Perry Saturn is a professional wrestler best known for his time in WWE, WCW, ECW and TNA. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Minneapolis, MN to discuss his new YouTube channel, being a part of The Radicalz group that made the jump from WCW to WWE, being given the Moppy storyline and who came up with the idea, the infamous match with Mike Bell, his battles with addiction after leaving WWE, getting shot outside of a strip club while helping someone, why he left WWE and much more.
You’re a YouTuber now!
“Yes, how crazy is that? Whatever a YouTuber is, I keep waiting to be canceled because of sh*t I say.”
Do you feel like there’s a certain line you won’t cross with what you’re making on YouTube?
“One time, Biff was so mad at me he told me, ‘Perry, if I gave you a million dollars, you couldn’t keep your f*cking mouth shut.’ It just shoots out of my mouth, and half the time I don’t even know what I’m going to say. It just comes out.”
What do you think’s been the biggest surprise for you since you started YouTube?
“Chase, the guy who does all the editing and stuff, and he knows Stevie [Richards]. So they know their stuff. Chase told me, ‘It’s probably going to take quite a few months before we get any traction.’ In three days we were monetizing. I’m not making money by the truckloads, but it only took three days.”
What have you been doing for work up to this point?
“I am on disability. That’s how I survived. I’m off of it this month because I’m making money on this. But that’s how I survived. I didn’t know I couldn’t work. This hand is dead. I can’t do anything with it. I have CTE, so if I get overworked, then I’m going to get confused. I handle stress and stuff like that aggressively. The last thing you want is a confused, aggressive Perry walking around. So I just deal with all that. I just had both my hips replaced, one at the beginning of October and one in the middle of November. I was in a wheelchair for like a year.”
I saw you about a year ago; you weren’t moving as well
“No, it was bad. And just because we all destroy our bodies, I just put it off. Kept putting it off for whatever reason. Should have done it a long time ago. I’ve had both my shoulders replaced, and they’re really hard to do. Hips were real easy.”
Are you in pain now?
“No, but I’m a drug addict, so I was concerned about taking pain medicine. So there’s no way you can have surgery without doing it. Both my shoulders, when I got them done, it was really hard to stop taking the pain medicine. This time I told myself I was only going to take them for a week, and that’s all I did. The doctor kept telling me you can take them longer, and I said no, that’s it. I was uncomfortable, but I got through it.”
I feel like you weren’t on the convention scene for a while.
“No, I was a drug addict in crack houses and stuff. The last thing I wanted was anybody I knew to see me on the rare occasion that somebody would recognize me because crackheads aren’t big wrestling fans. I would just deny it because I was embarrassed.”
I feel like there’s a lot of comments on your videos where it’s like I can’t believe Perry Saturn’s still alive. Can you believe Perry Saturn’s still alive?
“In WCW for a while, the boys were dropping off pretty bad. Raven and I, we had a dead pool. Raven and I were one and two on everybody’s list. I think the difference is him and I is I don’t drink alcohol. I think that’s the catalyst because there’s always cocaine and alcohol or muscle relaxers. We only did drugs. We did them by the load. I don’t know why it didn’t affect us. We would do 25-30 tabs of ecstasy in a night. I was taking probably 50 Vicodin a day.”
Where’d that self-awareness come from that you have now? The idea of yeah, I messed up in the past, but I want to be the best version of myself now.
“I was a drug addict, and I was lying to myself constantly, and I had to stop doing that. When I knew I had to quit doing drugs, I just quit doing them. I didn’t go to rehab or anything. I knew I shouldn’t do them anymore, so I didn’t do them.”
Was there a certain day when you woke up, and you said this is it?
“Yeah, I was going to commit suicide. I was homeless for a couple of years. I was in Iowa, out in the winter, and I was going to commit suicide and take a bunch of drugs and OD. I had my dog with me that I had a long time, she came over and she laid her head on my lap, and I thought I can’t commit. She needs me, and somewhere in there, I figured out if I can hang on for her, maybe I can get my sh*t together for me. 2010 is when I got clean.”
When do you feel like it really started to become a downward spiral?
