A pile of eight-by-ten–inch glossies were now strewn across my desk with pink stick-it notes for each:
This new editor moved with erratic steps through the office, on his cell doing play-by-play of his own actions. His gusty narratives were impossible to block out. "No, I’m here ’til four today, ate lunch already, about to check on that, the site was down this morning for twenty minutes, it’s fine now, X-Pac is next week, we’re confirming the location today, maybe Road Dogg too, I’m doing that now, I’m doing that this afternoon, those are supposed to be coming in any minute now, I didn’t get those yet...Doink the Clown, Paul E. Dangerously too. I know! So cool."
Outside, the rain baptized the blind-covered windows as a dull thunder percolated in mystery.
As I waited for the usual tributary of exclusive video clips to download, I typed a formal-looking letter to Dad, signing off with:
THANKS FOR THE BIRTHDAY CARD AND CHEQUE. WHAT WAS THE OUTHOUSE ANECDOTE AGAIN? THE ONE WHERE YOU WERE A PYRO? SORRY MY WHOLE LIFE IS ONE QUESTION AFTER ANOTHER THESE DAYS. I WAS JUST GOING TO GOOGLE IT BUT I REALIZED I DON’T HAVE A CLUE WHEN IT WAS OR WHERE IT WAS OR IF YOU WENT BY A DIFFERENT NAME BACK THEN.
MUCH LOVE, NATE "THE FRANCHISE"
From what Holly told me, Dad was now made of straw and soot, barely 100 pounds and 5’ 8" (he had shrunk a bit since his raging prime), still smoking and cooking all day long. His was a fire that never went out, the cigarette always an ember of death’s orange-eye glow, the same as his favourite popsicle flavour, and how these tiny alien eyes guided us to my room, on his back, and the cigarette smoke and the lively follicles in his evil mustache all dancing around my face while hours later I would dream I was Randy "Macho Man" Savage and tear my father’s moustache off in one swift move, bringing balance back to the galaxy.
September 1, 2010
What a friendly, communicative letter I just received from you, Nate. It motivated me to start writing, right away. Since you stressed that I write "neatly," I thought better to start by using this lined paper. To rhyme with paper, you want to know about my caper, with the outhouse. Let us back up a bit so that I may give you the background, as we didn’t need an outhouse, and details speak volumes of the way your grandfather was treated by these particular country people, and the efforts he needed to go through to take care of his family.
As I said, we didn’t need the outhouse. We lived in a very square, central-hall plan, cinder-block house in Dunnville. It was ill-heated—the furnace seldom worked, and we heated with a Quebec heater, which was turned on before we left our unheated bedrooms. We all gravitated to the tiny bathroom in the house to strip, wash, clothe and do other necessaries. I believe there was a wash stand with the traditional bowl and ewer. There was a bathtub, I believe, connected to pipes. There was however, no water.
Now, an aside if you don’t mind. In order to have a bath, water had to be pumped from a cistern (not a well), heated and carried upstairs. To which a bucket of cold water might be added, after which we three could mindlessly enjoy the pleasure of a bath.
This is a long aside, on a rather long saga, I believe. One day Dad slipped on the back steps, I think. (We had one set of stairs going up, one set of stairs going down or vice-versa). He was scalded badly. In pain, he ordered Mother to put butter on the wounds. She complied and was later reprimanded by a wonderful doctor we had, but who had a terrible bedside manner. He said something like, "You foolish woman! Do you realize that I must scrape off all of that butter before he can heal?" (Another aside about the doctor: when he realized Mother was not a good producer of milk, in spite of her ample breasts, he explained that some cattle are good for beef, others are good for milk—your grandmother was not impressed and certainly not pleased.)
Back to the bathroom: There was one other fixture of note. Did you miss it? I don’t think so. It is the "throne" of course. It consisted of a frame with a pool in it and a toilet seat on top. It had to be emptied at least once a week.
