Post by Stu-E Price on Jul 23, 2007 15:26:55 GMT -5
Smith is quite warped, but he's not a pervert.
Like my parents he never likes to waste anything. Years ago he was cruising along in his Cadillac, the one he used to transport himself and his crew for my brother Dean's landscaping business, when he accidentally ran over a pheasant. Minutes later, he hopped back in the car shaking his head sadly. He turned to Owen and said, "No point in having the bird die a senseless death."
He spent the next day in the kitchen chopping and cooking, getting this big feast ready. We all sat down to dinner and it was pheasant under glass. Well, after we dug in, Owen opened his big mouth and told us it was really road kill. We all put down our forks and Smith was really hurt.
Smith's first child was illegitimate. I was 10 when Smith impregnated Marla Josephson a girl my dad called "an arena rat." He hid the pregnancy from my parents, until during her eighth month my dad saw Marla and Smith together. When my dad questioned Smith about it, he was defiant and answered, "Yeah she's carrying my baby. So what?"
My mom and dad were shattered. Apparently Marla had been sleeping around, but Smith took full responsibility for the baby. When Toby was born, my mom and dad were so disappointed and disgusted they could never accept the baby girl, especially because there was always doubt as to whether Smith was her biological father.
She is grown up now and she turned out just like her mom. None of us ever sees either of them. Smith brought Toby around when my brother Dean died and she made a brief appearance when Owen died. I'm not saying my dad isn't nice to them. He just doesn't think of her as his granddaughter and will always feel that she was born because Smith being was an ass and Marla was a tramp.
Smith has had two other children out of wedlock, Matthew with a girl named Leanne Reiger and Chad with a girl named Zoe. When Matthew was born Smith was no longer seeing Leanne. He had moved on to a relationship with Zoe, after first dating her mother. He started sleeping with Zoe when she was just 15 years old.
Smith lost custody of Chad when Zoe became a prostitute and gave the baby up to her great aunt, Kathie Pointen and her husband Vern. Smith launched a custody battle and Chad became a foster child with a prominent Calgary gynecologist. In fact, the gynecologist and his wife tried to adopt him, but the aunt fought it and won custody. So Chad now lives with Kathie and Vern.
Smith is consumed with a lawsuit to regain custody of Chad, but so far he hasn't done too well in court. My brothers Keith and Bret were subpoenaed to testify and Keith said he felt that if Smith had custody he would leave Chad in the hands of my elderly parents. Chad is a handful due to attention deficit disorder.
Bret was even harsher. He testified that he had never known Smith to hold down a job and that he had witnessed Smith force-feeding Matthew. Both brothers said they wouldn't consider letting Smith baby-sit their own kids.
In fairness, Smith has done a lot of things to bury himself and cast aspersions on his reputation. He's lost his license due to several unpaid traffic tickets, but hasn't made any attempt to pay them off because of his anti-government-authority stance. He drives my dad's car anyway. And my dad always says, "I don't know what I'll do if the police catch him. If something happened to him and he had an accident and he doesn't have a license, what will I do?"
I just hope someone in heaven is watching over Smith, maybe our deceased brothers Dean or Owen. Right now, the court is trying to reduce the four hours per week that Smith spends with Chad to four hours every six months.
Zoe is dead. Her life as a prostitute killed her. Smith worked hard to try to get her off drugs. The police are not sure whether it was suicide, an accident or murder. She may have overdosed on drugs or someone may have injected her.
Smith lives with my mom and dad up in their big mansion on the hill on Calgary's west side. They have given him the entire top floor. He doesn't bother with housekeeping, but then neither does anyone else in the house. His place is wall-to-wall dust, cat fur, books and chaos.
When Matthew visits, he runs around the house dirty-faced and shoeless, like a wild animal. My dad is in his eighties and he is the only one who ever seems to be able to get Matthew to sit and eat. Maybe Smith is crazy, I don't know.
My dad says Smith was the best wrestler of all his sons and a particularly good villain. He had all the right facial expressions. I think it comes from being so cynical. He didn't used to be that way.
On one of Bret's first wrestling tours, Smith wanted to go to the beach in Puerto Rico and suntan. There, he spotted his future wife, Maria Rosetta. She was a bikini model.
I remember Bret telling me that Smith was mesmerized. He could not take his eyes off of her. He told Bret he was going to marry her and that she was the girl for him. It turned out she didn't speak a word of English.
