The resurrection of Jake 'The Snake' Roberts - Yahoo! Sports
long but good read
SMYRNA, Ga. – 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.
long but good read