Another diversion or aside: To empty the can, Dad had to cross a road, transverse a neighbour’s property, and dump the awful in the river, (sorry I can’t remember the name; it passes Dunnville, Ontario) right across from the intake for the water we drank and cooked with daily. Needless to say, we had water that was very tasty, even without the tea bag. (We always loved trips to the grandparents in Hamilton and Toronto, where we could drink terrific water.)
From the foregoing, you will ascertain that we did not require an outhouse. We had a perfectly wonderful system in place to take its place. We could walk to the privy in the dark and never get wet (perhaps a bit cold).
I believe when Dad and Mom moved in, the outhouse was on its side—not erect. Dad, being conscientious, got it erect, probably with help from others. The next Halloween, it was on its side again, and some seven, eight years later, still on its side.
I don’t know where the door was—probably on the bottom. My entrance was the opening over which the toilet seat would have been. In other words, what Newfies, the newly "have" province, would call the entrance to "The Long Drop." (There is a longer two levels of dropping positions. I don’t know how it works but I’m pretty sure nobody on the lower level gets dropped upon.)
I hope you don’t feel less of me if I tell you that at the age of about six, I used the "entrance" with an older young lady to play a form of doctor. I’m not sure what she was interested in, as she wouldn’t have got much from me, but I was interested in poop and passing it. I met her three to four years later, but we didn’t converse about it, to be sure.
Now you have the history of the poop-house. You now want to know about its demise.
Here we go: Dad now had three children and a pitiful, perhaps by then $1,200/year salary. (Perhaps he started under $1,000.) He had to take care of us. There was no effort to improve accommodations (at least until he had left, as they couldn’t find another sucker to live there unless they did.) Dad achieved a wonderful appointment at St. Matthias Church in Toronto. Dad talked to me, and no doubt Rebecca, trying his best to make it our decision to move to the big city where he was born, raised and schooled.
"The big lie": The lies parents tell. I had a dog. Dad has always had a dog—he got one for me but said "He’s the stupidest dog on the planet" (more or less). He knew the dog could not survive in the city and so told me that he took him to a farm. No doubt he did, but not to live there, but to die there. I didn’t figure it out for at least ten years. Don’t get me wrong: Dad did the right thing, no doubt. Santa Clause was, of course, another one, but Dad wasn’t strong on the Easter Bunny.
You’re now waiting with bated breath—when am I going to get to the story in question? Well, it follows: Dad wanted to leave everything in our home hunky-dory. There was an accumulation of newspaper in our country kitchen. (This is an area outside the kitchen, unheated, and useful for storing wood, some produce and whatever.)
He contracted a young lad, perhaps a bit older than I, and me, to take the paper out to the field behind the house and set it afire. Remember that I’m not yet seven years old. My birthday was within two weeks of arriving in Toronto, and I’m really not as smart as I look at this time.
We get the papers out to the field and try to light them.� No go! It’s too windy. The matches keep getting extinguished. I get this BRILLIANT idea. Why not put the papers in the outhouse? The wind won’t be a problem. As it turns out, I was right. The papers started burning immediately.
It was smoky inside, so I went out. (By the way, this is fifty-year-old unpainted pine.) I remember deciding to get on the "roof" of the outhouse and pacing back and forth. Then I noticed smoke coming through the cracks, and soon flames. I thought better of staying on the roof "side" and got down.
In seconds it was all aflame. My neighbour went running to hide in the cellar of his home across the street. (The one Dad passed every week to get rid of the "crap.") I, on the other hand, ran to the house
, through the country kitchen, into the kitchen, and cried "Mommy, give me water, lots of water, now! GIVE ME WATER!"
Mother tried to calm me, wondering what was going on. She finally looked outside to see the "shit house" afire and flames spreading towards the house.
Mother called the neighbour. His dad was home, probably worked shift work. She called the fire department, hoping they would respond. (I don’t believe they had to as we were rural.)
The neighbour collected some water to spread on the grass and stop the spread of flames. I don’t know what my mother said at all—I really don’t think that she had a lot of cuss words, as I never remember one from her.
As for Dad, he heard the siren on one of his trips to minister, and he prayed for anyone who might be endangered by the fire. Little did he know that it was his "precious" outhouse that was the centre of the problem.