Maria, her sister Rosa, and her mother were very poor. When Smith first dated her, she would wash her clothes on a washboard in the ocean with a rock. For drinking water, Maria would go down to the well and fill a ceramic jug, then carry it back to her home on her head. Years later Maria still had bumps on her head from carrying the huge jugs. Smith quickly learned enough Spanish to communicate. They fell in love and she moved to Calgary.
When I first met Maria I thought we would become good pals because we were both the same age, but Smith pulled the wool over her eyes and that got in the way of any friendship that could have developed.
No one in our family spoke Spanish and Smith communicated with her in a butchered version of the language. When he first brought Maria to visit, he wanted to marry her so desperately; he represented himself as owning our house, our business and all of our property. Because he was such a wrestling sensation in Puerto Rico, she believed him.
They married when she was 17 and still a virgin.
At first, Maria seemed puzzled that we were all living in her home. She thought that we were all a bunch of freeloaders living off Smith's generosity. Finally, she became annoyed. She began to lock herself in her bedroom. When was her husband's family going to leave? Smith would bring heaping plates of food and leave them outside her door. She'd respond by smashing the dishes on the stairs.
My dad didn't mind her antisocial behavior but when she threw the food away he got angry. "That was a gaddamn good dinner and she broke the dish too!"
Her behavior became more and more erratic. She and Smith would take two-hour showers together. They would sing duets and laugh and fool around. I remember pounding on the door begging them to get out so I could get ready for school. Maria would always respond with a "fok off."
When I would report this to my dad, he would barge into the bathroom, flick the lights off and on and order them to "finish up." This would lead to a major fight.
"This is my house! Go to hell! Why is your father ordering us out of our own bathroom?"
I think I preferred hearing them fight to listening to their make-up sessions, which always culminated in a noisy, passionate reunion in their bedroom on the floor above mine.
My dad and mom begged Smith to get Maria psychiatric help, but he refused. Sometimes she would strip off all her clothes and climb up on the balcony railing off our second-floor landing and wave at the airplanes. One time when it was 40 below outside and the snow was hip deep; she walked over to our neighbors' and tried to rescue them from an imagined fire.
The last summer she lived with us, in 1987, she made an unprovoked attack on Alison and Ellie's mother-in-law, Katie Neidhart. Alison was having tea with Katie. Katie offered Maria a candy bar. Maria didn't respond. Then suddenly she turned from the stove where she had been cooking rice and pounced on Alison.
Alison was holding her newborn baby girl, Brooke, so she couldn't properly defend herself when Maria began tearing Alison's hair out in clumps. It was as if Maria were fighting for her life. Katie tried to pull Maria off Alison, but Maria, screaming like a wildcat, kept clawing and scratching. Finally, Katie got her in a bear hug.
Desperate to escape, Alison bit down on the hand closest to her. Unfortunately, it was Katie's. The pain was so intense Katie couldn't even cry out to let Alison know she was biting the wrong person. Meanwhile, my parents were in their bedroom watching television. There are 18 stairs, a long hallway and a solid oak door between the kitchen and their room. My dad was 72 at the time and hard of hearing, but my mom thought she heard something.
"Do you hear that, Buffy?" she asked my dad.
"I think I did, Tiger." he replied. "I better go see."
When he opened their bedroom door, one of Maria's wails cut through the house. He sprinted to the kitchen and separated Maria from Katie and his battered daughter. My dad confronted Smith that night.
"You're gaddamned lucky Maria didn't crack baby Brooke's head open on the tile floor!"
My dad ordered Smith to take Maria to the hospital, but again he refused. That night our family had a meeting. Enough was enough. Since Smith and Maria would not take any steps to deal with Maria's mental illness, she would have to return to Puerto Rico. We basically voted her out of the country. Within a week she was gone.
She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and last year she died of pneumonia. It is debatable whether she went crazy because this was common in her father's side of the family, or whether she lost her mind from so many hits of the bad acid she took in Calgary in 1984.
Maria and a wrestler named Mike Hammer and a hired hand named Kevin Trembley dropped acid from the same batch just before a wrestling trip to Regina and they went nuts. That night, Mike Hammer went out and hired a prostitute to whip him, burn his back with lit cigarettes and walk all over him wearing spiked heels.
