When I went back up to my room to investigate, sure enough there was an electric eye embedded in the wood at the bottom of the staircase. Whenever someone walked up to their room it would set the eye off. If it beeped twice, they would know that two people had walked up the stairs and if that didn't match your registration, they would know you had someone in for a shag or a piss in the sink or whatever.

Now that I'd figured out the secret, the next time I had a visitor I hoisted her over my shoulder as I walked up the steps. I don't know why I wasn't charged extra when the drunken dude barged into my room during my first night. I guess the first accosting from an inebriated German was on the house.

I did quite well on the German meat market despite the fact that I was sporting a Michael Bolton hairstyle. Because of the heavy humidity in Hamburg I had some serious Shirley Temple sausage curls. The problem was that the hair dryer I used to blow out the curls blew its circuits the first day I arrived. Once I realized that Europe was on a different power system, I couldn't afford a European-powered dryer and was forced to rock the poodle lid for six weeks.

Fortunately, I noticed from hanging out at the Docks that most of the rockers in Hamburg had hair just like me.

CHAPTER 24.

MY FIRST FELONY!.

Every Monday there was a metal concert at the Docks and since I just so happened to be off on Mondays, I was able to check out some of my favorite groups. I got to see such mega-bands as Gamma Ray, Saxon, Accept, Manowar, Green Jelly, and Morbid Angel, who were all very popular in Europe, yet practically unheard of in the U.S. The highlight for me was getting to check out Helloween, whose Walls of Jericho Walls of Jericho album helped inspire my name. An extra bonus occurred when I got to meet their singer, Michael Kiske, one of my top three favorite vocalists of all time. I was starstruck and even though I'd tasted some degree of worldwide stardom and success, meeting him transformed me right back into a fifteen-year-old fan. If I met James Hetfield from Metallica tomorrow, I would act the same way. album helped inspire my name. An extra bonus occurred when I got to meet their singer, Michael Kiske, one of my top three favorite vocalists of all time. I was starstruck and even though I'd tasted some degree of worldwide stardom and success, meeting him transformed me right back into a fifteen-year-old fan. If I met James Hetfield from Metallica tomorrow, I would act the same way.

I thought I did meet James during one of my first nights wrestling in Hamburg, when I looked into the crowd and saw him sitting there. I kept looking over at him during my match, trying to figure why in the hell the mighty Hetfield would be sitting in a tent on the Reeperbahn.

After the match, I asked Robbie Brookside, "Am I crazy or was that James Hetfield out there tonight?"

Robbie laughed and said, "That was my friend Jorn. Everyone thinks he's Hetfield when they first see him. You have to meet him, he owns a record store and he plays bass in a band." He sounded like my kind of dude.

When I met Jorn Ruter after the show, he was sooo easygoing and impossible not to like. He played bass and sang in Torment, a Motrhead-influenced band, whose biggest hit was the pretty little ditty "Bestial Sex." He also owned and operated both a record label and a record shop named Remedy Records. Jorn knew his stuff and we spent hours debating and discussing all things metal.

You have to understand that in Germany heavy metal isn't just music, it's a way of life. The people of Hamburg seemed to me to be strict, cold, and tough with a pissed-off edge. Heavy metal was the perfect soundtrack for their lives.

Jorn showed that toughness by cruising the streets of Hamburg with his friends, one of them being Kai Karczewski, whose father, Uwe, painted the cover of the Walls of Jericho Walls of Jericho album...see how it all ties together? album...see how it all ties together?

They roamed the city looking for fights...with skinheads. While the Nazi-influenced punks patrolled the Reeperbahn looking for drunken partiers or homosexuals to beat the hell out of, Jorn's gang patrolled the Reeperbahn looking for skinheads to beat the hell out of.

There was still a big Nazi influence in Hamburg existing even in its architecture. In the middle of the city, there was a black fortress of a building perched like a bloated spider casting a dark shadow across the streets. It gave me a bad vibe, so I asked Jorn what it was. I found out it was called the Hafenbunker, a Nazi stronghold where Hitler himself stayed when he was in Hamburg. If there was ever such a thing as a haunted house, the Hafenbunker was it.

One night Jorn and I went to Ante's for a few beers. But the beers he ordered were a lot different from the Labatt's I was used to drinking. He'd got me a Guinness and I couldn't believe how dark and syrupy it was. It was like drinking a stein of Aunt Jemima's and I was still forcing down my first one when the next round came. Apparently German drinking rules are similar to wrestling drinking rules. Jorn got angry and sternly told me, "You are in Germany. You must drink like a German!"

So I did.

