Batista Unleashed Read online

  Somehow we got into the house without being hit. My mom can tell the story now and have you rolling on the floor laughing, but it sure wasn’t funny to her then.

  My mom worked at this place called District Photo that was several towns away in Maryland. They developed film. She worked nights, and without anyone else to take care of us, she had to leave us in the house by ourselves. At one place, the upstairs neighbor, the guy who owned the house, was around if we needed him. But usually we were just there by ourselves, my sister and I. We’d put ourselves to bed.

  My mother would take a bus to get there and back. Usually. If the bus didn’t come on the way back—and a lot of times it would just stop running without explanation—she had to hitchhike home around three in the morning. There were a few times when somebody stopped and she just sensed something was wrong, so she didn’t get in the car—which meant she had to walk home. That was a hell of a lot better than taking a chance, though.

  The thing I remember from her working there were the big company picnics. Those were kind of cool. That’s where I actually had my first drink of beer, when I was eight or nine. I have a picture of it, too: I have a big cup of beer in my hand and am wearing a KISS belt buckle. Real 1970s.

  KISS was a hot rock band at the time. Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss were the band members. They wore face paint, played heavy metal, and were huge at the time. They also had reputations as wild men offstage, Frehley especially.

  I don’t remember the beer, but I do remember not really caring for it much. I still don’t. I’ll drink Jack Daniel’s over beer any day of the week.

  HAPPY WEEKENDS

  My mother was always trying to brighten things up for us. I remember her waking us up one morning and packing us into the car—this was one of the few times when we had a car—and taking us to get donuts and watch the sun come up at the Jefferson Memorial. That was always her favorite memorial in the city.

  She had this philosophy that weekends should be different from the rest of the workweek, and she tried to make them special for us even though she didn’t have a lot of money to work with. She invented what she called “happy weekends.” We’d go on a little trip or she would make us these little sundae snacks in special cups she bought someplace. Cool stuff like that is what I remember when I think about being young and living in D.C.

  We didn’t have a typical household where you come home and eat dinner together; none of that. In fact, there were a lot of times when we didn’t eat at all. My mom would stock up during sales, buy things like beans and cereal. That’s what we’d eat. One day my mom was broke but had bought these beans with I guess some vegetables. She was making us a big pot of navy bean soup that was supposed to last us all week. It was all we had to eat.

  But she burnt the soup. Burnt the shit out of it. But because that was all we had, that was what we ate. The whole week. Burnt bean soup.

  Everybody around us was struggling to make do. We weren’t the only hungry kids around by any means.

  One time my sister was at a friend’s house across the street. They had a father and a mother, but they also had five kids, and they didn’t have anything to eat that night. So the mother called over to our house and said, “I talked to your daughter and I know you’re having tough times, too. I’ll be honest, we don’t have much to give our kids to eat tonight. But I can make two sheets of biscuits, if you have something to go with it.”

  “I have butter and jelly and apple butter,” my mom told her.

  We went over and we pigged out. It was like a picnic. The adults told us we were having dessert for dinner, Kool-Aid and biscuits and jelly. We thought it was fun.

  Sometime around then, President Reagan said on television that no one went hungry in America. That kind of set my mother off. She started yelling at the TV, “Why don’t you walk out your fuckin’ door? Why don’t you walk down here?”

  The White House was literally just up the street. It wouldn’t have been hard for anyone in D.C. to realize that, hell yes, people were hungry in America. All you had to do was take a walk. Whether you were the president or anyone else, it wouldn’t have been hard to see hunger anywhere in D.C.

  Photo 10

  Me and my sister, Donna.

  WITHOUT TEARS FOR THE DEAD

  I had a lot of fun growing up in D.C., and as I said, to me it didn’t seem any more dangerous than anywhere else. We couldn’t afford toys, we didn’t have video games or computers—so we spent all our time outside. We’d make up games and run around all night in the summertime, until one or two in the morning. It was all the neighborhood kids. I never felt unsafe doing it. I knew I was different, because I was white and my friends were black, but I never felt different. I fit in. And it always seemed like there were ten or twenty kids around, whether it was playing football in the street or just hanging out. God, we’d walk for miles to go to a public swimming pool.

  Again, I’d be the only white kid there. But it was one of those things where no one ever really bothered me. And if they did, it was no big deal. Nobody was getting shot or stabbed or anything; you were just handling things with your fists.

  But my mom remembers the city a lot differently than I do. She came from there, and I know she loved it. Probably still does. But her perspective at the time was as a mom with kids, and she wanted to protect them. She didn’t think much of anything in the city was fun.

  A couple of things convinced her she wouldn’t be able to stay in D.C. One time a guy was trying to shoot someone on the block nearby and, instead of hitting the person he had the beef with, he hit an innocent girl. People in the neighborhood grabbed him and were taking him to the highway overpass nearby to throw him off. My mother called the police and managed to convince them to get there just in time to stop the mob from killing the guy.

  This was around 1976. My mother went out to San Francisco to get settled, find a job and a place to live. My sister and I stayed with my father’s parents. That sucked ass. My grandmother was mean, nasty, and abusive. I remember her slapping me across the face more than anything else; that’s my memory of her. One time, she got pissed at me because I said something nasty to my sister, so she took a big key ring full of keys and threw it at me and hit me in the face with it. Oh yeah, she was a real bitch.

  Luckily, I only stayed with her for just a few months. First my sister and then I went out to join my mother. The new place was nice, especially compared to where we had lived, but we weren’t there very long—less than a year—before my father came out for a visit.

  He and my mom tried to patch things up. Not only that, but he actually convinced her that we should all move back east and live with him in Maryland, close to D.C. but not quite in it.

  We moved back, but it didn’t last long: my mother says three weeks. Anyway, my parents split again and my mom, who not only was broke but without a job, moved us back to D.C.

  Things had actually gotten worse in the year or so that we’d been gone. Once, someone was found dead in our front yard, and another was found very close by. But it was the third guy that really set her off. This stranger’s death made her decide we had to move out of there. She was worried, really worried, that one of us might end up being next. There was so much going on she couldn’t protect us from it all. And she was even more worried about what the place was doing to us.

  The murder happened on a Friday night. She came out of the house and found this man with a bullet hole in his head. She ran back in and called the police and an ambulance. Forty-five minutes later, neither the police nor the ambulance was there.

  In the meantime, all the kids from the neighborhood had heard that something was going on and came around to see. I was there, and I believe my sister was, too. We were all standing around looking at this poor guy who was dying. I think some of us were even telling jokes. My mother got real upset and pulled us aside.

  “The day you can stand over a man who is dying in the street and you don’t feel compassion and you do
n’t have a tear in your eye,” she told us,

  “it’s time for us to go.”

  We moved back to San Francisco right after that.

  WELFARE

  For a while when I was little, my mother didn’t have a job and I remember her being on welfare. She hated being on welfare. Hated it. But she had two kids and had to do something to keep them from starving. She got a job, though it wasn’t well paying, and earned extra money cleaning people’s houses, anything to keep us going and not take welfare. The jobs started getting a little better—we weren’t really that well off, but we had nowhere to go but up. She started working for a courier service, and then eventually DHL. DHL came with union benefits. She called it a “godsend” when she got it. In fact, she still works for them, though while I’m writing this she’s on an unpaid family leave of absence. To this day, she’s a very proud member of Teamster Local 85 in San Francisco. She’s just really very thankful for everything they’ve done for her.

  We lived on Fourteenth Street near Divisadero Street and Castro. School was down the block, and there were two parks—Buena Vista and Duboce—close by. Our home, like most of the apartments there, was a big flat. At least it seemed huge to us at the time, maybe because we didn’t have any furniture.

