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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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