Madeleine cradled my ankles in her arm pits, my body bent into a crescent, legs long and oiled, feet bare in the customs of Smoke City Wrestling. I moaned the way she’d told me to backstage. A sound of pain that could as easily be mistaken for a sex noise, because that’s what the men had come to hear.
I understood in that moment how wrestling might be sexy. The two of us wore booty shorts and sports bras, skin shining, athletic bodies pushing and pulling against one another.
My left ankle slipped loose My leg crashed to the mat. The hold hadn’t hurt, but the fall did a little.
Madeleine crouched into a half crab, some semblance of a grappling transition, like I’d fought partially free but she nonetheless still had me, all the while positioning my body to be more comfortable, less prone to actually getting hurt.
Madeleine was a safe worker. She’d been wrestling in Smoke City for five years and prided herself on knowing this variation on professional wrestling as well as anyone.
We sold sex to the men who drove in to Smoke City—a casino town—for card games and booze and to see what other trouble they might get into over long weekends. I came to the territory on the premise of good pay days, no travel, little of the wear and tear that comes with full-impact wrestling matches. Other girls reassured me if I could check my dignity at the door, it was a good place to cool my jets for a year or two and pad my bank account, add years to my career from giving my back a break from power bombs and spine busters in favor of sexy looking holds.
My first night in, I wasn’t so sure.
I won, but it didn’t mean anything—even less than the typically predetermined outcome of a professional wrestling match. Madeleine had been up front that most of us would take turns winning and losing, and the only exceptions were the girls with resting bitch face who worked better in dominating roles and girls like Lucy—a real girl-next-door type who sold better than anyone, so men would clamor to hear her whimpers escalate over the course of a match until the climax, screaming her submission.
I picked up the duke with a figure four leg lock that saw Madeleine shriek and stretch out her long neck in a way that drew a roar from the crowd. She ravaged fistfuls of hair and cast her tearful desperation at one man in the front row before screaming, “I give up! Please stop hurting me!”
I didn’t love that type of submission—the kind reserved for only the most cowardly jobber in most wrestling territories. I’d learn that was the nature of Smoke City Wrestling for the loser to be rendered a trembling, inconsolable mess whom the men in the crowd might fantasize about massaging the sore body of. I didn’t love what I had to do either, standing over her body, biceps flexed, a foot on her heaving bosom. They called it a victory pose, inviting flash photographs.
“Isn’t it all kind of voyeuristic?” I asked Madeleine in the locker room.
She smirked. “It’s wrestling.”
I’d shared a locker room with Dragon Princess when she’d talked about how it was a nobler pursuit to use physicality to entertain the masses by pretending to hurt someone rather than really hurting someone. I’d heard Pit Bull Peters talk about offering entertainment that transcended language—a narrative men like his Polish immigrant father could understand fresh off the boat, before he picked up the English language. I, myself, had mused wrestling storytelling might help us all better understand the human condition.
Madeleine was less idealistic than all that. Pragmatic. She’d come to Smoke City as a trapeze artist, performing in a niche circus show at one of the casinos until a torn rotator cuff and resulting complications meant she couldn’t perform safely anymore. She was in the habit of eating well and maintaining the musculature necessary to swing across high beams, and parlayed all of that to her wrestling career, such as it was—safer in this world of make-believe combat. “Men came to see the circus to stare at our bodies, too,” she said. “When we wrestle, we don’t bother pretending they’re here to see anything else.”
The men came to us for a novelty, maybe a fetish, a step removed from the burlesque shows or strip clubs all over Smoke City. But for some men, watching wasn’t enough. Some men wanted in on the action.
In the locker room shower, Madeleine explained, “Sessions are where the really money is at here.” She said men booked private sessions in casino hotel rooms to stage matches of their own with girls from Smoke City Wrestling. Some came with elaborate scripts and scenarios. The girl was a petty thief caught stealing in the room, and needed some discipline. Or she was a government interrogator, the guy a terrorist she set to squeeze between her thighs until he confessed his secrets. A lot of men didn’t want such pretense at all, though. They wanted to wrestle a pretty girl who knew how to apply holds and who wouldn’t make him feel weird about it. So, they’d wrestle, nothing predetermined or planned besides some agreement about going half speed or to not mess with a guy’s trick knee.
“Most guys who go in for this sort of thing are the submissive type,” Madeleine said. “And we can ask for a premium rate for the ones who aren’t. You always want another girl in the room for those ones. I bring an escort regardless—a lot of the girls do if it’s not a regular customer. Nico works out all the particulars with the client, and all the money stuff. Most of us don’t communicate with the client until we’re in the room, unless you’re like Lucy.”
