A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [32]
The match ended after ten minutes and the crowd voiced their disapproval when it was announced as a draw. We shook hands and I walked out of the ring, high fiving all the kids and feeling like the King of the World. Lance was waiting for me in the dressing room and we exchanged hugs and babbled excitedly about our success, until we noticed the other guys staring at us. We’d been taught that one of the unwritten rules of wrestling was never to brag or argue about a match in public. So we went into the bathroom and Lance said excitedly, “You were like Hulk Hogan out there, man!” In retrospect, there were probably like ten people cheering, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that our first match had gone off without a hitch and turned out pretty good. Lance still claims that it was the best match on the show.
Later on that night we also worked in a battle royal, which Lance won. It kind of bothered me that he got to win, but I took solace in the fact that I was the new Hulk Hogan, not him.
After the show, Puppets gave me a white envelope with JERICO written on it. The fact that he’d left out the H in my name was forgiven when I opened the envelope and pulled out a ten and a twenty. Thirty bucks! I used to make forty bucks a week for eight hours’ work at the deli and here I’d made almost the same for ten minutes’ work. I couldn’t believe how much money I’d just made for something that I loved to do.
I was an official working wrestler and it felt amazing.
CHAPTER 10
HOW TO DRINK LIKE A WRESTLER
My next match at the Moose Hall about a month later wasn’t quite as amazing. I was in a tag team match and was booked to suffer my first defeat. Nobody likes to lose when they first start out and I was no exception, but if I was told to lose to a turtle I would’ve done it. Instead I was involved in one of the dumbest finishes of all time. Both my partner and the referee went down and I was attacked by my two opponents, their manager, Benson Cyril, and their bodyguard, Big Titan. But the mighty Chris Jericho could not be beaten by four men, so they pulled out a bottle of ETHER. The idea was they would pour some on a cloth, hold it over my mouth, and pin me when I passed out. The kicker was they filled the bottle with rubbing alcohol. I was huffing and puffing after a brutally bad match, when Titan held the cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol over my face. I could see the little birdies circling around my head as my brain melted. They used the alcohol, they explained, so if the people in the front row smelled it, they would know it was real. Weren’t they supposed to be using ether? Does rubbing alcohol even smell like ether? I’m confused...
Meanwhile, later in the show Lance beat Bob Puppets to become the CWC champion in his first month of wrestling. Life just isn’t fair sometimes.
Our next match was the following week in a Quonset (look it up) in Strathmore, Alberta, another small town near Calgary. The promoter was a young guy named Fred Jung and he had booked Lance and me as a team named Sudden Impact. Fred’s show was a little more organized and show business gimmicky than Bob’s was, featuring guys with names like Luscious Bubbles, Earthquake Muldoon, and the Black Mamba. Also booked on the show in his debut was Dr. Love! Vic wore a pair of spandex tights with the sides of the legs cut out and replaced with mesh, which accentuated his chicken legs and made him look absolutely flabulous. He faced the Kaos Kid, Fred Jung, and I’ll give you two guesses who was booked to win.
Sudden Impact’s first match as a team was also our first abortion. In wrestling vernacular the term abortion means a shit match and, believe me, this match was a double helping of steaming shit.
First, the tape deck played my Poison tape backward and we had to walk to the ring to a loopy, psychedelic mishmash of spaceship noises. Then our opponents Steve Gillespie and the Goto Hills Savage