A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [70]
I explained to the guy I was working that night that I was going to take control of the match and call the entire thing. The pressure of being in the new territory had worn off and I became myself again. I relaxed and let the crowd tell me what they wanted to see. They really got into watching the exchanging of holds known as chain wrestling, so we did a succession of unique reversals and the crowd responded. We ended up having a decent match and my reputation was redeemed. When I left the arena that night, I took my case of beer with me.
CHAPTER 23
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT JERICHO
One of the guys who’d been riding me about my initial performances was a Scotsman named Drew McDonald. He’d been working for a decades and was always one of the top workers in the tournament and had made a bunch of snide remarks about my work after the first few nights. I was drinking a few pints at Ante’s after my acquittal, when I saw him staring at me.
“Mr. Canada, do you want to be a big dog?” he yelled over at me. “If you want to be a big dog, you’ve got to sit in the big dog corner.”
We started bullshitting and he told me that I’d earned his respect with my work that night. So we clinked our steins and proceeded to act like the big dogs that we were—until seven the next morning.
The more time I spent with Drew, the more I learned about his extremely disgusting side. He’d worked for Stu in Stampede as one half of the tag team Ben Doon and Phil McCraken (say the two names together quickly, junior) and he had the reputation for getting his rocks off by licking women’s toilet seats. He was also known for having no problem drinking a cup of pee, even if it wasn’t his...he would’ve loved being a rudo in Mexico. So it wasn’t a shock when he asked me if I wanted to go to one of the peep shows on the Reeperbahn.
We went inside and were ushered into separate darkened rooms the size of closets. I put a deutsche mark coin into the slot and a little TV came on with forty-four choices of movies...like cable.
On channel 12, I was introduced to the screen gem known as Caviar, which featured people eating each other’s feces. It had crappy reception, so I switched to channel 32, which featured a guy having sex with his foot. You know what they say about guys with big feet.
I flipped around for a few more minutes until I switched to Blumpkin, which saw a guy getting head while on the toilet. Are there enough people doing this that we need a name to describe it?
I was disgusted by Blumpkin and after watching for five minutes I left the booth.
Drew was waiting outside and asked me excitedly, “What did you think!”
“What did I think? What did you think?”
“I love this place,” he said. “I came here this morning, had a wank and wiped it on the door handle for the next guy.”
I recoiled in disgust.
“Couldn’t you have told me that before I went in there? How do I know that you weren’t in the booth I was just in?”
“You don’t,” he said and smiled.
As we walked out of the peep show, “Hold the Line” by Toto was blasting out of the speakers continuously on a tape loop.
I used to like “Hold the Line.” Now whenever I hear it all I can think of is Drew McDonald whacking off and wiping the product from his Scot knob onto the door knob. Does anybody have any hand sanitizer? There’s Something About Jericho...
As disgusting as Drew was, he was also very talented and taught me that the less you have to do in the ring the better it is for everyone.
The fans in Germany were very easily entertained. But I’d say that 65 percent of them were there every night, so it became a challenge to keep them on their feet without constantly relying on the same old tricks. When Drew and I worked the crowd into a frenzy without even locking up one night, I was impressed. Drew kept getting in and out of the ring until the fans became rabid. They wanted him IN the ring and wouldn’t settle for anything