In the middle of all this, I made another horrible choice for a girlfriend. Basically she was just a really bad lady. That’s when I started adding cocaine to the mixture. We were both highly dysfunctional, but she took it all to a whole new level. Of course, that didn’t stop me from having her take care of Dakota when I was away.
Eventually, and thanks to my dad, I started working for Total Nonstop Action for $1,000 a show. He was the boss, right under Dixie Carter. TNA wasn’t doing too well at that point, but I had a job making okay money. I could drive home just about every night. All I was doing was what little I had to do in the ring, then hanging out spending my money on coke, pills, and booze.
I started making excuses for why I couldn’t spend time with Dakota. Subconsciously I probably knew I didn’t want her around me or my girlfriend because the environment was so toxic. Despite the chaos, I showed up every night for work. I have no idea how I was able to stay on point with work at that time. One of my cardinal rules was never to drink before I worked a match. I wouldn’t consider doing coke before a match either. I’d take painkillers, fine. I had been taking painkillers for so long that I had convinced myself I really needed them. I was taking medicine because I worked in a tough business. That was the story I had cemented into my mind. But drugs have a way of altering everything, including the stories you tell yourself. Eventually I started doing a little coke before matches while retaining my vow to never drink alcohol before I got into the ring, as if that was something to be proud of.
The next bottom was right around the corner. We did a Pay-Per-View event, and I had a really good match that night. My girlfriend was in our suite with my daughter at the Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando. I went back to the room feeling really good about my performance. I had a couple drinks to kind of settle down. Meanwhile, I realized she had been drinking all day long. She drank a giant bottle of Jack Daniel’s, all of it. She was a mess, starting to get loud and crazy. I was in the other room trying to get Dakota to sleep. I kept telling this woman to keep it down. I should have known what was coming next.
She lost it. She started screaming and telling me that she was going to go sleep with Dakota. By then I had had more than enough. I said, “I can’t do this anymore. Get out right now.” As I was getting her things together and stuffing them into a bag, she continued screaming. I dragged her out of the bedroom where I had been trying to get Dakota to sleep and put her bags outside the door. She was fighting to prevent me from throwing her out of the room. As soon as I got the door open, I eased her out and that was it. Or at least that was it until the police arrived. My daughter was in the other room as I was trying to explain what happened. I never hit the woman or did anything at all violent. All I did was ease her out of the room. They didn’t want to hear a word I had to say. It turned out that she had multiple drugs and alcohol in her body, things I didn’t even know about. She was completely out of control.
Terri’s response was reasonable, and horrible. She wouldn’t let me see Dakota alone. I attended anger management classes. I spent three days in jail. It was awful, but I went through all of it. When I got out of jail, my dad was there. He gave me a hug and told me to get my life straight.
Over time, Terri started slowly letting me back into Dakota’s life, but I couldn’t see her alone for a long time. Initially, our only time together took place at a visitation center. I knew the people there were trying to protect the children. I understood they were doing their jobs, but I hated it. The center was a house with a backyard. There were things to do with your child, but there was somebody watching you every minute. Dakota was a smart little kid. I’m sure her mother told her what was going to happen, but Dakota just wanted her dad. I thought I had my demons under control, but I didn’t have anything under control. All I knew was that her mother kept taking me to court. To me, she was making my life more miserable than it already was by keeping my daughter away from me. I knew Dakota wanted everything back to the way it used to be when she could spend an entire week with me. There were plenty of times when I was crying. In a lot of ways, that was the beginning of the end.
My dad could work the crowd like none other.
I still needed to work, and Steve Corino, an independent, was part of the management for Zero-One wrestling, which combined with the Pride Fighting Championship in Japan. He put together a run in Japan for my dad and me as a tag team. It was good money and I was able to be with my father. It was an easy decision for me. My dad still had that incredible charisma. All he had to do was raise an elbow and the crowd, no matter where in the world he went, would go crazy.
He was almost sixty years old at the time and I was in my late thirties. I couldn’t help myself by then. I was messed up one night in Japan, too. I still didn’t think my dad knew what I was doing, but looking back I’m not sure how he couldn’t have known. I was drinking heavily pretty much throughout the day, every day. It was the first time I had drinks before I worked, and it showed in the ring. A couple minutes into the match I actually thought I was having a heart attack: I couldn’t breathe, I was sweating. Those boys over there go hard and fast, and it’s very physical. There was my dad, who had been doing this for forty years and probably had more aches and pains than I can imagine, and he was doing every bit as much work as I was. But I was ready to collapse. I felt like I was dying. There were probably seventy thousand people in the arena and it was the last night, the big show. I had been scheduled to go on the next trip to Japan, too, but they didn’t bring me back.
TEN
THE RAIN ON THE HILL
I don’t remember how I ended up back at WWE, but I signed a two-year contract in 2002. Another chance at a time when I couldn’t believe I had any left. It was either my fifth or sixth go-round with WWE, which had bought the WCW prior to my return.
