[Callista]

Prologue

My name is Callista Quinn, and I am a professional wrestler.

This story is true...except for the parts that aren't. Two of the parts that aren't are right there in the first sentence. My name is not Callista Quinn, but it'd make a bloody good ring name, alliterative, and a touch unusual, without being overtly so. So I'll use it for the time being, even though I don't actually climb into any rings, and haven't for some time.

What is true is that I have been a wrestling fan for most of my life. What is also true is that as of late, it's become a bit of an obsession. Watching it, talking about it, talking about watching it...I enjoy it, but I can't help but wonder if lately, my fandom/fetish/obsession hasn't become tinged with a bitter-sweetness. Regret, even.

You see, what is also true is that I had a chance to make a go of it. No guarantee I would have succeeded, of course. Mathematically speaking, the odds are against it, and the fact that I never tried is obviously a large mark against me having been able to stick to it long enough.

And I wouldn't have had the advantages I obtained from the path I chose. A free ride to a decent school. A career I do quite enjoy, even if it's not the sort of thing you dream of growing up to become. A partner who both infatuates and infuriates me, and knows I'm the sort that needs both in fair measure.

But I can't keep the thoughts of that other life from running 'round my head. I want to curse myself for faithlessness, but the thoughts simply can't be banished. So maybe if I put them down here, with an audience as is wholly proper for the subject matter, then just maybe I can exorcise this daemon from my soul.

Because my name is not Callista Quinn, and I am not a professional wrestler.

And this is not my story.

[Callista]

Chapter 1

We'll start with a fair amount of truth, if only to give a proper background. I was born in Salford, England. At a very young age, my family left England, and moved to Chicago, in the United States. For all that my father was a professor, he never lost touch with his working-class background, most especially in his love of sport.

Football, of course. My older brother and I are the fourth generation of our family to support Manchester United, and insofar as our father wanted grandchildren, I'm not so sure his primary motivation wasn't to ensure that there'd be a fifth. But if football was his favourite sport, his favourite programme was World of Sport. Akin to America's Wide World of Sports, World of Sport was a programme that aired every Saturday afternoon on ITV, showing a variety of various British sporting events, racing, darts, snooker, bowls, etcetera, but there was always wrestling.

In the 80s, after World of Sport ended, Dad took it upon himself to obtain VHS tapes of past broadcasts from a catalogue. Unfortunately, Dad's knowledge of European and North American history did NOT extend to such details as differing television formats. The tapes he'd bought were the PAL format used by most of Europe, not the NTSC format used in America.

So, he ordered us a PAL VCR, which came...and didn't work. After some swearing about this from dad, it was my brother who said, "Hasn't the TV got to be that same format?" Dad's face turned an interesting colour. Well, dad saved his pennies, and eventually was able to obtain a 12" PAL TV at what he insisted was a "reasonable price" (mum gave him such a look when he said this...) and THIS time he'd done his research and added a voltage converter/plug adapter and at last we could watch his tapes.

Some of the events interested me, some my brother, some neither, but what would keep us both captivated was the wrestling. That's what we called it: “the wrestling.” Alone amongst us heathens, mum hated “the wrestling”, and used to give him an earful for letting us watch, until she realised what an effective tool it could be for promoting good behaviour. Cleaned your room? Right, you can watch a match. Hit your sister? No wrestling for you! (“HA!” says my 6 year old self.)

So there were the three of us, crowded around a minuscule screen, watching the greats of British wrestling's golden age. Dynamite Kid, Marty Jones, Mark “Rollerball” Rocco, Sammy Lee, Flying Fuji Yamada, Jackie Pallo, Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, and of course, our favourite, Johnny Saint. Saint, besides being an honourable and fair-minded grappler and a brilliant technician, (and a native Mancunian) was frequently the smaller competitor in his matches, which of course appealed to two young children, (never mind that neither my 6'3 brother nor my own 5'11 self can quite pass for “small” nowadays.)

It was this shared experience of an ex-pat and his two children that helped alleviate some of the homesickness our father never quite managed to excise. Imagine my surprise the first time the name “Hulk Hogan” was uttered to me. I distinctly remember saying the words, “Wait, you Americans have wrestling TOO?”

To Be Continued

[howardcosell]

This is a great, great start to what's going to be a great, great story. I absolutely love the use of foreshadowing and I love the darkness of it all. I'm happy you're here.

