The Wrestler by Elizabeth Wenger

In the high school wrestling gym, it never seemed there were locker rooms. There were bodies. Boys with shirts off or shirts on. Boys with sweatpants and slippery torsos peeking out over elastic bands. Or with singlets tight against the bulge of their jockstraps. There were bodies. Sitting, standing, touching, bodies, at various levels of exhaustion. There was sweating. There was always sweating. 

You never realize how much effort is expended in the grappling of a wrestling match. From the outside, it never looks like they’re doing much. They seize each other’s deltoids, biceps, swelling quadriceps, and freeze. They lock up with their foreheads touching. And you’re sitting there wondering when the hell they’re going to do something. And then they’ll shift a bit more, knot their bodies together, closer, and they’ll stay there, stationary for a few more moments. This goes on in fits until someone is on the ground, pinned down, exhausted. When the round’s over you see them breathing heavy, coated with a thin, glistening sheen of sweat. The exertion of muscle on muscle. Dripping down the bridge of a nose, beading on shifting shoulders, sweat. Humidity. Bodies like walking climate systems—rainforests in human form. Huge, sweeping. 

*

This is not an essay I want to write. Nor is it, most likely, an essay you want to read. In any case, this is an essay about shame. But where to start?

*

Mia’s hands were always sweaty. Unusually so. Her fingers were long and slender. Her lips were plump. Her eyes, kind. 

We’d known each other since middle school in the peripheral way of classmates with little in common but place of enrollment. We didn’t get close until I ended up the athletic trainer for the wrestling team. I was supposed to wrap the wrestlers’ fingers and ankles. Ice down their bodies after a grueling round. Massage the strains in their sore muscles.

Mia was the manager. Her boyfriend, Liam, was a wrestler. Best in state. Short with a thick neck. Legs like a bull’s. Muscles roped around his bones so perfectly, he’d make Michelangelo’s David sigh. He was Serious About The Sport. His height was not a hindrance, but often an asset in the matches, allowing him to expertly roll out of an opponent’s grasp and execute each move with swift precision. He was Christian. So was she. They fucked, but like good Christians, were quiet about it. 

He loved God and liked to call the other boys faggot and pussy. He’d spit the words out his mouth like watermelon seeds. He liked being a Man. He liked knowing he was good at being a Man. He liked getting awards for wrestling because they were reminders to everyone of how good he was at being a Man. 

I saw him cry once after a bad round. Or maybe he didn’t cry, just did the thing men do when they are upset, but worried their words might be flung back at them: he stormed off, stoic, red in the face. Angry, but not a goddamn pussy. 

*

My friend says, “We are not born ashamed.” So I wonder, naturally, when do we become it? 

For answers, I could turn to philosophy, psychology, sociology or any number of fields that confront shame in that circuitous academic way. I could name the Other. I could speak about mirrors, about the stress of crowds, and the anxiety of eyes meeting bodies. The pressures of perception—or rather, of being perceived. I could talk about the biblical roots of shame. I could pick it apart etymologically. This is all to say, I could turn shame into an abstraction. In this way it would become a distant concept I could study and prod. I’d never have to really talk about it. About my shame. 

*

Mia and I got along. She thought I was funny. I was. I had to be, especially in that wrestling room. I was a queer Jew in the Bible Belt, bookish, clumsy, and strange. I had to laugh. Would do it often, nervously, as if the huffs of my ha’s would pierce through the heat of that gym.

And I liked making Mia laugh. 

She had this way of doing it. We’d be sitting there and I’d tell a joke, and it would take a second for her to understand that it was a joke, that it was okay to laugh. Then she’d get it, and she would start with this puh- sound and then smile. And her lips would flip upward, and her cheeks would round out, and she’d let out this warm, kind giggle. Then she’d sort of sigh like she’d been waiting to get that out for a while. And I’d feel okay. I’d feel really all right. I’d feel that sigh too. Because if she was laughing, maybe she didn’t mind me. Maybe she even liked me. At the very least, she didn’t feel like I was something to be cautious around. Not a threat. Just another girl disinfecting the mats and spreading bleach with lazy swipes of a mop. Yeah. Mia didn’t mind that I was gay. 