He was so whipped and burned that he couldn't sit down properly in the van on the way to Regina. Instead he knelt on the floor with his elbows on the seat. This was far less painful than missing the match and having to trying to explain why to my dad. The acid made Mike's eyes so weird, they shivered. Mike's future claim to fame was that he gave Chris Benoit, WWF's "Rabid Wolverine," his initial instruction in wrestling.
The day after dropping this same acid, Kevin tried to hang himself in the horse stalls from one of the beams in the back of the arena in Regina. Before they cut him down he had already messed himself. He was close to dead, but my brother Wayne and my brother-in-law Ben Bassarab, found him and resuscitated him.
According to Smith, Ellie's husband Jim Neidhart, my other bastard brother-in-law, made several passes at Maria, which she ignored. Maria had become quite dependent on pot. She was a hot-blooded Spanish girl so Smith gave her plenty because he thought it would calm her down.
Smith is a staunch pot supporter. He doesn't think it should be illegal. I do, because I think it alters your mind and destroys your brain cells like crazy. I never found it did much for me, except make me paranoid.
When Maria lost her mind she became quite a minus. Like so many drug addicts she was not the same person and you could never get her back. She would sit and rock back and forth, crying one second, laughing hysterically the next. Then she'd threaten to kill you and cry again, all within 20 minutes. She gained over 30 pounds and shaved her head.
Maria and Smith had a baby named Tanya. Tanya was born after Maria started to lose her mind. When she was pregnant, Maria ran back to Puerto Rico. We didn't see Tanya until she was about a year-and-a-half old. When she returned, Smith raised her largely with the help of my mom and dad.
Tanya's real name is Satanya after the devil. Satanya Ecstasy Hart. At the time Maria and Smith had lost their faith in God because of the way their lives had turned out.
Smith's life philosophy shows in the way he treats cars. He'd pick us up from school or he'd drive us out to the beach and he would floor it all the way. He wrapped one of my dad's limousines around a telephone pole and managed to walk away. He has always taken his frustrations out on his cars.
In Smith's eyes, a good-quality car will hold up to the abuse. But if it's a car of lousy quality, then it deserves to be driven "like the piece of shit it is." The same thing with people. If they can put up with Smith's treatment, they survive. And if they can't, they die a slow or painful death. To Smith, it makes no difference whether it's a car, a telephone, an old pair of pants or a person.
Like my parents he never likes to waste anything. Years ago he was cruising along in his Cadillac, the one he used to transport himself and his crew for my brother Dean's landscaping business, when he accidentally ran over a pheasant. Minutes later, he hopped back in the car shaking his head sadly. He turned to Owen and said, "No point in having the bird die a senseless death."
He spent the next day in the kitchen chopping and cooking, getting this big feast ready. We all sat down to dinner and it was pheasant under glass. Well, after we dug in, Owen opened his big mouth and told us it was really road kill. We all put down our forks and Smith was really hurt.
Smith's first child was illegitimate. I was 10 when Smith impregnated Marla Josephson a girl my dad called "an arena rat." He hid the pregnancy from my parents, until during her eighth month my dad saw Marla and Smith together. When my dad questioned Smith about it, he was defiant and answered, "Yeah she's carrying my baby. So what?"
My mom and dad were shattered. Apparently Marla had been sleeping around, but Smith took full responsibility for the baby. When Toby was born, my mom and dad were so disappointed and disgusted they could never accept the baby girl, especially because there was always doubt as to whether Smith was her biological father.
She is grown up now and she turned out just like her mom. None of us ever sees either of them. Smith brought Toby around when my brother Dean died and she made a brief appearance when Owen died. I'm not saying my dad isn't nice to them. He just doesn't think of her as his granddaughter and will always feel that she was born because Smith being was an ass and Marla was a tramp.
Smith has had two other children out of wedlock, Matthew with a girl named Leanne Reiger and Chad with a girl named Zoe. When Matthew was born Smith was no longer seeing Leanne. He had moved on to a relationship with Zoe, after first dating her mother. He started sleeping with Zoe when she was just 15 years old.
Smith lost custody of Chad when Zoe became a prostitute and gave the baby up to her great aunt, Kathie Pointen and her husband Vern. Smith launched a custody battle and Chad became a foster child with a prominent Calgary gynecologist. In fact, the gynecologist and his wife tried to adopt him, but the aunt fought it and won custody. So Chad now lives with Kathie and Vern.
