Former “Mean Street Posse” member Pete Gas recently spoke with The Memorabilia Guy; you can read a few excerpts below:
Pete Gas talks about the synopsis of his new book Looking at the Lights: My Path From Fan to Wrestling Heel:
The book is about my story – Shane basically asked Rodney, my partner and I, to do him a favour and he wanted us to do some vignettes, and long story short the vignettes turned into us going to that WrestleMania where he faced X-Pac. About 10 days after that, Shane called us back into his office and he had a couple of envelopes for us, and we didn’t know what the heck that was and it turned out we were getting paid. So, we were doing it for free, cause he asked us to do him a favour and we ended up getting paid on it. And then he asked if we had any vacation time. I guess they saw something in the Mean Street Posse and they wanted us to be getting involved. It was only supposed to last about a month, maybe a month and a half and after that, we lost a loser leaves town match to Briscoe and Patterson. That was one of the highest rated 15 minute segments in wrestling history for a long time. It was a pretty big accomplishment considering you’ve got guys like the Rock, Stone Cold, all those other guys and there it is – The Mean Street Posse gets beat up by Briscoe and Patterson. So it was kind of a nice feather in our caps. So, the story continues when they decided that they wanted to bring us on full-time and how we had to deal with all the locker room, gaining respect from the boys cause we didn’t come in the same way – we had to pay our dues. The book goes from me meeting Shane in high school until present day.
Pete reveals what he thought of the gimmick:
I thought it was kind of funny. We were wearing these khakis, and we wore them for a while and then we switched to blue jeans because every Monday Night Raw, one of us was blowing out the crotch on national television on these khaki pants. After a while we were buying pretty nice pairs because we wanted them good and sturdy and we were still splitting the crotch on them and Rodney seemed to be splitting the crotch the most because he’s got those big thighs and he didn’t have a lot of room in those pants. So we had to switch to blue jeans and I couldn’t be happier because at the time the baggy loo was in and it gave us a lot of room to work. It was a different look and it was cool for us because as we gained popularity you saw more sweater vests in the crowd. Stuff like that and signs, that means you’re pretty over with the crowd – that’s what you want. So it made us feel pretty darn good.
Pete Gas shares a funny story about Jeff Hardy tasting puke and it causing a chain reaction:
In these interviews for the book I seem to be getting sked a lot about a specific time when I was trying to lose weight because I wasn’t built like a wrestler, I was built like an offense lineman for football. I had to lose some weight, so I was dieting and we had a few nights in a row when we were working and we had two more shows to do and we decided we were going to eat fattening that night, and after eating we were feeling kind of crappy and I leaned over Rodney and said “I’m gonna go and throw this stuff up, I’m not gonna keep this in my stomach. I feel kind of guilty about cheating on my diet.” So Rodney, always being the one to go along with the crowd said he would do the same thing and Joey Abs did the same thing. So we go outside to throw up, and we decide we’re gonna throw up on our car hood. So we go and throw up on the hood, and we’re laughing, and all of a sudden out come the rest of the guys we were with, which was the Hardy Boyz, Edge and Christian, Prince Albert and Val Venis. So we were all in the parking lot and Jeff (Hardy) walks over and says “What are you guys doing?” and we explained what we were doing so he stuck his finger in Joey Abs’ throw-up and tasted it. That caused a chain reaction of guys who we were with throwing up. So Christian runs over to the bushes and he’s hurling his meal he just ate, and we were just laughing our asses off cause we just wanted to see, of the piles of throw-up, whose pile would last the longest once we hit the highway and whose would fall off. So we start driving down the highway and we’re laughing cause we can see the piles jiggling cause it’s not aero-dynamic and they’re all getting ready to splatter. All of a sudden, at once, all three of them completely covered our windshield, our hood, the sides – it was disgusting! Rodney’s driving and he’s hitting the wipers. I’m in the backseat and all of a sudden we look and there’s a cop behind us, pulling us over. So he pulls us over, and we were laughing cause Rodney was kind of swaying in and out in traffic. I rolled the window down in the back and there’s throw-up dripping from the top of the roof and I said “Officer you’re not gonna believe this. We wrestle for WWF and we’re bad guys.” And I said – “Could you believe the crowd hates us so much that they actually threw up on our car! And there’s no place to get it washed at this hour!” So the guy felt bad for us and let us go. The next day we went off to Columbus, Ohio, and we couldn’t pull into the parking lot and risk having Vince seeing our car with all this throw-up so we had to go to a car wash in the freezing cold, with three assholes scrubbing a car we’ve threw up on. But we laughed about it and had a good time with it. It’s one of those stories that sticks with you for a long time.
