When she was good, one of the first lessons Erica heard was that good meant submissive because no one wanted to cheer on a lady ass kicker; they wanted to see her beaten and victimized. Those were the words the West Texas wrestling promoter Lanny St. Germain used when he explained the psychology. Men could be ass kickers, and that was all right because that’s why the male audience watched them, to escape in the fantasy of them jumping off the ropes like a super hero or forcing a submission out of their pip-squeak boss who wouldn’t quit running his mouth. But lady wrestlers? It’s a man’s darkest fantasy—that he’s squeezed a pretty girl until she sweats and until she cries and until she screams.
So Erica sweat and she cried and she screamed and she was beaten and she was victimized. She learned to arch her back while she crawled like she was broken and how to contort her face into a pretty pout that sold anguish. That part was easier than she thought because, for all the predetermined outcomes and for all the falls she’d been trained to take without getting hurt for real, there was no such thing as a painless fall or a painless match. Wrestling wasn’t about living a peaceful life. A kidney punch was a kidney punch regardless of whether you braced yourself for it.
Then she met La Tigresse Numero Uno. She never saw her without the striped mask, even back in the locker room, even in the shower, even in the car to the next town. At the burger joint where they stopped because it was the last place open in a little town in Texas, the fat man behind the counter asked if she was trick or treating, and she locked him in a guillotine choke until he said he was sorry and agreed to give the both of them free French fries. They came to share hotel rooms. Tigresse still wore the mask, even when they slept on opposite sides of the queen-sized bed in those hotel rooms with sheets that reeked of bleach, with the splotchy stains in the carpet and cigarette burns on the shower curtains. Even the night they closed the distance between them and held one another in sinewy, tangled, fatigued limbs.
Tigresse butted heads with St. Germain—the man, his philosophies. Every time Erica told her about selling submissive, about the fans wanting to see her defeated, Tigresse hissed.
Tigresse taught her how to dive between the top and middle ropes. She taught her how to springboard into a plancha and that it was easier than it looked to spin on a stable opponent’s shoulders and transition to a hurricanrana. She’d trained with men back in Tijuana and San Diego who communicated the two central tools of the wrestling hero: the sympathy to make them cry with you, you have this, yes but also the heat to make them catch your fire, to burn the arena to the ground.
St. Germain didn’t like Tigresse. He jobbed her out to lesser talents three weeks straight and sent her packing for her next territory.
Her last night, Tigresse caught Erica’s last tear at seeing her go. She stopped the tear with her thumb and rubbed it back up to Erica’s eye. No sympathy now. Fire.
And that night, after Erica had been stretched in the Evil Evie’s Boston Crab and Gory Special, after she’d feigned tears and let loose screams, she took matters into her own hands. She was supposed to win on a lucky roll up, a flash pin after which she’d take another beating.
But Erica called for the bulldog to the middle of the ring and then sped to the corner with a fury, up the turnbuckles to the top rope. She started with her back to Evie and took flight in a corkscrew backflip, torqueing her body the way human beings were never meant to. That night—that good night—she took flight.
