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| Jake 'The Snake' Roberts | 
 In the tiny second-floor bedroom, there's a pile of 
Jake "The Snake" Roberts action figures on a table, plastic muscles 
ripped and bulging, snarls on tiny faces. Above them, on the wall, are 
signed comic-book-style cartoons of Jake The Snake fighting atop the 
Empire State Building and deep in the heart of the jungle. All around 
the room are photographs of Jake The Snake wrestling in some of the 
world's largest arenas against fellow iconic wrestlers.
It'd be a hell of a tribute to the man, were it not for Jake the Snake himself writhing in the bed in the center of the room.
It's a summer morning outside Atlanta. Jake Roberts, unshaven, his 
long hair matted, is lying in the bed, devastated, alone. He'd been 
clean and sober for eight months, drying out and cleaning out and trying
 to resurrect his life and his career. But he's just fallen.
Two airline bottles of vodka. That's all it was; that's all it took. 
Two tiny bottles, boom boom, downed in a parking lot. He drank to blot 
out the image of an old friend who'd fallen on hard times, the same way 
he used to drink to blot out the thought of his own fallen image.
And now that he's stumbled back into one bad habit, every seductive, 
self-loathing instinct in his body is telling him to get back in touch 
with another: 
when life gets hard, pack your [stuff] and run.
But on this morning, he doesn't run. He stays. He's got a control 
over his body and his mind now that he didn't have even eight months 
ago. He's hating himself for falling – "It was like hitting me in the 
head with a ball-peen hammer," he says – but he's getting back up to 
face what he's done. He's got friends now, people pulling harder for him
 to win now than they ever did back in the ring.
And in a twist so perfect it almost seems like it's scripted, the guy
 now tasked with helping Roberts save himself is the same guy Roberts 
once hoisted to wrestling stardom: Diamond Dallas Page. 
This is Page's house, and with Page's guidance, Roberts might just be on the way to a peace that's eluded him for six decades.
This, then, is a story of fame and fortune, addiction and recovery, 
snakes and yoga. It's what happens when lives go off-script, for better 
and for worse. 
Had he entered the wrestling game any earlier, Diamond Dallas Page 
might be somewhere working a forklift and punching a time clock today. 
Page was running a nightclub in Florida in the 1980s, dabbling with 
wrestling management on the side, when he first met Roberts. At that 
point, Roberts was well into his career as The Snake, and Page, then in 
his 30s, mentioned that he was considering getting into the ring 
himself.
"I wanted to do it, but I assumed I was too old," Page says. "I 
started managing at 31, but didn't even get into the ring until I was 
35."
"Thank God for his day job," Roberts says, shaking his head at the state of Page's early wrestling game.
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