It also made me think of my first wrestling match. I say "first" as if there were many, but because there were a bunch of guys on my high school team in my weight class, I was never good enough to get a match during meets and would have to wait for the county-wide tournaments to compete, so I only wrestled maybe five people in two years.
I was fifteen years old and 134 pounds, which was kind of a lie. I think I am and have always been 137 pounds, but because there were no female coaches, Coach Ed Hart (coach to the stars! Dave (R.I.P.) and Mark Schultz are from Palo Alto and wrestled for my high school) would send me into the PE office in the girls' locker room alone to strip naked, weigh myself, and report my weight. It was the honor system, and I always lied, but it didn't really matter, because whether I was wrestling 140 pound guys or 135 pound guys I was still going to get my ass beat.
(Dave Schultz, Olympic champ from Palo Alto, not long before he was murdered by the psychopathic DuPont heir who shot him in front of his DuPont-owned house.)
Actually, I didn't do this alone - the other girl on the team, who also wrestled at 135, who eventually became the epic love of my young insensate life, would also lie. Maybe she wasn't lying, she did seem to have hollower bones than me - but how is it possible that the two girls sent off to weigh themselves always weighed exactly 134.99 pounds? Once I successfully lost four pounds to make weight, but I think only a pound or two of this can be attributable to the running around in circles with plastic bags on/spitting saliva into the water fountain and the rest was probably just the difference between weighing myself with clothes and then without.
Anyway, we are now in October 1995. I am fifteen and am joining wrestling team because of a very attractive "Come Tryout for Wrestling!" poster that someone in the main office has posted to a kiosk on campus and because my friend Olivia, a spry girl thirty times more athletic than me, wants to give it a shot. I last longer than Olivia but we both eventually get boyfriends off the wrestling team so it is not a complete bust for her. I am a terrible wrestler, not just because my muscles are inflexible and sheathed in fat - I imagine that my muscles don't look like bands of fiber, but muscle fibers alternating with fat globules, like a digital sequence of 1's and 0's - but also because I think of any excuses I can not to go to practice (I have woman troubles twice a month, I sprain things) and when I go to practice I just lay on top of Kyla and we pretend to apply and struggle out of whizzers but put in only about 18-36% effort to do so.
I am basically a lazy pud. Wrestling helps me develop a lifelong dismorphic vision of my body as a shredded green monster even though I am still only 137 pounds - a 210 pound, 6' tighthead prop on the rugby team (whose name began with a "Z") taps my head with her own four years later and I collapse into a dream of stars and atmospheric pinging, and I still manage to hold onto the belief that I am the strongest, toughest woman to have lived since Teddy Roosevelt. During practice we do push-ups, then run around the wrestling mat, then fall down in unison, then do more push-ups. We do push-up plustorials - ten, then nine, then eight, etc.
Fifteen minutes are devoted to our neck muscles alone. Lift your head off the ground. Set it back down. Lift. Down. Lift - hold - down. The boys on the team have no necks, just parabolic domes verticed at the uppermost point on their headgears. In fact, when state-qualifying 190 pound wrestler Pavel Gonzalez, whose upper body looks like the Hagia Sophia, is tragically ejected from an SUV tumbling down 101 South the day after prom (these things do happen) the doctors attribute his miraculous survival - his neck is literally broken but his spinal cord was not severed - to the musclature around his head and he returns walking to school mere days later with a neck brace - his unlucky girlfriend Katie Conway spends several weeks in a coma and fourteen months recovering, entering Chico State a year later than planned.
Anyway, it is with two weeks of this training that I enter my first match. Someone drives me in the back of a baby blue sedan to Kennedy High School, across the Dumbarton Bridge in Fremont. The Kennedy team practices in a big quonset hut next to the parking lot, which signals to the affluent boys and girl of Palo Alto High School that we are messing with kids tougher than us. I am matched against a boy wearing a red singlet and Asics shoes. I am wearing green sweatpants and a SCVAL Championships t-shirt from the spring season, which I spend spinning in a circle on the track throwing discii a paltry hundred feet or so, and Asics shoes. The referee entreats us to shake hands. We do. (I remember very clearly that his hands were cold and wet, whereas mine were just cold.) He blows a whistle.
Then I am on my back and the match is over. It takes the boy in the red singlet three seconds to do a double-leg shoot and a takedown and pin me. It is not enough time for me to do anything except wonder how much better I would have fared if I had applied myself to the neck exercises more diligently.
Twenty minutes later we get back in the baby blue sedan and drive back home over the bridge.
(These are the other matches I can remember: (1) against a floppy fish who was even fatter than I was, whom I beat; (2) against a wide-shouldered boy who pulled my right arm over my chest hard enough to tear my rhomboid muscle a little bit, who won by decision; (3) against a boy during a Valentine's day tournament, he pinned me in the third round but not before I accidentally peed a little bit into my singlet (what can you do?); (4) against a girl who I beat but was too misogynist to consider a victory, but we were pretty evenly matched.)
I'm bored and am bored of writing about this now. What I would really like to do is kick my brother Richard, who is a fecalith, in the nuts. Ta for now!
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