Justin Credible was recently a guest on The Steve Austin Show; you can read a few highlights (transcription credit to Bill Pritchard for Wrestlezone.com) and listen to the full show here:
Justin Credible comments on his history of drug and alcohol abuse:
As everybody knows, I’ve had a history with drug and alcohol and substance abuse for a long time, and I got clean off of opioids about five or six years ago. When we first talked, when I did the podcast a long time ago, but since then I felt for some reason — I guess I wasn’t real happy with who I was —and I was trying to find a life outside of the business, because it wasn’t paying the bills quite frankly. It was really hard for me and it became a mental health issue and I started drinking. At first, [it was] not too much, just casual beer here, beer there, and it just snowballed, man. It snowballed into 750 [milli]liters of vodka a day, and you mix that up with Coca-Cola and sugar, because I actually hate the taste of booze, believe it or not. I was always a ‘gimmick’ guy and I liked pills, I don’t like booze. So, I thought for some reason I’m not a drinker and I can handle a buzz every now and then, and it snowballed to a period where I was almost 300 pounds of just pure bloat, fat, on the verge of death. My liver failing, my calves were really just —I thought I was going to lose my legs—it was ridiculous.
So, I went for help, I asked WWE’s Wellness Policy… and they put me in a great place in Florida. In December I hit a snag, I had a relapse. It’s always an interesting thing and everything happens for a reason; it happened publicly at a show in Connecticut. I kinda made a jerk of [myself] —I haven’t watched the video, I refuse to— but I could imagine I was pretty embarrassing.
Through that, this guy got a hold of me, a guy from Connecticut, his name is Douglas Cartelli, and David Gere, are in the movie business. David actually produces a bunch of movies that our friends have been in. They brought me together with [Diamond Dallas Page] to put together a documentary basically about the journey. It’s me getting back on track with my life, it’s really interesting because we’re not trying to make a movie about wrestling—it’s been done. We didn’t want to do a [Resurrection Of Jake The Snake] documentary too, I’m not Jake, but it’s a human story where I think I’m like Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’. I’ve got a regular job, and I work for this guy’s concrete company now, and I can take my indie bookings if I can get them.
Credible gives an update on the filming status of his documentary:
It’s just a humbling journey; we’re still in production and we don’t know where it’s going to end up. There’s no finish line, we have some ideas, but really we just keep the cameras on—I have a camera that I keep on in the house which is really kind of weird. At first you think it’s all a gimmick, with pick upshots here or there, but you get some really ugly things that go on that you don’t —it’s been a hell of an experience. Hopefully a good one for me because it’ll be good for people in my situation, many people suffer from substance abuse these days. I’m sober today, it’s going to be 90 days and 2 weeks. I don’t like to say the ‘one day at a time’ thing, but we’ll see. That’s really what the principle of this whole thing is.
We’re still [filming]… we’re looking for something, we’re looking for a finishing point really. To see if my life could change, to see if we get something where I go through that curtain one more time back to being somewhat of myself. We really don’t know. There’s no end game. It’s really difficult — there’s a bunch of footage—it’s really hard to dissect what the narrative is, what the story, what you’re trying to bookend. It’s really up in the air at this point. There definitely is a… they’ve got Netflix and iTunes and all kinds of distribution, so we’ll see. That’s definitely up to them, but we’ll be shooting up to late Spring, from what I understand.
Credible comments on what he’s learned from getting treatment:
It’s a full-time job to be an addict. Drugs are great, and they’re really great until they stop being really great and they turn on you. They really do turn on you to where it’s not fun anymore, and it becomes —you’re forging prescriptions—I’ve been arrested for that. A lot of people don’t know about that, so I don’t know why I’m saying it, but anyways, I’ve done a lot of shady stuff, and it becomes a full-time job. You just learn to deal with your emotions. In this macho world it’s hard for guys—and I’ve had guys, big names in this business—cry in my arms with regret and guilt, shame. We want to hide, we don’t want to tell our friends, our comrades, or people we look up to, or look up to us, and show our most vulnerable weaknesses.
It’s crazy, but they teach you how to manage that as best as you can. It’s an every day process. I’d hate to be that preachy guy because no one likes to hear that—especially me, that sounds like a bad rib—when I do fail, I stumble it’s like a big thing putting it out there like I do. It’s almost like an accountability thing because believe me, I’ve had this happen at a liquor store, get myself something to drink, and somebody after one of my relapses said ‘you don’t need that’. I was kind of pissed off like ‘Dude, who they hell are you?’ but then I’m putting it out there so it’s on me publicly. It’s a weird thing, but it’s almost surreal sometimes, but it makes the fight a little better.
