Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream (13 page)

But I’m really not the egomaniac people think I am. It may be how I come across sometimes, but that’s just how I carry myself. Some people come across insecure, some people come across cocky, some people come across bitter. I happen to come across as having this big fucking ego because of the
way I carry myself and how I present myself. I think people get confused between ego and confidence.

My philosophy of the business says you are who you make yourself to be and you make it to the top and stay there because you’ve got that much more talent or charisma than the rest of those who are chasing their dreams. It’s that presence and perception, that confidence and believability of walking through the curtain or down the runway and carrying yourself like a star because you really believe you’re a star.

Now most people, except for those who are very close to me, can’t tell where Dusty Rhodes the celebrity ends and Dusty Rhodes the individual begins or vice versa. The line is very thin and even some who are close to me can’t really tell the difference. Well, say what you will about me, but the one thing I stood for, if I went out for a match or an interview, was when the fans left the building, they knew they definitely got their money’s worth. I may have been known as a common man to them for my chosen style of dress, including jeans, T-shirts and cowboy boots instead of Armani suits, but I’ve had my share of limo rides and dressing to the nines. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s or somewhere like that most of the time so my children had health, happiness, and financial security, but I’ve eaten at the Russian Tea Room, Club 21, and Christine’s. That’s the real Dusty Rhodes.

Of course my heart will always belong to Texas and specifically to Austin, but I could have easily made New York City my home. I love the city and I love the people in it. The diversity is unbelievable. Sure, my friendships with Willie Nelson and David Allan Coe are legendary, but I’ve also partied at Studio 54, sang on stage at New York’s Lonestar Café with John Belushi, and hung out with people like Bobby “D” … or as you know him better, Bob Dylan … as well as people like Roy “Halston” Frowick, the famous designer for people like Jackie O and Liza Minnelli. As a matter of fact, the New York Times ran a story one time on Andy Warhol and his “three hundred pound wrestling friend,” alluding that we were more than just friends if you catch what I’m saying! Whoa! We were close, but not that close!

Isn’t that what the American Dream is really all about? Living life to its fullest and doing the best you possibly can with the hand you’ve been dealt? Some people use the analogy of taking lemons and making lemonade. I say take the lemons, but try to go out and grab some apples, oranges, bananas, or whatever and make fruit punch.

So is this really all about someone with an inflated ego? Or is this just me talking about someone who took responsibility for providing for themselves and their family? You make up your own mind, because I’ve already made up mine.

It’s like those stories in the wrestling magazines we all read as kids. I used to read them and think they were real. I didn’t realize until I got into the business that Bill Apter, George Napolitano, and some of the other guys used to make those stories up. Some of those guys were real dipshits, but not Bill or George. I read an old magazine recently that said I was studying in my den in Montana. … I never had a home in Montana, let alone a den. I couldn’t help laughing because my home was on the road and my den was in the ring. If fans would have been given the chance to read the real stories about “The American Dream,” Dusty Rhodes, they’d have a whole different perspective of me. They wouldn’t have to read a book like this to understand who I really am. And no offense to those magazine writers, but the real stories about the people in the business are a hell of a lot more interesting than the ones made up.

“The purpose of the wrestling magazines, like the wrestling business, was to sell. There were a handful of people who we knew we could put on the cover to turn that issue to gold. Dusty was one of those people.”

—B
ILL
A
PTER

The thing about Bill, or “Wonderful Willie” as I call him, was that he was always very respectful of me, and as a matter of fact, to this day he thinks he can imitate me better than anyone else on the planet and does so every chance he gets. If you call his answering machine, it’s him trying to sound like me. George was also very respectful and gave me lots of press.

One of the things I was always thankful for when I finally reached that celebrity status was the crowd of people I ran with that I fondly refer to, even to this day, as my posse. While some members of the posse have changed over the years, these are the people who were and are my second family. These are the people who probably know me better than anybody. And unlike in other entertainment circles where some people try to sponge off you because you are famous, these people didn’t hang with me because I was Dusty Rhodes, this wrestling celebrity or any of that bullshit … these people hung with me because I was Dusty Rhodes their friend.

Some of the stories and experiences we shared are pretty wild. So, in the words of my brother and posse member David Allan Coe, “If that ain’t country, I’ll kiss your ass.”

First and foremost there’s Jerry Allen Lewis, better known to those in the Tampa Bay area as “Captain” Lewis of Captain Lewis and the Gator Tail Band. A regular performer at the Imperial Lounge in Tampa during my heyday, the good Captain could play a mean keyboard as well as the sax, having grown up in Detroit with such musicians as Bob Seger and Ted Nugent.

Along with the Captain, two other members of his band were part of my posse; they included the late guitarist Phil Swain and a big, bald, tattooed guy, who made my buddy David Allan Coe look clean by the name of Jim Binns, also known as the Great Binnsinni. The Great Binnsinni not only played the spoons, but was a somewhat famous—or should I say infamous— tattoo artist, having put his work on Tanya Tucker and Jimmy Buffet among other celebrities.

While these three guys were part of my Florida posse, they were also my Detroit posse. I say this because I was wrestling The Sheik at Cobo Hall in Detroit one night and these guys not only showed up at the airport to pick me up in a limousine to take me to the building, but after a near riot broke out right after our match, they got me the hell out of there unharmed by driving the limo right into the hall and escorting me out of there like Mafia bodyguards.

To this day the Captain is still one of my closest friends as he is the man who kind of introduced me to one of my favorite musicians and now good friend, Willie Nelson.

