La Puta Ama

It’s evident.

Self-fulfilling.

The Ice Mage took me for granted, thought me a bratty child, dismissed me because sometimes not everything is black and white. He saw weakness because I had seen little success on the scorecard. He failed to realise that sometimes it is better to feed your opponent a bishop or even a rook, so you can corner the king.

I’d offer up a queen, if I were sure.

I said it from the start. Wins and defeats mean nothing until they mean something. Because when it matters, I don’t just win. I dismantle.

Nathaniel Cartwright is on the tail of a two fight skid and you can argue he came back too soon, or that he was changed after the Damian fight. But the reality is that the tables are turned, aren’t they? The reality is that Damian’s dominant performance at Annihilation is aging poorly because each time Nathaniel steps in the ring, he shows us why he never deserved to be there in the first place.

But this is just how the story goes and how it will always go, I know it. The same way when I was at The Kingdom of Pro Wrestling in Mancha Real, those gilipollas who made fun of me for wanting to wrestle with them, called me gypsy and told me to go back to the kitchen or the bedroom where I could be useful. That’s the thing, isn’t it? People get this idea of what you’re capable of, and it wasn’t until a year into my training as El Rey Lagarto II that any of them had a single idea that I was the stupid gypsy girl who should open her legs and close her mouth.

We were learning a gorilla press, where you lift the opponent in the air and then drop them on their face at full elevation. I was paired with Nilbert, and it hadn’t occurred to El Rey del Sur to partner me with someone else. Nilbert was the noisy one, the macho one, the one that substituted personality with insults and prayed that nobody saw past the glass wall. Everybody saw past it but they chose to ignore it, we all let him has his bravado, because it was all that he had. But after landing on his face and not properly bracing himself for the impact, he’d been smarting. He had cut his lip superficially, and suffered a catastrophic hemorrage to his ego, so when he raised me above his head and his fingers ran along the tight bandage strapping I wore around my chest, he decided to say something.

“What the fuck man?” He demanded, as he dropped me down without care for my safety at all.

“Broken ribs.” I muttered under my breath, trying to conceal my feminine voice.

He looked at me with this look. It was this look of disbelief, of derision, of hate. Like, how dare I fool him and take advantage of him and be here in his space when he had clearly established himself as an alpha all those months ago.

“No fucking way, chamo.” He grabbed me by the shirt that I wrestled in and pushed me against the training room wall.

El Rey del Sur intervened, telling Nilbert to let go of his nephew, maintaining the façade. But I knew it was over. I knew they’d be looking for reasons to touch me, or to get me to speak, or to follow me, to find out. I knew the gig was up. I burst into tears and fled, I ran straight out of the training hall and into the house. La Reina was making coffee, which I still do not understand in the evening, but alas. As I came through into the house, she led me to the armchair and sat me down. My eyes were bloodshot, and the red mask had tinted crimson from the tears that were streaming down my face. What a fool.

They were right all along, because I’d left my family, I had given up everything for this dream and now it was going to be over before it would even have started. I mean, I wouldn’t be accepted by them, so what hope did I have for the rest of the wrestling world?

“Hija.” she spoke softly, but firmly. She called me her daughter, because mine had abandoned me. She insisted that I sleep in their house because it was empty anyway, and because their children were grown and moved away. “Hija, it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to hide who you are to please a couple of dick heads. You could kick all of their asses. Why do you think you have to be wrapped up like a boy? Do you care if they like you? If they accept you?”

And the truth was, I didn’t care. But I didn’t have the critical thinking to consider that their feelings were irrelevant to me. It was the first of many life lessons that La Reina bestowed on me. She pulled that mask from my head, and unplaited my hair, running her thumb across my cheekbone and clearing the tears away.

“Look in the mirror.” she directed me across the living room to a gold-framed ornate mirror that was at least seven foot tall and five foot wide, mounted on the wall.

I did as she said.

“Who is this?”

