This Love Is Not for Cowards (14 page)

“I already knew who he was. Call me crazy, but I just went to say, ‘Hi.' He and I and Arson and Charlie were drinking when all of a sudden Charlie's like ‘I gotta go, guys.' We didn't ask any questions. Before he left, Charlie told Arson that J. L. wanted some El Kartel shirts. He wanted to wear them. Arson asked me if we could make him a shirt. I said, ‘Dude, first, I don't think we can
make
a shirt that fucking big. And two, I really don't think you want him wearing our shirt. What if he's seen?' All these years we've been fighting the drug cartels in Juárez. Everyone thinks El Kartel and the cartels are linked together. We don't want to give people a reason. So it was like ‘No, dude.'

“ ‘But he wants one,' Arson said. He had a point. You can't say no to somebody like J. L. When he didn't show up again, we were all just relieved.

“There's these stories from Durango, where my mom comes from. There were parties at the ranches. The Devil would show up at the party. He would appear as a handsome guy and take the girls out to dance. Only when he would leave did the women notice that his feet were the hooves of a goat. My mom tells old stories like that. It was kind of the same thing with J. L. You see this guy and he's nice to you, but when he leaves you can't believe he was there. We were exposed to so much danger. It's crazy nerve-wracking.”

THE INDIOS' GREATEST win ever came against a team called Cruz Azul. Blue Cross. A traditional power stocked with stars from the Mexican national team. If the Indios' 2007 victory over León elevated them into the Primera, beating Cruz Azul a year later allowed them to remain in the top league, an achievement nobody expected. The Indios had played so poorly in their first season that a quick relegation back to the minors appeared inevitable. The slim calculus of survival required the Indios to make the playoffs in their second season, then advance to at least the semifinals, the final four. Unlikely. Highly improbable. That they strung together enough wins to qualify for the last of eight playoff spots was considered a miracle in itself. Their reward was a home-and-home series against Cruz Azul, the winningest team in the league that season.

No goals were scored in the first game, played in Juárez. No fans watched the second game, at least not in person. Swine flu hysteria. The health ministry, fearing the spread of the infectious airborne disease, barred the public from entering the sunken blue bowl where Cruz Azul plays on a field below street level. Indios players wore white masks over their mouths on the flight to Mexico City, and then on the bus to the stadium. The absence of fans gave the match a spooky aura, as if the Indios and Cruz Azul were the only survivors of a nuclear war. Quietly, the Indios won, 1–0. When the final whistle echoed around the empty bleachers, Indios piled atop their goalie, as if they'd just won a championship—which in a way they had. They got to stay in the major league. Francisco Ibarra divided among the players some two million dollars in bonuses.

Although a win in today's home game against Cruz Azul is just as necessary, interest in the game isn't as high. At practice all week, television reporters showed up only to grab five minutes of footage before taking off again, no longer able to convince their producers they need to soak up sunshine for the full three hours. A national soccer magazine discontinued its “Relegation Watch” feature, stating, “We all know it's going to be the Indios.” Even Gil Cantú acknowledges the inevitable. “Yeah, that's probably true,” he admits when I tell him about the magazine insult. The game is being played on Marco's twenty-fourth birthday. His parents are here to help him celebrate, and are sitting in Olympic Stadium alongside several other Texas relatives. When Marco runs onto the field for the pregame national anthem, his young nephew from Dallas runs alongside him, which makes two women sitting near me squeal at the cuteness. Head coach Pepe Treviño runs out for the anthem to a shower of boos.

The Indios play their best game yet. What is it with this team, always bouncing back whenever I abandon hope? Early in the first half, Gil's conspiracy theories are fed when one of our defenders is red-carded out of the game, leaving the Indios shorthanded. But even down a man, the Indios outwork a top team. Marco and the rest of the defense coalesce into an elite unit, an impregnable wall. Cruz Azul forwards sulk in frustration, as if they can't believe the lowly Indios are shutting them down. At one point, Christian, the number-one goalie, back from his injury, snuffs a Cruz Azul breakaway to preserve the shutout and earn himself Primera player of the week, a major honor. (The goalie who'd started against Atlas wasn't even allowed to dress in a uniform for this game, a major punishment.) The score is still 0–0 late in the match when Marco somehow finds himself with the ball just outside the Cruz Azul penalty box, unmarked and in shooting range.

“As I kicked it, I thought to myself,
Please give me a birthday gift!
” Marco will tell me after the game. His slow shot dribbles wide of the net, not even close; the guy's a defender for a reason. The game ends soon afterwards, a scoreless tie. Angry Cruz Azul players walk off the pitch shouting insults at their hosts.
Enjoy the minor leagues, chumps.
The tie gives Juárez only a single point in the standings, but I'm happy with the moral victory. It's inspiring to watch these underdogs play with such heart, and at such a high level. El Kartel, never content, chants in Spanish that Pepe Treviño is not a head coach—he's a nightclub whore.

The front door of Marco's house is wide-open a couple hours after the game, when I drop by for his party. Little things like this give me hope. How dangerous can it be in Juárez, really? Marco's extended family, including young kids, have driven down here, by choice. No one would bring kids to a real war zone, right? A host of Dany's Juárez relatives cram into the house, too, overflowing into the backyard, where a flat-screen TV broadcasts a game in the German Bundesliga. I find a seat at one of ten round tables set up in the garage. Dany carves up a spongy soccer ball frosted with the word CONGRATULATIONS, probably the same cake Marco's been getting since he turned three. He was physically exhausted when he took his shot on goal, he tells me with a sheepish smile. After the massacre at Atlas, it was satisfying to tie a top team, especially shorthanded, and even if the Indios really needed an outright win. He tousles the hair of a nephew as he shares this postgame breakdown. Marco tells me he can't wait to have kids of his own.

“We'll find out tomorrow,” he says when I ask if Pepe Treviño is going to be fired, as seems certain.

Chapter 9

Fussion

The players on the indios are in great physical shape. Not a lot of other people in Juárez are. I blame the food. Every day in Juárez I enjoy lunches and dinners that, if I were back in Miami, would register as my best meals of the month. I often go with Marco to Los Bichis, a Sinaloan seafood chain. We watch the Champions League as I tuck into the garlic shrimp and yellow rice I always order. Ramón, in the Indios' media department, has turned me on to an even better Sinaloan place, nothing but a small roadside shack out near the airport. The specialty there is aguachile: diced onions, raw shrimp, cilantro, cucumbers, and mounds of other stuff dumped into a spicy and cold Clamato base, splashed with lime and served in these huge black lava-rock bowls. When I'm the mood for pure grease, I go for gorditas and carnitas at El Puerco Loco, “the simple taste of the North.” The restaurant's logo is a smiling pig, an accurate representation of how I feel after swallowing pockets of deep-fried pork that I'm compelled to cut with a bottle or two of sugary Mexican Coca-Cola. