“I’ve got an idea for a book.” I told them. “Not really a book yet, just an idea for a scene.”
“Let’s hear it,” Steph said.
“Well, it’s about this shy kid, Andy, who was given up for adoption when he was a baby. He’s had a kind of tough life, been kicked around in foster care, done a few years in a juvenile center, when his dad comes back into his life.”
“Sounds good,” Kurt said. Since Kurt probably won’t be a big part of Diaries, I’ll just state that he’s a great guy, an absolutely phenomenal wrestler, and someone I’m proud to call a friend.
All right, with that out of the way, let’s get a little weird. “Well, Andy comes to find that his dad has some strange habits, including participating in some really loud sex in the bedroom next door. Sometimes he encourages his son to listen with his ear next to a glass against the wall.”
Steph and Kurt were both nodding. I mean, let’s face it, this father is a great character. Even some critics who didn’t care for the book as a whole had to admit the dad was memorable.
“Well, the night is Christmas Eve, and Tietam hires actors to re-create the Nativity scene on his front lawn.” Which I thought was completely original until I saw the same idea on Curb Your Enthusiasm a year or so later, before Tietam was actually out.
“On this night, Andy has fallen asleep, using his Nat King Cole cassette to drown out the sex next door. He awakes to find that something weird is going on, you know, under the sheets. He’s startled and he sits up, causing the girl, who had been, you know, doing something to him under there, to retreat from the bed. Andy sees that it’s the Virgin Mary, or at least the girl who’s dressed like her.”
Steph and Kurt were transfixed. I think Kurt was even turned on. He was touching his gold medal in a suspicious way.
“But Andy’s dad is not about to let either one of them off so easy. He more or less orders her to finish the job (you can imagine what kind of job it is), and Andy’s too scared to say no. So you simultaneously have this kid experiencing both the worst and best feelings of his life. He tries to escape the reality of his situation by turning on his cassette player, so you have this really traumatic episode juxtaposed with the beauty of Nat King Cole’s ‘Oh Holy Night.’…Well…that’s it. What do you think?”
Steph claps her hands. “I think it’s awesome, Mick.”
Kurt just stares, then says, “I think you’ve got some serious problems.”
But it was all a ruse by Angle, a way to deny the vague sexual tension that had existed between us for months. Without thinking, I lunged for the former Olympic champion, drawing him into my warm embrace, not caring how many WWE Superstars were witnesses to our forbidden…What the hell! Yes, I’m kidding.
I think that lunchroom loquaciousness was actually my first public expression of my ideas. Before that, it had just been a seed in my brain, which over the course of the next year or so seemed to flower and grow, until all that remained was to take all the visions and inspirations that had kept me awake on so many occasions, and put it down in words.
Quite frankly, I was scared. Exaggerating to wrestling stars was one thing. Creating characters, plots, and dialogue was something altogether new. If I’d taken Judith Regan’s offer, I guess I would have been forced to. But without a contract to bind me, I bided my time, never quite finding the courage to enter the bold new world of fiction.
If not for the events of September 11, 2001, I may very well have chosen not to enter that world at all. But after mourning the loss of lives, the loss of humanity, and the loss of our country’s sense of safety for a month, I felt the need to sit down and write. Really, it was an act of escapism. Because for six weeks I retreated from the world (although much of Tietam was written on the road), finding great comfort in my long hours of solitude, telling the upbeat, optimistic tale of redemption that was Tietam Brown.
Unfortunately, I was about the only person who saw it as optimistic or upbeat. The word most used to describe it was dark. Another common adjective was disturbing. I remember checking my messages while I was in England, filming Robot Wars for Spike TV, and hearing Barry Blaustein’s voice. Blaustein was the director of Beyond the Mat, the acclaimed wrestling documentary that wasn’t all that popular with Mr. McMahon. But Barry and I have remained friends—I’m even staying with him when I go out to California next week—and he was one of the first people to read the original Tietam manuscript. Barry is a well-known Hollywood scriptwriter, so I trusted his opinion, and looked forward to his feedback. What I heard was a little surprising.
