But even when we got there, it was as if there were a scrim over all we saw. This was our fantasy job, after all. We would let no ugly realities get in the way.

"We want honest fights," spat Tiger Lilly's proprietor, Edwina, a well-groomed pit bull of a woman, tapping her clipboard and stalking the mats. "Absolutely no biting, you hear me? Twenty-five dollars extra for hair-pulling and scratching."

Ellie and I giggled appreciatively at her sense of humor. The other women stared at us pebble-eyed, failing to get the joke. We pulled at the edges of our cotton leotards and adjusted our little dance belts and glanced over our competition. I guessed that most of the other women had just been released from prison. They too must have been drawn to the easy money but, poor things, they obviously didn't have the skills we had to offer. Their giant bangs, set aflame into glossy cocoons with hair spray and cheap dye, leaped off their foreheads like animals trying to escape. Their eye liner curled wet around their eyes and their vaguely dilated pupils had the fierce indifference of malnourished hyenas. They were tough, raw young women who looked like they'd seen their share of street fighting. I remember feeling concern for them flash across my mind: These young women didn't look sufficiently groomed for a career in entertainment. How on earth would they know how to perform for the camera?

We signed waivers promising we would not sue Tiger Lilly under any circumstances. Then we approached Edwina about our expertise.

"We have a routine perfectly worked out," I began.

"Good girl -- the camera will love you. We don't want nothin' fake, get it? This is real athleticism. Can you give me real?"

"Our routine is very real," said Ellie, beaming. We'd recently taken a fight choreography class and learned hair-pulling, stomping on stomachs and face slaps.

Edwina began pairing the group off according to weight and height. Ellie and I were nearly identical in size but Edwina ignored this, punching her clipboard in our direction. "Friends don't wrestle," she explained. She matched Ellie with a 6-foot redhead named Grace.

I was paired with Venus, a sculpted blond with forearms like pork rounds. She was beautiful as only a serious female bodybuilder can be: carved from stone and tanned to a medium toast, with glinting feral eyes and a quick feminine flutter of a smile. She seemed quite nice, different from the other women. We introduced ourselves, both confessing that this was our first time. But before we could really talk, Edwina called out, "No talking to your opponent. I don't want any fixes. Winners get $225 -- $25 for the loser."

The lights from the video cameras made our skin glisten. Between grunts and gropings I could see the black impenetrable eye of the lens swooping in like a snake mouth to swallow us whole. Edwina, the producer, encircled us like a yipping dog, bending over unnecessarily to offer the camera close-ups on her black and white referee hot-panted ass. Venus was a gracious opponent, though I don't know if she would have gone so far as to make a deal. But each time she slammed me to the ground, she whispered an apology in my ear.

After one or two such apologies, it occurred to me that aside from the blue mats and the shrieking whistle, this "wrestling" bore little resemblance to the sport favored by Bulgarian Olympians and thick-necked high school boys. In addition to the hair-pulling and scratching, which Venus thankfully never resorted to, choke holds were fair game, as were "scissors" and a host of other illegal moves. And though it was primarily made "for gentlemen's entuhtainment," as Edwina put it, it was not a staged athletic spectacle like professional wrestling or roller derby. It was real fighting -- not sport, not theater. Think cock fighting with women instead of roosters. Whoever wanted to watch this wanted to see blood, pain, a real struggle for dominance.

The other young female wrestlers sat by, staring gloomily. Gradually, it dawned on me that they were regulars and, unlike me, they were prepared. They knew this easy money was nothing to giggle or preen over.

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