I ended up totally loaded and spent the rest of the night going absolutely crazy. The highlights of which included a foot race between Jorn and me over the roofs of cars parked on the street and a schnitzel-eating contest, which was not a good decision. Holy heartburn, Batman!

I woke up the next morning next to a naked hermaphrodite-whose picture was in the stack of porno magazines scattered across my room. I had spent all of my deutsche marks on such classics as He's a Woman, She's a Man, Midget Titties, He's a Woman, She's a Man, Midget Titties, and and Caviar Deluxe Caviar Deluxe (normal Caviar wasn't enough for this mag) and didn't remember a damn thing. (normal Caviar wasn't enough for this mag) and didn't remember a damn thing.

Later that night in the dressing room I told my Caviar Deluxe Caviar Deluxe story after taking a post-match shower, while Doc messed around with a movie camera he'd brought with him from Liverpool. story after taking a post-match shower, while Doc messed around with a movie camera he'd brought with him from Liverpool.

"Hey Lion Heart, what would you do if I was filming right now?" he inquired.

I checked and saw that there was no blinking red light on the camera, so I decided to put on a show.

"I'd take off my towel and shake my shit like this!" I whipped off the towel and started flapping my horn back and forth like a paddleball.

Then I performed a sweet electric slide and a swank Pee-wee Herman tequila dance while my Arthur Digby Sellers whipped to and fro.

"And what if I told you I really was filming?"

"Well, you're not. The red light's not blinking." I started to pogo.

"Actually, it is," he said and ripped off the piece of black electrical tape that had been hiding the blinking red light.

I scrambled to cover up my Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey with the bunched-up towel at my feet. "Promise you won't show that to anyone," I begged. "It's freezing in here!"

Later on, all the boys and a ton of fans congregated at Ante's for the nightly after-show party. I was making some headway with one of Ante's gorgeous daughters when the whole place suddenly burst out laughing. I turned to the big-screen TV behind the bar and saw my Tico Torres staring back at me with a one-eyed grin.

I felt like George Costanza as I explained how cold the dressing room was. And that shower...there was NEVER hot water in that damn shower. The laughter got louder when my Pee-wee (poor choice of words) Herman dance began.

I was furious and I didn't speak to Doc for a week. He finally cornered me in the dressing room and said, "Listen man if you want to get even, get even, but the fact you're not talking to me is killing me. Please...rib me back already."

I racked my brain and decided to exact my revenge by stuffing raw eggs into his wrestling boots and cutting the laces minutes before his match. I put my plan in motion and stifled a giggle when Doc stuck his foot into his boot, cracking the eggs. I waited for him to freak out, alerting everyone to my master plan. Instead he diabolically diffused my rib by silently cleaning out his boots and tying knots in his laces and nobody was ever the wiser.

I learned two important lessons that day:

1. Never sell a rib, and 2. Never whip out your Dustin Diamond in front of a camera.

Did I mention how cold the dressing room was?

Now reunited, Robbie, Doc, and I had a couple of strippers take us on the two-hour drive to Hanover to visit the boys in the CWA. The Catch Wrestling Association was the WWF of Germany and I wanted to check out the difference between Rene's promotion and the big leagues. Their tent was fancier than ours and the crowd was a little bigger, but other than that it was pretty much the same scenario as Hamburg, with one notable exception.

The quality of the workers in Hanover was head and shoulders above our group. The best of the lot was Fit Finlay, an Irishman who was the king of the heels in the company. That night I watched his match and he commanded five fines against a young guy I'd never seen before or since. Fit was a friend of Robbie and Doc and when they introduced me he said, "What are you doing here?"

"I'm wrestling in Hamburg right now."

Finlay smiled his gap-toothed grin. "Give those guys in Hamburg a message for me," he said cheerily.

"Sure," I replied just as cheerily.

"Tell those cunts to fuck off."

I returned to Hamburg and told everyone that Finlay had wished them well in their future endeavors.

Toward the end of the tourney, a sign was posted in the dressing room announcing that Kinder Catch would be held the following Sunday. Kinder Catch was probably the worst idea I'd ever heard. The basic premise was that you would baby-sit a bunch of kids under the age of ten and tell them wrestling's secrets. We should have told them that Santa Claus was bullshit too while we were at it. Now playing the role of Catfish Charlie...Chris Jericho.

I arrived that morning straight from the Kaiserkeller sporting a horrible hangover. Rene had all the kids line up in the ring and showed them our tricks, like a turncoat magician at a child's birthday party. The kids ran around the ring doing drop kicks and taking bumps while we tried to make sure they didn't break their Kinder necks.

When the last day of the tournament arrived, nobody seemed to know who was in the final. When the tournament started there'd been a chart in the front lobby listing all the standings, but it had been taken down a few days later because I don't think Rene knew how he wanted the tournament to end.