“I’m not blaming Dean [Malenko] for it, but Dean became an agent, and then I was traveling by myself. I would try to toe the line because I respect Dean, I wouldn’t want Dean to look at me like that. His opinion really matters to me. I was just by myself, and it’s just no good. I was so bad that I had to constantly write down where I was at because I’d wake up half-ass sober and have no idea where I was at or anything.”
Do you feel like there was a big lesson or life lesson that being in the army taught you?
“That’s one of the reasons why my brain works the way it did. I learned that if I have to do something, it has to be done, and it’s just going to get done. So that’s why I didn’t go to rehab, and I kept doing drugs because I wasn’t ready to quit. Then once I was, that was it. I woke up and didn’t do them, and haven’t done them a bunch of times. Really wanted to out of boredom and sh*t, but I know that’s not going to be right for me. I learned that you lie to yourself all the time. My big deal was prescription pills, so I don’t have a problem. I’m getting them from the doctor. Pretty sooner or later you become a liar and a thief because all drug addicts are. You got to stay away from your friends and family because you don’t want them to see. You isolate yourself, and it just keeps going and going. I remember thinking when I was wrestling, I didn’t know how people became homeless. I’m thinking that doesn’t happen overnight. Yeah, it kind of does before you know it. It’s just like I was on TV wrestling with WWE, and eight months later or something, I was living on the street, lost my house, everything. Nothing that happened to me as an excuse for what I did. That was all on me, just being an idiot.”
How did it happen so quickly after leaving WWE?
“I was a huge drug addict. I was taking large amounts of drugs, and wrestling helped me stay a little grounded. Now I had free time and drugs and wasn’t making money, so I had to come up with ways to get drugs and stuff like that. Then when I got shot, I started to feel sorry for myself and start telling myself I didn’t deserve it, which just made it easier for me to drift farther apart.”
I want to ask you about that incident. So, in 2004, you see this woman getting attacked.
“There’s a strip club. I can’t remember the name of it, and right next door is the hotel, and the guy I get drugs from is there. So I’m going to the hotel to get high, and I hear somebody screaming. My dumbass, I think it’s two strippers fighting. So I figured I’m going to check this out, and I just stumbled on it, and it lasted a few seconds. I didn’t even know I got shot. I thought the guy hit me, not because I’m tough, but because I was in shock.”
Where’d you get shot?
“I got in the neck, and right here you can feel the hole. My collarbone’s gone because I got shot right here, and I didn’t realize it. The police actually had to argue with me to get me in the ambulance because I didn’t think I needed to go. Just because you go in shock. My memory’s very unclear, and I kind of remember. I know what happened, but it’s not a clear picture in my mind. Because, like I said, I remember telling the cops that I thought he punched me in the neck, and I kept going, no, I just got hit, because I got shot in the shoulder, and my body spun. I thought, oh, we’re fighting, and then I got shot in the neck, and my eyes watered and my legs buckled and I thought, oh f*ck, I’m going to get my ass kicked. I better get my sh*t together. Then the cops were there and there’s a big one. Guy ran and got away and never got caught. The other guy went to jail and while he was in jail got killed.”
How much did your life change after that?
“Now it made my life so much better. Then I thought it ruined it. I went from I had a nice house, a nice car, and was just getting ready to start wrestling again. I was just recovering from knee surgery, and I went from that to homeless. Hiding, didn’t want anybody to know who I was, it’s very embarrassing. It just happens so fast, and once it starts happening, you get to a point where you don’t care. F*ck it, this is it. This is my life.”
How are you able to look back on it now and say it’s a great thing that happened to you?
“I’m very happy with the person I am today.”
When you went to WCW, did you feel like there was a ceiling there? What made it so that you needed to leave?
“We all felt that way and watching matches and stuff now, we were wrong with a lot of the things. Every now and then, Eric would tell them that you have to talk about this, and they wouldn’t talk about the guys in the ring. To us, that was happening all the time. If Eric hadn’t got fired, I’d have never left. I loved working with Eric. Eric really liked me and always took care of me. But we worked all the time. The mid-card guys did everything. In the beginning of the month, first day of the month, they give you your booking sheet for the month. I’m on the road the entire month, so I have no idea when I’m going home, I have to wait to the next booking sheet, and then they’d want to try to elevate one of us, and the group of guys would say, ‘Well, the house shows are down. These guys can’t draw.’ Well, no, the house shows aren’t drawing because you guys aren’t making the house shows. You’re the main event guys, so sh*t like that was frustrating. But our problem when we left was because Benoit and Sullivan, you know, and we were all getting residual heat for that.”