I went back as Goldust, only this time he was more comedic than dark. One of the bits we did was Goldust getting electrocuted. As a result of the shock he developed Tourette’s syndrome. I guess since Tourette’s isn’t life-threatening they figured it was okay to laugh at someone with the problem. Batista and Randy Orton threw me into an electrical panel and I suddenly started speaking in this halting, stuttering kind of a way. I’d start to say something that sounded as if I was going to say a curse word or something terribly off-color. I’d draw out the consonants, stuttering and trying to spit out the word. Finally, when I got the word or sentence out of my mouth it was something else entirely, which of course was part of the joke.
Booker wasn’t feeling the love.
That’s also when Booker T and I came together as sort of the odd couple. It was supposed to be a one-shot deal, but we had real chemistry together. In one episode, we did a scene called “A Night at the Movies” as sort of Siskel and Ebert characters. We talked about The Scorpion King, the Rock’s first big movie, and everyone loved how that came out. So they put us together and we continued to do all kinds of spoofs. We did some cool stuff. Booker is a real good guy and we had a lot of fun. People were popping for us like crazy. At the time, Booker T was thinking about joining the nWo, which was hot. One of the spoofs had me showing up everywhere, just shadowing Booker T. I’d show up in a different costume every time. I was still Goldust, but we’d add something to make me look like Undercover Brother, Darth Vader, the Crocodile Hunter, crazy stuff. I’d try to talk him out of joining the nWo so he could join forces with Goldust. “Come on, Booker T. Together with Goldust we’ll become the Tag-Team Champions of the world.”
We ran that story for weeks and it was really working. Finally we started tagging together and it just clicked. One day, we shut down a 7-Eleven for a shoot. I was dressed up like the basketball player Latrell Sprewell. I had my gold paint, but I also had a basketball jersey and gold chains around my neck. Booker was walking through the store talking about how he had to get his prematch Slurpee. Meanwhile, I was sneaking around the store.
“You didn’t see no gold freak in here, did you?” Booker asked.
Just then I
walked up to him talking in Goldust’s voice.
Finally he said, “What are you doing here, man?”
I was eating a hot dog and I said something like, “If you let me be your partner, Booker, I’ll let you take a bite out of my weenie.” People just loved it. From that point, fans knew that every week they would see Goldust stalking Booker and that it would be funny as hell.
I was getting a big push and the combination of Booker and me was working. Then right in the middle of it all, they took Booker away from me. We had become Tag-Team Champions, but they wanted to push Booker in singles. That’s fine in retrospect. At the time I didn’t understand why they would kill something that was working so well. I don’t know whether Booker was tired of the whole thing, or whether our bit had run its course.
I bounced around for four or five years. I did the bit at TNA and shuttled between independents when I wasn’t completely absorbed by finding my next bottle of vodka or pills.
At TNA, Vince Russo and I came up with the Black Reign character. I was working as Dustin Rhodes, but I wasn’t working that often, so we came up with the idea that Dustin had this split personality, BlackReign. It wasn’t much of a stretch given my life at the time. Russo said, “Just flip out and go nuts.” One night during an interview with one of the announcers, that’s exactly what I did. I started out talking really calmly, then I went crazy. That was the birth of my alter ego, Black Reign.
The character was pretty dark, which fit the color of my personal life. He came out with black and silver face paint that I did myself. Black Reign also carried around a huge pet rat that I had to travel with. I went through three rats, and a couple of them were mean as could be. One of the bits involved me putting the rat into a pillowcase. I’d grab my opponent and open the pillowcase over his head so it looked like the rat was biting his eyes out or tearing his face apart. Then I added an accessory. I started carrying a weapon that my girlfriend, Ta-rel, found at a Renaissance fair. It was a real old-world war hammer with a big spike on the end. It was a dangerous weapon. So I had that in one hand and the rat in the other. I’d hit guys in the head with the hammer, or put the rat on them.
Russo came up with the rat idea, which tells you a little bit about how his sick mind works. I was scared of the damn thing at first. It took me a while to get used to the rats because every one of them was huge. With TNA we weren’t traveling in airplanes very often, so I had to cage the rat at home. I kept the rat locked up, then loaded the cage into the car and drove to a match. The original rat died. The second one was Misty No. 2, a big white rat. It was so nasty that I had to wear welding gloves to pull it out of the cage. It tried to bite me every time I went to grab it. One day I had to do an interview with another wrestler. I had the welding gloves on, but the rat didn’t want any part of coming out and sitting through an interview. We decided to send out a runner to find a new, and hopefully more cooperative, rat. Meanwhile, I put the cage, with the rat inside, into my car and went back inside to prepare for the interview. After about three hours I realized, “Oh, no, the rat’s in the car.” I ran outside and it was fried, stiff as a board. I thought I had kept the windows down in my little Honda Civic, but apparently not. It must have been 120 degrees in the car, and the rat was gone. Thankfully, they found another rat and the show went on. We called the third one Misty as well, but the rat was a male, so his name became Mr. Mister. He was awesome. I’d let him out of the cage at home and he’d crawl up on the couch and go to sleep. I had a cat and a dog and neither one bothered Mr. Mister. It was like having a third pet.
That last little bit of time was the hardest period of my life. It’s remarkable I lived through it because I was riding a rocket toward the bottom.