“Hi, this is Barry. I just finished your book. And it’s really good, but it’s really dark. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. Okay, bye.”
Dark?Was he crazy? Didn’t he see the hope?
But as it turned out, he wasn’t crazy. It was dark. But I’ve come to see the book as a microcosm for my worldview at the time: a pretty bleak place with just a little light shining through.
My literary agent, Luke Janklow, had sent the book out to several publishers, many of whom were enthusiastic, but all of whom had the sense to comment, “The girl’s got to live.” At first I fought it, saying some pretentious artist thing about “sticking to my vision,” but the more I thought about it, the more I came to see the enormous power such a change afforded me. I was bringing someone back from the dead. I was like James Caan in Misery, Dr. Frankenstein in—um, what was the name of that movie?—like Vince McMahon resurrecting Mark Henry’s career.
Besides, I really liked the girl in the story—maybe even had a crush on her. As far as I can tell (and I have asked for some female opinions on this), even as a married man, it does seem to be permissible to have a crush on another woman, as long as the woman is fictitious, and you are the guy creating her. Pretty cool, huh?
One morning, I received a phone call from Luke, who had sent out the revised manuscript (the one where the girl lives) and had gotten a couple of firm, respectable offers. Neither were quite as high as Judith Regan’s original, sight-unseen offer, but they were nonetheless pretty substantial.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Luke said.
“Okay, what is it?”
“I mean, you’re going to think I’ve lost my mind.”
“What is it, Luke?”
“I sent the manuscript to Knopf.”
“So?”
I had no idea of Alfred A. Knopf’s lofty status in the book business. It was the home of John Updike, V. S. Naipaul, and a lot of other writers whose work I’d never read. I went into my office, which houses a pretty impressive library. Hundreds of volumes, and not a single Knopf among them. Wow, they must be prestigious if I don’t read them.
By the time I spoke to the Knopf editor, Victoria Wilson, I was fully aware of what Alfred A. Knopf represented, and how prestigious writing for them would be. I was also fully aware of Ms. Wilson’s reputation. “She’s not a back-slapper,” Luke told me. “She’s not going to feed your ego and tell you how great you are. But she will challenge you and make you a better writer.”
I dreaded that call. I was terrified of her. Until meeting Melina, it was the most frightened I’d ever been to talk to a woman. I was like Ebenezer Scrooge meeting the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. And not the Reginald Owen Scrooge either. Not the George C. Scott, not the Bill Murray in Scrooged , not Michael Caine in A Muppet’s Christmas Carol, not Scrooge McDuck in Mickey Mouse’s Christmas Carol, and certainly not Henry Winkler in An American Christmas Carol. I’m talking about the Alastair Sim, down on his knees, shaking in fear, saying, “Spirit, I fear you most of all” Christmas Carol , which is sometimes called Scrooge. That’s how scared I was.
“I like it,” Ms. Wilson said. “You’re a natural storyteller. But it’s got problems, major problems. I’m not talking about a few edits, either. I’m talking about major structural problems requiring considerable rewriting.”
Although Victoria Wilson neither looks nor sounds anything like her, I was actually picturing Margaret
Hamilton as Ms. Gulch in The Wizard of Oz as I was writing that. Probably not much of a compliment until my admission that I always found the Wicked Witch to be quite sexy. Hamilton, as you know, also played the Wicked Witch in Oz. Because as you remember, the whole trip to Oz was a dream, and therefore all the characters played dual roles. Ray Bolger, for example, played both the Scarecrow and Huck. Bert Lahr was both the Cowardly Lion and Zeke. Jack Haley was both the Tin Man and Hickory. And though it took me a while to figure it out, Frank Morgan, an old vaudeville performer, was both the Wizard and Professor Marvel (and the Emerald City doorman, the carriage driver, and the Wizard’s guard), which I guess I should have guessed, because of the mystical nature of both characters. Wait, what the hell was I talking about anyway? Oh yeah, Knopf.
