The Ballad of Ethel Bridges
by David P. Barker
She sat in silence outside of the conference room. Her legs were crossed at the ankles. Her hands rested demurely in her lap and her hair was perfectly coiffed. She looked like a woman with all the poise in the world but her insides were bouncing around. She was waiting and waiting was not something that Ethel Bridges did well. Her gray eyes scanned the hallway around her. It was still. She could hear the overworked air conditioner units straining to keep up with the Las Vegas heat even this early. When she was sure the coast was clear, she uncrossed her ankles and breathed a heavy sigh. She reached to her feet and lifted her handbag. Withdrawing a flask, she took a deep drink before resuming the demure look she had just been occupying.
How long is it going to be? She asked herself as she glanced at her watch. The diamond-encrusted watch was her pride and joy. She wore it as often as she could. It had cost her a pretty penny but she had earned a pretty penny by putting her body on the line when other women were making meatloaves and casseroles. When they were attending PTA meetings and baking brownies for the bake sale, she was on the road. It had been two hours. Two long hours. Two hours of sitting out in front of this conference room like she was just a regular person waiting for her husband, but she wasn’t a regular person and she hated having to act like it didn’t bother her.
Her mother had always told her that some people were born patient and some had to become patient. “It doesn’t come naturally to all of us, Etta. Some of us got to work at it.” Her mother would say to her when Ethel was frustrated that something wasn’t going her way. Ethel hated when her mother said that. Why should she work on being patient? What had patient women gotten? Her mother had been patient with her father and Ethel’s daddy had drank himself into a grave before Ethel had started high school. Lots of good that had done them. Ethel cursed silently.
She looked around once more to make sure no one had started down the hallway. They hadn’t. She reached back for her purse and her trusty flask of liquid courage. She took another deep drink and felt the strength coursing through her veins. Strength that her mother would be ashamed of but strength that had fueled her since she was eighteen years old. That was seventeen years and two failed marriages ago. She slipped the flask back into her purse and clutched it to her abdomen. She let her eyes close…
****
The smoke hung in the air. Thick fog blanketed the arena and masked the faces in the crowd. The lights in the building were low and the spotlight was on the ring. Across the ring from Ethel Bridges, Mabel Valens stood. Valens was a carnival pro who had barnstormed around the US and Canada during the first World War back when she was a teenage runaway. That was more than twenty years before and now Valens was something of a relic in the sport. A woman who had survived over twenty years in the sport without ever making it into arenas. Valens had ground out a living taking on men and women in real and fixed fights. She was quick-tempered and did not have the kinds of looks to make her a pinup girl. She was a wrestler and Ethel was nervous. Women hadn’t been allowed to wrestle in arenas before this. Ethel could hear the crowd. They were silent and watching intently. Ethel knew what they were waiting on. These fans wanted to see if the women could bring it. Could they deliver? Would they have the same intensity as the men? Or would they be just a gimmick? A sideshow carnival act was brought into the arena that wouldn’t last. They locked up in the center ring in a snug collar-and-elbow. The trademarked opening match lock up for professional wrestlers. Each had their left arm against the other’s collar, their right arms were bent and locked against the opponent's elbow. The sides of their faces were pressed together and the two women dug the balls of their feet into the canvas to try and muscle the other into position.
“Hear that?” Mabel growled out in a low voice made scratchy by one too many cigarettes and late nights. Ethel listened. The crowd was buzzing. “We’ve got ‘em!” Mabel added. They hadn’t even done anything other than lock up but the intensity of that lock up and the novelty of it being two lady wrestlers doing it? That was enough for the people in Nashville. When Ethel, ever the babyface, managed to power Mabel back into the ropes and gave a clean break, the people applauded. They progressed through their match -- they knew they had fifteen minutes -- which both felt like an eternity and a blink of an eye. Ethel outwrestled Mabel for the early portion of the match, the so-called shine. Mabel had to resort to cheating -- and she did. She was the heel. Her job was to cheat to gain an advantage over the babyface and the twenty years of carnival experience made her an expert in getting the ire of the paying customer. Mabel pulled hair and used her body to position herself just where the official couldn’t quite see. With the referee out of position, she hit Ethel with a closed fist to the eye socket and Ethel sold it like she was hit by a professional boxer. The crowd was livid. They almost came over the barricade. It was a near-riot that was only quelled by Ethel somehow managing to dive at Mabel’s legs. She pulled the veteran’s legs out from under her and then pushed herself through them so that she could use her knees against the underside of Mabel’s. The position allowed her to trap Mabel in a position where she was folded in half, knees by her shoulders, with Ethel’s weight down on her. It was a pinning move, Ethel’s trademark often called the Cajun Clutch (in reference to Ethel’s place of birth). Ethel got the three count and the victory and the riot stopped there.