I didn’t know how to answer. When I looked back at my face, my dark skin, my strong brow and long nose, I felt shame. I felt persecution, I felt the judgement that La Reina had shown when I had asked about wrestling at her window all those months ago and she sent me away, frightened that I was scouting for places to ransack. When I look at myself, I feel the weight of a community that has spent its entirety being beaten down by the mainstream. I also feel the weight of a community that beats itself down too, and uses that same victim mentality to justify the way they objectify and subjectify their women. I feel like I should not be seen, and much less heard.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” La Reina demanded. “What is your name?”

“My name is Jéssica.” I respond, timidly.

“Que?” She asked, firmly, louder.

“Me llamo Jéssica.” I say again, not whispering this time.

“No, no no no. Con gusto. Con alegría.” With joy, with heart. She stood me up, pointed me at the mirror, straightened and broadened out my shoulders and wiped away the tears that kept coming and coming. She slapped me in the shoulders, encouraging me.

“MY NAME IS JÉSSICA, AND I’M THE FUCKING BOSS OF THIS PLACE!! SAY IT!!” she yelled, staring into my face in the reflection in the mirror.

“Soy Jéssica, y soy la puta ama!” I repeated.

“NO. OTRA VEZ!” Again.

“SOY JÉSSICA, YO SOY LA PUTA AMA!!”

She was going red, repeating what I said, cheering me on.

“VAMOS! Go in there, show those pelagatos who the fuck you are!”

And it worked, because who the fuck cared what those pendejos thought. I walked in there, I got in Nilbert’s face and I told him that if he was scared to get his ass kicked by a girl then he could always leave, but otherwise, he had to learn to live with it.

And unlike the fairytale cliches that I am sure you’d expect, that wasn’t the end of that story. It became awkward and his friends refused to partner with me, so things became pretty complicated. But the parable ends here, because the point is that when I am overlooked, I tend to clap back, I tend to rise to the occasion.

And that’s the thing about occasions.

I feel like a broken record saying the same thing I said about Holly Rhodes, but it was true then just as it is true now, when the chips are down, Acid Beth runs away. She did nothing when she was in the ring with me, and trust me, I just got off a whole monologue about the Xs and Os of wrestling, and about how the wins and losses don’t mean anything until they mean something, but there’s a reason she was the nail to Tara’s hammer at Annihilation. There’s a reason Tara didn’t easily destroy Chelsea Skye like she had on Victory II, because despite all of her shortcomings, Chelsea Skye had fire in her belly. Tara knew that one swift kick to the stomach early on and you’d shut down. The lights would go out and you’d be there physically, but you were just surviving, you were just waiting for your opportunity to lay on your back and take the defeat.

So it was prophesied, and so it came to be.

In the two other occasions she has graced the ring in Pro Wrestling EXCELLENCE, it has been in the show opener, and that is not a jab, there is credit to be had for setting the tone of the show. If the booking is correct. But these are gatekeeper matches. These are the kind of matches that you give to local talent in the hopes that they will do something incredible and earn their spot. Maybe she’s happy with that, maybe that is the level that she can attain. Or maybe she has paid her due and its time to get a jump in competition, hence her facing me this week… but when it came to Annihilation, she did nothing, and she was not even close to tested in her other matches. So there may not be a lot of analysis to do, which is okay too.

We all learned to adapt on the fly. We all learned that when the unexpected confronts you, you alter course. Didn’t we? I took on Holly Rhodes, who everyone expected to have a shutout against me and I made her look average. I took on Nathaniel Cartwright and made him look like a rookie, made it look like Damian Ayla was human because I made LIGHT work of his flagship challenger. Because I don’t care what people think of me. I don’t care that I had a negative win loss record. Only they cared. And it cost them. I came for them, I dealt with them. Violently. I am La Andalucera, and I am the fucking boss.

At Victory, there will be another demonstration. Another pawn taken as the pieces on the board move into place. Beth can try to prove me wrong, I welcome it. I relish the opportunity to go to deep water because I know you’ll drown before I draw breath.

But know that there is nothing that will stop me from achieving my goal. Because I don’t care if I have to make a hundred sideways moves, as long as the last move is decisive enough.

The King Cornered. Let the Queen reign.

Me llamo La Andalucera, y yo soy la puta ama.