Adversity

I’m certain it’s the first thing that will come out of her mouth, Victory II, and how she already ‘beat’ me. The moment where she built her name, the moment that she will be clutching to her chest so tightly as she walks out to that ring and looks to double down.

She thought she had me all figured out because she heard something about my past, played pop-psychologist, and thinks I am lashing out for attention because nobody loves me. It’s so far from the truth, though. If anything, they loved me too much, and they didn’t want to let me go. This isn’t about upbringing, it’s about la independencia, telling my story and not being a subplot in somebody else’s. So she can save the deep analysis for another day, for another broken soul who can’t find their way.

I run my hand through my hair, as I sit with one knee clutched to my chest. The crisp biting cold of the late November air is sharp in my chest as I inhale, almost breathtaking. I exhale a cloud of condensation. From warmest lungs come whitest clouds, a humble gift of myself that is momentarily expelled into the world; and this is the beauty of the cold winter days, to show us what we would otherwise never witness. As I watch the cloud dissipate, my focus shifts to the letters that hang on the monolithic face of the building that dwarves me.

PPG Arena. A different place, different circumstances. Different outcome.

When I think back to Victory II in Los Angeles, and the moment that Holly Rhodes took advantage of Xaria Linette’s head kick to put me down with the Holly Diver, I think it lives differently in my head to how it does in hers. It’s the moment that set the stage for what was to follow, so of course it is this serendipitous moment for her and she can’t see the forest for the trees. Luck runs out. She doesn’t have Xaria Linette to be a wildcard, to set a cat among the pigeons so to speak. To be that unpredictable factor that was able to position herself to twist the arms of fate against me on that night. And it was nothing more than fortune. She was of no further use, a lucky kick made me vulnerable, and then Xaria succumbed to the same fate she was destined for regardless. Offering herself up as a measly sacrifice following her otherwise incompetent display. And it cost me. There are no excuses, all is fair. Holly did what she had to do, she took the gift that was presented to her. For this I am not bitter, but I only make certain to warn Holly that living on the glory of fortune will be your downfall.

She should walk with trepidation, because as soon as she cashed in all her casino chips with Xaria Linette’s ineptitude on that occasion, it all began to fall apart. She wasted all her serendipity on a meaningless pinfall over Xaria Linette in a three-way including La Andalucera. Then what happened?

Pittsburgh is a cold place. Industrial. There is construction going on in the street where the arena is. There are more people in hard-hats and high-visibility vests than there are people in double-breasted jackets. The flow of people moves past me quickly, and people are speaking in jargon that is difficult to understand. A feeling so rarified that it strikes me as odd, is that nobody seems to pay attention to me sitting on the floor. Nobody takes interest in the girl with the big nose and the messy hair and the ripped black jeans and leather ankle boots, whose foot juts out into the thoroughfare whilst the other is clutched to her chest. They simply step over or walk around, without looking down or commenting.

Whether they are too busy, or used to it, or don’t want to start something with someone on the street, it doesn’t matter. But for me, I come from a place where I was barely able to walk in the street without needing to empty my pockets, or simply told that my people were not welcome and I should go somewhere else. I remember the boys outside ‘The Kingdom of Pro Wrestling’. I don’t know if they were more offended that a girl was interested in it, or a gypsy. But they gave me everything.

It took me three months to summon the courage to ask El Rey del Sur why he lied for me, why he instructed his displeased wife to help me strap down my modest breasts and pretend to be his nephew, why he created a backstory so that I could train with these boys, despite being such an undesirable.

“I am a Spanish, fighting in a world of Germans, British, Dutch. Sure, I perform similar to the Mexicans, but I am alone in a sea of strong-style traditional tough guys who laugh at people in masks. Every day, I train people who grow up watching Centurion or Joe Montuori. They are not interested in lucha libre. They just want to be famous and controversial in front of people. Who are they calling themselves ‘The Wolfpack’? I like those boys, but they will never make it. Before you even found yourself in my front yard, you fought and won more battles than they will ever have.”

I come from a world where people look down on me. Typically, people don’t want to give people like me a chance. I expected to be kicked, shouted at, told to leave. In the cold, distant and judgemental world that I’d grown accustomed to in Spain, that is exactly what happened. Sometimes I did leave, a lot of times I did get kicked. I did a lot of shouting, I never took it lying down. Often I left only when I was satisfied that I’d knocked a handful of molars down their throat. It wasn’t like that here. Especially not on this frigid morning in Pittsburgh, where everybody was halfway between two building sites with a list of tasks to carry out before their foreman took them to task over tardiness. These people didn’t know or care what my background was, or why I was sitting on the floor. They had more important things to deal with.

And seemingly, that was the case for Holly Rhodes.

