A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [73]
One morning when I went to pay the rent—again—I was surprised when the guy behind the desk said, “Last night you had a guest in your room, you have to pay me 125 deutsche marks.”
That was a fifty DM increase and I was perplexed. How did he know I’d had a guest? I scanned the bar for a secret mirror or a video screen, anything that would’ve helped him to find out, but there was nothing.
A couple of days later another of Hamburg’s finest impressed me with her hospitality and the next morning I was charged 125 deutsche marks again. I still had no idea how he’d found out, until I heard a couple of beeps coming from behind the desk. Upon closer inspection, I saw what appeared to be a telephone switchboard. This was strange because there were no telephones in the rooms.
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 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 Motörhead-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.