How to Wrestle a Girl

by Venita Blackburn

  “It’s bullshit,” Esperanza whispered, “but you can beat that fool without trying.”

  Another of the boys eyed my wrists and hands, then my whole body.

  “I don’t know, man,” he said, “she looks like she could kick a door down.”

  Esperanza cursed and ushered me to the seat. I mentioned that I just wanted my fries and no one listened. I didn’t bother mentioning I was grieving a lost parent and just had surgery on my elbow two months ago. If they didn’t care about food, they wouldn’t care about that. My father believed in sports the way he believed in the weather; they guided our days, and we adjusted our whole lives to the games. Without him I lost my faith in balls and sticks.

  JV Boy’s hand looked relatively clean, but I still didn’t care to touch it, let alone hold it tightly for several seconds or more. I looked up at Esperanza. She was nearly taller than everybody, even the teachers. I wanted to give her my pocket change and take her places and erase all the other heads, even the ladies making the orders in the tiny hot kitchen behind the counter. I wondered if love begins that way, hoping to erase other people’s bodies.

  I grabbed JV Boy’s palm and held it tight.

  “First, we test the grip,” he said.

  I felt him try to move my hand back by the wrist, so I tightened instinctively in resistance. His own hand moved back easily, so I rotated the whole thing so his knuckles faced my chin.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  Someone counted to three. The pressure engaged. He dug his jagged nails into my skin and shook the table a little. My bare elbow on the wood felt grated and stung. Pain, to me, is a portal, an access point to another world, the smallest of places and those infinite in scale. When I broke my arm, I went to the atoms. When I buried my father, I went to the stars. When I came out to my mother, she told me to wash my hair, then I went to the past. It’s the greatest high when your own body is so wrecked you get to leave it for a while. With his hand in that position he had no chance to win. All I had to do was endure the pinch, the pressure, the sting, then pull his arm a little farther out and it was over. I won. The screaming was incredible. The boys, the girls, the little ladies in the kitchen giggled like something extraordinary had happened.

  “She swoll. She swoll!” the boys chanted.

  “Fucking man is what she is,” JV lamented, and demanded a rematch.

  At that last declaration I felt a different kind of hurt, familiar and wicked. I ignored it and the others ignored it, the suggestion that something about my body was not quite right. But there was a hot and sexy bag of fries on the counter with my number on it. I took them and walked away. The skies in Southern California are beautiful in the early evening. The smog ignites in gold and fuchsia. I wasn’t diagnosed as intersex until twelve, more female than male so before that girl was just a good guess. After a few paces I felt I wasn’t alone. Then I wasn’t alone. Esperanza followed me. We said, “Hey,” one after the other.

  It was quiet for a while but not a bad kind. She apologized for making me arm wrestle, but I told her it was fun. She was surprised I wasn’t hurt by what JV had said. There was more of that good quiet. I offered her some fries, meaning my heart, my blood, my future. She declined, said she had already eaten.

  “Who is that lady on your backpack?”

  “What?”

  “On the key chain?”

  “Scully?”

  I had no clue, but turns out the woman was not a Euro-pop superstar but instead an actress named Gillian Anderson, star of The X-Files. All of which I knew nothing about and all of which Esperanza was now determined to explain in full. I liked listening to her talk, her head above me framed in the pink clouds.

  When I first met Esperanza a year ago we were gathering on the softball field for the first practice. The other girls laughed, tossed balls at each other, or scrunched their eyes into the sun for the pain of it. Esperanza walked over to me with an agenda. She looked like she was going to give me a hug or punch me in the mouth. Whatever it was would be too much, and I lost my breath. Instead she just pivoted on her heel and stood next to me, not saying anything at all. The movement of her chest reminded me that I needed to breathe, so I did and thankfully avoided passing out like a dumbass. Before she came over I didn’t realize how scary it was to be there with those strange girls and the ribbons and the rules I barely knew yet of how to pay attention but not stare, how to walk like them and love their walk, how to recognize the pack, be strong but not too strong, be satisfied with stepping aside for boys, how disappointment would be a condition of life, how being a girl can take the air out of our lungs before we have a chance to protest. But with Esperanza suddenly and fiercely at my side for no other reason than it seemed right, I felt claimed. I felt happy.