*****
Ethel’s eyes opened and she looked around her once more. She checked her watch again and sighed. She was not a patient woman. Her lack of patience had always served her well. It had driven her to make lady wrestling more acceptable to the mainstream public and more accessible to the fans who wanted to see it. She had refused to take no for an answer. She, along with her late husband Roger, had called promoters and matchmakers in every town they could think of to get women booked. They had built a stable of women who could appear in a territory and provide fresh matches on a card. It was her unwillingness to wait for the rest of the world to catch up with her that had made her the World Women’s Champion for the past decade.
She stood but did not pace. It would be unseemly for a woman to be pacing outside of a conference room. Instead, she lifted her handbag and walked the few paces to the window that overlooked the city stretched out beneath her. Las Vegas. A city that wrestling promoters loved because it was a city where they were embraced for their excesses. They could be womanizers and whoremongers. They could drink and eat until they were red in the face and bursting at the seams. They could gamble and flaunt the wealth they had made on the backs of men and women like Ethel. She inhaled and held her breath.
She understood the hypocrisy of her dislike of the brotherhood of promoters. They had built their monopolies and solidified their fiefdoms on the labor of shortsighted men willing to sell their bodies for the opportunity to be stars. They made backroom deals to protect each other and ice out the competition. They called all the shots and she hated them for it while at the same time did the same thing. She and her husband Roger had controlled women’s wrestling. They had built their monopoly on it. If you wanted the Women’s Champion, you had to go through them. If you booked women that weren’t affiliated with them, you didn’t get the Women’s Champion again until you paid a penance. They were ruthless. If you were a woman and didn’t work in their stable? Well… Ethel shuddered as she thought of the things she had done to keep her spot.
She checked her watch once more. She wondered how long she would have to wait. She wondered what the result would be. Would it be worth it? Would she have her license to promote? Her husband had been the promoter. It is what made their arrangement worth it. There had never been love between Ethel and Roger. They never even publicly acknowledged their marriage. It was more business arrangement than a love affair. They didn’t live in the same house. They didn’t sleep together. Outside of consummating the relationship, their sexual lives were separate from one another. Roger had disgusted Ethel. He was short and round and ill-groomed. The opposite of her. Roger had never cared about the way he looked because he wielded the power of the pencil and the telephone and that power had made a lot of young women chasing a dream or freedom or running from something bend to his will. Ethel had turned a blind eye to it. She knew what kind of man he was, but the kind of man he was had made her a star. So what kind of woman did that make her? She exhaled the breath she had been holding.
*****
“God damn it, Ethel, shut the door!” Roger yelled at her when she opened the door to his office. She had unintentionally caught him in the middle of an act that polite society would frown upon. She shut the door and counted to ten in her head. How could he be doing it here? In the booking office? In the middle of the day? Couldn’t he do that in a hotel room somewhere on the outskirts of town?
A few minutes later, Roger pulled the door open. His face was red and sweaty and his combover was disheveled. Betty looked embarrassed to be in the room with him and disgusted with what she had participated in. Ethel sympathized to a certain degree. She knew how it had gone down. Roger had promised Betty that she’d be a star. Maybe be the one to replace Ethel on the throne. The same promises he had made to all the girls before Betty that had never come true because, well, Ethel wasn’t willing to lose. Ethel didn’t do jobs. She was the babyface star attraction. She was the Queen of the Ring.
“What was so important you had to come barging in here?” Roger growled out.
Ethel noted the uncomfortable look on Betty’s face.
“When will Stan be here? We need to hit the road if we’re going to make it on time.” Ethel replied coolly. Stan was her driver and part-time lover. She didn’t flaunt her affairs as Roger did, but she had plenty. A rotating cadre of drivers who could keep their mouths shut.
“He’s not here already?” Roger asked exasperated.
“If he was, I’d already be on the road.” Ethel retorted.
“Don’t give me that kind of lip.”
“Don’t say things that get you that kind of lip.”
Suddenly the back of Roger’s hand met Ethel’s face. Ethel didn’t flinch. It wasn’t the first time, but it was going to be the last.