[peccavi]

An excellent start; you've established your character and setting; I'd never thought that the differences in TV technology would so set a scene. Well done. I'm waiting eagerly for more.

[Callista]

Americans did in fact have wrestling. Quite a lot of it. For the better part of a century, American wrestling was broken up into territories, with the NWA as a loose confederation of the promoters of each territory. Here's an image showing the territory map as it existed in the 1970s.

As in most cartels, the alliance was uneasy. Throughout the late 50s and early 60s, the organization was plagued with infighting between promoters. One of those, Vincent J. McMahon, promoter of the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF), based in New York and claiming a large chunk of the nation's most popular region, split from the NWA.

In the 1980's, McMahon's son Vince McMahon Jr, used the growth of cable television and pay-per-view to take his company nationwide. While many thought he would overreach and burn through his funds, by the late 80s it was apparent that this was not the case. In the days of the territories, regional wrestling promotions would buy airtime cheaply on local UHF television stations, but that wasn't enough any more.

Someone with cable television, (say, to see the World Cup, and if you'll allow me some brief profanity here, fuck Maradona that cheating cxnt!) and the perseverance to pore through the tv listings could find all sorts of wrestling on! The WWF, of course. NWA, (the name was used by Ted Turner's company, which had wrestling bought Jim Crockett Productions,) The midwest-based AWA, Texas' WCCW, even the odd GWF show from Florida.

WWF was not the best wrestling I'd seen, certainly not up to the high standards of our World of Sport tapes, but it was the biggest. Huge crowds and high-quality production values made it seem like a big deal, even when the matches were mostly squashes. I'd even see the odd familiar face or two, most notably the British Bulldogs, a team composed of British wrestlers David Smith and Tom “Dynamite Kid” Billington, the latter one of the true elite in world wrestling.

There was even a women's wrestling show! Ok, it was apparent even to six-year-old me that the girls on Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling were not nearly as talented as the wrestlers on most of the other shows, but it stuck with me nonetheless. It was a veritable buffet of wrestling, and if the dishes weren't all the highest quality, I still wanted to taste them all! Mum despaired for me.

I was getting close to that age where Mum wanted to go back to school and work full time, (she was in fact a non-faculty lecturer and grad student at a prestigious university,) which necessitated finding me “activities” that would keep me occupied after school. “What about a sport?” she asked.

I answered, “Wrestling?”

“Second choice?” she asked in a flat tone of voice.

“Football, then.” To give my mother all credit, she didn't dislike wrestling because of some notion of it being unladylike. She disliked it because she thought it was idiotic. Outside of that, she was happy to provide me with what took my fancy.

This actually made things a bit easier for me at the time, because while mum wasn't taken by notions of what young girls were and weren't supposed to do, other young girls were, and “soccer” was seen as a girl's sport at the time. (I'll give you Yanks this, you are very progressive when it comes to women in sport.)

I don't know if she guessed that my tendency to obsess over one thing would align my sights on this new element or not, but if so, she guessed right. I'd still catch wrestling on TV now and then, but it was eat, sleep, and breathe football for young Callie.

Only problem was, while you Yanks might be progressive about women playing soccer, you don't know the sport all that well. Training was a bit of a joke. The coaches saw the game as running around and kicking the ball, so the training consisted of distance running, and kicking the ball. Technique? We dribbled the ball around stationary orange cones. That'd be really bloody useful if I needed to slalom around defenders standing all in a row who don't move any, but that happens less in actual games than you might imagine.

Tackling was discouraged because we might hurt someone, heading training was the coach gently tossing the ball right at our heads and getting us to hit it back, and positioning and movement were ignored completely. Even at age 7, I could see I wasn't getting as much out of it as I'd hoped. I quizzed my brother, as football-mad as I, and he reported the same.

I talked to my father about it, and he asked if I enjoyed playing. I admitted that I did, and he said I should stick with it. In another year, I'd be in a new age group with different programs, and maybe the training there would be better, and meanwhile, as long as I liked to play, what did the rest matter?

It would be one of the last conversations we'd have.

To Be Continued

[RedEnforcer]

I'm really enjoying it so far. Sounds like we're about the same age so it's a bit of a trip down memory lane.

[Callista]

It's perhaps a bit of an indulgence on my part to phrase it that way, but then I can't remember the actual last conversation we had. It was a few weeks later, and the content of it would have been mundane morning minutiae, the conclusion of which was me racing out the front door to make the school bus.

