After an hour of mindless chatter, I felt comfortable enough—and drunk enough—to call Axl out. “Hey Axl, I have a bone to pick with you!” The studio went silent and Trunk gave me a look that said, “Jericho if you blow this, I’m going to kill you!”
But I was undeterred. “Axl, when Guns were opening for Iron Maiden in 1988 in Winnipeg, I asked you for your autograph outside in the parking lot and you told me you would be right back. Well, you never came back and I want to know why.”
“That’s it?” Axl said with relief. “I thought you were going to tell me I had sex with your girlfriend … or your mother.”
(Your mother’s a fuckin’ goof.)
Eddie’s show was supposed to end at 2 a.m., but the program director realized how much of a coup it was to have Axl Rose live on the radio (he was the Howard Hughes of rock and roll after all) and told Eddie to keep him on for as long as he could. We finally wrapped up the show at 4 a.m. and made our way over to the Bungalow, a trendy NYC hotspot that despite the late hour was wall-to-wall packed. Hanging out with Axl Rose has its benefits, and we were escorted to a huge VIP section, even bigger than the one Lindsay Lohan occupied beside us.
After a few hours of Patrón and Grey Goose (alas, no Nightrain) I stumbled over to Axl, who threw his arm around me and smiled his mischievous grin.
“You know what?” he said. “I had a really good time with you guys tonight. It’s pretty rare that I get to talk about music and just be a fan without having to worry about all the bullshit. Thanks for hanging out with me.”
Thanks for hanging out with you? Thanks for hanging out with me, spacebrain!
And by the way Axl, I thought Chinese Democracy was genius.
CHAPTER 46
Benoit
In the two years I stayed away from wrestling, I literally stayed away. I didn’t watch the shows or read the Internet for results. I became a casual fan who paid slight attention to what was going on, and that was about it. I got a few phone calls from Brian Gewirtz asking if I’d do a one-shot deal here and there, most notably as John Cena’s surprise guest tag team partner for a Raw at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, but I politely declined. You’re either in or you’re out, and if you’re not in then you must be out (Hurricane™) and I didn’t want to be one of those guys who would show up every once in a while. But slowly I started to feel the wrestling fire kindling inside me again, and I can attribute that to two factors.
The first was that I had just finished writing my book (the critically acclaimed A Lion’s Tale in case you’ve forgotten), and the experience of reliving my entire career in such detail made me realize how fortunate I’d been to live my dream and have so many tremendous adventures along the way. The book also made me remember that I was pretty damn good at what I did, and I started thinking what it would be like to return.
As a result, I started doing autograph signings to get a feel for what the fans were thinking and whether they wanted me to come back. While I enjoyed doing them it was also a little depressing. The final straw was when I did a signing in Long Island that was about as well attended as the one Randy the Ram did with the guy with the colostomy bag. Looking around at all the old-timers clinging on to the business, hoping for one last break, really got to me.
What was I doing here? I was thirty-six years old, not fifty-six, and if I was going to be doing something involving wrestling, it should be in the big leagues.
The second and most important factor was when I watched Cena and Michaels wrestle for a full hour on Raw. It was an amazing performance that showcased the true art of the business; a business that I’d once been a part of and wanted to be a part of again.
The match excited, intrigued, and quite frankly annoyed me. After having great matches with both guys in the past, I was jealous that I wasn’t involved, and watching it made me antsy.
After it was over I knew it was time to come back. It was time for Chris Jericho to return to the WWE.
But there was another factor that cemented my decision to come back. If Cena and Michaels had just showcased the best of wrestling, the man whom I considered to be my best friend in the business was about to showcase the worst—almost destroying the entire industry in the process.
I hadn’t seen Chris Benoit since the day of Eddy’s funeral. He had been devastated, and even though we promised we would keep in better touch, that became increasingly more difficult, due to the fact that Chris would simply drop off the grid for weeks at a time. I called him the Loch Ness Monster because he would surface for a short period, then submerge himself again shortly afterwards and be impossible to find. Sometimes I’d miss his call and get back to him literally minutes later, but he wouldn’t answer and I wouldn’t hear from him again for weeks.
But as hard as he was to get on the phone, he would always return emails and texts. So that became our main mode of communication to keep in touch, stay up to date, and send each other pictures of our kids. Chris was always interested in how my children were doing and asked about them frequently. He loved kids, especially his own, and would write about them all the time.
It seemed strange that he would rather write long emails than pick up the phone and talk, but that was Chris—always a little strange. He wore a long black leather overcoat even in the summer. He constantly chewed on coffee straws, with an extra cocked behind his ear waiting to be gnawed and a fresh supply in his pocket. He was very intense during conversations, to the point of being angry.
“How are you doing, Chris?”
“GOOD … YOU?” he would reply, straight-faced with a steely glare.
Chris also didn’t share the same sense of humor with too many other people and never laughed at the obvious. Once when we were on a long drive with Chavo Guerrero, I popped in a cassette (remember those?) of a famous Canadian comedy radio show called Brocket 99, which was a broadcast of a fictitious Indian reservation radio station. Growing up with Canadian Indians and near reservations, I found the routine hilarious. Benoit was from the prairies as well, so I thought he might get a kick out of it too. I was wrong, and instead of doubling over with laughter like me, he remained stone-faced during the whole show.