She treated the match with Xaria Linette and myself like a stepping stone. It was supposed to be. The winner was going to fight for the Impulse Championship, of course. She stood tall and made her claim. She could be the one that changed the course of history. Only, that isn’t what happened. Because she rode the crest of that wave, feeling like she was undeniable. She beat the great Xaria Linette, and she beat the unknown but formidable La Andalucera. In one fell swoop she jumped the line and everybody thought that she would walk through the competition and be the inaugural Impulse Champion.

I was disinterested because there are other things - other people - that pique my interest in PWE, but disinterested as I may have been, I did stand by backstage and watch on a monitor as Allen Chaney hurled himself off a ladder and quite literally squash any chance of Holly Rhodes becoming the first and incumbent Impulse Champion. When the stakes were high, she buckled. And this becomes a trend, a crutch. Ever since that fortuitous moment, it has been downhill and fast. Although, to some surprise she seemed to fail upwards. As she lost out on the Impulse Championship, her next task was to face Nathaniel Cartwright. And following his dominant display, he was served up to The Godslaying Beast himself, Damian Ayla. But that’s another story for another day.

Another big stage, another opportunity. Judging by what happened to Cartwright following his performance, it must be said that Knight was planning to put Rhodes forward to face Ayla at Annihilation should the outcome have been reversed. And Rhodes was expected to win, but she buckled. It’s difficult to know whether it is a mentality thing with her. When expectations are high, or when the stakes are high, she seems to falter. Three huge chances squandered.

Frustrated, I push myself up to my feet and step forward directly into the path of a large man with a long red beard tied with a band and tucked into his work jacket. His sternum boulders into my sternum and all of a sudden his focus is jerked from his daydream and into reality.

Much to my chagrin, he steps back to a good safe distance and starts to apologise profusely. He was even complimentary on the fact that I was able to stay standing despite him bouldering into me with such force, which I found condescending. I tell him to watch where he’s going, hopeful that he snaps back.

Of course, it's a pipedream. I’m repeating “make it easy, sucker” over and over under my breath, all the while ready to uncork a right hand. Internally, I was begging for release. But he doesn’t give it. He holds his hands up, apologises once more and disappears back into the flow of people.

Holly is naive. She has great physical attributes, she is huge and strong and knows how to use that to her advantage, but she’s mentally weak. You see it. When the going gets tough, she shuts down, checks out, disappears. She doesn’t know the feeling of everything being lost, staring up at the ceiling after taking the beating of a lifetime, and willing yourself to your feet just one more time, pulling yourself out of the proverbial hole and standing defiantly in the face of your aggressor and refusing to be put down like a dog in the street.

Because she’s lived a charmed life, a privileged one. She knows that she has a safety net so she can take risks because the cost of failure is not catastrophe. If it doesn’t work, cower in the corner until it's all over. Until the beating stops. Because the beating stops. There is no hardship. She has never had to overcome it, and that is why she is so mentally weak. She is not prepared to go to where she needs to go in order to get the job done when it really matters.

When shit hit the fan, she disappeared for three years and did something different. She hit a roadbump and split. First sign of trouble. I don’t know what she thought happened in her absence that made the do-over worth the effort. Did she think the world got nicer, and more forgiving in her absence? Did the obstacles in her path become suddenly more traversable? Or did the world move on without her?

Clearly, the power that is has trust in her. She is the main event in the first show after Annihilation. The prognosis for the person who walks away victorious looks positive. The opportunity to right the perpetual wrong. But here’s the thing, on the surface of it we are both fighting and clawing to get a piece of relevance in this place. We are both trying to get on top of what has become a rocky ride. But are we?

Are we really running in parallel? Holly is on her trajectory and the narrative is that I am desperate to get myself somewhere, to get myself this win. Tara and Chelsea both said before Annihilation that I wouldn’t be anything until I started turning battles into victories. But when I think about my contributions in PWE, it doesn’t boil down to victories and losses. How can somebody who has never won a match be the main attraction at the first show after Annihilation? Look at Annihilation. I had every opportunity to win. By all rights, I should have won. I could have won. But I did something else, for something else. Not everything revolves around the outcomes that you are privy to. Sometimes there are bigger and more complex parts of the machine working towards a goal and it doesn’t make sense to spite the long term for the short term. I live with the choices I made.

I sleep easily, knowing that not a single person on this roster has pinned my shoulders to the mat, yet Holly Rhodes will no doubt cling to that narrative as they all do, whilst being barely one match removed from a two-fight skid.

And let us not forget that she broke that skid against, Xaria Linette who everybody has been screaming from the rooftops about because apparently she is a legend, but for the last 5 shows and has yet to do anything of note at all. Somebody should tell her that it is time to hang them up, she has been nothing but a disappointment since she stepped foot in the Ring of Excellence.

Victory V is a different matter altogether. There is no metagame, nothing beyond the surface layer. An opportunity to put her to rest without the wildcard. One on one, woman to woman. And I hear the noise of the people, even if they’re whispering. She won last time, she’s the better athlete, bigger, stronger.

