I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Read online

  My brother and I inherited our dad’s genetic tendency toward independence, but our mom also taught us to stand on our own two feet, to think and do for ourselves, and not to be reliant on other people. Dad was easygoing to a fault. He was strong and a powerful swimmer, another trait that he passed on to me. He could swim across the Mississippi and back. None of his friends could do that. But for all his strength, he never struck us or handled us roughly. My mom took care of that aspect, though—she’d get after us with a razor strap. She was the disciplinarian. But even though my dad never laid a hand on us, there was a quiet strength in him, an authority we didn’t have the guts to test. If we got out of line, just hearing his footsteps on the stairs was enough to make us behave. I learned from him that sometimes strength doesn’t need to flaunt itself—it simply is, and people recognize that.

  He really enjoyed life to the fullest, and I think there’s a lot of him in me. I think too that I’ve passed some of both of my folks on to my son, Tyrel, consciously or not, because he’s really into the experience of life, and at nineteen he’s already out following his own road and doing his own thing. My wife, Terry, agrees that there’s a lot of me in him.

  And my father was something else besides. He was a hero. At my dad’s funeral, a friend of the family told a story about a car wreck that my dad had happened upon. The car was burning, and people were trapped inside. My dad went in and pulled the people to safety. No hesitation. He saved the lives of everyone in the car, and then he just walked off. He didn’t even stick around to accept the accolades. That was the kind of guy he was. Hearing that story gave me a very vivid sense of the kind of man my father was. He wouldn’t think of himself as a hero—and in a sense, that’s what made him great. In a crisis situation, he could impulsively do what had to be done.

  Sometimes, though, my father’s impulsiveness took unexpected turns. My mom, the more disciplined of the two, used to have a stash of money she’d save up for new cars. She liked to buy a new car every four years, and she always paid cash. She didn’t believe in buying anything on credit. There was never a car payment in our house.

  But one time when I was about seven, my dad sneaked into that stash and used the money to buy a piece of lakefront property. Of course, he had to come home after the deed was done and fess up. We all tensed for the explosion.

  “Well,” Mom said finally, “we’ll just have to make do with the old car for a while.”

  We couldn’t believe it. Instead of tearing our family apart, my father’s impulsiveness somehow pulled us together. My grandfather helped us build a cabin on that land. It was a great time. The whole family went out there, all the cousins and everybody, and pitched tents while we built it. Everybody helped out. Even we little kids got to pound some nails. One night a storm blew in off the lake, and we were afraid the wind would rip the tents right off of us. It was great fun. We still have that cabin today—a dubious business decision transformed into a family legacy.

  Now, I’ve got strong political opinions, and they took root early. Both of my folks could be very stubborn and bullheaded, but my dad was politically so. My first introduction to politics came early in life, over family dinners. We watched the news on the TV while we ate, and he argued back to it whenever he heard something he didn’t like. He ranted and raved and carried on to the point where my mom was ready to toss him down to the basement.

  He’d get fired up, and he loved to talk about it. He hated all politicians. He didn’t have too many kind things to say about any of them or about the government. My father referred to Hubert Humphrey as “Old Rubber-Lip.” His name for Richard Nixon was “The Tailless Rat.” I was watching TV with him the day of Nixon’s famous “I am not a crook” speech.

  My dad looked at Nixon on the TV and said, “Look, you can see the son of a bitch is lying.”

  I looked at him. “Come on, Dad. How do you know that?”

  “Because anyone with sweat on their upper lip is lyin’ to you.”

  Sure enough, whenever he was doing an important speech, Nixon always got this line of sweat on his upper lip.

  I truly believe that my father developed his deep hatred for Nixon because he voted for him. My dad was a staunch Democrat; the old-fashioned, farmer/laborer, working-man’s Democrat. He never would admit it, but I think he voted for Nixon just to vote against Kennedy, because, like many people at the time, he was afraid that if they put a Catholic in office, the pope would be running the country.

