hint of needle poking flesh. I didn’t even know how tattooing was done. I guess I thought it was like a painless superpermanent marker — just something that was drawn on.

A good two weeks passed, maybe even more. I didn’t say a word about tattoos and neither did Diane. Maybe the trip to Medford had been a total waste of time — the most foolish needle-related experience since Leo DiCaprio hit the hard stuff in
The Basketball Diaries.
It wasn’t as if I thought Diane Bentley was going to swoon and slowly melt like a scoop of Carvel in the sun. I just thought she’d have a super-cool reaction. Even when I was in high school, I needed that reaction, that positive feedback, that pop from the crowd. Sure, running out to get a tattoo for the sake of a single girl’s reaction might seem a little extreme, but was it really any worse than taking back body drops on gymnasium floors in front of only slightly larger crowds?

Mr. Biggers pulled a no-show. Absent for the day. Half the class decided not to show up, too, and the sub for the day just let the remaining students read, study, or even talk quietly among themselves.

“So, Mick?” Diane Bentley said, a mischievous little smile on her face.

“Yeah.”

“How’s that tattoo?” Yes, there it was — the question I’d been hoping for.

“Oh, the tattoo?” I said.

“It’s good.”

“Oh yeah?” Obviously cynical.

Diane went back to writing, possibly cranking out my next geometry assignment.

“You know, Diane,” I finally said, “I don’t think you believe me.”

In an odd way, looking at it now, her reaction reminded me of Victoria Wilson, my editor at Knopf, telling me in a fairly declarative tone that the rewrites I’d turned in couldn’t possibly be any good.

“Why not?” I’d asked Ms. Wilson.

“Because you cannot rewrite a book in one day.”

That’s the same tone Diane Bentley took with me: “Mickey … I know you don’t have a tattoo.” Calm, but fairly declarative.

“Mickey, I know you don’t have a tattoo,” she repeated.

This was going to be fun.

“Well, I do have one,” I said, turning in my seat to face the front of the class, hoping she’d continue with this line of questioning.

“Okay, Mickey, let me see it.”

“What?” I said, pretending not to hear.

“I said okay, Mickey, let me see it.”

Diane Bentley had a huge smile on her face, toying with her good friend, calling his bluff.

That smile disappeared the moment I took my trousers down — a theme that would remain constant with women throughout my life. The moment she saw that first black panther paw peeking out of my undies her entire demeanor changed. The smile disappeared, replaced by that look of wonderment and disbelief a kid gets looking at the magician at a birthday party: wondering how it was done, but not quite accepting it as true magic.

But what could she do? As the unveiling proceeded, Diane had to accept that her shy friend Mickey — the kid with the out-of-style crew cut, the limited wardrobe, the never-kissed lips — was a bad boy in disguise.

“Mickey … I … am … freaking out!” There it was, the reaction I’d been hoping to get — not necessarily the freaking-out part, but the surprise, the excitement.

“So what do you think?” I said.

“I’ll tell you what I think, Mickey … I think I … am … freaking out!” she practically yelled.

I called Diane Bentley a few days ago, just to see if she had any qualms about being in my book. It had been a few years since I’d seen or talked to her, since I’d heard her distinctive voice yelling out “Hey Mickey” at an appearance at an upstate New York minor-league
baseball game. She had just come to the game as a spectator with her family, having no idea that the Hardcore Legend would also be among the attendees.

“I’ll be honest, Mickey,” she said during the phone call. “I never thought people would stand in line to meet you.”

“Hey Diane, do you remember that tattoo I showed you in high school?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you know the only reason I got it was to impress you?”

She asked me if I ever regretted it, much in the same way I’d asked wrestler Stevie Richards if he regretted the weak, homemade-looking Mötley Crüe tattoo on his shoulder. “Every single day,” Richards had told me. “Every single day.”

“You know, Diane, there are probably months at a time that go by when I don’t even think about that tattoo. But I’ve never regretted it once, not a single day. Your reaction in Biggers’s poetry class made it all worth it.”

A reaction, any reaction, I learned — be it laughter, disgust, dismay, or the look of shock from Diane Bentley in Mr. Biggers’s poetry class — could be a very powerful … and addictive … thing.

March 26, 2009

Long Island, New York

11:01 p.m.

“Stinger, I don’t blame you for being angry with me,” I said. “You asked for an explanation and doggone it, I’m going to give you one and I think in a few minutes we’re going to be laughing about this because it’s really quite simple. It was a big misunderstanding. Now, I’ve put together a tape, I had Keith Mitchell in the back put together
a little video to straighten things up, but before we see this video, I want to make it clear that I had taken a heck of a beating at the hands of Kurt Angle. Stinger, I’d been Angle Slammed, right out there, by the announcer’s desk, my head literally bouncing off the concrete floor. I’d been battered from pillar to post, so I may have been in a slightly altered state when I saw the following scene take place. Let’s take a look.”