  The Warlord.

  My mom found a mattress that my sister and I shared for a while. We had milk crates to sit on in the kitchen, and industrial-size wire spools for a kitchen table. We had that for years. Somebody told me recently that those spools are real chic now. We were cool before our time.

  Mom used to go to the thrift store and get clothes for us. I remember one pair of shoes I had worn through on the bottom, and I had to tape cardboard inside of them so my feet didn’t get wet.

  MY MOM GOT US THROUGH

  I think my mom was really strong, as strong as you can imagine. And loving, too; just real loving. But she was stern when she had to be.

  You can’t get away with this anymore, but I’ll tell you, she’d not only beat us if we were bad, she’d whip the shit out of us. She’d put us over her lap and spank the shit out of us. Her children knew right from wrong. And we weren’t supposed to talk back. That was one of her big rules.

  I remember one time in San Francisco, I was in trouble for something, I don’t know what it was. She was just yelling at me. Anyway, I thought she left and I was alone in the apartment. So I started cussing, “I hate that fucking bitch!” And I turned around and there she was.

  Oh man, she laid into me. She beat the shit out of me. She knocked me on the ground. It’s funny now, but I think I may still have the bruises.

  But she was also very loving and affectionate. She was never afraid to tell us that she loved us or to hug us. I think that’s a real important thing for parents. They have to show their kids they love them.

  WARLORD

  I watched a bit of pro wrestling as a kid. I think my favorite wrestler was The Warlord. Sometimes I get teased about that. Most people don’t know who The Warlord was. If you ask them who their favorite was when they were a kid, they’ll always say Hulk Hogan or Macho Man, Ric Flair, or maybe Dusty Rhodes.

  I say The Warlord and people say, “Who?”

  Terry Szopinski was The Warlord. He started in World Championship Wrestling in 1986, where he was managed by Baby Doll and then Paul Jones. This was back before Ted Turner bought the wrestling franchise and created the WCW that was so popular as a rival to World Wrestling Federation in the 1990s. Terry wrestled there for a few years, and then went to World Wrestling Federation.

  During his career, he teamed with Barbarian as The Powers of Pain, and some of his most memorable matches involved feuds with The Hart Foundation—Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart—and the Road Warriors. In real life, the Road Warriors—Hawk and the original Animal—were friends and had encouraged Terry to get into wrestling. At points during his career he was known for wearing a reverse Mohawk haircut and face paint; his signature moves included the Warlord Lariat—a clothesline he administered from a dive—and the Warlord Lock, which was a variation on the full nelson. Like most wrestlers, he worked as both a babyface and a heel, though it was probably as a heel that he earned his greatest recognition.

  I think I admired him because he was the most massive human being I had ever seen. I always looked up to the big guys. I thought they were just incredible.

  A THING FOR HEELS

  When you’re a kid, sometimes the wrestlers who make the biggest impact are the heels. You remember them because they’re your mortal enemy. You want to squish ’em like a bug when you grow up.

  You know one wrestler I really hated when I was a little kid? Mr. Fuji. I despised Mr. Fuji. I don’t know why. I just despised him. And guys like Rick Rude. I always hated Rick Rude. He was a great heel. He was so arrogant; he was just perfect.

  Speaking of perfect: I hated Mr. Perfect, too. I hated him. Arrogant prick.

  Mr. Fuji is probably another wrestler today’s generation doesn’t know. His real name was Harry Fujiwara, and he began his career as a wrestler, though at some point he became popular as a manager. His peak as a wrestler, a bit before my time, came as a tag team partner in World Wrestling Federation, where his partners included Professor Toru Tanaka and Mr. Saito. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2007.

  I think Rick Rude is still pretty well known to older fans, especially if you give them the full name, “Ravishing” Rick Rude. He was a big-time heel, so overconfident and arrogant that you couldn’t help but hope he would slip on a banana peel or something on his way to the ring. He was a star in both WCW and World Wrestling Federation in the late eighties and nineties. Tragically, he died in 1999 from heart failure. He was only forty.