With pen in hand, I headed for the spare room above my detached garage about thirty yards away from my house, where I had done the bulk of the Tietam writing while sitting in an orange padded chair that super fan Andy Wong of Kowloon’s Chinese Restaurant in Saugus, Massachusetts, procured for me from the Worcester Centrum. Why the Centrum? Because that’s the building I won my first WWE title in, from The Rock on December 28, 1998. Did the seat hold any emotional value for me? None whatsoever. But it was still a nice gesture, and it sure beat paying a small fortune for one of those ergonomically designed chairs.
Before heading to the spare room, I had given my wife explicit instructions not to bother me under any circumstances. “I don’t know how long I’ll be in there, “I said. “It might be ten hours, it might be eighteen. But I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
No more than two hours later, I heard my daughter Noelle’s voice outside. “Dad, Dad.” I feared it was an emergency, the only explanation for an interruption at such a critical time in my writing career.
With my staunchest literary supporter, my wife, Colette.
Courtesy of the Foley family.
So away to the window, I flew like a flash, tore open the shutter and threw up the…Wait a minute, I think I just spoke through the window screen.
“What is it, honey?”
“Mom says you have to help unload the groceries.”
“Tell Mom I’m working.”
A few minutes later, I heard her come again. “Dad, Dad.”
“Yes, Noelle.”
“Mom says she needs your help with the groceries.”
“Did you tell her I was working, honey?”
“She says she doesn’t care.”
With that, I stormed down the stairs and charged the house, ready to fight for my artistic rights.
“Colette, I told you I had to work all day.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “You can go back to work after you unload the car.”
“But this is my job. I’m a writer.”
“Yeah, sure, Mick.”
“I’m not joking,” I pleaded, sounding like Donald Sutherland’s feeble professor in Animal House, the one who finally confesses that his novel in progress is a “piece of shit.”
Colette just looked at me, and despite one last protest of “I’ve written four best sellers,” I headed for the car, realizing that convincing my wife, let alone the literary world, that I was really a writer was going to be more of a challenge than I thought.
“Darling.”
“Yes, Vicky.”
“You cannot rewrite a book in five days.”
I was terrified. I should have just said, “Yes, ma’am,” but I had put about seventy hours of work into those five days, and I thought my rewriting was pretty good. So I asked what I felt was obvious. “Why not?”
“Because I’ve been doing this for thirty years, and I know it’s not possible.”
“But have you read it?”
Victoria let out a frustrated sigh. “Listen, Mick, I have a fifteen-hundred-page manuscript and a thousand-page manuscript to edit. When I am through with those, I will read your changes. I don’t know how long it will take.”
Man, I loved writing that novel, but I missed the breakneck creative pace of WWE, where I’d get an idea while barreling down the freeway at 3:00A.M ., and it would come to life in front of millions the very next evening. I think Tom Petty was right. The waiting really is the hardest part.
It was about two weeks later when I got the fateful call.
“Darling, how are you?”
My heart was pounding. “Well, that depends on you, Vicky.”
“Well, there are a few problems.”
“Are they big problems?” I asked.
“One of them is,” she said.
“Okay, let me have it.”
So, she let me have it. But it really wasn’t that bad. She was proposing a big change, but one that basically involved deleting some religious passages. No real rewriting. Vicky felt that my past as a wrestler was going to make me an easy target for critics, and she didn’t want unnecessary religious controversy to overshadow the characters and the story. The other change was fairly minor.
“Is that it?” I asked, almost unable to believe my luck. “So, we’re ready to print it?”
“I must admit,” Vicky said slowly, “I am impressed not only with the work you did but the speed in which you did it.”
I was shocked. “Is that a compliment?”
“It’s as close as you’re going to get from me,” she responded. Despite the fact that she was a stern taskmaster, I have often been told how highly she thinks of me, and despite the fact that I’m still terrified of her intellect, I like her very much as well.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll keep this a secret between you and I.”
“That’s you and me. ”
“Damn.”
