The Strange Tutelage Of Truth Martini: Wrestling And The Art Of Identity
By Colette Arrand
Before the possibility of estrogen, my body was an object worth destroying.
I t was 2012 and I was a poet in suburban Detroit, a woman trapped — not as the cliché has it — in the body of a man, but by the limits of my hometown. I had no work, nobody to confide in, and no means of actualizing a transition that I had been thinking of as far back as my memory allowed.
I obsessed over my body. Fat. Masculine. An unstoppable force, hurtling forward into the wide-open space that a white, male body creates for itself.
I was an immovable object, immune to change. So I decided to harness this force.
I decided to send what little money I’d saved to a P.O. box owned by a man named Truth Martini. I decided to become a professional wrestler.
Truth Martini is a lean, whiskey-throated man approaching middle age. His arms feature tributary tattoos of his father and grandfather — desiccated portraits I mistook for Frankenstein’s monster — and his inked chest depicts the crucified Christ. He is also, unquestionably, the best wrestling instructor in the state of Michigan.