  After the arm wrestling, Esperanza asked if she could come over to my house. Before my dad died that was normal. He hosted parties for the team. They loved him way more than me. I wanted to tell her that my house wasn’t the same house now, but looked up into the shadows of her eyes and got lost in a stuttering yes. I thought Esperanza and I were going to hang out together, alone at my house, for the first time, and chill (not start fucking at random), just relax without me plugged up to an IV and constipated from surgery after my elbow was shattered by a fastball.

  It was still early in the evening and my house was empty. It was a two-bedroom off Pine with no parking. Esperanza flopped on the couch like it was hers, and I couldn’t help but smile. It had been hard to recognize my house since the funeral and now more so with Esperanza’s whole body in it. It was a nice room, with a faux-suede sectional, warm sunlight, and a checkered rug. Happy people could’ve lived there. I sat on the edge beside her, then sank a little deeper, then back to the edge again. Esperanza laughed.

  “You’re so girly,” she said. “Let me see your laptop.”

  I obeyed. Then we started talking about nipples and I was less nervous. We had for-real nipple talk, the whole science of it after some online videos’ algorithm diverted us too far in one direction. Or we did it to ourselves. After accidentally/on purpose committing twenty-seven minutes to amateur porn, we had vast theories. Tiny nipples always indicate confidence, imminent success, conqueror of huge cocks, summoner of orgasms, with total disregard for the pleasure of anyone but herself. The big tits are shy at first, then wildly dominant to the point of alarm. Still, all of it can change depending on the direction they point. There is no argument against nipples and fate. Esperanza simply declared that I was into tits and asked me for something to drink. I got her sparkling water.

  “Why don’t you like your house?” she asked like a therapist being paid by the hour. I got warm and felt like too much of me had been seen without my permission, as if the truth of my whole life stuffed down deep had been squirming around on the floor this whole time. I told her I don’t like being at home anymore. That wasn’t good enough, so I told her more.

  “I came out to my mom, and she looked at me, looked at my forehead really, looked hard like it was either missing or communicating better than my own voice. Then she looked up even higher and told me to wash my hair. That’s all.”

  Esperanza drank from her can and swallowed with difficulty, then burped unceremoniously and apologized in a whisper. She didn’t ask me about my mother again and just put on some videos of baby elephants being rescued from muddy ditches. It helped.

  The first time I had a wet dream about Esperanza we were on a beach because I thought that’s where people do that kind of thing, sugar themselves with sand and salt, grinding to the rhythm of the waves or some shit. The dream ended like a dropped water balloon, and I had a slightly harder time looking Esperanza in the face for about a day. Then it passed. At the end of the third and fifth wet dreams Esperanza shouldered through my bedroom door in a pantsuit and a roid rage, then shot me in the chest with an FBI standard-issue nine-millimeter.

  After the arm-wrestling night, she came over the next day to take me somewhere. She told me to wear sweats. I th
ought we might go for a run along the beach through the houses we probably wouldn’t ever afford and drop candy wrappers in their flower gardens. Instead, we ended up in the dank back room of a gym/donut shop on Magnolia Ave. doing Brazilian jiujitsu. Magnolia Ave. ropes its way through a business district full of warehouses and multipurpose buildings. The gym could’ve once been anything from an ice-cream storage facility to a craft-beer brewery. An American flag and a flag of the Philippines sagged on the wall high up in the air, photos of Filipino fighters in shiny shorts posed, muscles taut in preparation to do harm for eternity. All along the wall were punching bags—a black one with duct tape, a brand-new red one, and one shaped like the upper half of a Band-Aid-colored man. The gym had to be two stories, a couple thousand square feet, the only enclosed space was a tiny bathroom I smelled right away, a very unventilated fecal aroma, while the rest carried a familiar sweaty scent, staleness, a faint lemon-scented disinfectant, and something distinctly male. Past lives from previous tenants still haunted the room via boxes piled in the corner, haphazard mats thrown on the floor, and the banners hung up on ropes instead of fastened to the wall. Gouges of paint and plaster from other built-in structures that had been removed cascaded along the wall’s surface as if all of it could be sucked out at any moment and grow something else instead, some other temporary dream. I didn’t feel like working out or sweating or kickboxing. We’d gone off plan, a plan I hadn’t gotten around to verbalizing, of course, but the plan nonetheless.