I was in in the tourney and I was confused, so I can just imagine how the fans felt. It wouldn't have been hard to figure out a point system or a round-robin bracketing, but Rene was just too lazy. He didn't think people would care about such details, even though it was a TOURNAMENT. the tourney and I was confused, so I can just imagine how the fans felt. It wouldn't have been hard to figure out a point system or a round-robin bracketing, but Rene was just too lazy. He didn't think people would care about such details, even though it was a TOURNAMENT.

But I found out that I'd advanced to the semifinals (who knew?) and would be facing Drew McDonald to decide the third-place winner. There'd been zero buildup for the match but the crowd was still buzzing when we stood across from each other in the parade. It was hard to keep a straight face during the staredown as he was flexing his thigh and the tits of naked girl tattooed on his leg's were bouncing up and down. It was actually a lot cooler than it sounds.

We had great chemistry and the match went perfectly. During the entire tournament, Drew had been trying to convince me to try a move he'd thought of where I would do a Frankensteiner with the both of us standing on the top rope. I thought it was impossible but he kept bringing it up and I finally agreed to do it for the last match. We both climbed to the top and I jumped up on his shoulders, back-flipping him into the ring while the fans went nuts. I liked the move so much that it became one of my signature moves (and almost led to my death four years later).

Drew ended up pinning me but we were both winners, as Rene told me it was the best match he'd ever seen during his time in Hamburg. Considering my less than auspicious start, it was nice to end the tournament with a bang.

The final match was Blackie Boy Smith winning the tournament by beating Rene (Rene was in the final? What a surprise.) and they had no chance of following Drew and me. I took great pride in that.

Even though I'd been wrestling for years, I'd never experimented with steroids. I didn't have the guts to try them. Plus I didn't know where I could get them and after my crack-buying experience in Denver, I'd proven that I didn't have much flair for purchasing illegal drugs.

But when I found out that they were easy to obtain in Germany, I decided to pop my sterry and bought 150 tablets of Dianabol. The Dianabol looked exactly like these little sugar tablets that Germans use to sweeten their coffee. They came in this Tic-Tac container type thingy, so I bought one and replaced the sugar pills with Dianabol pills. I'd discovered the perfect way to smuggle contraband over international borders, but I got paranoid and became convinced I was going to get caught. I wrapped the dispenser in a pair of dirty undies, but that still wasn't enough. So I stuffed the gonch into a stinky sock and then stuck the stinky sock into a pair of sweaty tights. But I needed more protection, so I put the whole rolled-up wrinkly mess into the bottom of my laundry bag. I figured if the customs guys found my stuff after all that, I deserved to get busted.

I was freaking out when I took my bags through German customs, even though there still wasn't a customs area. When I approached Canadian customs I felt like I was packing a shoe bomb, but thankfully my bags weren't searched.

So it was official. I had transported illegal substances across international borders.

My first felony!

(Apologetic Author's Note: If any customs officials are reading this book, please don't search me as I promise to never smuggle illegal contraband again. I don't know why I even bothered because the Dianabol didn't do shit for me. As a matter of fact, I think they actually were sugar pills in the first place.)

PART SIX

KNOXVILLE.

CHAPTER 25.

AIN'T NO PARTY LIKE A WAL-MART PARTY After returning from Germany I decided it was time to get serious about working in the States. I'd thought a lot about Rip Morgan's comment that I was ready to break into the WWF and wondered if he was right. But even though I'd achieved some worldwide notoriety, the WWF still hadn't acknowledged my existence or sent out any kind of feelers toward me. Since they were essentially compana non grata, it was time to look elsewhere for mainland exposure.

I called Lance to touch base and share stories about working in Germany and I asked him what he had coming up next. He mentioned that he'd been talking with Jim Cornette (who I had interviewed years earlier for my college newspaper), now the promoter for Smoky Mountain Wrestling, one of the top independent companies in the States.

SMW was based out of Knoxville, Tennessee, and it had been getting a lot of recognition because of Cornette's involvement. He'd been a successful manager and assistant booker in both the WCW and WWF, before getting tired of the grind and walking away to form his own company.

SMW offered more of a slower-paced, old-time style of wrestling than what the glitzy WWF was selling. To a certain extent the fans in the Southern states preferred Smoky's style to the WWF's, with a lot of them still believing that they were watching a legitimate sport and behaving accordingly. This included automatically cheering or booing a wrestler based solely on whether he came to the ring from the heel or babyface locker room.

The company also relied more on wrestler interviews to build up the big matches. This was the opposite of wrestling in Germany or Mexico, where there was less emphasis on cutting promos. If I was ever going to get to the WWF, I would have to learn how to deliver a better promo, and working for Jim Cornette, one of the greatest promo men of all time, would help me to do that. I got his number from Lance and gave him a call.

