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I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, until Jimmy Hart told me I was losing the TV title to Konnan on Nitro that night in Chattanooga.

He was making his point by taking away the title (and my laundry I guess) and I planned to make my point by having a great match with Konnan, a guy who wasn’t exactly Chris Benoit in the ring. My mission was to go above and beyond to put on an awesome spectacle and I’m not lying now when I say that we did.

Since Bischoff was laying down the law and resorting to brass tactics, I needed to do the same and I turned to Kevin Nash of all people for help. I’d heard that Nash and Hall had used an agent to broker their deal into WCW. Having an agent in every other form of entertainment is commonplace, but in wrestling they are regarded as vermin.

Wrestling began as a carnival attraction a hundred years ago and as far as it has come as a viable entertainment entity, it’s still quite primitive in its treatment of its employees and that will probably never change. But I thought if I had representation, I could avoid further personal conflicts with Eric and formulate a game plan to help me escape WCW.

Nash put me in touch with his agent, Barry Bloom. We met in New Orleans in yet another secret meeting and it was the smartest move I could’ve made. Barry orchestrated a foolproof plan for my escape and played Eric like a temperamental fiddle. At first Eric refused to deal with him due to previous bad blood, so Barry had me hire a lawyer in Atlanta named John Taylor. John had fought against WCW in the past and Bischoff was reluctant to deal with him too. I had hit the Bischoff hornet’s nest with a stick and he was furious. So I was prepared for him to make the reminder of my time in the company a living hell. Surprisingly he didn’t.

Maybe he forgot or maybe he just didn’t care, but nothing happened. I worked an angle with Perry Saturn that culminated in a Loser Wears a Dress Match. What better way for Eric to embarrass me, right? Wrong. Perry wanted to do a Marilyn Manson gimmick and lost willingly.

I wrestled a battle royal during MTV Spring Break in Cancun. I won and went out drinking for fourteen hours straight with the host, a relative unknown named Kid Rock (who I referred to as Rock Kid) in celebration. Only in WCW could you get a bigger push (and a hell of a party) when you were leaving the company.

I didn’t escape completely unscathed, as I got a call soon afterward that I’d failed the WCW testing policy. The banned substance found in my system was androstenedione (Mark McGwire’s supplement of choice), which I bought at a GNC in the mall. The fix was in.

As penance, I had to attend a steroid counseling session with the company quack in Atlanta with two other wrestlers, Lenny Lane and Bobby Blaze. Lenny was about my size and Bobby was built like you (I keed) and none of us were typical poster boys for rampant steroid abuse...although I was a sexy beast and worked out hard. But it was strange that the three of us had been targeted while so many others in WCW were practically neon signs for it.

What was even more peculiar was the class itself. We sat in a room for two hours watching public service films that looked like they were made in the 1970s.

“Hello, I’m Lionel Hutz. You may have seen me in such films as Weight Supremacists and The Golden Curls. That was before muscle-enhancing narcotics caused my testes to spontaneously combust.” I took heed and threw all of my GNC products away.

After receiving another tongue-lashing from Eric about how much of an asshole I was for going back on my word (bor-ring), I was in my apartment in Clearwater, Florida, watching Wayne Gretzky’s last NHL game. Tears were streaming down my face as I watched one my childhood heroes play his final shift. It inspired me to leave a tribute to the Great One on my answering machine.

“Hey this is Chris, leave a message because I don’t want to talk to anyone. Unless of course this is Wayne Gretzky, the greatest of all time, in which case