  Mr. Perfect—well, the name says it all. Curt Hennig, of course, wrestled as Mr. Perfect for a portion of his career when he was with World Wrestling Federation. He was the son of Larry “The Ax” Hennig. He’s a Minneapolis boy who wrestled for a long time with the old AWA before joining WWE. He held the Intercontinental title in 1990 and in 1991, losing it in a memorable match to Bret Hart. Unfortunately for those of us who admired his wrestling style even while hating his heel character, injuries cut short his ring career with WWE in the 1990s. He continued not only as a commentator but occasionally appeared with regional franchises. A hall of famer, he passed away in 2003.

  When I think about those guys now and remember how much I hated them, I realize just how good they really were.

  We didn’t get a chance to go to many live wrestling events when I was little. Money was tight, and there were other priorities, like food. My mom still talks about taking us to see a cable telecast of one of the WrestleManias in San Francisco when I was little. I believe I saw the Wild Samoans there, and maybe Hulk Hogan, but I don’t remember it all that well.

  Which kind of disappoints my mom, since it cost ten dollars to take us—huge money for us at the time.

  GOING BAD

  School in San Francisco was a lot different than D.C. For one thing, we weren’t the only white kids in class anymore. The school was only a block away from our house and was really new and more modern. It was a nice place, as far as the building went.

  But I never really liked school, in D.C. or in San Francisco. The first time I ever skipped school—we called it ditching—I must have been in first or second grade. The older I got, the more I’d ditch.

  Not that it was a good thing to do, or that it made any sense. One time, a couple of friends and I ditched school the day the class was going on a field trip to the zoo. So what did we do? We went to the zoo. We followed them around, watching them. They were there, we were there; it wasn’t like we were getting out of schoolwork. So tell me how that made sense. But I guess it seemed like fun at the time.

  The schools I was in tried to catch up to me, but usually they didn’t do all that good a job. One time, I think it was sixth grade, the principal called the house looking for my mom. I answered the phone and tried to convince him that I was her. I don’t think it
worked, but I did skip just about that entire year.

  Cutting class meant we had a lot of extra free time. I can’t say that we spent it all that wisely. We spent a lot of hours riding around, on the bus and the cable cars. When I was a kid, you could ride the bus all day long for a nickel, and get bus transfers to the cable cars. Sometimes if the conductor or bus driver asked for the fare and you didn’t have it, you’d just jump off.

  After Fourteenth Street, we moved to a much rougher neighborhood, and I began getting into trouble more. It was about then, sixth grade I think, when I realized that a lot of the kids were hanging out with their own cliques, according to either race or ethnic background. Mexican kids were hanging out with Mexican kids, the blacks were with the blacks, the whites were with the whites. I didn’t fit in anywhere exactly. I was white, but I’d grown up with black and Hispanic kids and they were my closest friends. I started hanging out with all the blacks and Mexicans. I kind of blended in there best.

  We were living across the street from some projects, or what is now called government-subsidized housing. They were more than a little bit rough. This was the first time I started realizing anything about gangs. They weren’t doing drive-bys or stuff like that back then, but there was a lot of stealing, a lot of fighting, stuff like that. I started doing it, too. We’d take whatever we could get our hands on. Food, bikes, money, whatever.

  I remember once we stole a motorcycle when we were ten or eleven. I snuck out of the house. It must have been about three or four in the morning. We broke into this garage of another house and stole the bike. There were three of us, and because we didn’t want to start it up in the garage, we carried it out. Then my friend Carl took off on the bike and left me and the other kid running behind him.

  Most of what we did, though, wasn’t that bad. We’d hang around, or go onto rooftops and try to look into people’s apartments. I remember a couple of times watching people have sex. That was the sort of thing we did to pass the time.