*****
They had never found out what happened to Roger. His car, with his body inside, had been found upturned in a lake. No one was sure how it had happened. Ethel sure as hell wasn’t going to tell. It was a secret she’d take to her grave. A secret that had cost her Stan as well -- not that anyone was looking for him. He was young and flighty and when she said she thought he’d headed to Mexico to chase senoritas, people believed her. Roger’s passing cleared the way for Ethel to finally grab all of the power for herself. For years, Roger had been trying to find a way to supplant Ethel as the World Women’s Champion. He’d introduced a United States Women’s Championship in an attempt to create a new draw, but it had flopped. Fans wanted the World Women’s Title and they wanted Ethel. She had been a regular on the covers of the wrestling publications. She was even featured in many mainstream publications. She’d been on talk shows. She’d been featured on the radio. She was in demand and she made money and that had made her hard to knock off her spot. Plus, they’d never had a woman who could legitimately beat Ethel. The coiffed hair and made-up face and manicured nails could be deceiving. Ethel was as tough as they come.
She checked her watch once more. She had been waiting for too long. She had a feeling that it was going to be bad news. It was a longshot that they were going to let her into their club, but she was hopeful. She’d made all of those men a lot of money. She had drawn for all of them. She had a mind for the business and could make them all a lot of money if they let her in. If they didn’t, surely she would be booked to job, or she would be double-crossed or somehow find her way out of her championship and be replaced. Ethel knew it was the nature of the business, but she wasn’t ready to relinquish her crown just yet.
The door opened and out stepped the Vice President of the Alliance. He was a big man, a former amateur wrestler who had moved from the Great Lakes region down to Texas where he ran Amarillo. Augustus “Gus” Stevens, Sr. The patriarch of the Stevens family and a man that Ethel had always gotten along with. “We’ve reached a decision.” He said in a voice that didn’t fit the gruff exterior he had.
“And?” Ethel asked nervously. She had been waiting her entire adult life for this moment.
Gus held his hat in his hand, “I’m sorry.”
David P. Barker is an American writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. During the day, he teaches middle school. At night, he writes stories exploring a wide variety of genres but consistently comes back to grit-lit. He lives with his wife and five animals.
by David P. Barker
She sat in silence outside of the conference room. Her legs were crossed at the ankles. Her hands rested demurely in her lap and her hair was perfectly coiffed. She looked like a woman with all the poise in the world but her insides were bouncing around. She was waiting and waiting was not something that Ethel Bridges did well. Her gray eyes scanned the hallway around her. It was still. She could hear the overworked air conditioner units straining to keep up with the Las Vegas heat even this early. When she was sure the coast was clear, she uncrossed her ankles and breathed a heavy sigh. She reached to her feet and lifted her handbag. Withdrawing a flask, she took a deep drink before resuming the demure look she had just been occupying.
How long is it going to be? She asked herself as she glanced at her watch. The diamond-encrusted watch was her pride and joy. She wore it as often as she could. It had cost her a pretty penny but she had earned a pretty penny by putting her body on the line when other women were making meatloaves and casseroles. When they were attending PTA meetings and baking brownies for the bake sale, she was on the road. It had been two hours. Two long hours. Two hours of sitting out in front of this conference room like she was just a regular person waiting for her husband, but she wasn’t a regular person and she hated having to act like it didn’t bother her.
Her mother had always told her that some people were born patient and some had to become patient. “It doesn’t come naturally to all of us, Etta. Some of us got to work at it.” Her mother would say to her when Ethel was frustrated that something wasn’t going her way. Ethel hated when her mother said that. Why should she work on being patient? What had patient women gotten? Her mother had been patient with her father and Ethel’s daddy had drank himself into a grave before Ethel had started high school. Lots of good that had done them. Ethel cursed silently.