  My father vehemently opposed Vietnam. He’d say, “Ah, that Viet-nan. That thing’s no good. Somebody’s makin’ money.” He was a street-smart, blue-collar guy with an eighth-grade education, and he called it “Viet-nan.” But he’d say, “That’s the only reason we’re there, because somebody’s makin’ money.” And by God, I think he was right.

  Like me, my father was a patriotic man; like me, he was a veteran. But what he taught me was that the country was us, the people, not the government. I would come home from school with my head full of what they’d taught me in class, and I’d argue with him about the domino effect of communism. And my father said, “Bullshit. There ain’t no domino effect.” And he was right. We ended up losing that war, but it was communism that ultimately collapsed.

  My parents were the biggest influences on me in my early years, of course, but I also had a sixth-grade teacher that I really liked named Helen Dunphy. Just before my class left sixth grade, she made predictions about what each one of us would turn out to be. She predicted that I would be a sportscaster after I retired from the ring. She was referring to boxing rather than wrestling, but otherwise she was dead-on.

  In those days, you got very close to your grade-school teachers. South Minneapolis in general was a close-knit community back then. It was a great time to live there. You could roam around and do anything you wanted with great freedom, with none of the fear that city kids grow up with today. Nobody worried about where their children were. We’d just tell our folks we were going down to the river for the day, and off we’d go and not come back until dinner. And they had no fear. My dad actually got me interested in the river, because he himself had grown up playing around on the banks of the Mississippi.

  I met up with Helen Dunphy about thirty years later, after I had made it big in wrestling. One of my classmates had kept the sheet of paper that she’d written down all her predictions on. And I decided to go over and look her up and have a reunion with her. She was in her last year of teaching before she retired. She didn’t believe it when I showed up unannounced for a visit. She had her foot in a cast at the time, so she had sent a kid over to answer the classroom intercom. I told the kid, “Tell Mrs. Dunphy that Jim Janos, Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura, is here.”

  I heard her voice in the background saying, “Come on!”

  The principal leaned in and said, “No, you better tell her he’s here. I’m looking at him!”

  She was a very popular teacher who really loved her kids and took the extra step—the kind of teacher who makes all the difference. She probably never knew how much of an influence she was in my life. She was thrilled to see me that day. We sat together and reminisced all afternoon. It was one of those rare moments when you can tell the person looking at you isn’t just seeing you the way you are now—she was seeing me the way I’d been back then, too.

  But you can’t get a good sense of what’s at the core of who I am until I tell you about the South Side Boys. These were the guys I grew up with in South Minneapolis. I met most of these guys in grade school, and we ended up forming friendships that have lasted a lifetime. My dad had the same kind of lifelong friendships with the group of guys he grew up with; they were friends to the grave. My son doesn’t have that, and I feel bad for him. I’m still in touch with these guys today; they’re still very much a part of my life. They keep me in touch with reality. They connect me to my past. They keep my feet on the ground.

  The South Siders came and went; there were anywhere from five of us to twenty-five. But there w
as always a core group that I was a part of, and different people from time to time orbited around that core. Kevin Johnson and I met in kindergarten. Kevin’s father, Eddie, was the one who told the story about my dad saving the lives of those people in the burning car. There was Ricky Bjornson; he’s still a South Sider at heart, even though we kind of drifted apart in high school. We started hanging with different crowds because I was more of an athlete and he wasn’t. But he came to the party after my inauguration. He was my best friend in elementary school. There was Lynn Wagner and Jim Hovey. Steve Nelson became a major part of the core group of South Siders, and he played a pivotal role in where I went with my life. But he didn’t come into the picture until later.

  In fifth grade, Jerry Flatgard moved into the neighborhood. He became my best friend. To this day, it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been away from each other; whenever we get back together, it’s like no time has passed. That’s the true test of friendship. I was in Jerry’s bed when I lost my virginity on New Year’s Eve when I was sixteen. That’s a pretty good indicator of a close friendship. But don’t worry, Jerry wasn’t with me. We weren’t that close!