His lack of reaction made me question my own sense of humor.
“Do you not find this funny? If you don’t like it I’ll turn it off.”
He responded stoically, “No, keep playing it. I think it’s hilarious. I’m howling inside.”
I let it play, but he still didn’t laugh. Not a giggle, not a chuckle, not a tee-hee—never went “Ha.” Yet when somebody threw up or fell down the stairs, he would belly-laugh out loud for hours on end.
We spent the rest of the drive in silence, and when we arrived at the hotel someone was throwing a party a few doors down from us. Chris grabbed a garbage can filled with trash from the hall and dumped in a bunch of ice. Then he pulled down his pants and filled the rest of it with 100 percent Canadian wolverine piss. He propped the can against the door at an angle and knocked furiously. We ran down the hall like three teenagers and I heard the cries of disgust when the partiers opened the door. We snuck into our room, trying to be quiet but failing miserably due to Chris’s giggling, and called the revelers.
When they answered Chris said in a creepy little-kid voice, “You don’t know how to party,” and hung up laughing uncontrollably.
In February 2007, I decided to take Ash up to Edmonton so he could play with his cousins in the snow. My cousin Todd (Chad’s judicious brother) lived in Sherwood Park, the same suburb in which Benoit used to live and two of his children still did. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, so I sent him a text before we left notifying him I was going to be there on the off chance he would be too. He texted back instantly saying that by sheer coincidence he was also in Sherwood Park until Saturday. Ash and I got in Friday afternoon and we agreed to meet as soon as we landed. I called him when I arrived at 2 p.m., but he didn’t answer so I told him to call me when he could. I didn’t hear anything from him, so I texted him again at 5 a
nd at 7, but still nothing.
I was getting annoyed because it was near Ash’s bedtime and Chris was going to miss out on seeing him. I was leafing through the Edmonton Sun waiting for his call and saw his picture advertising an appearance he was making at an indoor lacrosse game that night. I figured he would call me after the game, but he never did, so I went to bed.
I awoke at 3:30 a.m. by the beep of my cell phone informing me I had a text.
“Hey Chris, just got back from my appearance, sorry I missed you. Hope to see you soon.”
Who gets back from a personal appearance at 3:30 in the morning?
His actions really annoyed me. I hadn’t seen him in so long and here we were by pure luck in the same town, yet he still couldn’t make the effort to see me and my son for a measly twenty minutes? How lame was that? I considered Chris to be a brother, but it wasn’t always easy to be his friend. You had to take the good with the bad when it came to his friendship.
As strange as he was, I still trusted him more than anybody in the business, and a few months after watching Cena-Michaels on Raw I texted him to get his advice on a comeback.
He replied, “The business fucking misses you, the fans fucking miss you, the locker room fucking misses you, I fucking miss you … I think you should come back.”
I told him that the time off had been good but I was ready to return.
He responded quickly, “I can’t wait to help you get into shape for your return!”
A few days later Chris sent me another text that said, “Hey Chris, it’s been awhile, I just wanted to say hi. Call me when you can.” I asked him when I should call since he was always so difficult to get on the phone and he replied, “Haha. You know me too well! Daniel goes to bed at eight, so call me any time after that.”
I called him every night at 8:30 for a week and of course he didn’t answer. I tried a few more times until he finally called me back on a Friday afternoon. I was playing with Ash so I didn’t answer. He left a stoic message saying, “Hey Chris, just looking to talk with you. Hope all is well. Call me back. Bye.”
In retrospect, I really wonder what it was he wanted to talk about.
That night I watched the Brian Pillman DVD that the WWE had just released. Chris knew Pillman quite well, and when it was done I texted him, “Hey man, I just watched Pillman’s DVD, it’s amazing how many of us have died young. It’s so sad. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.” He didn’t respond.
On Saturday I was booked to do an autograph signing on an indie show in Evansville, Indiana. When I landed I returned Chris’s call and there was no answer. Coincidentally, a few hours later I got the news that local Calgary wrestler Biff Wellington had passed away. Chris knew Biff quite well from Stampede Wrestling when they were both starting out, and I thought he needed to hear the news. I sent Chris another text: “I don’t know if you heard but Biff Wellington passed away today.” He didn’t reply yet again.
On Sunday I had another signing at a small indie show in a roller skating rink in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and I was embarrassed to be there. I felt even worse when I saw Bobby Eaton, one of the great workers in the ’80s who was now wrestling for small shows like this one. It was an honest living and there was nothing wrong with it, but the difference was he had no other options and I did. I was ready to return to the WWE, and signing pictures in a skating rink was not where I needed to be.
Still, it was good to see Bobby and we had a great conversation. Halfway through I asked him if he had spoken to Benoit lately and he said he hadn’t for a while. When Eaton went to the ring for his match I thought about texting Chris to tell him I’d just seen Bobby but I didn’t, too self-conscious to let him know what I was doing.