I made the papers the next day, perhaps for the first time, just days before leaving Byng (our county).
The Caption in the local paper: "Little House to the rear of the Rectory burns to the ground"
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Mesh
Monday, October 4th, 2010
In the years of my assorted youth, (1986–1993), news of a wrestler’s contract being terminated was never something I had access to, in any great detail. In fact, as I scrolled through a series of historical missives about wrestler’s firings, I could scarcely recall a WWF contract being nullified before the era of wrestling dirt sheets (roughly 1996–1997). By then, the first wave of online tabloid culture had given rise to wrestling’s rumour mills, full of hearsay and legit "industry" news. Up to that point, firings would be absorbed on air in a matter-of-fact way, incorporated into a storyline, or wrestlers would be "suspended indefinitely" until a new contract was negotiated. Many times, wrestlers’ names were never brought up again; into the ether. My assignment this week was to gather material for a section called "SUSPENDED INDEFINITLEY."
In fact-finding quarantine, I gently Googled while listening to an extended remix of George Michael’s 1996 song "Fastlove." I Googled that too. Reading the minutia about the song, finally, after years of wondering, I discovered what song George had gutted to add to the remix’s multi-faceted hook: "Sending you forget-me-nots, I want you to remember..." from the song "Forget Me Nots," the 1982 hit recording by Patrice Rushen.
In a secret file on my desktop, I had made a growing list of long-winded questions, written in a one-way interview with Randy Savage, who I knew never gave interviews.
I left the file open, pushed my uneven wheeled chair back and headed out into the blissful wind. I crossed the street and went inside a quiet Italian café. I wanted a gin and soda, and squeeze of lime.
I studied the late afternoon water hole: a couple hunched in the early stages of unravel, red in the face, as one of them asked a question to the oddly toothed waitress with the shaved head, and the balding manager, counting French fries in the freezer, reminding whoever was in earshot to cut limes and put them in a clean pitcher when it’s slow.
I exhaled violently, letting out a sigh that teetered on threat. On her cell, the bartender laughed, then shook her head.
"Totally," she said into her cell. I wanted to be drunk now. "It’s odd to have secrets at an early age," she added, wrenching her neck away from me, still on her phone, disappearing partially behind a tray of dirty bottles and glasses.
PreliminaryQuestionsForRandySavage.DOC
QUESTION 1: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. My name is Nate, and I have a lot of issues, I mean, questions for you. To start off, I’ve seen you live a few times at wrestling shows: Maple Leaf Gardens versus Ricky Steamboat with my sister and dad when you were Intercontinental champ in the summer of 1986, then at Wrestlemania VI in 1990, then again at Maple Leaf Gardens two more times, once against Razor Ramon, once against Shawn Michaels, in the early 1990s. I think around 1992. Wrestlemania VI was disappointing because it was like $65, and I had the worst seats. You were no longer the main event, and wrestled somewhere in the middle of the card. I think eighth. Strange because the last three Manias, you were top dog. I saved up the money from my job at Dominion, and during an intermission or something, I ran into some classmates who were watching from their dad’s SkyBox. I pretended to be there with my cousin, which I wasn’t. When I was seventeen (1992), my uncle bought me a video camera for Christmas, and it had these dubbing functions on it so I could make video dubs and do voiceovers. I made one video with you crawling back to the ring at SummerSlam 1992 in a match against the Ultimate Warrior, where Mr. Perfect and Ric Flair attacked you. The song I chose was "Ordinary World" by Duran Duran. You losing the match went with the thesis I was trying to prove, that the times had changed. I also made a montage with you and Hogan in it with John Lennon’s "Jealous Guy." Then I’d edit clips of me playing road hockey or whatever. I guess I was dealing with "our" collective place in the world: no longer relevant or worthy of attention, no matter how colourful our attire was. Sorry, but that’s how you made me feel. Your hyper-colours were like, so desperate. Things were better a few years before. I identified with your best-friend status with Hulk Hogan in 1987–1988 intensely. I had a best friend then, too. We were the Mega Powers, too, you know. When you and Hogan split in early 1989, Andrew and I bet two dollars on the outcome of your match against Hogan at Wrestlemania V. I bet on you, and you lost. I still believed in you though. Andrew kept saying, "I told you." That summer, you teamed with Zeus, that large muscular black guy, and I started working at Dominion and was trained by a black boy named Matthew. Andrew and I still hung out, here and there, but I wasn’t invited up to his cottage, and he was more popular than I was from the previous year. So I’m skipping all over the place here in my first question to you because I’m a bit nervous. It’s crazy, I mean, you were such a huge part of my life, and we both had best friends who were more popular than we were, who were blonde and well, we both know how those two separate relationships turned out. I mean, in 2002 you wrote a whole rap album about how much you hate that guy, didn’t you? In 1986, I built a toy-wrestling ring with a fruit crate and some bungee cords. One afternoon my father got mad at me for something and stomped his foot through the centre of the ring! I had to rebuild the ring with thicker wood that I deemed "foot-proof." I made a purple cape for your action figure out of material my mom had in her sewing box. Did you and your Dad always get along?