That afternoon, around 1:30, I was asked to go to the principal's office. I remember thinking that one of my classmates must have grassed me up as the one who pulled Karen Connolly's hair at recess, but then when I arrived, I saw my brother waiting, looking as confused as I felt.

Heart attack, they told us. A friend of our mother's took us home in her old beige Pontiac Bonneville. I have absolutely no idea why I remember the car make and model, but I do. It's one of the few things from that day that I do.

The school year was a few weeks away from ending, so our mother arranged for us to stay home those last few weeks. Our grades were both excellent, and my mother obtained some curricula from our teachers and promised to ensure that we were taught them herself. She would give us some reading over those weeks, but that was it.

Looking back, I think she just wanted us home, with her.

I didn't learn a lot of what went on with her until later, but she'd been going for a doctorate in political science. She was already having great difficulty with her dissertation, and after dad died, she had no stomach for academia any more.

In August of that year, she put the three of us in the car and we drove from Illinois to California in ten days, (admittedly two of those days were spent on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, I seem to recall some comment from mum about her “having earned it” in the course of the drive.)

We finally did arrive, however. And only a week before all of our stuff! I don't know how it is that a moving truck can be a week late, but it was. Not having changes of clothes was the immediate issue, though sharing a room entirely bare of ought but a couple of mattresses and a single lamp with my brother wasn't much fun either.

Eventually, though, it arrived, and we got to start putting some semblance of a life in order. Just one problem, though. Dad's tapes never arrived. My brother and I went from being two kids who would just as soon do as little of the moving work as we could get away with into a cohesive and efficient unpacking machine, all in search of those tapes, but they weren't in any of boxes.

Eventually concluding that the moving company had lost the box, we immediately set upon mum to try to contact them and retrieve them. She was visibly annoyed by this, but said she'd do it later. “Later” ended up being a time when neither of us were there, something I failed to notice but my brother didn't. Mum reported that the movers checked there truck, but that there were no boxes of tapes in the truck that had carried our goods. I was on the verge of tears. My brother...looked angry.

Later, in our room, he said, “She's chucked them.”

“What?” I asked.

“Dad's tapes. She never liked them. She chucked them in a bin before we left.”

“I'll tell her you said that,” I said. I don't know why I said that. I think I really didn't want it to be true.

“Go ahead,” my brother shot back. “See what she says. You know how she fumbles when she tries to lie.” I didn't know any such thing, but it would be years before I'd even mention the tapes to either one of them. Maybe he was right, maybe he wasn't, but if he was, I don't think I wanted to know.

End Chapter One

[Callista]

Chapter Two

It's one of the easiest things in the world to view one's early childhood through rose-coloured spectacles, but it really felt like a corner had been turned in our family, and not for the better. Mum was always working, or so it seemed. My brother grew restive, then rebellious. Mum quickly learned that if she wanted to dissuade him from a particular action, she was better off evidencing apathy, or even approval, then attempting to forbid him from doing so.

Myself, I turned inward. Being the quiet one in the family made things so much easier. Soccer, (and it was easier to call it that, even though in the stubborn centre of my mind, I still called it football, as dad taught me to,) stayed my outlet, and the level of training was steadily improving. I still watched wrestling, though it felt like American wrestling just wasn't quite the same.

When my brother left home for college, things got a bit simpler, at least for me. We'd moved, and I had a room to myself for a few years now, (thank all the deities in the heavens,) but now, without the air of simmering tension between my brother and my mother, it was quieter, more serene. In that serenity, it felt like I was finding myself, as well.

I'd hit my full height of 5'11, and I'd hit my full development in football, as well. The height was an asset in defence, (I played centre-back,) but I lacked pace, and while I was tall, I was a bit slight, so wasn't able to be a physical force in defence. Worse yet, my technical ability was average at best. Maybe if I'd had better training when younger, my technique might have been better, but at this point I felt like I'd plateaued. At that point, the games weren't fun any more, so after my sophomore year, I didn't join the team again.

I stopped by the office of the coach of the school's wrestling team to ask about a girl wrestling. He said he'd allow it, but he hoped I wouldn't. Curious, I asked why. He said, “Because it'll be a pain in the ass for me, and you won't enjoy it much either.”