So when The Radicalz happened in WWE, how quickly did that come together?
“Bro, that happened so f*cking fast. I had an internet guy, Jeff, and he called [Bruce] Prichard to see if they were interested. While that was going on, Bill Busch had this meeting telling us that anybody who doesn’t want to be here, they will release them. So we were saying we want to be released, and they were trying to talk us out of it. Prichard called me back an hour later and said we want you in Connecticut now, and I’m like, okay, well we got to get out of the building here first. Vince Russo was the booker, and he’d book and have us going over. Mike Graham or Kevin Sullivan would take the match, and they’d have us do the job. We’d get to the back, and Vince would go, ‘What are you guys doing?’ So we said okay, we don’t want to work with Sullivan or Mike Graham anymore. You know the cartoon Foghorn Leghorn, but the little chicken hawk that wants to fight everybody. That’s Mike Graham. They’d get him drunk in the middle of the day, so he comes up to me and pulls a knife out on me in Cincinnati, Ohio, says he’s going to kill us all, motherf*cker is mad, never drew a dime. I called the police and filed a police report. Now we take that and go to Time Warner’s Human Resources Department, and that was it. Bill Busch tried to talk us out of it, and I got worked up and started yelling at him and sh*t. He wasn’t going to talk us out of it. And once the police came to the building to interview Mike Graham, Bill Busch said, ‘Okay, you guys got to go.'”
So they bring The Radicalz in as a package. How close were you with Dean and Chris and Eddie?
“For a couple years, I worked with these guys all the time. Went out with them, traveled. Those guys were friends a lot longer than I was their friend, but we all respected each other and stuff. They were starting to do the Horseman angle with Dean and Chris and Arn and Flair. Arn couldn’t work anymore. Those guys went to Flair without telling me and wanted me to be the enforcer, so we started to do that. We were getting close, and very similar personalities. Me and Benoit were more similar. Dean’s really mellow and sh*t, but Dean is so professional. If I wanted to be a pro wrestler, a real professional, I’d watch him and do what he did. Eddie and I’d worked over 200 times, I think.”
Do you have any major regrets about your wrestling career?
“Yeah, my career ended maybe a decade too soon because I couldn’t do it off the drugs. Somewhere when we went to WWE, I rubbed somebody the wrong way too, because that’s why I did bullsh*t things. I got the reputation of roughing up the enhancement guys. What nobody hears is before every match, Jerry Briscoe would grab the guy and tell him, ‘Hey, Perry’s really old school. You got to go out there and make him work for it. No sell some of his stuff.’ Then I’m going to go berserk. I’d come through the back, and they’d be laughing their asses off. Well, now the boys are, like Paul London. He was when he had to work with me. He was worried because now I’m beating everyone up.”
Paul London talks about that match. He loves that match.
“Yeah, but he was worried about it. Kevin Kelly asked me if I could help him look good, and he’d like him to get more work. We should all stick together and help each other out, right? Because at one time, some veteran helped me out, right? So I owe him that. But I knew he was nervous, so I didn’t smarten him up about that. I kept him nervous. But the Mike Bell thing was my fault. That hip toss put me on my head. I saw a flash of light, and the next thing I knew he was in the corner, and I was kneeing him. I was blanked out through all that, but it doesn’t matter. I was wrong. You can’t do that.”
When you got to the back after that, Mike Bell match
“They were hot. Tom Prichard was the agent, and he babyfaced me with the heat. ‘Perry, are you okay? We need to make sure he’s okay. I didn’t know he landed on his head like that.’ The next day, my neck was f*cked up. I had to go to the doctor to get my neck looked at, but I wasn’t hurt, and that doesn’t give me the right to do what I did. And Vince told me, ‘Okay, Perry, you have to tell me right now that you’re never going to do that again.’ I go, ‘Vince, I didn’t do it on purpose this time, so I can’t tell you that because I didn’t mean to do it.’ He was getting hot at me, and I’m just not going to tell him something that I don’t believe. If I tell him something, he’s going to know it’s what I believe. Otherwise, I’m not going to say it, because that’s important to me.”