  We were like the Three Musketeers, me and Ricky and Jerry. We’d all made bets on who would be the first to “do it.” They both assumed that I wouldn’t be the one, because I wasn’t as aggressive with females as they were. But I had been dating a girl who I’d picked up on Lake Street (our “Happy Days/American Graffiti” street, where guys with hot cars cruised around and picked up girls and took them to drive-ins). She and I had gotten so far along that we were about ready to do it in a car. But I wanted my first time to be special; I didn’t want it to be in a car. Jerry’s folks were out of town that night, and we were having a party, so I brought her inside and took her into Jerry’s bed. And when I brought her downstairs to take her home, I waited until her back was turned to give Jerry and Ricky the nod, to let them know I’d won the bet. And it was funny, but after that night, I was never again with her. It was just one of those things.

  We had all gone to Cooper Grade School together and then to Sanford Junior High. But then in high school, we got divided. I lived on Thirty-second Street. For whatever reason, if you lived on the north side of Thirty-second Street, you had to go to South High School. If you lived on the south side, as I did, you went to Roosevelt. So one half went to South, and my half went to Roosevelt. But it was remarkable; we always maintained our friendship. We went to rival high schools and played against each other, but on the weekends we hung out together. We were the South Side Guys. We were the 1960s’ version of the Little Rascals.

  We always used to sleep out in the backyard in tents. But as soon as our folks were in bed, we were up and out of the tents, running the streets all night. We stayed out until two or three in the morning, and we were only in sixth grade. We stuck stuff in our sleeping bags so it looked like we were sleeping. We took off in hopes that our parents wouldn’t come out and catch us gone. And miraculously, they never did. Thank God. If my kids behaved the way I did, there’d be a lot more gray hair on my head.

  We were adventurers. We roamed the riverbank. And we drank. In that era, that’s what you did. This was early junior high school. We’d go down to the sandbar on the Mississippi riverbank on Saturday and Sunday mornings, because the older kids always had beer parties on Friday and Saturday nights. If you went down there early the next morning, you could always find a few beers lying in the sand, ones they’d lost during the night. We had a little cave where we hid them. Then when we accumulated about thirty of them, on a Saturday we’d tell our families we were going to the river all day.

  We’d go down at eight or nine in the morning, dig up our stash of scavenged beer, and start drinking. We’d get drunk. Ricky had some kind of stomach problem, so when he got drunk he’d go into projectile puking. He’d spew like a firehose into the river, and we’d laugh. And then by noon it was time to start sobering up so we could go home. By the time we went home around six or seven at night, we’d be sober. We went through the whole period of getting drunk and getting sober without passing out or going to sleep. It was strange. As an adult, at some point you usually sleep it off. But we didn’t want to miss any of it.

  We started out that way, being pretty wild kids. We’ve never really grown up. We still misbehave when we get together. It’s just in us. Jerry and I ended up getting labeled. It was always “The Jerry and Jim Show.” We would find someone to pick on, and we’d have fun with them. The other South Siders speculated about who would fall prey to us.

  There was a teacher in junior high named Mr. Steele, whom we hated. We thought of him as a little wimpy guy who tried to act tough. We never respected him. One night we built a stuffed replica of him. We put a sign on it to make sure there was no mistake about who it was supposed to be. Then we traveled the alleyways until we found an aluminum stepladder, and we stole it. We took it over to the school and hung Mr. Steele in effigy from the flagpole. When we were done, we couldn’t decide what to do with the ladder, so we pitched it through the school window.