I learned that, in contrast to the helpless victim she’d play for the arena crowds, Lucy had a reputation for taking an active role in her bookings—messaging with clients about wardrobe choices and favorite holds and other nuances of sessions for days leading up to a meet up.
I told Madeleine I’d come to Smoke City to be a wrestler, not a prostitute.
Madeleine laughed and made the obvious joke that there wasn’t much difference, but when I didn’t laugh in return she clarified that there was no sex. “I’m not going to say no girl has ever gone into business for herself and worked out something in the room, but it’s not the standard. I’ve never done it. Nico’s good about protecting us on that—making it explicit that prostitution is illegal and that’s not what we’re selling.”
I hadn’t interacted much with Nico yet. He was one of the management guys, who came across as something like a gopher, running a new microphone out to the ring when the one the ring announcer was using died during the show, and updating me and Madeleine when they mixed up the order of the matches and we wound up going on earlier. I could see a guy like that running in between girls and clients, too, though.
Calm and practical, equal parts setting customers straight that wrestling didn’t entitle them to anything they might want, and reassuring them, too, that they really weren’t getting into anything illegal.
“Sometimes a guy will get too excited and cream himself,” Madeleine said. “It’s an occupational hazard. And, if you want, it’s grounds to call the session then and there, no refunds.”
*
I asked around. When you bounce between territories you learn quickly that you can’t trust what everyone says. Wrestlers are liars with their own self interests at stake, sure, but also, everyone sees the world differently, and especially if you get paid to get hit in the head night in and night out, there’s every possibility you’re not taking in the world through the clearest eyes.
Maybe Madeleine and Lucy worked sessions, but that didn’t have to mean it was the norm. Maybe they had a reputation as whores or for lusting after money to the extent they’d do anything.
But then Nico invited me out for a bite after the show. His treat.
We ate at Cardiac’s, a hospital-themed burger joint a few doors down from the casino where I wrestled and stayed. The place served quarter-pound, half-pound, and full-pound patties, besides The Coronary Embolism, featuring two one-pound patties stacked one atop the other, dressed up with a dozen strips of bacon. An advertisement by the door proclaimed that customers ate free and got their names on a plaque if they finished that one. Cardiac’s other central gimmick was that anybody who didn’t clean his plate got a wooden-paddle spanking from his waitress. As we came in, one of those waitresses—in a grease-stained nurse’s uniform with a low cut top, a short skirt—thwacked away at a gleeful middle-aged customer I could only assume didn’t finish his dinner on purpose.
I ordered a water and a quarter-pound burger with no bun. Nico was confident enough to get himself a half-pounder and a strawberry milkshake.
He gave a Cliff Notes version of what Madeleine had said about session wrestling. More brass tacks about how the going rate for most girls was a hundred dollars per half hour, and the rate doubled for sessions over an hour long. The girls kicked back twenty-five percent of the take to Smoke City Wrestling for facilitating the arrangements, twenty dollars an hour to Nico if we wanted him to sit in the room for safety purposes, or to film (at an extra hundred dollars an hour at the customer’s expense). He conceded that most of the girls provided each other’s backup or camera services and worked out for themselves what money would change hands or if they’d simply owe one another favors.
Nico went over all of this and told me that I had my first request. “Not one of the regulars. A tourist. He saw you tonight and he wants to meet up Saturday in his room if you’re up for it.”
Nico came across less like a pimp than an accountant, or the kind of attorney who didn’t go up in front of court rooms, but rather pored over tax law and advised client whether to pay or plea or fight or get ready for jail time.
Case in point, he told me if I didn’t want to work a session, I didn’t have to. “I know this is different from what you’re used to. You’re a serious wrestler. I saw your work from Damphry and I pushed to sign you. We need more women who can actually wrestle here in Smoke City to keep the rest of them safe.”
I hadn’t realized that anyone affiliated with Smoke City watched any other wrestling, besides looking for pretty girls with a cursory bonus if they knew a short arm scissors from a headlock.
The food arrived, mine a slab of greasy meat I wasn’t shy about tearing into with my fingers.
Nico cut through his bun, through his burger, through all the fixings with a knife and fork, keeping his hands clean. “I’m grateful you’d come to work with us at all, so don’t feel like you have to do something you aren’t comfortable with. You probably do want to consider sessions, though. You’ll wind up making a lot more money here than Damphry if you do.” Nico paused to squeeze and jostle the plastic ketchup bottle.