So where did Moppy come from?
“My excuse to convince why I couldn’t tell him I wouldn’t do it anymore is because I landed on my f*cking head and I had no idea what I was doing. A week later, I’m doing Moppy.”
How’d they pitch that to you?
“They didn’t pitch it to me. They had Paul E pitch it to me because I was close with Paul E, and I’m pretty sure they assumed I was going to quit, and I was going to. Paul E explaining it like I’m the village idiot. I go, ‘Paul E, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to look like a f*cking idiot.’ He goes, ‘Perry, you have no choice. You have to do it.’ I go, ‘I can’t do it. I’ll be f*cked.’ He goes, ‘You’ll be f*cked if you don’t do it.’ I go, ‘So I’m f*cked either way then? So I’ll just go home.’ He goes, ‘You won’t be f*cked if you get it over.’ I trusted Paul E, and they never gave me any direction or anything. They just go here’s the mop and do whatever. They called them Saturnisms. I was very serious, especially back then. Every day I wanted to quit, and every day I thought about it. But I kept hearing Paul E say, ‘Not if you get it over.’ No direction at all. I come up with all that sh*t on my own. The island, Castaway, I make Moppy into the ball, Wilson.”
Did you always know Eddie Guerrero was going to be a star?
“He’s the best worker I’ve ever been in the ring with. He’s so good. No matter what you do, he can make you look good. He’s the only person I know that could make anyone look good. Chris was a great worker, but Eddie was great and smooth. No matter what you wanted to do, Eddie could do it.”
Do you feel like because you were a WCW guy that you got treated differently in WWE?
“No, I think that Hunter didn’t want me using the pass to cozy up to him. I think there was something there. I don’t know. Shouldn’t have been because we trained together and stuff. But he was very standoffish to me and stuff.”
It comes to this point where you’ve got to choose. It’s Terri or Moppy. Talk me through how that came together.
“Pat Patterson thought I should marry a plunger, so that’s what he pitched, and somehow the plunger got turned into the mop. The whole idea was I did that because I got hit in the head, which is what happened with Mike Bell. This was my punishment, and I can prove it was a punishment because they never gave me any direction. One day in Meadowlands, the people are coming in the building and stuff, and Pat Patterson grabbed me. He used to call me Gimmick for whatever reason. He goes, ‘Gimmick, come here. You hear the people every time they come in, they chant Rocky, Rocky, Rocky?’ I go, ‘Yeah, they’re chanting Rocky. So what?’ He goes, ‘No, listen, you idiot. They’re chanting Moppy.’ It was getting over. Then they went to the wood chipper. They made one Moppy T-shirt for me to wear. If they wanted it over, they would have made [more]. They were showing up with homemade costumes as mops and sh*t, not millions of them, but it was happening. Believe me, I didn’t want it to get over, but it was getting over.”
When you look back at your wrestling career, what are you most proud of?
“Me and Raven, the feud that set the flock free. [Dallas] Page and Raven went to Eric and asked him if we could book that. So that entire angle we booked. He gave us a segment of a show. So that’s all of our ideas. And when I went over, you can see the people explode. We got them. I got through the back, and Eric was there and thanked me and told me I know I made money that match. How can you not be proud at that?”
I want to acknowledge you because not everybody gets out of the situation that you were in. A lot of people don’t.
“Yeah, but that’s how I am. I couldn’t do it any other way.”
But you did it. Yeah. And you’re still here.
“Not doing it was impossible. Once I decided to do it, it was going to be done. That’s how my head works. Bullies in school and stuff when I was a little kid, you know, first grade, and I was cutting school, and the cop busted me, was had was a black belt and taught martial arts. That day, I decided that’s it. I’m getting the black belt, and no one’s touching me. I got it.”
What is Perry Saturn grateful for?
“My family, Raven, and that I got to stand in a ring and have thousands of people scream their heads off!”
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