Smith is consumed with a lawsuit to regain custody of Chad, but so far he hasn't done too well in court. My brothers Keith and Bret were subpoenaed to testify and Keith said he felt that if Smith had custody he would leave Chad in the hands of my elderly parents. Chad is a handful due to attention deficit disorder.
Bret was even harsher. He testified that he had never known Smith to hold down a job and that he had witnessed Smith force-feeding Matthew. Both brothers said they wouldn't consider letting Smith baby-sit their own kids.
In fairness, Smith has done a lot of things to bury himself and cast aspersions on his reputation. He's lost his license due to several unpaid traffic tickets, but hasn't made any attempt to pay them off because of his anti-government-authority stance. He drives my dad's car anyway. And my dad always says, "I don't know what I'll do if the police catch him. If something happened to him and he had an accident and he doesn't have a license, what will I do?"
I just hope someone in heaven is watching over Smith, maybe our deceased brothers Dean or Owen. Right now, the court is trying to reduce the four hours per week that Smith spends with Chad to four hours every six months.
Zoe is dead. Her life as a prostitute killed her. Smith worked hard to try to get her off drugs. The police are not sure whether it was suicide, an accident or murder. She may have overdosed on drugs or someone may have injected her.
Smith lives with my mom and dad up in their big mansion on the hill on Calgary's west side. They have given him the entire top floor. He doesn't bother with housekeeping, but then neither does anyone else in the house. His place is wall-to-wall dust, cat fur, books and chaos.
When Matthew visits, he runs around the house dirty-faced and shoeless, like a wild animal. My dad is in his eighties and he is the only one who ever seems to be able to get Matthew to sit and eat. Maybe Smith is crazy, I don't know.
My dad says Smith was the best wrestler of all his sons and a particularly good villain. He had all the right facial expressions. I think it comes from being so cynical. He didn't used to be that way.
On one of Bret's first wrestling tours, Smith wanted to go to the beach in Puerto Rico and suntan. There, he spotted his future wife, Maria Rosetta. She was a bikini model.
I remember Bret telling me that Smith was mesmerized. He could not take his eyes off of her. He told Bret he was going to marry her and that she was the girl for him. It turned out she didn't speak a word of English.
Maria, her sister Rosa, and her mother were very poor. When Smith first dated her, she would wash her clothes on a washboard in the ocean with a rock. For drinking water, Maria would go down to the well and fill a ceramic jug, then carry it back to her home on her head. Years later Maria still had bumps on her head from carrying the huge jugs. Smith quickly learned enough Spanish to communicate. They fell in love and she moved to Calgary.
When I first met Maria I thought we would become good pals because we were both the same age, but Smith pulled the wool over her eyes and that got in the way of any friendship that could have developed.
No one in our family spoke Spanish and Smith communicated with her in a butchered version of the language. When he first brought Maria to visit, he wanted to marry her so desperately; he represented himself as owning our house, our business and all of our property. Because he was such a wrestling sensation in Puerto Rico, she believed him.
They married when she was 17 and still a virgin.
At first, Maria seemed puzzled that we were all living in her home. She thought that we were all a bunch of freeloaders living off Smith's generosity. Finally, she became annoyed. She began to lock herself in her bedroom. When was her husband's family going to leave? Smith would bring heaping plates of food and leave them outside her door. She'd respond by smashing the dishes on the stairs.
My dad didn't mind her antisocial behavior but when she threw the food away he got angry. "That was a gaddamn good dinner and she broke the dish too!"
Her behavior became more and more erratic. She and Smith would take two-hour showers together. They would sing duets and laugh and fool around. I remember pounding on the door begging them to get out so I could get ready for school. Maria would always respond with a "fok off."
When I would report this to my dad, he would barge into the bathroom, flick the lights off and on and order them to "finish up." This would lead to a major fight.
"This is my house! Go to hell! Why is your father ordering us out of our own bathroom?"
I think I preferred hearing them fight to listening to their make-up sessions, which always culminated in a noisy, passionate reunion in their bedroom on the floor above mine.
My dad and mom begged Smith to get Maria psychiatric help, but he refused. Sometimes she would strip off all her clothes and climb up on the balcony railing off our second-floor landing and wave at the airplanes. One time when it was 40 below outside and the snow was hip deep; she walked over to our neighbors' and tried to rescue them from an imagined fire.