And see, everyone knew by then. The whole school knew, and no one particularly minded, maybe because I had always been funny, a little odd, but in an okay way, and this whole gay thing kind of added to the joke. Something we could all laugh about. 

There were a few who did mind, but even those people didn’t say anything right out most of the time. Liam was one of those, I guess. He gave me these looks sometimes if Mia and I were being too particularly chatty. It was the kind of look one dog gives another when they’re afraid it’s out to steal their bone. Territorial. Sort of watch yourself. Sort of know your place.

I knew my place, and it wasn’t in the wrestling room. Most of the time, Mia and I would do our part with the mats then spend the rest of the hour walking around the high school. When the weather was nice, we’d drive off campus and go on little picnics at a nearby park. Or else, we’d sit waiting for the bell to ring and watch the boys as they’d run around hootin’ n’ hollerin’.

It would get to be Lord of the Flies in there, sort of animal and loose when the coach wasn’t around. Mia and I would play Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show, but without the balcony seats. We just sat on a bench on the edge of the mats and observed the boys’ play and provided commentary.

Of course, this performance wasn’t strictly for Mia and me. They performed to and for each other (perhaps also for themselves). Every flex, every step, carefully blocked across the stage of those wrestling mats. Their friendships formed along careful lines of an unspoken hierarchy. This was facilitated by weight class, but also by skill, which sectioned them into various levels of dominance. And all of this was clear to any viewer. It was a practiced act, based on the scripts of historic masculinity.

Though he wasn’t the biggest, there was an air of royalty about Liam that let you know he was the leader of the pack. You could see it in the respect gleaming in the other wrestlers’ eyes and in his stride that was something like a lion king moving through its pride. A certain confidence and authority hovered in the air around him like a suffocating scent.   

In socialization, as in wrestling, the art is in the body. It is in the eyes and subtle signals sent with an arm crossed, a hand held out, or a shoulder pulled back. A highly physical attention to detail and an intuitive sense of movement are vital. Bodily control, or lack of it, dictates where one ends up: on top or pinned down. 

I didn’t spend much time with boys those days. I still don’t. And if I do, they are usually queer. Straight men always fascinate me as subjects of study, though. That wrestling room, those tournaments, were exhibits of male prowess. I was allowed, even encouraged, to watch and examine their bodies and gestures. I was made to film each match, so I could play it back with the wrestlers who would pause and discuss.

Then, when they were injured, I had to touch them. Their hands and their thighs. I’d inspect, I’d hold, and feel. They were fine specimens, all of them. If not handsome, they were strong, with bodies like those found in anatomy textbooks: developed, symmetrical, each muscle discernible from the next. 

*

Once we were at an out-of-town tournament and, being the only girls, Mia and I were assigned a hotel room to ourselves. And when we went in the room, I saw there was only one bed and I thought, well, fuck. Because it is one thing to be friends with a queer, and to laugh with a queer, and another thing altogether to share a bed with one. And maybe she wasn’t thinking that, but that isn’t the point. The point is, there was a chance that I would make her nervous, because she would feel me there, in bed, and would feel, by extension, my desire, whether or not that desire was actually directed toward her. I wasn’t sure if it was, or maybe I was in denial so deep it had become true.

To be queer—to be queer and say so—is to acknowledge desire. To acknowledge desire, then be defined by it over and over again. To be defined by that desire, even when you are walking down the street. Even when you’re reading a book. To be defined by it even when you’re the furthest thing from it. To be defined by it even when all you want to do is fall asleep. 

And so, I saw that bed and stood there for a moment wondering what to do. But Mia just sat down and laughed. And I felt all right again. 

*

Would you understand me if I said that my shame is ashamed of itself? That as I write this, I am all too aware of the telling and of you reading it. I can see every misstep and imagine you thinking not only that my shame is wrong, but that I’m describing it all wrong too, perhaps even being a bit dramatic. I’m sweating on the keyboard. I’m feeling myself take shape in your eyes. But I’m feeling all wrong. 