Chris wouldn’t have cared, but I felt he would’ve been disappointed in me for lowering my standards so much. Even though I hadn’t seen him for so long he still had that kind of influence over me. I didn’t want him to feel that I had let him down.
After the signing, I got back to my hotel and went online to read about the day’s events. I was surprised to see that Chris had no-showed that night’s Vengeance PPV in Houston. It was very unlike him to no-show an event, especially a PPV. I thought maybe he was having some kind of family problems and didn’t want to bother him, so I decided against sending him another text.
I flew home on Monday and went to the gym with Ash, leaving him in the play area as I worked out. Right before I started training, I got a message from Brian Gerwirtz asking me to call him. “I have some funny news for you, something you’d be interested in hearing. Get back to me when you can.”
I finished my workout an hour later, and after loading Ash into the back of my Expedition, I called Brian back. When he answered, the tone of his voice had changed drastically. The jauntiness he had displayed in his message only an hour earlier had disappeared and been replaced with panic.
I was overwhelmed by an awful sense of dread.
“Hey man, I got your voicemail, what’s up?”
Brian could barely squeeze his next words out. “Oh, this is terrible. This is the worst news. I don’t know how to tell you this, Chris.”
Not understanding what the hell he was talking about, I asked him what the problem was.
“I don’t want to tell you this. This is horrible and I don’t know what to say.”
I started guessing what could be so bad that he couldn’t bear to tell me. The first thing that popped into my head was that Vince was going to go live on Raw and totally bury me. I’d just begun early negotiations for my return to the WWE and maybe for some reason I had pissed him off and he didn’t want me back. Was he going to go on the air and call me a piece of shit that would never work for his company again?
Midway through my thought, Brian dropped the hammer.
“Chris is dead.”
Chris is dead? Chris who? Chris Masters? Chris the Trainer? Chris the Writer?
“Chris who?”
“Chris Benoit,” Brian said, his voice cracking.
The world froze as I processed what I had just been told.
Chris Benoit was dead.
Did I know a Chris Benoit? The name sounded vaguely familiar; like someone from high school maybe? Someone I played rec hockey with?
The car behind me honked alerting me that the red light had turned green, snapping me out of my daze and bringing me back to reality.
“What do you mean, Brian?”
“He’s dead, Chris. I’m sorry.”
I let out an anguished groan and I could see my face contorted into a grotesque grimace in the rear-view mirror as I swerved down the road at a snail’s pace.
“What happened? What happened?” I was a broken record, but it was all I could say.
“Nobody knows what happened, but he’s dead. They’re all dead.”
They’re all dead? What was he talking about?
“What do you mean, they’re all dead? Who’s all dead?”
“Nancy and Daniel. They’re dead too.”
Those words pushed me over the edge and I had to pull over.
“Brian, I have to call you back,” I muttered as I started sobbing uncontrollably. I lost control of my faculties like Benoit had at Eddy’s funeral. I was moaning and my breath hitching as I tried to compose myself.
Ash, all of three years old, commented innocently from his car seat, “Daddy, you cry funny.”
I wiped my eyes and put on my brave face for my son’s sake, but I was tearing apart inside. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to Chris and his entire family. How could they all be dead? Carbon monoxide poisoning? Food poisoning? Had someone murdered them? But despite all of the possible scenarios that were running through my head, I knew in my heart that something much worse had happened.
My gut feeling was Chris had killed them.
I chased the horrible thought out of my head and finally made it home. I wasn’t interested in talking to anybody; not even Jessica or especially John Laurinaitis, who kept calling my house unti
l Jess told him that I wasn’t up to speaking to anyone.
Ironically, Raw that night had originally been slotted to feature a “funeral” for Mr. McMahon, who’d been “blown up” in a limo accident a few weeks earlier. The office told everybody to dress in black mourning clothes and the set was all decked out with flowers, with a choir, a priest, and a coffin set up in the middle of the ring.
There were going to be special guests eulogizing Vince, one of them being Bruce Campbell, Ash from the Evil Dead trilogy and the inspiration for my son’s name. Knowing I was a big fan, Campbell’s appearance was the funny news that Brian had originally called me about.
So when Vince called a talent meeting to inform everyone that Chris had died, the whole roster was already dressed for a full-service memorial.
The plans for the Raw interment were canceled and replaced by a Chris Benoit tribute show, a compilation of his greatest WWE matches (which might be the last time they’ll ever be aired on TV), along with heartfelt comments from his peers. Amid the kind words and valiant portrayals of Chris was a serious, more ambiguous comment from William Regal that chilled my blood. He said that Chris wasn’t quite the person everyone thought he was and there might be more to his death than meets the eye. I could tell that Regal suspected the worst, just like I did.
I watched the show drinking Crown Royal straight from the bottle, barely paying attention when they aired our Royal Rumble Ladder match, which I consider to be one of my best matches ever. During the match Jim Ross mentioned, “Chris Jericho has been reached at his home in Tampa and is despondent over the news of his good friend’s death.”
I watched the rest of the show in silence, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I would never see my good friend again.
Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps Page 37