Jessie “Bonesaw” Brooks Would Survive the Zombie Apocalypse
As women’s pro-wrestling ramps up, Bonesaw keeps doing what she’s always done: hit hard
It was a tag-team match where the bad guys, as usual, didn’t follow the rules. Jessie “Bonesaw” Brooks fell to the ground after pro-wrestler Mike Law elbowed the back of her head. She was dragged out of the wrestling ring onto the ground by Law’s partner, Marc Hauss, who then met her with a punch to the face. As Bonesaw struggled to stand, a man in the crowd began cheering, “Let’s go, Jessie!”
Brooks tried to step back into the ring, but the referee forced her to watch from the sidelines as Law and Hauss beat up her partner, Joe “Joey B” Bellini until, at last, Joey B rallied long enough to crawl toward Brooks and slap her hand.
Brooks, 28, standing at 5-feet-3-inches with 170 pounds of muscle, slid through the ropes and rushed both men.
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In the minutes before her match, behind a curtain that blocked out none of the shouts and cheers of a different fight, Jessyka Perea paced back and forth. Perea — Brooks’ name out of the ring — huddled in the dark with Hauss, Michael Dumeng (Mike Law’s alter-ego), and Bellini, miming sequences of movements with names like “bump and feed” and “one amigo, two amigo, three amigo” as though they were a dance. She tied and retied the golden sash she wore over her black one-piece wrestler’s uniform. And she laughed at the Three Stooges-like antics of her friends and boyfriend, Kris Levin, the referee of her match. “I keep laughing until the minute I walk out there,” Perea said. As Bonesaw, she almost never smiles.
Like many of her fellow performers, Perea grew up watching professional wrestling on TV and is unable to explain why she wrestles. She started training in 2009 while a student at SUNY Purchase College. She would travel by bus and train three hours to Ring of Honor in Philadelphia, a training school for professional wrestlers, but says the commute didn’t faze her. “It was just something I had to do,” she said.
The 50-some performers and staff who put on the match I saw — the Warriors of Wrestling show at Fun Station USA in Staten Island on Feb. 11 — gathered in the afternoon, while children in nearby rooms were still playing arcade games and Skee-Ball. Wrestlers greeted each other with a mix of hugs, chokes, and fake punches. They often stopped me to ask, “Are you having a good time?” Over two hours, the group pushed the ring onto the basketball court, unfolded chairs, and hung up curtains and lights. By 7 p.m., the changing room was full of people half-in and half-out of street clothes and wrestling costumes, eating pizza, and rubbing on baby oil.
The 300 fans who packed the house suspended their disbelief as they walked through the door. Professional wrestling is long past the days of pretending to be “real,” though the athletic ability needed for stunts such as aerial jumps and slamming throws is as real as in any sport. Jake Gomez, the second-in-command at Warriors of Wrestling, likes to say that their collective obsession is “full-contact improvised theater in the round with an interactive audience.” Five women performed that night.
Women’s professional wrestling has been on a roll. Ronda Rousey took the Ultimate Fighting Championship by storm and helped make women’s fighting mainstream. The WWE, or World Wrestling Entertainment — the gold standard of professional wrestling, featured on TV — rebranded its women into “Superstars,” rather than the long-running “Divas” name, and added more matches and talent. Perea said she has seen this popularity trickle down to the indie level. Now, more women train and perform and more promoters book them for matches, she said. Warriors of Wrestling, the Staten Island indie promotion where Perea often performs, will host its first all-womens show in April.
But women still work to be taken seriously. Perea considers herself lucky to have trained at gyms and performed in promotions where she is treated like “one of the guys.” Not all women have that experience, and Perea believes that has stunted the growth of women in professional wrestling.
Perea does still face the occasional problem. On a recent trip to Las Vegas, the show’s promoters wanted to “see what we can do” and made her and another woman practice before the show. “They were all shocked that we can actually wrestle,” she said.
That skepticism doesn’t just come from inside the sport. Perea made headlines outside of pro-wrestling media last fall when an inspector with the state Athletic Commission almost stopped her match with a man before realizing that state rules actually allow it. She regularly performs with men.
Perea is also part of Valkyrie, an all-women’s promotion in New York City created by Levin, her boyfriend. Valkyrie wrapped up its last show more than a year ago, but not before it proved that women’s wrestling makes good business sense, Levin said: fans want to see women taken seriously and perform. Valkyrie still arranges showcase matches for its members in other shows.
Women can now be “tough” in the ring, like Jessie “Bonesaw” Brooks, or a cheerleader with sex appeal, or a hip hop dancer, like “C-bunny,” said Christina Sarni, her alter ego. Women are no longer confined to the “bra and panties” shows of old. “Now, just like the men’s (division), we have a wide variety of type of girls, so everybody can relate to somebody in the ring,” Sarni said.
Perea wrestles for fun, not money: one performance pays her anywhere between about $40 to $150. She books usually two or three shows a month. Someday soon, she hopes to try out Mixed Martial Arts, but for now she is focusing on pro-wrestling while she finishes school.
She graduates in April from the Swedish Institute in Manhattan with a degree in massage therapy. A useful specialty to have in a hobby unforgiving on the body. Aside from the usual aches and sore muscles, she has had four concussions, but only the fourth was a bad one, she said, after getting dropped on her head. No broken bones yet. Next, Perea wants to pursue a master’s degree in infectious disease and eventually a Ph.D. in epidemiology. An ironic coincidence, she admits, now that she has been battling a case of Lyme disease for the past year. She never considered taking a break from wrestling to recuperate, though she did book fewer shows.
When Perea travels to NYC for school from her home with Levin in South Jersey, she uses the 3-hour commute now to study, sleep, watch professional wrestling videos, or read zombie and infection apocalypse books, the initial spark for her interest in infectious disease. At least, she agreed, laughing when asked, she would have both the physical and scientific skills to fight back and survive in a zombie apocalypse.
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That ferocity was on display in the ring that Saturday night. Perea screamed as she knocked down Law. Two kicks to her stomach only postponed the inevitable as she picked up Law and slammed him onto his back with her signature suplex. She repeated the move three more times on Hauss before Law jumped in and almost got the upper hand.
Then, in kind of dramatic twist common in pro-wrestling, a new masked man taunted Law while his partner entered the ring and hit Law from behind with a baseball bat: revenge from a previous match. This provided Perea the opportunity to throw Law backward one more time and pin him to the ground, while upside down, until the required three-count ended the match.
The zombies don’t stand a chance.