She looked around once more to make sure no one had started down the hallway. They hadn’t. She reached back for her purse and her trusty flask of liquid courage. She took another deep drink and felt the strength coursing through her veins. Strength that her mother would be ashamed of but strength that had fueled her since she was eighteen years old. That was seventeen years and two failed marriages ago. She slipped the flask back into her purse and clutched it to her abdomen. She let her eyes close…
****
The smoke hung in the air. Thick fog blanketed the arena and masked the faces in the crowd. The lights in the building were low and the spotlight was on the ring. Across the ring from Ethel Bridges, Mabel Valens stood. Valens was a carnival pro who had barnstormed around the US and Canada during the first World War back when she was a teenage runaway. That was more than twenty years before and now Valens was something of a relic in the sport. A woman who had survived over twenty years in the sport without ever making it into arenas. Valens had ground out a living taking on men and women in real and fixed fights. She was quick-tempered and did not have the kinds of looks to make her a pinup girl. She was a wrestler and Ethel was nervous. Women hadn’t been allowed to wrestle in arenas before this. Ethel could hear the crowd. They were silent and watching intently. Ethel knew what they were waiting on. These fans wanted to see if the women could bring it. Could they deliver? Would they have the same intensity as the men? Or would they be just a gimmick? A sideshow carnival act was brought into the arena that wouldn’t last. They locked up in the center ring in a snug collar-and-elbow. The trademarked opening match lock up for professional wrestlers. Each had their left arm against the other’s collar, their right arms were bent and locked against the opponent's elbow. The sides of their faces were pressed together and the two women dug the balls of their feet into the canvas to try and muscle the other into position.
“Hear that?” Mabel growled out in a low voice made scratchy by one too many cigarettes and late nights. Ethel listened. The crowd was buzzing. “We’ve got ‘em!” Mabel added. They hadn’t even done anything other than lock up but the intensity of that lock up and the novelty of it being two lady wrestlers doing it? That was enough for the people in Nashville. When Ethel, ever the babyface, managed to power Mabel back into the ropes and gave a clean break, the people applauded. They progressed through their match -- they knew they had fifteen minutes -- which both felt like an eternity and a blink of an eye. Ethel outwrestled Mabel for the early portion of the match, the so-called shine. Mabel had to resort to cheating -- and she did. She was the heel. Her job was to cheat to gain an advantage over the babyface and the twenty years of carnival experience made her an expert in getting the ire of the paying customer. Mabel pulled hair and used her body to position herself just where the official couldn’t quite see. With the referee out of position, she hit Ethel with a closed fist to the eye socket and Ethel sold it like she was hit by a professional boxer. The crowd was livid. They almost came over the barricade. It was a near-riot that was only quelled by Ethel somehow managing to dive at Mabel’s legs. She pulled the veteran’s legs out from under her and then pushed herself through them so that she could use her knees against the underside of Mabel’s. The position allowed her to trap Mabel in a position where she was folded in half, knees by her shoulders, with Ethel’s weight down on her. It was a pinning move, Ethel’s trademark often called the Cajun Clutch (in reference to Ethel’s place of birth). Ethel got the three count and the victory and the riot stopped there.
*****
Ethel’s eyes opened and she looked around her once more. She checked her watch again and sighed. She was not a patient woman. Her lack of patience had always served her well. It had driven her to make lady wrestling more acceptable to the mainstream public and more accessible to the fans who wanted to see it. She had refused to take no for an answer. She, along with her late husband Roger, had called promoters and matchmakers in every town they could think of to get women booked. They had built a stable of women who could appear in a territory and provide fresh matches on a card. It was her unwillingness to wait for the rest of the world to catch up with her that had made her the World Women’s Champion for the past decade.
She stood but did not pace. It would be unseemly for a woman to be pacing outside of a conference room. Instead, she lifted her handbag and walked the few paces to the window that overlooked the city stretched out beneath her. Las Vegas. A city that wrestling promoters loved because it was a city where they were embraced for their excesses. They could be womanizers and whoremongers. They could drink and eat until they were red in the face and bursting at the seams. They could gamble and flaunt the wealth they had made on the backs of men and women like Ethel. She inhaled and held her breath.
She understood the hypocrisy of her dislike of the brotherhood of promoters. They had built their monopolies and solidified their fiefdoms on the labor of shortsighted men willing to sell their bodies for the opportunity to be stars. They made backroom deals to protect each other and ice out the competition. They called all the shots and she hated them for it while at the same time did the same thing. She and her husband Roger had controlled women’s wrestling. They had built their monopoly on it. If you wanted the Women’s Champion, you had to go through them. If you booked women that weren’t affiliated with them, you didn’t get the Women’s Champion again until you paid a penance. They were ruthless. If you were a woman and didn’t work in their stable? Well… Ethel shuddered as she thought of the things she had done to keep her spot.