I was wrestling in Atlanta at the Omni on a Friday night—a sell-out— and the very next night Willie Nelson was scheduled to be in concert at the building, so Captain Lewis, Greg Troupe, another close friend who I’ll talk about in a moment, Michelle and I all decided to go to the concert. Before the show, however, the Captain, who knew one of Willie’s band members, made arrangements for us to meet. Well, when I was backstage, making my way around, we kind of just came across each other and began talking. The Captain, being the character he is, said, “Hey Willie, this is Dusty.” … He said this as after we’d already introduced ourselves to each other and were already talking! Anyway, I don’t know who was more excited to meet who, but as it turned out we were both big fans of each other and we just hit it off.

You gotta love the Captain.

So, not only did he “introduce” me to Willie, but he was also with me the night I decided to propose to Michelle.

“Dusty and I were out drinking one night and he told me to make sure that no matter what happened that he should not call Michelle, because if he did, he was going to propose to her and he had already been married and divorced once. So every time he went to the pay phone to call her, I’d cut him off and make sure he didn’t. Well, eventually I had to go to the bathroom and by the time I came back out, it was too late. He had called and proposed.”

—C
APTAIN
L
EWIS

To this day I think he believes I actually proposed to her by telephone, but I didn’t. I did call her to tell her how much I loved her though, and that hasn’t changed. How could I not love a woman who has put up with me and my shit for more than 25 years?

Anyway, aside from the Captain, Swain, and Binnsinni, Greg Troupe, who I mentioned before, was also a member of the posse. Greg was and is a real cowboy. I ain’t talking about an urban cowboy that you see up on a movie screen, I’m talking a flat-out Florida cracker cowboy … a real tough son of a bitch who spent some time on the rodeo circuit.

Greg was around me during some crazy times, and this one night he brought this other cowboy friend of his along with us for a road trip from Tampa to Jacksonville. I figured this guy must be a tough son of a bitch like Greg, because why else would he bring him along? Now, there was a little bar that was also a barber shop, not too far from the Jacksonville Coliseum, where I always stopped to get my beer after the matches. This place was in a rough neighborhood, which kind of reminded me a little of where I grew up. Well, when they’d see me pulling into their parking lot, they would always party it up and they would go fucking crazy. So this one night, we stopped the vehicle and I said to Troupe, “This other guy doesn’t get out of the truck. I ain’t kidding. I ain’t got five minutes or I’ll be shooting you.”

So I went in and come back out in a few minutes, get in the truck, and Willie Nelson is blaring on the fucking radio. As I got in and slammed the door, I looked over to the right and the same door that I just came out of, one guy comes out fighting with this woman and another guy comes up
from behind her. I knew there might be some bad shit going down, so we took off.

As we drove off, we thought we heard a gunshot. It could have been a car backfiring, but we talked ourselves into thinking it was a gunshot.

So this cowboy, who’s never been around me and who came with Greg to go to the matches, didn’t say anything the whole 210-mile drive back home except, “I can’t believe that shit. I can’t fucking believe it.” He didn’t say anything else. Nothing! We didn’t see anything going down, but we could only imagine. Buddy, he was white as a ghost … scared to fucking death. For Greg, he was used to shit like that; just another night on the road.

“The night Dusty met Willie Nelson, after we left the concert, he, Michelle, Captain Lewis and I went back to the hotel room and getting drunk on Jack Daniels, decided to give the Captain an earring by using a paperclip to make the hole. I haven’t seen the Captain in years, but the last time I did, he still had the earring.”

—G
REG
T
ROUPE

Rounding out the non-wrestling side of my posse was Danny Ellis, another cowboy and local Tampa rodeo guy, John “Sugar Bear” Berg, a local Tampa dirt track racer who did some time recently for trafficking, and of course later on, my buddy David Allan Coe.

David Allan was a notorious country outlaw musician. As many of you may remember, he played at many of the “Great American Bash” shows, which are what they were all about, wrestling and country music. I always thought his music was a lot like my wrestling. He not only wrote for Elvis Presley, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and more recently Kid Rock, but he wrote “Take This Job and Shove It” for Johnny Paycheck, “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)?” for Tanya Tucker and had his own hits like “Longhaired Redneck,” “Jack Daniels If You Please,” and “Willie, Waylon and Me.” He even billed himself as “Davey Coe, the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy” performing in a mask and driving a hearse, which in a way was a lot like my Midnight Rider or Uvalde Slim personas.

When I won the NWA World title from Ric Flair in the steel cage at the 1986 “Great American Bash” show in Greensboro, North Carolina, David Allan was the first one to hit the ring to congratulate me, even before “Magnum T.A.” Terry Allen.

“I was a big fan of Dusty’s long before we went on tour together. Being in his posse was no different than when I was with Elvis, except there they called us the ‘Memphis Mafia.’ We’ve been friends for about 30 years now. When you’re always on the road, it’s not unusual to be around those types of people and to be in those situations. It’s a way of life.”

—D
AVID
A
LLAN
C
OE

From the wrestling side, there was Banny Rooster (Mike Graham), Barry Windham, Bobby “Black Jack” Mulligan, who was like my lieutenant, Dick Slater, and later on, Magnum. We had some crazy fucking times.

At one point it seemed like the center of the wrestling universe, or at least my universe, was a little place called Yeehaw Junction, Florida, located on Highway 60 about midway between Tampa and West Palm Beach. I think more funny shit went down in Yeehaw Junction than anywhere else I can remember.

One night, Black Jack, Barry, and I were heading home and just outside Yeehaw Junction, this guy had this shed on a field that had these donkeys. So, being drunker than shit, I got the brilliant idea that we should try to ride them. Well, they had a little too much in them too, and so they were all for it. So, here we go trying to get over or through the fence and I caught my balls right on the fence wire. Anyway, we got through the fence and onto the field. What a fucking picture that must have been. Can you imagine me, Barry and Black Jack late at night chasing after these mules in a field and trying to ride them?