  This is my cousin Sensei Reyes, Esperanza said.

  Sensei Reyes had fighter coming off him like fog, at least twice our age with a bald head like a raptor in a washed-out blue gi. Esperanza was taller than him by a lot. He had a short neck, short legs, and dense rack-of-beef back. They had the same thick eyebrows, though he was much darker and kind of happier, the way some people always seem to have a song or joke replaying in their heads.

  A woman came out of the hallway, bringing with her the smell of butter, sugar, and her own pleasant fragrance that was everything the room was not. Black hair hung to her ass. A little girl popped from behind with pink frosting splattered down her shirt and around her face, as if she had thrown her whole head into a pile of cupcakes and shaken it. The girl skipped over to the Band-Aid-colored torso punching-bag man and began to climb him.

  “Get down, Ana.”

  The girl protested and frowned for the first time.

  “But I love him,” Ana pleaded.

  The real class began to trickle in. Aging men with youthful hopes of being champion mixed-martial-arts fighters or just not being bullied. They ignored me and Esperanza, as far as I could tell, which felt nice. Two women came in too, one a colorful older lady in peacock yoga pants and the other not. The other woman was so thin and timid that she almost disappeared entirely whenever she turned sideways. Sensei Reyes had us run in circles, taking turns punching the Band-Aid man, which I’m sure he thought was a grand gesture of feminist solidarity. I liked him for it. Then we did some extra weird shit. He made us pair up, get on the ground, and practice untangling our legs from one another while trying to trap the other person. It was confusing as hell. I got paired with the yoga pants lady and thought this was all wrong.

  The coast I knew in Long Beach had soiled baby diapers, needle caps, condoms, and too many seaweed pods to walk on barefoot. It was beautiful like it was supposed to be in pictures far away, but not enough to peel your body out and roll around in. That would be stupid. I didn’t need to be killed in a dream over and over to know that Esperanza was a sexual threat. She ate sherbet, orange, had her phone programmed with start times of cable cartoon-channel season premieres, never had a pet, put lip gloss on right after eating, never ironed her softball uniform, always had tiny crushed bags of chips in her backpack for “emergencies,” liked to put me in dangerous situations for unspecified reasons, and could possibly be very, very straight just like little Ana and her lover Band-Aid Man.

  “You’re just supposed to use leg,” Sensei Reyes told me. “That comes later.”

  He pulled my hands off the old woman’s knees because I kept trying to reposition her. Esperanza was paired up with the two-dimensional woman while I had to slide my legs along a menopausal white lady’s yoga pants like we were two monstrous crickets wondering what the hell happened to the day. I wanted to be with Esperanza, though with this much contact I might’ve passed out. The point of it all had vanished. Where there was an intention to knead the afternoon into brilliance, roll it all up into something nice and warm like Christmas lights, I ended up knotted against a strange woman like we were mushed meat and bone all together and still by ourselves.

  And then Esperanza was gone completely. I didn’t know it the first day. She didn’t text me that day and didn’t show up to school or jiujitsu. The absence hurt. I was paired up with Noemi. Turns out the mousy timid woman who seemed dangerous as a lukewarm glass of water could put a submission hold on you that would lift your ghost to the ceiling. I remembered a party at my house with the team. No parents, no rules, just thin walls between us and the next town house, so everybody kept it reasonable. We were athletes and really good and had practice in the morning, so no one got that high. Instead, we watched porn. Watching porn with softball players is like watching a horror movie or a documentary. Most of them looked at it like they were reading an instruction manual, the rest of us were mortified at the human species as a whole. We sought out the most absurd videos that had the best user approval rating, but ultimately no matter the context of the video, eventually a penis of substantial girth went into a neat and pulsing vagina. I knew that experience would never be me, how my own body seemed too far away from the veiny dicks or carefully folded labia. The moment before the sex when the pair still talked, still had a way in or out and still considered their future, I felt an almost-arousal, my underwear sliding against me, my body wakening real and firm as a knuckle. Then it went away. The videos clicked on and on from hairy to waxed, to messy in a controlled way then not a controlled way, to artificial sound effects of liquid sloshing, to a total absence of faces and wrists and knees, leaving nothing but sections of bodies carved out for the thrum of feeling they provided without the troubling business of life before or after that singular moment. I felt sorry for everyone involved.

