Man is meat. So said one of the broken wrestlers who taught Dom to bump and run the ropes in a drop-ceiling gym spitting distance from the Mason-Dixon. As a kid in a business that ate its young, Dom was used to shit advice. That line stood apart.
There were nights, especially after Dom had taken Pilar from their mother, when he tried to parse why it stuck with him—why he spit it through his teeth on the bench, toasted no one with it before downing a shot, mouthed it while he lay on the floor and watched his kid sister flop herself to sleep on their trash-day futon. He wanted to make it smart, to make it more profound than where it came from. Man is meat. He can be cut. He can be cooked, chewed, and swallowed.
On the East Coast’s independent wrestling circuit, a loose network of promotions busting chops for pocket change, Dom was a heel. His job was to stay big and act mean. And lose. Heels did the heavy lifting. They blocked the matches. They tuned the marks. The more heat Dom could spark, the brighter the spotlight on the baby faces.
Though his bouts were theater, the risks were real. Dom’s day-to-day was managing that risk, calculating when a dangerous maneuver was necessary to get the pop he wanted. Even in a routine match, spines could snap. A pound of pressure could collapse a windpipe. It had happened to better wrestlers. It happened to guys with necks as thick as tree trunks. Every wrestler had only so many rolls of the dice.
From the entry gates, the Sumter County Freedom Festival was tents, flags, trailer pop-ups fringed with neon, and all things sugar and grease. A whiff of fry oil reminded Dom of how hungry he was. The place was aggressively pastel. Some festivalgoers had parked themselves under shade, closing their eyes to rest them. Even the ground, a once-turfed lot flattened to hay, reflected the sun with a vengeance.
Aside from a few permanent show buildings and restrooms, the fairgrounds were wide open to the blazing Midlands sky. The place was packed. Braised skin pulled as taut as the tents. Tattoos of every shape on every possible surface, with no offense neglected. Dom didn’t take ten steps into the crowd before seeing people in all stages of consciousness—some comatose and cooking in the sunlight, others grinding away to the bass thumping from a music stage.
“I’m gonna get a sno-cone,” Pilar said.
“Why?” Dom asked.
“Because I’m melting. And sno-cones are delicious.”
Dom gave her a look. She was punching at her phone.
“So much for rare and appropriate cheats,” he said.
Her thumbs tapped with a pianist’s flourish. “This is rare. Can you even imagine a ball of ice on a day like this? Miracle of science.”
“You can’t out-train a bad diet.”
“Jeez, coach. Ease up. You nervous or something? You’re sweating buckets.”
“You’d listen to a real coach,” Dom said.
“You know me so well, bro. I love taking orders.”
Pilar elbowed Dom and skipped ahead, eyeing the endless line of food trailers. Dom’s career had brought them to the South. He was working with Mid-Coast Championship Wrestling, an indie outside Charlotte with a respectable draw, usually a couple of hundred per show. Main stage was the Hangar, a repurposed maintenance building on an old airstrip outside the 485 beltway. When Dom wrestled the Hangar, he’d loiter until curtain to scrounge leftovers from the food trucks parked outside. Pilar had sworn off heavy meats as she ramped up her training. Any money Dom saved on free meals meant his sister could get more creative at the grocery. Fresh out of high school, she had a sharper look and a straighter shot at the top than Dom ever had.
Several bookers had already inquired about the young Contreras sister. But Dom was determined not to feed Pilar to these salivating men. He hoped Bonnie Blue would give her a look. After the death of her longtime partner, Bonnie was now in control of MCCW. The sleazy showmen of the Southeast would have sold Pilar’s ring time with implicit demands for certain private performances. Bonnie was different—the rare woman in a sea of bullies and louts. She was cold and hard and hungry. She could boost Pilar to stardom.
