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I could hear in his voice that he was as irate as I was, but he was bottling his feelings up inside. After his outburst at Eddy’s funeral, Chris rarely showed emotion when I spoke to him. He always seemed troubled and distant. Little did I know that his problems ran much deeper than I thought.

CHAPTER 37

Dinkus

I flew to Toronto directly after Eddy’s funeral to begin Fozzy’s eastern Canadian tour, and my cousin Chad came in from Calgary to hang and get a taste of life on the road like a real rock and roller.

I’d known Chad my whole life and he was very wise. As a matter of fact, it was he who had originally explained the birds and the bees to me.

I was nine and Chad was seven and we were having a deep conversation about life when the subject of how babies were made came up. I told him shrewdly that my mom had explained to me that a daddy’s seed was passed into a mommy’s tummy while they were kissing. (Thanks a lot for that one, Mom.)

Chad shook his head wisely. “No, that’s not how it works. Babies are made by cock and cunt.”

I can confirm thirty years later that Chad was indeed correct.

The first gig of the tour was in Ottawa and I was scheduled to do an in-store signing a few hours before the show. Doing in-stores was important because they were an easy way to sell records and create awareness for that evening’s gig. I was excited to show off to Chad how big Fozzy was getting, as my previous signings in Winnipeg, Calgary, and Montreal had all drawn over five hundred fans and been huge successes.

We arrived at the Sunrise Mall promptly at 4 p.m. and headed to the record shop. I was a little wary when there was no line outside the store, but I figured that a large mob of fans had queued up inside instead.

I was wrong.

When we walked in there were exactly four people at a card table bearing a handwritten sign that said CHRIS JERICHO OF FOZ Z Y—TODAY AT 4. Whoever wrote the sign had spelled Fozzy with only one Z and had tried to compensate by adding a tiny second z between the letters afterward.

Surveying the wasteland, I said to Chad, “Keep your head down and let’s get the hell out of here.”

We inched our way to the door hoping to escape before I was recognized, but just as we reached the front a security guard spotted me.

“Hey it’s Chris! He’s here, everybody! Come on and sit down, Chris! Let’s get this party started!”

It was a party all right—if parties sucked.

I sat down to a smattering of applause in front of a wall of All That Remains CDs, waiting for Artie Fufkin to show up so I could kick his ass for a man.

Usually at an appearance I would sign my name, shake a hand, and move on to the next person. But due to the lack of humanity in the store, I was writing War and Peace on each autograph to kill time. “To Yngwie, Thanks for all your support and I really hope you have a good day and I think you’re cool and fun to talk to and yada yada yada … your friend, Chris Jericho.”

Despite my stalling, I was done signing in six minutes.

I was taking a picture with the five rent-a-cops who had been hired to protect me from all of my rabid followers, when I saw the owner of the store looking at me like he wanted to perform an evisceration. I posed with a morose smile on my face feeling stupid enough already, when it dawned on me that there were more security guards in the store than fans.

“It’s okay,” Chad said, shrugging his shoulders wisely. “Ottawa isn’t a big college town.”

The attendance for the gig was almost as bad as the in-store and I couldn’t figure out why. We’d played Canada quite a few times on the Happenstance tour and had done well, so it didn’t make sense that we were bombing so badly this time. The attendance never got better: Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal—all of them showing that our appeal was becoming more selective.

But the last night of the tour was in London, Ontario, and as we drove toward the venue, I could see a huge line snaking down the block.

“All right,” I thought to myself. “This is more like it! The