He followed this by asking “You weigh about one-thirty, I'm guessing?” It was close enough, and I nodded. He explained, “When you wrestle other girls, and there won't be many, you'll be outmatched. They'll be more compact and probably stronger to be in your weight class. The rest of the time, you'll be wrestling boys, and most of the boys in your weight class are going to be freshmen. Half of them will trip over themselves freaking out about where they are and aren't touching you, and about half of the rest will be TRYING to grope you.”

He added, “And all of THEM will be more compact, and have more muscle mass as well. The only wins you'll get will be forfeits from boys too embarrassed to get on the mat with you. Now, if you're okay with all of that, and you put in the time and training, that's fine. I'm not gonna be the bad guy, here, and say 'no, girls can't wrestle', but that'll be the way it is.”

“You don't sugar-coat it, do you?” I said sourly.

“Nope. If you don't mind me asking, though, why wrestling? What about that interests you?” I don't know why I bothered, but I told him about my dad and his tapes.  He said, “Well, I'm not going to say I know very much about WWF stuff, but my guess is that you need to be in pretty good shape, especially in terms of cardio. Have you considered track?”

As in most schools, the coaches were PE teachers who split their time between multiple team activities. At my school, the wrestling coach also coached track and field, and he put me onto distance running. It was relatively easy to pick up, football's great for cardio, after all, but as it turned out, I wasn't anything special there, either. The difference though, was that I didn't care.

For one thing, I didn't need to be a stand-out to help the team. Our school hadn't actually had a female runner for the 3200-metre distance before, and they were one leg shy of 800-metre runners for the relay as well. All I had to do was place in the top ten in my events, (and there were rarely much more than ten runners competing in the 2-mile,) and I'd score points at meets.

For another, the fact that I could just run and run and lose myself in the act of putting one foot in front of the other, chasing after that runner's high, it felt like...freedom. Freedom from worrying about test scores and homework and family fights and how I was going to come out to my mum.

...oh, yes, there's that.

Before he left for college, my brother had gotten back into wrestling, and had started spending some of the money he made working buying and trading wrestling tapes. Naturally, he made sure to make those tapes available to me, and he also made sure to let mum know he was doing it. I wonder if he was daring her to say something, trying to provoke a fight about the missing tapes, but in any event, she declined the bait.

I think originally he had the idea of rebuilding dad's old library, but then instead of British wrestling, he found himself getting into Japanese wrestling instead. “Puroresu”, he called it. At first I chided him for mocking a stereotype, but he insisted that's what they called it. “Joshi puroresu” was supposedly the name for women's wrestling.

Watching the joshi tapes at that age was a revelation. Separate from the wrestling itself, I found myself admiring more than just moves and techniques. I will decline to describe specifics, as we are talking about an under-18 at the time, but suffice it to say those tapes were enjoyed more than my brother would have guessed (or would have wanted to know about.)

But just because I'd figured something out, doesn't mean I'd figured out what to DO about it. It was frightening, especially since I'd accustomed myself to my “quiet one” role. Speaking up did not come naturally. So I hid it. My passion for sport actually helped me out in that regard, because if you are a girl who likes sports, you WILL be called a lesbian for it. It was a burden we all shared, and a burden shared is a burden lifted.

Other burdens I just endured. I didn't get TOO much attention from boys, (very few high school boys will attempt to date a girl taller than they are, and most of the rest can be thrown off by the lack of sufficiently large tits,) but without dating or dances, a social life is difficult to maintain. I kept my circle small, and accepted the labels of “quiet” and “shy” without complaint.

[RedEnforcer]

I'm completely drawn in. Please, more.

[Callista]

In retrospect, I'm really not sure why I was so petrified. My mother was very liberal, and had expressed support for gay marriage, anti-discrimination laws and such. I don't know if it was the old joke about “would you want your daughter to marry one?” or was it just taking that step of letting someone else know. For half my life, I'd let that “quiet one” status keep things inside. It was a difficult habit to break.

My timing was perhaps less than brilliant as well. A few weeks after my 17th birthday, I'd finally mustered up the courage to talk to her about it. When I got home, I saw her on the phone, saying, “We are NOT finished, here. Do you-” and there was a pause, followed by my mother swearing, (she NEVER swore) and slamming the phone down. Seeing I was there, she said, “You will not BELIEVE what your brother has done now.”

“Oh?” I said, wondering if it might not be perfect timing, hiding my revelation amidst whatever he'd done to infuriate her.

“He's leaving school! Says he already has a job lined up in San Jose.”

