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“Guys, that last shot could’ve been blah blee bluu …”

[That is the stupidist hat I’ve ever seen in my life.]

“Furthermore, I think fleezen flobbin flue …”

[That hat is really stupid.]

Needless to say, I hated that damn hat.

Hour after hour, day after day, Robert sported that hat, and it became my white whale. I was Captain Ahab and I wanted to capture that hat. I wanted to torture that hat. I wanted to kill that hat.

I patiently awaited my chance, skulking in the shadows like a voyeur, until finally I received my due diligence. After the rain (Nelson™), the weather turned quite humid and Robert took off the brown leather antichrist to wipe the sweat from his forehead, putting it on the hood of a car. Fate intervened at that exact moment. Someone called Robert into the club, and he turned and rushed inside, leaving the hat behind.

This was my chance.

I hurried over to the car and reached to pick it up. But before I could touch it, the demon châpeau flew off the hood, its fangs springing out from underneath the hatband, and latched on to my jugular. I fell to the ground, and started rolling around the parking lot locked in a fight to the death with the blasphemous bonnet. It was with great effort that I finally pried it off and stuffed it into a duffel bag, entrapping it for a thousand years.

As the furious fedora bopped around inside the bag like a puppy caught under a sheet, I was rewarded with the sight of a returning Robert searching for his hat. He searched desperately inside the car, under the car, and on top of the car.

He asked everybody within earshot if they had seen his missing lid.

“My hat! Has anyone seen my hat?”

But no one had. And no one has seen it since.

Long after the video was completed, we got requests from Robert demanding that whoever stole his sou’wester to give it back. It became one of America’s great mysteries, on a par with the Kennedy assassination and the existence of Bigfoot. Now the truth can be revealed.

Robert, I stole your hat and threw it the fuck away.

And while I’m at it, the C.I.A. assassinated Kennedy. Can’t explain Bigfoot, though.

When the “With the Fire” video was completed, we got the good news that MTV2 had decided to play it in semi-rotation. I was quite proud of the fact that for the first time ever, a WWE Superstar (as they like to call us) was in a band with a video being played on MTV. That’s why I was quite confused when the WWE didn’t really promote that monumental occasion. Sure they had done a piece on the making of “WTF” for WWE Confidential but concluded it by only airing two minutes of the video, and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t show the whole thing. If “WTF” was good enough for MTV, why wasn’t it good enough for the WWE? WTF?

But instead of being thankful for the airtime they’d given the band and keeping my mouth shut, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and called the producer of Confidential to see if they would air the whole video. A few days later, I was in Fort Lauderdale for a PPV and got summoned into Vince’s office.

“Here’s the deal. You have this video you want to show. We aired a piece of it. What more do you want?”

“Well, I think you should show the whole video the way it was shown on MTV. It’s the first time that someone from the WWE has had a video on the channel, and it seems like that would be a big deal.” I thought it was a totally valid point.

Vince felt differently and quickly took the wind out of my sails.

“Well, quite frankly, I heard the video sucks.”

Well, that was blunt.

“And why did you call the producer of Confidential and ask her to air it? We’d already decided not to. If you’re going to play that game you have to come to me first, not the people working for me. Listen, Chris, I’m not just trying to teach you wrestling lessons, I’m trying to teach you life lessons here. And going behind my back is not how you do things if you want to get something done.”

I didn’t understand at the time why Vince was so interested in teaching me life lessons when all I was trying to do was get my video played. But now I think