She checked her watch once more. She wondered how long she would have to wait. She wondered what the result would be. Would it be worth it? Would she have her license to promote? Her husband had been the promoter. It is what made their arrangement worth it. There had never been love between Ethel and Roger. They never even publicly acknowledged their marriage. It was more business arrangement than a love affair. They didn’t live in the same house. They didn’t sleep together. Outside of consummating the relationship, their sexual lives were separate from one another. Roger had disgusted Ethel. He was short and round and ill-groomed. The opposite of her. Roger had never cared about the way he looked because he wielded the power of the pencil and the telephone and that power had made a lot of young women chasing a dream or freedom or running from something bend to his will. Ethel had turned a blind eye to it. She knew what kind of man he was, but the kind of man he was had made her a star. So what kind of woman did that make her? She exhaled the breath she had been holding.
*****
“God damn it, Ethel, shut the door!” Roger yelled at her when she opened the door to his office. She had unintentionally caught him in the middle of an act that polite society would frown upon. She shut the door and counted to ten in her head. How could he be doing it here? In the booking office? In the middle of the day? Couldn’t he do that in a hotel room somewhere on the outskirts of town?
A few minutes later, Roger pulled the door open. His face was red and sweaty and his combover was disheveled. Betty looked embarrassed to be in the room with him and disgusted with what she had participated in. Ethel sympathized to a certain degree. She knew how it had gone down. Roger had promised Betty that she’d be a star. Maybe be the one to replace Ethel on the throne. The same promises he had made to all the girls before Betty that had never come true because, well, Ethel wasn’t willing to lose. Ethel didn’t do jobs. She was the babyface star attraction. She was the Queen of the Ring.
“What was so important you had to come barging in here?” Roger growled out.
Ethel noted the uncomfortable look on Betty’s face.
“When will Stan be here? We need to hit the road if we’re going to make it on time.” Ethel replied coolly. Stan was her driver and part-time lover. She didn’t flaunt her affairs as Roger did, but she had plenty. A rotating cadre of drivers who could keep their mouths shut.
“He’s not here already?” Roger asked exasperated.
“If he was, I’d already be on the road.” Ethel retorted.
“Don’t give me that kind of lip.”
“Don’t say things that get you that kind of lip.”
Suddenly the back of Roger’s hand met Ethel’s face. Ethel didn’t flinch. It wasn’t the first time, but it was going to be the last.
*****
They had never found out what happened to Roger. His car, with his body inside, had been found upturned in a lake. No one was sure how it had happened. Ethel sure as hell wasn’t going to tell. It was a secret she’d take to her grave. A secret that had cost her Stan as well -- not that anyone was looking for him. He was young and flighty and when she said she thought he’d headed to Mexico to chase senoritas, people believed her. Roger’s passing cleared the way for Ethel to finally grab all of the power for herself. For years, Roger had been trying to find a way to supplant Ethel as the World Women’s Champion. He’d introduced a United States Women’s Championship in an attempt to create a new draw, but it had flopped. Fans wanted the World Women’s Title and they wanted Ethel. She had been a regular on the covers of the wrestling publications. She was even featured in many mainstream publications. She’d been on talk shows. She’d been featured on the radio. She was in demand and she made money and that had made her hard to knock off her spot. Plus, they’d never had a woman who could legitimately beat Ethel. The coiffed hair and made-up face and manicured nails could be deceiving. Ethel was as tough as they come.
She checked her watch once more. She had been waiting for too long. She had a feeling that it was going to be bad news. It was a longshot that they were going to let her into their club, but she was hopeful. She’d made all of those men a lot of money. She had drawn for all of them. She had a mind for the business and could make them all a lot of money if they let her in. If they didn’t, surely she would be booked to job, or she would be double-crossed or somehow find her way out of her championship and be replaced. Ethel knew it was the nature of the business, but she wasn’t ready to relinquish her crown just yet.
The door opened and out stepped the Vice President of the Alliance. He was a big man, a former amateur wrestler who had moved from the Great Lakes region down to Texas where he ran Amarillo. Augustus “Gus” Stevens, Sr. The patriarch of the Stevens family and a man that Ethel had always gotten along with. “We’ve reached a decision.” He said in a voice that didn’t fit the gruff exterior he had.
“And?” Ethel asked nervously. She had been waiting her entire adult life for this moment.
Gus held his hat in his hand, “I’m sorry.”
David P. Barker is an American writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. During the day, he teaches middle school. At night, he writes stories exploring a wide variety of genres but consistently comes back to grit-lit. He lives with his wife and five animals.