But first, here’s another exclusive. The next part—where I name the wrestler—actually took place many months before the previous part, where I rewrite the book in five days. If this was a Knopf book, Victoria Wilson would unleash her powers of intimidation on me, forcing me to go back to the spare room over the garage to toil for hours, making late-night changes in the discomfort of that stupid orange Worcester chair. I’m hoping Margaret Clark, my editor at Pocket Books, will be willing to be a little more charitable. So what do you say we just leave it as it is?
All right, back to October 2001, during the writing-in-notebooks stage. Concerned about my legal safety, I asked a famous wrestler to take a walk with me. Accompanied by Edge and Christian, my favorite two eyewitnesses, the famous wrestler and I sat in a fairly secluded part of a forgotten arena, where I proceeded to read him a few paragraphs of Tietam Brown. It is not meant to be an exact reenactment of my conversation with this wrestler, but at times it’s pretty damn close. As you read, think of me as poor, shocked Andy, and the wrestler in question as Andy’s father, Tietam.
“Dad, I’m having girl problems.”
He resumed his dinner-table Thinker pose and stroked his chin. He squinted a little and then closed one eye, a study in concentration. Surely he was weighing all the options, drawing inevitable conclusions, and would momentarily come bubbling forth with a sparkling nugget of knowledge that could transform my life in an instant. Then again, this was the same guy who’d used the term “bald-headed champion” only a few hours earlier. What had I been thinking?
His initial analysis of the situation surprised me.
“Well Andy, taking into account that all women are by nature different, and taking into account that you have yet to introduce me to your friend Terri, I would have to first warn you that forming a specific game plan for your specific situation could prove somewhat difficult.”
He sounded smart. My dad sounded smart! I could almost feel those clouds dispersing.
“With that in mind, there are some generalities, some strategies if you will, that do appear to be effective with most woman I’ve encountered.”
The anticipation was killing me. Sure my dad had his share of somewhat off idiosyncrasies, and yeah, maybe he didn’t do things that other dads did, but women did like the guy, and there had to be a reason. And
I was pretty sure it wasn’t the fuzzy dice. He opened his mouth. “Well, Andy, whenever possible, get them to lick your ass.”
The clouds in my mind that had seemed to disperse accumulated en masse and rained all over my parade. I waited for a big laugh, and then a pat on the back to let me know that I’d been had. We would share a good chuckle over the whole thing, and then he’d tutor me on the lessons of love.
Except he wasn’t laughing. Or smiling. Not even a little. As a matter of fact, I’d never seen him quite this intense, not even when talking about the Suglings’ scarecrow.
“That way, Andy, no matter what happens after that, you’ve always got something over them.”
With that last line, I closed the book, took a deep breath, smiled, and said, “What do you think?”
Raven, aka Scotty the Body, aka Scotty Flamingo, aka Johnny Polo, looked every bit like a proud father. He was beaming. For a moment, I thought he might actually shed a tear. His first response consisted of two simple words.
“That’s fabulous,” he said before getting up and walking off in a strut more subtle, but every bit as proud, as the John Travolta paint-carrying Brooklyn bop of Saturday Night Fever .
May 5, 2006
Dear Hardcore Diary,
My son Mickey is a rock-and-roller. He’s been that way since about the age of two. But he’s also very particular about what he considers to be rock and roll. He’s not much of a harmony guy, and definitely not a mellow rocker or light rocker. Just a basic three-chord guitar guy, who happens to make world-class rock-and-roll faces, although truth be told, he brandishes his air guitar a little high—almost like Tiny Tim on a ukulele solo.
It’s not as if I’m some king of heavy metal dad either, the type of guy who forces the hard stuff on his kids at the expense of the classics. My musical tastes are kind of eclectic, running the spectrum from Christmas tunes to Emmylou Harris to Springsteen to Drive-By Truckers. Of course, as I mentioned in an earlier book, my definition of eclectic is many people’s definition of rotten, and as a result, word spread among my fellow wrestler that the hardcore legend has the worst musical taste in the business.