DEFIANCE Wrestling | A Favoured Saints Company

Finding Eric Dane

Posted by Angus Skaaland on 23 Aug 2013

Dealing with the events of the last few weeks would have been hard for anyone, but to say that Eric Dane had taken the hits to DEFIANCE to heart would have been an understatement.

That was four days ago...

What is it that they say? “Heavy is the head,” or something?

Yeah.

“Heavy is the head that wears the Crown.” Or, in this case, the Armani suit. I’m not sure how that translates, but you get the idea. Now, to say that Eric Dane has had a public meltdown or two in his career might be an understatement, but one thing that he’s never done, not once since I’ve been under his employ, is take off two days in a row.

Nevermind three.

So here I am, at the asscrack of Day Four, searching through the underbelly of New Orleans for the one person in my life who’s ever been honest to his word, Eric Dane.

Surprised?

You shouldn’t be. He’s always been the kind of guy who liked to tell you what he was gonna do to you before he did it, just so afterwards he could say “I told you so” through that sneer of his. Take for example his second WfWA World Title. The Alliance had been in a stand-still for a good long while, but the announcement of the second Summer Games has brought back the interest, and therefore the participation of member promotions and wrestlers alike. Eric, for his part, had been recovering from his second torn quad, the one that had cost him the World Title a year before. So, having been ineligible to compete in Summer Games 2, he did the next best thing, he hand-picked the winner, partnered up with him (his name was Chili. Yes, I’m serious.) and taught him all the tricks he’d need to win Summer Games and with that, the World Title. At the very beginning he told the guy that he was going to turn on him, but memories being notoriously short in this line of work, everybody forgot.

And then Chili won Summer Games and became Champion. And then, like clockwork, Eric dropped him on his head with a Stardriver. His “I told you so” promo the next night was vaunted as the beginning of the hottest era in Alliance wrestling history. That is to say, the golden age between 2002 and 2009.

The point of this trip down memory lane is this: Eric Dane is a man I trust, one of very few, and so on the cusp of his fourth day in the wind, I’m trudging through piss and puke soaked streets filled with would-be revelers who are six months out of season to be celebrating but doing it anyway. Fuckin’ tourists.

I’d been through all of his old haunts. Bars, strip clubs, the usual. I’d been down to the dog track where I found out that he’d dropped a few grand on the pups while pounding back Whiskey Sours with anyone who’d have a drink with him. This was bad news, the boss hadn’t been a public drinker since the last time he went through rehab. You know, the time that it supposedly worked. I followed the trail as it cooled in front of me until I came to Harrah’s downtown. Turns out he dropped twenty large in a high-stakes poker game in the first hand.

He played for three more hours.

Apparently he’d had seventeen martinis in that time as well.

This was just a few hours ago, or “last night” if you will. I’d been getting more and more worried, he’d been leaving too thick of a trail, it was too easy to follow, he just happened to be one step ahead the entire time. Something wasn’t connecting. When Eric Dane wants to disappear it takes more than the sleuthing of Angus the Color Guy to turn up which rock he’d hidden under, it was almost like he wanted to run me around in circles like it was some kind of a game.

It was around here that I called Tyrone Walker. The one thing I did know was that if Dane was drinking and gambling like a maniac in public, the next step was hookers and blow. Not the trios team, but if anybody might be of some use it was Walker. He didn’t answer, though, leaving me again to my own devices. I was just starting to reach the hot side of annoyed when I remembered Katrina.

You know, the hurricane.

For those of you who don’t know your history, Eric lost everything in that storm. He’d gotten himself stuck like Chuck, just like everybody else who hadn’t left for whatever reason they’d given themselves. His reason, of course, was a bender. But he’d stayed in town once the storm passed and the flooding stopped, helped rebuild the city. One of his prized possessions is a picture that’d been taken of him and Drew Brees putting the frame of a house together during the aftermath. The reason any of this matters is because I remembered that he’d kept an apartment in the Quarter ever since then as a place to remind him of home whenever he forgot what that felt like.

You see, a guy like Eric Dane could never have a home of any sort of permanence, it just didn’t work. He kept apartments like this in Orlando, Charlotte, Detroit, and Las Vegas, but this is the one that “felt like” home. His words, not mine. He rented the entire building, this being the place he’d stayed in the months after Katrina, and allowed everyone else who’d been there then to live there now. It was some kind of penance I think, his way of remembering where he’d been and who’d been there with him.

When I made it to the top floor after having to visit with more Nana’s and Auntie’s than anybody should ever have to remember, the first thing I noticed was that his door wasn’t only unlocked, it was open. I pushed through the door and padded into his apartment, fully expecting to find the remnants of either Hurricane Eric, or the back of his head splattered upside the wall in all of it’s red and grey glory. I was a little bit surprised to find neither. Everything was in order, no dead hookers or broken lamps, empty bottles or overturned furniture.

The sliding glass door to his balcony sat open, wind rustling through the curtain giving it all away. I made my way through his living room and out onto the wrought iron balcony that I knew I’d find him sitting on. He used to cut promos from here, back in the day, he called it his pulpit at the time. We always got a kick out of that.

And there he sat, in all of his untucked and tie-loosened glory, a half bottle of Maker’s Mark and two glasses, one empty, one emptied, and a full ashtray on the table beside him, He took a long, lazy drag from a cigarette.

“Si’down,” he slurred.

“How’d you know I was coming?”

“Hadja tailed.” He motioned down to a man leaning against a light post, reading a newspaper. Upon further inspection I recognized him from the dog track and the casino, only I’d never have put it together until now. “Have ya’self a drink, Ang.”

I sat down, poured myself two fingers of bourbon, and took a cigarette from the crumpled pack he offered. We’d spent many a night here, discussing DEFIANCE, the business in general, and anything else that might have come up. “They don’t know what to do down at the office without you, you know.”

“Buncha fugghin’ kids down there, don’ know their peckers from a No. 2 Pencil. Can’ do a goddamned thing without some’body spellin’ it out fer ‘em!” He was loud.

“Yeah, well, you can’t have your hands in every single department, from marketing to A/V, and expect anybody to learn how to do anything without you. You gotta take a step back. Learn to delegate.”

He hiccuped then burped. It looked uncomfortable. He lit another cigarette.

“You can’t be everything for everyone all the time.” This is a mantra I’d been repeating to him for six months now. He’d been ignoring it pretty well for the most part, but somewhere in his bloodshot eyes I recognized a flash of realization.”

“I’mma be ever’thang fer Heidi. Ha! Call Jeff’n tell’m I said dat!”

I nodded. Smoked. Drank.

“Gonna teach’at little girl somethin’, gonna show ‘em all sump’n!”

I took the last drag from my cigarette and pulled out my phone. He cracked a stupid, drunken grin. “Who you gonna call?” He asked. “Ghos’bussers?” He got a kick out of this. I fidgeted with my phone for a second before pointing it at him.”

“If you’re gonna cut a promo out here, at least let me get it on tape. Upload it to the website.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Hey man, you’re the one who booked yourself on the pee-pee-vee. Now it’s time to get to work puttin’ an ass every eighteen inches. Ain’t that what you tell the boys?”

He nodded, agreeing. Contemplating. Pouring himself another drink he answered me. “Alright.” He cleared his throat before going on. “Turn that fucker on. Turns out maybe I do got something to say.”

I could see him mentally collecting himself, pushing the haze of incoherence away rather than embracing it. He shook the cobwebs loose from his head, ran an absent hand through slightly graying hair. I stood up to get the best angle that my Android phone could get, and I pressed record.

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