Nothing came. “Where’s that waitress?”
I signaled over his shoulder. As if on cue, to answer Nico’s question, she slapped her wooden paddle hard against a guy’s backside. A young guy, maybe a college student, with a table full of hooting friends. He winced on contact, red in the face, before his lips gave way to a smile.
* I slept on it. One of the perks of working Smoke City was getting to take up residence in a room in the casino hotel—no need to pay rent or split the fees on rooms, no next town to race to. We worked the same arena in the same casino, working largely the same matches over and over. We didn’t make any real effort to keep kayfabe—the suggestion that our matches were legitimate fights. The people who came to see us were either out of towners who’d only watch us once, without a storyline to follow week in and week out, or else the local pervs who didn’t make any bones about coming over and over again for the purpose of seeing the same thing.
I slept on sheets that smelled of bleach, which at least signaled they were clean, over carpet that reeked of cigarettes despite the no smoking sign posted outside the door. I mindlessly flipped through cable TV stations, imagining what it might mean to tangle limbs and stretch and scream with a man who’d paid to touch me in a room not unlike this one. I thought about it until my eyes were heavy and I dreamed about it, too. In my dreams, the man was portly and balding. The kind of man with disposable income, who didn’t have much of a sex life, chronically single or else locked in a loveless marriage, all too eager to feel something. And if he touched himself alone in his hotel room, remembering the highlights from my match with Madeleine, was it so much worse to come to his room myself to reenact camel clutchess and body scissors? If it would be someone else in my place—maybe Madeleine herself—doing exactly the same thing if I said no, was there any difference at all? Any difference besides whether I had a couple hundred extra dollars?
All that, and maybe it would be a good thing to rip off the Band-Aid, get my first session over with.
*
I told Nico I’d do it. Madeleine was standing by when I did, and volunteered that she’d be the extra body in the room to keep things safe and make sure I was comfortable.
I was honest when I told her I couldn’t imagine anything less comfortable than having another person watching. Because weren’t we selling intimacy of a kind? And even if the customer was the one who wanted intimacy, would it really be more comfortable in that hotel room for my first session, the full knowledge that another, more experienced woman was looking on, judging what I did or did not do, what boundaries I did or did not erect, whether I was truly giving the customer his money’s worth relative to her own standards?
She didn’t fight me on it. Later on, though, she lent me her Taser.
I told her I didn’t think that’d be necessary.
“You’ll be alone in a hotel room with a stranger who’s paying to fight you.”
I didn’t think of it as fighting, but then, hadn’t Madeleine told me some men liked to be dominated, and others like to dominate? That some men wanted to compete, even if only a playful way to test their strength against a woman’s and feel the mutual sweat and strain. She'd said some men liked to get slapped around, and I imagined how easy it might it be to cross a line. Hit him too hard and he hits back. Try to leave when time is up, but he hasn’t had enough.
I took the Taser.
*
His name was John. Maybe a pseudonym. I came wearing a t-shirt and jeans over the same attire I wore to the ring. He answered the door in a white t-shirt, gym shorts, and flip flops, the comforter from the bed and a series of bath towels all laid out across the floor. He had light brown hair and was clean shaven, maybe six inches taller than me. The kind of build that suggested he might have run casually, but wasn’t a regular in the weight room.
Average. And young. Maybe in his mid-twenties. He thanked me for coming.
He told me it was his first time and asked how people usually started these things.
I almost told him it was my first time, too. But wasn’t it part of the game to come across as confident? A warrior relative to this everyday man?
Besides which, maybe we didn’t have to get to the wrestling right away.
I told him I liked to talk first, reassured him the time wouldn’t count against the hour he’d booked. He sat down on a corner of the bed and, I started to sit on a far corner, then thought better of starting on the bed, and sat instead on the corner of the desk, a couple inches higher than him.
I asked him why he’d booked a session.
He blushed, and I thought maybe I’d gotten it wrong. After all, even if paying to wrestle a woman weren’t illegal it still wasn’t something most men would be proud about. Maybe a man more sure of himself could pick up a girl at a bar and coax her into playing out these fantasies. I was about to tell him he didn’t have to answer, when he started in.
“I always imagined girls wrestling. It started when I was middle school and watched wrestling on TV, and I think my brain got confused with all the bodies grinding against each other and stuff. I started imagining girls from school, and started imagining them wrestling me before I realized that any of it was sexual. Then you start putting the pieces together, like when you touch yourself that you’re—” He trailed off, shy again.