QUESTION 2: In the winter of 1986, Andrew came over along with my other friend, Eric. We made a tape-recording of us wrestling. I told Andrew I was Macho Man and Roddy Piper put together, and he started singing, "Put together as one, there are people dying..." imitating the song "We Are the World." I cracked up so hard. We took turns doing play-by-play as we wrestled. Andrew said, "Oh my God, he’s juggling with a saw blade. They seem to be calling wrestlers in from all over the world to try and stop this...They say they’ll be here tomorrow morning?! What the heck, where are these people!?" Years later, I used sound bites from the tape for the friendship memorial VHS I made for Andrew called "The Death of the Mega Powers."
On this same VHS tribute, I made another montage with a George Harrison song, "All Those Years Ago" that had clips of me and Andrew playing hockey in our driveway and the Mega Powers (you and Hulk) kicking ass in the ring. Also around this time, Dad started working at Andrew’s father’s funeral home; I think it sort of made Andrew think our family was desperate, or that we were beneath not only his family, but virtually every family in the community. My father became The Undertaker, grew pale and smelled of deadly chemicals. I wrote a lot of strange notes to my good friend Andrew at this time issuing challenges and questioning loyalty. No one really understood what I was going on about. Andrew was avoiding me at all costs, started playing squash all the time with his new best friend Alex from California. I felt that Andrew and I had been friends for so long that the end of our friendship had to be at some sort of blowout pay-per-view spectacular. Towards the end, whenever I spoke to him, he would shake his head.
He would shoot down every idea I had for us: going to a movie, playing road hockey, going shopping and going to the park on our bikes. Around that time, I also turned my jean jacket into a Macho Man Randy Savage ring jacket. I added bright colours along the arms, wrote out "Macho Man" in glittery paint on the back, and from the arms added long streams of bright material (yellow, orange and pink). I was going to wear it to school for Halloween along with a cowboy hat I’d spray painted orange but chickened out at the last minute. I didn’t have a beard or sunglasses; mainly, I was afraid of being ridiculed. How did you feel wearing that stuff at the time? Did you ever wear it out in public? Outside of wrestling? It’s not very practical attire.
QUESTION 3: Going back to 1994, you were working for the WWF but not wrestling, doing play-by-play. It was near Thanksgiving. On this night, I locked my mouth up with fork and gristle for the last time at the twentieth annual Thanksgiving dinner. That’s when I found out our home was being sold and that I would have to find my own place to live. It’s a shame that things happened the way they did, but in the end, I think people have always respected me for being someone who always stood behind his beliefs and stood up for himself. In the closing Moments of the meal, it was revealed that there was no plan on using me in a domestic sense any longer. Though I never surrendered a tear during the meal, history was made and a new era began. Confusion, anger, betrayal, embarrassment, disgrace, disgust—all compounded and formed a kind of squall in my pharmacy belly.
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