* 

You have likely seen a cincture before. They’re these cords that get tied around the gown of a priest. And most people, at least I always did, think of them as decorative or utilitarian. Simply something to hold the gown in place. But this is not the case. They remind the wearer of purity by separating the lower body from the upper, turning concupiscence to chastity. My friend, Peter, an amateur theologian, told me this not long ago. He was chaste and smart. A devout Greek Orthodox Catholic with a vested interest in church history and faith.

We spoke often about desire or, as he would call it, lust. (And words are important here.) We talked endlessly about these feelings as if we could expel them in the form of logical discourse. Discharge in words. Conversations were like confessionals. Once, on a boat, he looked out on the water and told me, regretfully, about a sex dream he had. His legs were crossed, and he was sitting with his head sort of tilted downward. With the water behind him, I pictured him as a recluse on a remote island. He was speaking to God, not to me. It wasn’t a far stretch from what he’d once told me he’d do if he lost everything. Leave. Join a monastery. Take a vow of silence. But he wasn’t a monk; he was a biologist regretting the sin of his subconscious. 

He described what happened in the dream as animal. The woman, like many people in dreams, was anonymous. She was a body, maybe a sort of vessel. He seemed bothered. He did not want to comment on it, just to speak it aloud, to exorcize it. 

How different this was from the way I spoke of sex with queer friends. Openly, loudly, comically, proudly. But even that feels performative. Marching through the streets with rainbows and screaming pride through megaphones as if our volume could cover our fear. Or maybe it is only my fear, my shame…perhaps the collective pronoun is misplaced…from what did I inherit this shame? From whom? Or perhaps from when? 

Isn’t shame sewn into the fabric of history? Shame from the Catholics. Shame from the Puritans, the Jews, and even the Quakers, who call themselves Friends. The great shame of the great fall from God. Born of sin and forever asking forgiveness. 

Before I wrote this, I told myself I was enough evidence for my own feelings. I wanted to write my own shame without using history or religion to explain it. I told myself I wouldn’t abstract it or cite it. But I am. I need to justify and corroborate. And that need to authorize the shame is part of it, too. Perhaps? But more than that… maybe it points back to the connectedness of shame. All the shame of past and present mixing together in all our bodies. And my body is one of these. And I am trying to isolate it and extricate it from this global network. But I cannot contain my shame in me, because it is not contained but connected. My shame is unique, but it is also just like yours. 

*

The night before the tournament, Mia wanted to watch a movie. It was a love story. A very bad one called Adore about two mothers who fall in love with each other’s sons. It is, to reiterate, a terrible movie. One about wrong love. But I cannot help but laugh at it now, this story of unnatural desire. I laugh, too, that we decided to watch the movie in the bathroom. We placed the laptop on top of the toilet with the lid down and sat, fully dressed, in the tub with our legs hanging over the edge. It was all so funny. It felt like a sleepover did when I was a kid and we all had kid bodies. But we weren’t quite kids. We were teens with teen desires. Our teen bodies were touching and we leaned in close to the screen and felt girlish and gay. 

We were about thirty minutes into the movie when a knock came at the door. We blushed and looked at each other, rushing to close the laptop and answer the call. But it is difficult to pull oneself from a dry tub. It took a few moments and another knock came. This time harder. We ran to it and somehow, in our excitement, as we flung the door open, we tripped backwards and ended up tangled on the floor of the hotel room’s entryway, giggling. 

Liam stood in the frame, his body imposing. He loomed over us and glared down with narrowing eyes. “What are you laughing about?”

Mia tried to explain the movie, but couldn’t get the words out clearly enough through her laughter. 

“What are you doing?” he said and reached down for her and pulled her up half-angry. “What are you?” he asked. “Lesbians?” And he threw his look my way.  