“That you’re masturbating,” I said for him. Because isn’t it easier to say words like that after someone else has said them first, like it’s easier to tell someone you love them after you know they’re feeling the same way?
John seemed relieved I’d said it. He told me about humping his teddy bear when he was a kid, and turning to his hand for better control, so the telltale squeaks of the bedsprings against a man-sized body wouldn’t clue in his parents or his college roommate to what he was doing.
“I came here alone,” he said at last. “Because I’d read about sessions and that they did them in Smoke City. And then I saw you.”
This was another side of Smoke City. Not a boys’ weekend full of cocktails and cigars over the craps table and getting talked into bottle service at the strip club. This was a man who had the means coming with a purpose, standing on the cusp of something. This was a lonely man. A man I could understand. A man whom I didn’t think was sure he wanted to go through with wrestling a woman in a hotel room.
“You look a lot like this girl I had a crush on in high school. Betty. I never had the guts to ask her out, then she met a guy in college, first semester, and they wound up married.” He shook his head. “Two kids and everything.”
When he stopped, I told him a little about myself. Where I’d grown up and my first gig wrestling in New England then moving south. How I’d never been to Smoke City a week ago and wasn’t sure how long I’d stay.
I thought we had a connection and wondered if other girls talked to clients like this, like talking somebody off a ledge. Was I talking myself out of a payday? Maybe other girls did have these talks, but without disclaimers about the talking not coming out of their time, so there were only a few minutes to wrestle afterward, or until the guy no longer looked at them as objects to wrestle, but still had to pay them for their time.
But I was wrong.
We hit a lull in the conversation. John sighed and took off his t-shirt. “Start on the ground?”
*
We wrestled. Half speed, less grappling than practicing the motions of a dance. I sat on his chest, facing his lower body, and he guided my hips in his hands until my butt was on his face, and he nestled in. I waited a minute and leaned forward, collapsing my thighs around his neck and squeezed softly. An erection peaked from beneath his gym shorts. He moaned Betty’s name.
I figured I shouldn’t correct him. We were both playing our parts. The helpless victim. The wrestler. Betty.
We transitioned through a headlock with his face in my armpit, to me scissoring his ribs between my legs while he smothered himself in my chest.
I hadn’t set a timer like Madeleine had said I should on my phone. I hadn’t taken out my phone at all, and it wasn’t until I had him in a camel clutch, gently fish hooking his mouth, that I could see the clock radio. I’m not sure how long we’d talked. I’m not sure how long we’d wrestled. But I was pushing two and a half hours in the room.
“It’s time,” I said.
“Please.”
I thought John was still playing his role, begging as he feigned extra hurt from each lightly applied hold.
No. He was begging for real. Not for mercy, but for more. “One more hold. Please.”
I applied a figure-four leg lock. The thing about the hold is that it would be nearly impossible to apply in any real fight, without an opponent who was unconscious or overtly cooperating.
John was eager to cooperate.
So I lifted his leg by the ankle and threaded my leg through, spinning, positioning his ankle over the opposite knee, then my knee pit over the ankle. Apply pressure and it really does hurt. I only put on a little.
The way our bodies landed, I had my foot on his crotch and could feel him squirm.
He shuddered.
He screamed his submission in a white spray of spittle.
We were done.
John rested on his back while I pulled on my jeans and put my t-shirt back on, then he rolled over twice to reach a dresser drawer, pull it open and take out his wallet. He paid me in cash.
I counted the bills. Crisp twenties I imagined him taking out of the ATM for this purpose—two hundred dollars, and an extra twenty that might have been a mistake or might have been a gratuity. I didn’t clarify with him, just folded them into my back pocket and got out of there.
*
There are territories you go to to learn new skills, to build on your reputation. There are territories you go to for the money. With a little luck, you leave a little richer, your body unhurt, ready to hit the road.
I took the elevator down to the ground floor. It was odd, to go from John’s panting company to the silence of the elevator to the blinking lights and chatter of the casino floor. I stopped at the first slot machine I came across, themed around woodland creatures, all squirrels and bears and birds and fauns and gnomes peeking from around tree trunks and up in leafy branches. I asked a cocktail waitress for an amaretto sour, got comfortable, and fed one of my fresh-earned twenties into the machine to take my chances.
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He is the author of three full-length short story collections: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue from Duck Lake Books, Circus Folk from Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, and most recently The Long Way Home from Cowboy Jamboree Press. Chin won the 2017-2018 Jean Leiby Chapbook Award from The Florida Review and Bayou Magazine’s 2014 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.
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