“Well,” I said, determined to get this out one way or another, “not to distract you from that, but I've got something to tell you.”

“What is he THINKING?”

“Mum!” I said, getting annoyed. I didn't WANT to be the quiet one. I wanted my voice heard. But of course she was so indignant with my brother that I might not even have been there.

“Is his thinking about his future? What about his NEXT job? He won't have a degree, and then-”

I saw red. I stepped forward, took hold of my mother's shoulders, and screamed at the top of my lungs, “MUM WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT HIM FOR ONE SECOND? I'M TRYING TO COME OUT OF THE FUCKING CLOSET, HERE!!!”

In the lingering silence that followed, I can only say that it was quite clear that she'd heard me. My face reddening rapidly, I let go of her, mumbling, “Not quite how I planned that...”

When she finally found her voice, her response was, “Are you sure?” I'm not sure what I would have said back, only that it would have been screamed, but before I could, she held her hands up and said, “Sorry. Sorry, love. Stupid question. You just...caught me off guard.”

I crossed my arms, pushed back from the brink of rage again but still irritated. “What, normally you're on guard for one of your children telling you they're gay?”

“I almost might have expected it from your brother,” she said. I raised an eyebrow at this. “He's never brought a girl home,” she explained.

“He's never brought a girl home to YOU,” I noted, then bit my lip, instantly regretting saying that. It was entirely true, but it wasn't needed right now. “Look, I don't want to talk about him. First off, are you okay with this?”

My mother nodded fiercely, possibly out of desire to convince herself as much as me, but that she wanted that was positive. “Yes of course! I love you no matter what.” After a pause, “So does this mean YOU have a girl to bring home.”

I felt my face reddening again. “No mum. I'm...not out to anyone else.”

“Are you planning to be?”

That...was a very good question. “I...don't think so. High school is...” something to survive, something to get past, “stressful enough,” was what I actually said. “I'm only there for another year. I think that's for later, for me.”

Not that it entirely worked out that way, but in any event, I was to get pulled into something else completely. You see, my brother's job paid well, and he had spare money for all sorts of things, including tickets to a wrestling show that he'd take his little sister to...

End Chapter Two

[peccavi]

You've not anywhere near a fight yet but you've got people enthralled. It's a great story already.

[Callista]

Chapter Three

For my brother, wrestling was something that reminded him of our father, so while he'd watch WWF/WCW, it wasn't the sort of thing he sought out. Indy wrestling was what captured him. A small crowd and wrestlers who looked like human beings rather than something out of superhero comic books.

The venues were as varied as high school gyms, county fairs, or sometimes even in the company's training gym itself, although those shows stopped after the city found out about them, citing fire codes and zoning laws. It was too bad, too. Those shows were dirt cheap, and between a train ride, a bus, and a mile's walk, I could get to them even when my brother wasn't available.

Going to those meant I had time to talk to folks. The wrestlers, of course, but also the owner, as well as the students. The shows were pretty much just advertising for the wrestling school, which was how the company made money. During the shows, students helped with things like setting up the ring, selling tickets. Sara, one of the training school's first female pupils, admitted to me that they weren't paid for doing that, and they even had to figure out their own transportation. It was just part of “paying your dues.”

Which was the literal truth, as well, as the school charged $5000 plus $20/month for “gym membership.” I don't even know what set my mind on that path, but I was immediately doing maths in my head on what this would entail, financially. I would be turning 18 just before the end of the school year. Theoretically I could start training with a parent's permission sooner, but I knew I'd not get that, so didn't factor that in.

Speaking of school, that was going to be a problem. I'd been accepted at a few universities, but none close enough. My scores were good, but you needed better than “good” to get into Cal, and I didn't even bother trying Stanford. The closest was Santa Cruz, and even if I had a car, trying to drive from there to Hayward a few times a week was going to be too expensive.

Mum would pay for room and board, true, but extras would have to be wheedled, and those would be few and far between. Things like a car, (never mind wrestling school,) were right out. So, I did a bit of research.

And then I lied my fucking arse off.

[Callista]

I pleaded indecision, (which wasn't entirely untrue,) but said I was weighing a more traditional education against trying to study drama and acting, (more than a bit of a stretch,) and that I didn't want to waste her money spending a year at an expensive university if it wasn't what I wanted, (an outright lie. I'm ashamed to admit it now, but at the time I'd have gladly had her spend that money if only I could have seen a way to make it work.)