  We weren’t juvenile delinquents; I wouldn’t put it that way. We just had a streak of mischief in us. And if one of us dared the other to do something, it would happen. It was just one of those things. I remember back when we used to go up to the lake and pitch tents in the woods, we would always stash some kind of liquor in our sleeping bags. One time, Jerry was bragging that the only way to drink was to drink like a man, which meant you didn’t use any mix. So to prove it, he drank a whole pint of Fleischmann’s straight. Boy, did he pay for it the next day. We were lying out on the shore the next day, and every ten minutes he’d have to roll over and dry heave. And the whole time he had to try to hide it from my mom.

  We were all tough. We never backed down from anybody. We weren’t above defending our turf when we had to. But we weren’t a gang, as you think of gangs today. There were gangs in Minneapolis at that time, but we weren’t part of that at all. Nobody carried guns and knives in those days. Kids on the street didn’t kill each other the way they do, sadly, today. If you had a problem to settle, you settled it with skin.

  Of course, we did what we could to make sure that when it came down to skin, we could make an impression. In shop class we made what were called “fist-loads,” on the sly. The shop had big lengths of tube steel, welding rods. Whenever the teacher wasn’t around, we cut off a big piece of it, and Jerry hid it in his pants. We took it home and cut it into four-inch lengths that fit inside our fists. When you hit somebody when you’re holding a fist-load, it’s much more effective. It makes your fist much heavier. You can take somebody down real easy with a fist-load. When my dad was a kid, you just put a roll of quarters in your hand and it did the same thing.

  We always carried our fist-loads in our pockets in case the need ever arose. And it did from time to time. We all had our own turf, and if anybody invaded your turf, you had to defend it. Remember, this was in 1962 or ’63, before the Beatles came to America and launched a cultural revolution. This was before the hippies, before the era of love and peace. One time, this kid named Billy Fritz was throwing snowballs at Jerry’s sister after school. Like any junior high-school kid, Jerry had no great liking for his sister. If he’d been the one picking on her, probably nobody would have thought twice. But woe unto anyone else who messed with her. After all, she was his sister. So Jerry calmly took a dog chain, wrapped it around his fist, came up to Billy Fritz, and pow! Billy’s face just exploded. But in those days, you didn’t get busted or labeled for that kind of thing. If you got beat up, you didn’t run home and cry to your parents, and you didn’t call the police. It was just part of life. You accepted it.

  In those days, it was good to have an older brother. I had Jan, and Jerry had Dennis (who is today a sergeant in the Minneapolis police department). An older brother meant you had access to more stuff. When Dennis went to college, we bargained our way into the wild frat parties he and his friends had every weekend by promising to clean up the
next day. We passed ourselves off as college students to the coeds. We were sixteen.

  When you have an older brother, you tend to follow him in everything he does. He became an athlete; I became an athlete. He got into swimming; I got into swimming. He became a swimming captain; I became a swimming captain. And then later he became a SEAL. It wasn’t until after the service that Jan and I started to go off on different paths.

  An older brother can teach you a lot about passing yourself off as older than you are. One day in high school, we got out of class for teacher conferences, and we decided to have a party in the daytime. We were sixteen, and the drinking age was twenty-one. We all threw all our money together and drove down to Mary’s liquor store near Twenty-seventh. I put on an army jacket and a pair of shades, and I walked in in broad daylight and ordered three cases of beer and assorted liquor.

  When I walked in, the guy behind the counter said, “You in the army?”

  I said, “Nah. I just got discharged. I was stationed in Germany.”

  He asked, “We still got a lot of troops in Germany?”

  I said, “Oh, yeah, quite a few.” Totally bullshitting him. I bought so much stuff I had to wheel it out to the car on a dolly. They never carded me, in spite of the fact that I paid for all that beer with a fistful of crumpled-up one-dollar bills and change. We weren’t smart enough to go to a bank first and change it into bigger bills!

  A lot of the South Side Guys ended up going into the military, oddly enough. We wrote to each other when we were in the service. We all got back about the same time. When we got home, we reunited. And even though we’d all grown up in different ways and were changed a lot by our different experiences in the service, our friendships were as strong as ever.