Pilar rode shotgun to Dom’s summer gigs. It was worth cutting into her training time. The gym, much as it could build muscle, could never prepare Pilar for the lifestyle. The road was hard. No breaks, no offseason. To make a real living, to be able to afford the basics—and build a nest egg for the inevitable injury—a wrestler had to be on the road three hundred days a year. This meant long nights down dark stretches, joints aching from the pain of a half-dozen weekly matches. At least Pilar could fit into Dom’s Civic, still going strong after two hundred thousand miles and modifications that transformed it into the world’s most pitiful RV. Dom’s head had worn a bald patch into the driver’s-side canopy. Every pothole posed a serious threat.
MCCW ran satellite shows in partnership with smaller promotions across the Carolinas. Dom leaned hard on these for extra cash and to keep sharp in case an opportunity rambled down the I-95 corridor. At the Freedom Fest, Dom was booked to wrestle a satellite show as, once again, Hack Barlow. His lumberjack gimmick had drawn decently in the Ohio Valley before fizzling and forcing him to move south. In indie wrestling, if you weren’t climbing, someone else was bound to use your neck as a stepping stool. Dom had dropped forty pounds and was planning on distancing himself from the burly Barlow in favor of a sleeker and more maintenance-friendly frame. Who he would become was an unanswered question. His old jeans and flannel hung off him as if he were a kid who’d made a Halloween costume from his dad’s clothes.
When a community celebrated “freedom” in the Carolinas, it was typically code for “firearms.” But this festival wasn’t like the mash-ups of fair and trade show and Second Amendment circle-jerk that Dom was used to. The first sign was the leather, any trace of it much too much as the temperature climbed. Armbands, spiked collars, chaps, leashes, hoods, corsets, and, unbelievably, full-body suits. All this amid Stars-and-Bars types browsing cases of assault weapons, slurping from tall boys as they meandered from tent to tent. Outside a doughnut truck, a middle-aged woman fingered the trigger of an Airsoft replica Glock. Nearby, a fuzzy-lipped teenager read the fine print on a roll of flavored condoms. At a booth crammed with obscene trinkets, a man in a striped polo and salmon-colored shorts squeezed a dab of clear liquid onto his index finger, thoughtfully rubbed it with his thumb, and sniffed.
“Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been on the road,” Dom said. “You’ve never seen everything.”
Pilar wedged her phone into a front pocket of her jean shorts. Half the screen stuck out over her waist and the hem of her bright green tank top. She wagged a finger at her brother. “You love this, don’t you? Maybe we’ve found your kink. El fetiche de Domingo. Wait. It is fetiche, right? Fetiz? Fetrices?”
“I have no idea,” Dom said.
Pilar scrunched her face. “Well, we should do some shopping. You’d look good in this stuff. Are you a leather or spandex man?”
“You don’t know? I thought we were close, Pilar.”
“Shut up. I’m serious. We could build a new character for you right here on the cheap—cowboy, sergeant, gun nut.”
A man wearing a beret and a bandolier walked by sucking a camo-colored pacifier. “I’ll think about it,” Dom said.
“You have to seize the opportunity. Trust your gut.”
“Right. Why would I think about the most important decision of my career?”
“Just saying—both of us should be making moves. In fact, why don’t you talk to the booker and get me on the card? Preview of coming attractions. They can pay me in sno-cones.”
She was so eager, Dom thought. He never snickered. Plenty of the old boys would have—men whose hulking bodies were like muscle cars with moldy leather interiors. Every greenhorn in the business fought with a chip on their shoulder. Few made it far. There was no way to tell where Pilar’s enthusiasm would lead. Wrestling was changing. More women were climbing into stardom. The business was filthy with men waiting to pounce on those who would stop at nothing to get there.
“You only get one debut,” Dom said. It was a line he’d used before.
Pilar drew her eyes to the sun and let them bake for a second before she pried out her phone and started tapping. “Service is so bad here,” she said.
“When you booked?”
“Five.”
“Heat of the day. Super. I’m gonna browse around for you.” “I’ll save you a seat,” Dom said as the cool blue of an ice cream trailer drew her away. A man wearing black and purple vinyl crossed with hot-pink zippers shouldered past her.
“Dom the Dominatrix!” she called out.
“No!” Dom replied.
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From Kayfabe by Chris Koslowski. Used with permission of the publisher, McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2024 by Chris Koslowski.