I picked a local community college ostensibly on the basis of its drama program, noting “Tom Hanks went there!” (True, though I hadn't the faintest idea whether the drama program was any good. I just wanted to take acting classes to try to help play a character and cut promos.) I utterly neglected to mention that that college being located in Hayward, mere miles from the wrestling gym.

That summer, I made a few inquiries at wrestling shows of Roland, the wrestling company's owner, and he said that the five thousand could be paid in monthly installments, though he'd charge interest. A few more pointed inquiries got me a commitment to a suitably low rate on those. (I suspect what that interest rate was could be highly variable depending on how savvy the student in question was.)

Roland was a very odd man. Standing a good half of a foot shorter than me, he must have weighed over twenty stone. He'd tried to make it as a wrestler in his youth, and while his then-trainer admitted his student had a mind for the business, he simply lacked the body.

He'd worked as an accountant until his late 30s, at which point he used the money he'd saved up to found a wrestling company. He was a liar, a cheat, and given to bouts of shocking self-centredness. But I'm not sure there's ever been a successful wrestling promoter that that sentence has not described. And while his company may have been small, it ran, mostly profitably, until the day he died, over 20 years after he founded it. It's not stardom, but it's success in my book.

So, I arranged a part-time job to cover the gym fees, signed up for fall classes, (two thoroughly basic courses in history and literature as well as my “cover” class of drama,) and signed my name to become a student of professional wrestling.

Also, there was more lying. Mum, if not entirely pleased with my school choice, at least pleased I was (supposedly) following a path she could understand, (acting being a fine art, and therefore something she could approve of,) had gifted me her old car, (though I suspect the entirely minimal trade-in value a 1987 Chevrolet Spectrum had in 2000 had something to do with that as well.) It was actually MORE expensive then taking buses and trains, I found, but it meant I could keep both my work uniform, (“Would you like chi, er, fries with that?”) and my training gear with me without needing to lug two duffel bags onto said buses and trains.

That last prompted questioning from mum, who asked why I needed pads for track. “Track?” I said sleepily. Realising I needed to explain this away, I said, more cleverly, “Oh, I'm not doing track any more. I thought I'd try football again.” I was patting myself on the back for that one for weeks.

Meanwhile, I had my training for real, now. They did an “assessment” of you first. Had you do a few lifts, to start. I did al-right with my legs, but my upper body was described as “underdeveloped.” My muttered comment, “heard that since I was thirteen” produced more laughter than I strictly speaking would have liked. After that, they had you run around the block until you couldn't.

The pace the male trainer set for us new students wasn't all that fast, and since my legs were as long as his, this was only a moderately fast jog for me. One by one, the students dropped off, leaving just me and another after about a half hour, at which point the trainer stopped us outside the large warehouse-style door to the gym (which gave the gym it's nickname “the garage”.) Mike, the head trainer, gave me an awfully funny look when we did.

Bumping was what I went onto next. Take a hundred back bumps your first day. Then take five and come back and take a hundred more. Did I mention this was on a mat? The ring was being used for other things. After an hour of this, I could barely force myself to stand. I asked Don, one of the assistant trainers, if I still hadn't gotten it right. Don cheerfully explained, “Oh no, you had it pretty good about the 10th or so bump.”

”Then why the bloody hell-” I started to say, suspecting hazing here.

Don cut me off, “You HAD it pretty good. The ones you've been doing the last ten minutes have been garbage. And the reason we make you do THAT is because you need to be able to bump just as well at the end of a match, when you're beat-up and tired, as you do at the beginning. Any more questions?” I shut my mouth and shook my head. “Good.”

[Callista]

Possibly the best thing about that ugly, blocky hatchback, was that the car could (usually) get me to those shows that were farther away. Sara, who had as old and awful a car as I did, would carpool with me, with each of us taking turns subjecting our decaying vehicles to the stresses of driving and California traffic, though sometimes whose turn it was was dictated not by order but by whomever's car WASN'T in the shop at the time, as often as not waiting for us to scrounge up the money to get it fixed as for the actual repairs.

We'd show up, help put up the ring and set up the chairs, and then we'd generally be assigned to the ticket desk under the theory that “pretty girls sell tickets.” I didn't mind because sitting with Sara was a treat. She was as Joshi-mad as I was. We'd talk over matches we'd seen, swap tapes we'd acquired, talk ring psychology that was way over our heads, not that we knew it at the time.