I was surprised when Jim called me back excitedly the next day. He'd already seen some of my work via an audition tape Lance had sent him chock-full of highlights of the two of us wrestling each other. One of the clips featured me taking a crazy bump over the top post straight to the floor and Cornette wouldn't stop raving about it. When I brought up that I'd interviewed him for my college newspaper five years earlier, he laughed and then cut to the chase. "I would love to bring you and Lance in to work as a tag team."

There was more emphasis on tag teams in SMW and the top stars in the company were the Rock 'n' Roll Express. Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson were former NWA and WCW tag team champions and one of the biggest drawing acts of the 1980s. I thought Lance and I would be a perfect fit for the company. I didn't want to spoil any of Lance's plans though, so I called to ask his opinion. He liked the idea and we were Tennessee-bound.

Cornette's plan was to put us together as a young and fearless team called the Thrillseekers. Our gimmick was that we were more extreme than the rest of the performers in SMW. This extreme didn't mean that we broke tables or shot staple guns into our heads; it referred rather to our devil-may-care attitude as we walked the earth seeking thrills...or something like that.

The idea was that we'd explode into the territory performing flashy moves and working diverse styles that had never been seen by these fans before.

Cornette made the arrangements to fly us down to Knoxville to sell us on his company. He also had an idea of what he wanted us to wear in the ring and sent us a few rough designs. They featured a pair of stickmen wearing singlets, resembling a Southern Spirit Squad. Cornette's notes stated that our first names were to be written on the front in "gold lamr similar material."

It was lame all right. We would've been better off wearing loincloths.

We were both excited about the prospect of working full-time in the States and we had no idea what kind of money we could expect to make. I had left Mexico on good terms and even though the peso had crashed, I knew I could go back and make a good living. But I felt at this stage of my career it meant more to get the gig with SMW even if it meant a huge pay cut, although Cornette didn't need to know that. So it was time to do some hardball negotiating.

From the moment Lance and I stepped off the plane in Knoxville it was as much of a culture shock as being in Mexico City the first time. For starters, even though we were still in North America I had a real problem understanding a damn word the people were saying. Trying to figure out the Southern accents was harder than trying to decode carny and Cockney combined.

Cornette met us at the gate wearing a tight SMW T-shirt that barely covered his ample belly and a pair of Zubaz workout pants that were in style a decade earlier. He had a haircut like a first-grader, short and parted with an ax to the side, and was sporting a pair of Coke-bottle glasses.

"Hey y'all."

"Pardon?"

"Jeet yet?"

"Excuse me?"

"Jeet yet?"

I just nodded politely until I decoded that he was asking, "Did you eat yet?"

When I finally jate, the food was just as alien as the accent. Blooming onions, grits, okra, BBQ that wasn't actually BBQ at all, but some kind of mystery meat covered with a cold, slimy sauce. And what the hell was a Waffle House?

The culture shock continued when I saw a huge billboard on the side of the highway featuring a familiar face.

"Why is there a picture of Burt Reynolds from Smokey and the Bandit Smokey and the Bandit on that billboard?" on that billboard?"

"Burt Reynolds?" he asked in amazement. "That's not Burt Reynolds, that's Richard Petty...one of the most famous NASCAR drivers ever!"

I'm from Canada. What the hell did I know about NASCAR?

He took us to a fancy riverside restaurant and began the hard sell about how good it would be for our careers to work with SMW. Jimmy unveiled his plan to build us up by introducing the Thrillseekers to his fans with television vignettes.

We filmed the first one in the Smoky Mountains at Pigeon Forge, the home of Dollywood (me likey Dolly). We wandered around the tourist attractions while Jim filmed us performing such death-defying thrill-seeking activities as ice skating, horseback riding, go-cart driving, video game playing, and the extreme coup de gr of jumping onto a Velcro wall whilst wearing a Velcro suit. Another wacky scene showed Lance throwing treats into a bear pit only to pan down and reveal that it was really me jeeting the treats. HILARIOUS!

The whole concept of the vignette was goofy to begin with (now I know why Jim's nickname was Corny) but I made it worse with my horribly cheesy overacting. I was bopping along to Danger Danger's "Rock America" (Corny couldn't have picked a worse hair metal entrance song for us if he tried) once again trying to be David Lee Roth and once again ending up as Screech. If you didn't know me you might've thought, "This guy's an idiot." (Then again, you might think that even if you do.) Then he wanted to end the clip with the two of us banging our fists together, which would cause a lightning bolt (to be added in post) to shoot out of our hands.