The last summer she lived with us, in 1987, she made an unprovoked attack on Alison and Ellie's mother-in-law, Katie Neidhart. Alison was having tea with Katie. Katie offered Maria a candy bar. Maria didn't respond. Then suddenly she turned from the stove where she had been cooking rice and pounced on Alison.
Alison was holding her newborn baby girl, Brooke, so she couldn't properly defend herself when Maria began tearing Alison's hair out in clumps. It was as if Maria were fighting for her life. Katie tried to pull Maria off Alison, but Maria, screaming like a wildcat, kept clawing and scratching. Finally, Katie got her in a bear hug.
Desperate to escape, Alison bit down on the hand closest to her. Unfortunately, it was Katie's. The pain was so intense Katie couldn't even cry out to let Alison know she was biting the wrong person. Meanwhile, my parents were in their bedroom watching television. There are 18 stairs, a long hallway and a solid oak door between the kitchen and their room. My dad was 72 at the time and hard of hearing, but my mom thought she heard something.
"Do you hear that, Buffy?" she asked my dad.
"I think I did, Tiger." he replied. "I better go see."
When he opened their bedroom door, one of Maria's wails cut through the house. He sprinted to the kitchen and separated Maria from Katie and his battered daughter. My dad confronted Smith that night.
"You're gaddamned lucky Maria didn't crack baby Brooke's head open on the tile floor!"
My dad ordered Smith to take Maria to the hospital, but again he refused. That night our family had a meeting. Enough was enough. Since Smith and Maria would not take any steps to deal with Maria's mental illness, she would have to return to Puerto Rico. We basically voted her out of the country. Within a week she was gone.
She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and last year she died of pneumonia. It is debatable whether she went crazy because this was common in her father's side of the family, or whether she lost her mind from so many hits of the bad acid she took in Calgary in 1984.
Maria and a wrestler named Mike Hammer and a hired hand named Kevin Trembley dropped acid from the same batch just before a wrestling trip to Regina and they went nuts. That night, Mike Hammer went out and hired a prostitute to whip him, burn his back with lit cigarettes and walk all over him wearing spiked heels.
He was so whipped and burned that he couldn't sit down properly in the van on the way to Regina. Instead he knelt on the floor with his elbows on the seat. This was far less painful than missing the match and having to trying to explain why to my dad. The acid made Mike's eyes so weird, they shivered. Mike's future claim to fame was that he gave Chris Benoit, WWF's "Rabid Wolverine," his initial instruction in wrestling.
The day after dropping this same acid, Kevin tried to hang himself in the horse stalls from one of the beams in the back of the arena in Regina. Before they cut him down he had already messed himself. He was close to dead, but my brother Wayne and my brother-in-law Ben Bassarab, found him and resuscitated him.
According to Smith, Ellie's husband Jim Neidhart, my other bastard brother-in-law, made several passes at Maria, which she ignored. Maria had become quite dependent on pot. She was a hot-blooded Spanish girl so Smith gave her plenty because he thought it would calm her down.
Smith is a staunch pot supporter. He doesn't think it should be illegal. I do, because I think it alters your mind and destroys your brain cells like crazy. I never found it did much for me, except make me paranoid.
When Maria lost her mind she became quite a minus. Like so many drug addicts she was not the same person and you could never get her back. She would sit and rock back and forth, crying one second, laughing hysterically the next. Then she'd threaten to kill you and cry again, all within 20 minutes. She gained over 30 pounds and shaved her head.
Maria and Smith had a baby named Tanya. Tanya was born after Maria started to lose her mind. When she was pregnant, Maria ran back to Puerto Rico. We didn't see Tanya until she was about a year-and-a-half old. When she returned, Smith raised her largely with the help of my mom and dad.
Tanya's real name is Satanya after the devil. Satanya Ecstasy Hart. At the time Maria and Smith had lost their faith in God because of the way their lives had turned out.
Smith's life philosophy shows in the way he treats cars. He'd pick us up from school or he'd drive us out to the beach and he would floor it all the way. He wrapped one of my dad's limousines around a telephone pole and managed to walk away. He has always taken his frustrations out on his cars.
In Smith's eyes, a good-quality car will hold up to the abuse. But if it's a car of lousy quality, then it deserves to be driven "like the piece of shit it is." The same thing with people. If they can put up with Smith's treatment, they survive. And if they can't, they die a slow or painful death. To Smith, it makes no difference whether it's a car, a telephone, an old pair of pants or a person.