I wonder what my face looked like then. I wasn’t laughing anymore. And I wasn’t saying anything, just thinking about the way he said it and how the word echoed and I wanted to reject it. It was so hard around the edges. Accusatory. The syllables fell on me, heavy. I was mad but I stayed silent and felt like a wound. Like something infected. Something that could spread. Like the Staph we mopped up off the wrestling mats. Virulent. 

I got up and retreated to where I couldn’t be seen. Tail between my legs. I heard him muttering to her. Then I heard them kiss. Some soft touching of lips. Then the door opened and closed, and he left. I remember wanting to say something, wanting to make her laugh, wanting to feel alright again. Like we had before. Like kids.

We didn’t finish the movie. We went to bed, and I rolled to the very edge so not even a leg kicked out in sleep could touch her. 

*

I want to say I’m over it all. That I’ve gained confidence in my desire. That I’ve shed all remnants of shame that came with those first years of being out. But I haven’t. This isn’t really a hopeful essay. My shame has not become easier, but it has become commonplace.

I’ve been trying to articulate this shame. But it is hard to articulate something that has become so quotidian. I think of it as a chronic pain. This thing I rub at and medicate. I used to drink a lot. And sometimes that helped, for a bit. Like I could forget my body. Forget the way it is seen. Forget my queerness, my deviant desire. I drank and forgot the sweat spreading on my palms as I approached a woman. I drank and forgot I am a woman. I could be anyone. I drank and became just a thought, a desire, floating through space, trying to make itself known without offending. 

*

And here is something: sometimes I walk, I now realize, like Liam walked. With wide legs. Arms swinging. Playing at confidence. 

Funny how envy can come so close to shame. Funny how they grow out of each other. I think I hated Liam because I liked him. Liked something about what he was, but which I would never be. About how he stood with his back straight, like I never could. And how everywhere he went, he knew he belonged. I liked how even when he was slimy with sweat, no one seemed to mind. 

I liked how Mia looked at him. 

It isn’t that I wanted—that I want—to be him. Or even that I want to have the body of a man. It’s just…there is this thing I read, in an Eileen Myles’s book, Chelsea Girls: “I had always wanted to be a boy. To have women love me, to have extra rooms to go into, to be free.” And that’s just it.

At times, I worry I’ve adopted more than this masculine stride, though. I didn’t stop watching men after I left the wrestling room, but I did it more covertly. Like an actor studying for a role. I wanted to emulate that freedom and confidence. But it was hard to cut out the pieces I liked without pulling the bad with them. I see this in myself and am ashamed. I ask a friend, “Can a gay woman have the male gaze.” We laugh and wonder.

*

Sometimes I dream of escaping this shame. I build walls around me, a little monastic cell. And when I finally seal the last stone and close myself off from the world, maybe my shame burns off into a delicate steam and dissipates and dissolves. There wouldn’t be mirrors in this box. There wouldn’t be light. There wouldn’t be other people. There wouldn’t be eyes. No one to see and no one to be seen by. And there would be nothing wrong with me because in a way, there wouldn’t be a me.

But I must recognize the impossibility of this daydream. Even on the worst days when I shut myself into my room, turn my broken mirror to face the floor, turn off my phone, my lights, I can feel shame follow me in through the door. I can feel it snaking its way in from the blinds. I can pull the sheets up over my head, but it is still there somehow. It is everywhere. I read it on the news. I see it on the TV. I feel it between my fingers. It is hushed or it is screamed. We march and write songs about it. It penetrates us, infects us, kills us. We ask someone to forgive us, or else we try to forgive ourselves. 

This is an essay about shame. It is an essay I’ve been writing for a while now on my skin and in my chest. I am ashamed. Ashamed at my own sensitivity. Ashamed at my poor articulation. But here you are. I am breathing in. This is not an essay I want to write. And not an essay you want to read. I am breathing out.

Elizabeth J. Wenger (wengerwrites.com) is a queer, Oklahoman writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Wenger holds an MFA from Iowa State University. She is a PhD student at the University of Utah and editor-in-chief of the literary journal, Okie Modern