Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [45]
Or something like that.
Sneap and I spent the rest of the night riding the luggage cart into the walls of the Newark Hilton.
The Jericho-Sneap debauchery™ continued a few months later after a gig in Chicago. There were a couple of pretty girls in the audience, which was a rare thing for Fozzy. Most of our fans were guys, and the majority of them could’ve entered a Joey Ramone look-alike contest and fared quite well. After the show, Sneap and I struck up a conversation with the birds and they invited us to come visit them at the club they worked at. We had no idea what kind of club we were going to meet them at since it was already after 2 a.m., but we followed a map (Archaic Author’s Note: These were the days before GPS, kids.) until we eventually found the street the club was on. But the farther we drove, the darker it got. We ended up turning onto what looked like a deserted road, with a burned-out strip mall at the end of it. As we got closer, I saw that the windows of all the stores were painted black except for one that had a little neon sign in the corner that said OPEN.
That was peculiar.
We opened the door, and were greeted by another door. At the end of that small corridor was a small sliding window, like the one on the door leading into the Emerald City of Oz. Sneap knocked, but instead of the Lollipop Guild, a short greasy Danny DeVito– looking guy with a huge mustache slid the window open and said with a growl, “Yeah?”
It wasn’t the friendliest of greetings, and even though our Spidey senses were telling us to vacate the premises, we had come too far to turn back now.
“Hi,” I announced. “We’re looking for Lilly.” (Legal Author’s Note: Lilly’s name has been changed to protect the innocent. Plus I have no idea what Lilly’s name actually was, so “Lilly” will have to suffice.) “We met her about an hour ago and she invited us.”
Then came the eternal question that every musician from Steve Perry to Joe Perry, Eric Carr to Ringo Starr, and Ryan Ahoff to Paul Baloff has been asked.
“You guys in a band or something?”
When we answered that we most certainly were, Oswald Cobblepot warmed up and muttered, “Come inside.”
He opened the door and led us into a makeshift waiting room occupied by three filthy pea green couches. We opted to stand, shifting back and forth on our toes, until Louie DePalma announced that Lilly hadn’t arrived yet but was on her way. I wandered over and looked into one of the corner rooms. Inside was a worn-down massage table covered with horrible upholstery seemingly from a 1970s leisure suit. Half-empty bottles of massage oil were assembled on a scratched and worn wooden table, along with stacks of yellowed sheets, skin lotions, containers of baby wipes, an old ster—
My mind zipped back to the containers of baby wipes. I did some basic pervert math and came up with the following equation: Lotion + Baby Wipes = Jack Shack.
It seems our innocent Lilly (and probably her friend) was employed at this fine establishment as a Happy Ending Consultant. If we decided to stick around (and with the funk on the floor that wasn’t too hard to do), I could imagine the headline if the cops happened to raid the joint right then:
“Wrestler and Englishman Arrested at Rub N Tug.”
We turned tail and ran out of there faster than my first sexual experience.
Now I know what Vincent Benedict meant when he told us to come inside.
Don’t get me wrong, Fozzy did have other female fans beside Ms. Knob Knuckler, including a pack of girls who followed us everywhere. As much as I’d love to tell you they were Playboy bunnies or Maxim models, they were not. We affectionately referred to them as the Hungry Bunch, and they followed us loyally to every gig, small or big. And these girls were big.
But they were awesome supporters and we treated them as if they looked like porn stars. It was always nice to see them blush when we told them how pretty they looked or how nice their outfits were. They were also the first ones who got behind our attempt to enrich the pop culture vernacular by popularizing