But connect the dots and look at the trend, every time she is on a big stage, the same thing happens. The same thing is going to happen, she will be in front of her hometown crowd, she will let the lights get to her, she will be full of confidence from having pinned Xaria Linette for the second time and she will sleepwalk right into yet another disappointment.

The fact of the matter is that Holly Rhodes is too nice. She lacks the killer instinct, when we are one on one, she is not clinical enough to outsmart me. She is not strong enough, mentally, to keep coming when I put her down. Mark my words.

As I close in on the service entrance of the arena, I take another look around. It’s vast. It might be somewhat industrial in appearance and feel, and it might be unusual in terms of the culture of the city, but it is vast. A world away from where I came from, not only on the cultural level but physically, too.

Jaén is a tiny town, the houses are made of concrete, and people are packed in like sardines into their little communities. It isn’t because of a lack of space, it is because of a lack of innovation. My people are happy with what they have and don’t believe in overindulgence. So we fit seven of us into a two bedroom cottage with holes in the ceiling and no windows on one side of the house, because there is no need for extravagance. Especially for the humble community leader, who was anything but humble when he wasn’t on public display.

So, as my lungs felt like they were bursting out of my chest with the cold air I’d been holding in them for the last thirty seconds, I took a moment to smell the proverbial roses. I had come a long way from the days when I had to strap myself into a lizard outfit and pretend to be a mute boy just so the other guys would let me train with them.

I don’t know how long it took them to realise that sometimes when they went to perform a piledriver or powerbomb on me that there was significant strapping around my torso and no muscles to speak of, or that I’d go to the main house to change and never join them when they went to the bar for a beer afterwards. I am certain that there were some suspicions about me, but I didn’t know if their suspicions were true. I never got chance to find out, because Esmeralda had suspicions of her own.

Ever since Mama had permitted me to play volleyball, Esmeralda had been jealous. She was already married, of course, but had always found Mama and Papa in particular behaved differently with me. Esmeralda always asked me questions on Wednesdays, about volleyball, and the team. In the end, I found out that she had been talking to Dolores, my younger sister who was in the class beneath me and had been trying to catch my lies.

“But there is no Ifigenia in the team, she started playing soccer instead!” Esmeralda snapped, when I was trying to explain why I wasn’t in the picture that the school printed and displayed in the town square. I knew she was on to me but I was too far gone.

I wanted it too much. I had a feeling that I knew what she would do, so I stayed in school the next Wednesday, waiting for volleyball practice. I smiled awkwardly at the coach and told her that I was interested in joining the team, and she graciously let me sit by the side to watch. I saw Esmeralda at the gates of school that evening, and thought that I had put her ideas to rest.

The next week, less than five minutes after we had started running the ropes to warm up, we heard an aggressive pounding at the door to the Kingdom, followed by swearing and a commotion. La Reina started shouting down to the basement from the house above, and before we could really make out what she was saying, Papa, Mama and Esmeralda burst into the basement.

“I knew it!” she screamed triumphantly, perhaps not sure if she realised the gravity of her actions or what the consequences of exposing me to my parents in this manner would be.

I didn’t see daylight for four weeks afterwards. I was closed off in a dedicated part of our tiny household. Almost a cellar-type outhouse that was just four walls and a corrugated steel roof. It was boiling hot in the summer, absorbing all of the beating sun’s rays, and equally cold in the winter. I stayed there in my own mess for the duration, eating only bread and minimal water throughout.

By the time I was released, Esmeralda was begging them. She felt responsible for the fate of her younger sister. It would be the first major trigger point among many that would follow, but it was the one that consumed me as I stood outside PPG Arena in Pittsburgh, preparing to headline my first show. I’d come this far and there was so much further to go, but I knew that without adversity, it wouldn’t have been possible.

Wins and losses only matter when they matter. I was ready to show what I meant by that.

“¡Hey, cabrón!” I snarled, reaching out to grab the shoulder of the man in the orange high-vis vest. I swung him around to face me, and it was the same ginger beard from earlier.

“I know what is the game, you try all this time intimidating girls who don’t speaking English,” I lie, “You bash into them, see how they reacting, then you take them for bad things. I know exactly, you predator.”

The space between us shrunk rapidly as I cornered him next to the site entrance, a secluded section hidden by metal fences with branded mesh ziptied onto them.

“Miss, ma’am, there must be a misunderst-” he began stuttering, but it was too late. My long fingers pressed into his chin and cheeks, as I tightened my grip around his face.

I drove a knee into his sternum and he doubled over, and then I wrapped my left arm around his neck and under his throat. It didn’t take ten seconds for me to feel his legs go limp.

I released him and the man, easily three-hundred pounds, slumped to the floor. The impact brought him back to.

“Wh-why?” He coughed, hand pressed against his throat where a large hematoma was forming.

“Yo soy La Puta Ama. You don’t fuck with La Puta Ama!”

Sometimes, people are too nice. Too agreeable. Too pure. These people in Pittsburgh, they do not give me what I need. So I had to take it. I take my release. And now, I am ready.