  When Esperanza was gone for a week, three other guys came in to jiujitsu class, all of them teenagers like me and Esperanza, but not at all like me and Esperanza. I recognized their faces but never spoke to them or knew their names. One had adenoids and a whole lot to say even though he couldn’t breathe through his nose. Another had a skin condition that caused a kind of moldy crust to form at his joints. The last one was big, musky, queer, and would become my favorite. It was the saddest bunch of losers.

  They smelled like boys, meaning they smelled like wet puppies—metallic and peppery, with a dash of mildew. They weren’t like me and Esperanza at all. We had hard shoulders and jaws. We did the exercises as if they would never end because that’s what we were used to, practice had no final count. Everything began again and again to tear down our muscles for them to rebuild. The class had to run around the building four times before we could start. I ran full-out for five minutes and lapped them all twice. I thought my heart would explode when I finally stopped. When it didn’t I just laughed. No one else laughed even though it was funny to be so alive just then. They were afraid of me. I liked it. Sensei looked at me when he announced a tournament with the wave of a black-and-white flyer. I just stretched and tried not to think about her. Adenoids asked me what kind of stretches I was doing, and if I was sure that would be good for jiujitsu. I told him any stretch is a good stretch, and the words came out so smooth and convincing it should’ve been etched on a rock and made a religion. He nodded and imitated my movement; then they all did. I had never experienced anything like it. They weren’t used to winning, and I could tell. The softball team were champions (near-champions, at least). We’d gone to regionals every year. I felt like this bu
nch would never make it past a certificate of participation. The thing I knew for sure was I could do anything I wanted here.

  The next day, still no Esperanza. I thought she was dead. She’s dead. She died. Died. Died. Dead and done, I told myself. I’d rather her be alive than dead, but dead rather than an asshole. Sensei paired me up with Reginald, the big softy, and left the dojo for a while. When he came back in, he screamed.

  “It’s not football!”

  I’d been taking turns shoulder-ramming all three of the losers one at a time. Reginald was fun to push. He looked jiggly but was pretty solid and giggled a lot if I grabbed him by the man tit.

  “She cheats, Mr. Sensei,” Reginald panted. “Nips are off-limits.”

  “I don’t care about your breasts.”

  Sensei Reyes turned red at his own words, at the reality of his new students, but kept talking without a quiver in his aging voice. Adenoids fell on his ass in silent laughter, not recovering in time to get any other instructions. I was small here, and it felt strange not to have the most powerful legs and arms. I didn’t know if I liked that yet or if it was worth the missed after-school pizza comas at home.

  “Get in bottom position.”

  Reginald obeyed, fake-wincing at pain in his left tit. Sensei took top position behind and said, “This is good,” his two hands held together like the logo of a youth center. Even though Reginald was a buffalo, I could still rotate him around with some effort. He, however, seemed completely shocked that he could not pin me with ease. I had no idea what was legal or illegal, technique or flight response. Reginald yelled that I was cheating again. Sensei told him to shut up and fight. The tone was familiar to me now, and I knew exactly where I was again. Sensei wasn’t red anymore, never left during warm-ups because something new had sprouted, and in that moment he sensed glory was not just possible but likely.

  After practice my muscles shook and my skin felt rubbed raw like paper under an eraser. It was good. Then Adenoids asked me if I was gay and if I had a dick. I hit him in the throat. Reginald fell down ass-first laughing, but I helped Adenoids get on his feet anyway. That was pretty much how we said hello and goodbye. We were cool.