Every morning, as soon as I pulled myself out of bed, I’d take three Vicodins or Lortabs just to get moving. I was sore and pretty banged up physically, but over time pain pills exaggerated rather than eliminated whatever pain I was feeling. It was a slow process for me to get into the day. I’d get that first rush from the pills and then I’d get moving. I might do something around the house, or jump into my truck and drive to the river to work on this book.
I wrote probably fifty pages longhand sitting in my truck out near the river in High Springs. I’d just sit there drinking and writing. I wrote some bitter stuff. I recognized I had a problem, though I didn’t understand the true nature of what was happening. I didn’t have any idea about how to get help for myself, but there I was dispensing wisdom to the masses. The irony of course is that I used that process to deal with my own problems. I knew I was a mess. My rationale was to write a book that would warn, then help others who might be temped to drive down the dead-end road I was living on. I didn’t have the coping skills or the tools to deal with my own problems, though.
I wanted to quit taking all the pills. I was conscious of the need to do so, but I was horrified by the prospect of going through withdrawal and having all those demons back in my dreams. I’d tell myself, “Okay, today is the day. I’m going to quit.” For a couple days I’d slow down, cut back on the amount I was taking. Then it would all pick up again. I went down to the river just about every day. I’d prop my feet up, turn on the radio, drink, and write. After a couple hours I’d go home. I might take a nap, but when I woke up I’d take some more pills and head to the bar with a buddy. That was my life.
The horrible thing about drugs, particularly painkillers, is that the more you take the more you hurt. That’s how it starts. If I was taking ten a day, I thought I needed to take fifteen. Once fifteen pills didn’t kill the pain, then I took twenty or twenty-five.
There were several times when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore. At one point I was taking money from my mother and father to pay bills. Instead of actually paying the bills, I’d buy another bottle of booze or some more pills. Eventually my living conditions started to deteriorate. I went from one trailer park to another. At the end I was living in a one-room “apartment” attached to a house. It had been a garage that the owner enclosed. He put in a kitchen and bathroom for me, but it was tiny. I had my dog and a roof over my head. Beyond that, all I cared about were the drugs and alcohol.
I was working independents here and there, getting deeper and deeper into the addiction. Then I came across an angel, the woman I have been with for the last six years. It was as if Ta-rel was dropped out of heaven to save my sorry self at a time when I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for kicking me to the curb and never looking back.
For the most part, she took care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself or didn’t care enough to take care of myself. She kept me living long enough that I could be saved. I have long promised myself never to get married again, but if I ever do, it will be to her. She doesn’t drink, but she was a bartender at a place in High Springs where I hung out and got drunk. It’s amazing I had the presence of mind even to acknowledge her. I didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything at the point she entered my life. She saw me at my absolute worst and for some reason never left my side.
For about the last month leading up to the end I was living in this little box. Ta-rel, my angel, would come over and visit me. We would sit up and watch movies, maybe share some food. All the while I’d be drinking. I also have attention deficit disorder, so I always had to be doing something else, too. Usually, it was something creative. I have always been artistic. I have designed logos, T-shirts. Even during my descent into hell, when times were tough with Terri and I didn’t have Dakota after my arrest, I spent all day and night drinking and making very intricate wooden crosses. Each one had a different tribal design with paint and designs. I created necklaces with really cool stainless-steel beads I picked up at a store near my house. I had all the necessary tools. I’ve always liked doing things with my hands. I made crosses for my father and sister.
That’s why I could sit by the river and write. I have always loved to draw and create. So I’d sit there with my dog, drinking and drawing. I was taking pills, drinking vodka with Mountain De
w, and eating those cheap little frozen party pizzas. That’s it. That was my life.
I became so fearful of not being able to fall asleep that I was up to fourteen to twenty milligrams of Xanax. There were times when I fell asleep with food literally hanging out of my mouth. Then I’d wake up and not even realize I had been to sleep. So I’d pop a few more Xanax. By the time the night was over, I had taken enough pills to knock over a horse. It’s incredible what the human body can withstand and the level of drug tolerance you can build up. I was probably taking close to forty pills a day at the end. I was so desperate that I actually bought pain pills from drug dealers because I would run out long before I could find another doctor to write a prescription. If I dropped a pill and it fell into the carpet, I would spend hours down on my hands and knees trying to find it. At the same time I was drinking so much that I’d wake up dizzy and unable to walk.
Finally, after a three-day binge, I’d had enough. It was raining. I pulled myself up and walked right out the door. The rain was pouring down and I stumbled up a hill near this house where I knew I could get cell-phone reception. Somehow I managed to call my dad. It was four thirty in the morning. I was falling down the hill in the mud. Ta-rel was trying to hold me up. I scared my dad half to death. I managed to get back into the house, soaking wet.
I had found the bottom.
As soon as I woke up, I called Ann Russo, who works for talent relations at WWE. She handles everything in the office and truly saved my life.
Ann took care of everything. One of the wonderful things about WWE is that it will take care of anyone who has a problem. If you have ever been a part of the WWE family, they don’t turn their back on you.
Cross Rhodes: Goldust, Out of the Darkness (WWE) Page 8