Being a mainstay in Japan was her top ambition. I asked her about WWF or WCW, and she said, “WCW will be dead in a year or two. As for WWF, given how they treat women, no, never.” Well, she was half right. “Anyway, I'm not pretty enough for them.” I perhaps disagreed a bit TOO vehemently there, (I could have easily let myself crush on her if she weren't entirely straight,) but she said, “you're more their type. Skinny.” I probably looked confused at that, because 'skinny' was not the shared physical characteristic about women in WWE I most noticed. “Well, of course you'd have to get your tits done,” Sara said, acknowledging that.

It was exhausting, but I was managing...or so I thought. My fall quarter grades came in and they were...not to my usual standard. There were only so many hours in the week. I was at the gym twenty, I was working twenty, and school would take me thirty. That would just work, albeit without much of a social life, but it ignored the transportation time between all of these things. And, being eighteen, I wasn't entirely willing to totally forgo that social life.

In the end, there weren't ENOUGH hours in the week. I wasn't willing to cut time from training, I couldn't afford to cut time from work, (that paid for the training!) so the only thing left was school. I'd thought I could coast there, but even in drama class, there was homework and study required, and that wasn't getting done.

Mum was unhappy, but I barely cared. It was...a response she wasn't used to. My brother would yell back. I half-assed some excuses and then went up into my room. It turned out, it got her suspicious as well. Unbeknownst to me, of course.

There were also the bumps and bruises. I tried to play them off as football-related, but after the second black eye, I'd later learn mum wasn't buying it. I can only imagine what it looked like, to her. My grades were shit, I was coming home with assorted minor injuries, and every few weeks I'd go God-knew-where and come home at some ridiculous hour.

The last straw happened on New Year's Eve, 2000.

[Callista]

Things were tough all around. My grades were looking to be even worse, as I'd signed up for maths and science classes in addition to my drama cover. My boss had suspended me after I'd no-showed again. I'd tried to give him a list of dates I couldn't work because of shows months in advance, but he refused to work with me, saying, “If I let you dictate your schedule like that, I'd have to let everyone do that, then what would we have?”

My reply, “A happy work force?” did not endear me to him further.

It was clear I'd have to start finding other work soon, but there wasn't much in the area, and the further away I got from the schools, the harder it was going to make things. Wrestling training was...tough. I was starting to get past the point where I had to beat myself up quite so much, but learning moves was slower than I'd like. Even Sara had about a stone on me. We had some relatively small men, but not THAT small. I had to spend a large percentage of my time trying to build up upper-body strength, (and I bloody hated lifting weights,) and the results just weren't coming.

I had no interest in steroids, but without the muscle mass to throw folks around. then despite being 5'11, it looked like my offence was going to have to be either aerial or ground-based. I had a better knack for the latter, and while mat wrestling wasn't in fashion in America at that time, there was always Japan.

In any event, I'd hoped the Christmas holiday would do me good. Lack of money would be a concern, but maybe I could sell off some pressies, (or hopefully just get a lot of money in gifts,) and meanwhile, I had a break from work. Even better, the year-end show was built around a tournament, similar to ECWA's Super 8. Less great was that the show was out in the middle of nowhere, but as they say, all part of paying your dues.

And there were a lot of dues, because that night fucking SUCKED. Sara caught a ride with someone else, so I was alone for the whole trip. On the way there, I got a flat tire. I had to wait nearly an hour on the side of the road for the tow truck to arrive. The driver helpfully informed me that the spare he put on shouldn't be driven at more than 50mph, or more than 50 miles.

Roland gave me an earful about being late, which I reeeeaaallly wasn't in the mood for, (put me on the bloody card and I'd never be late!) but I bit my tongue and got to work. As punishment, I got stuck at the merch table for the show, and the venue was this weird sports facility that had a set of bleachers in between me and the ring, so I didn't even get to watch the matches. By the time the ring was broken down and loaded on the truck, a dense valley fog had settled.

Now, there was a shorter way to get home, but I didn't KNOW it, and this was before GPS in your smart phones, so when it came to getting home, I had to go the way I know, which was freeways the whole way, so I was driving faster than I was supposed to on the spare, longer than I was supposed to on the spare, and in awful fog for a good chunk of it. I was a nervous wreck by the time I got home.

Mum being in that same state when I arrived didn't help at all...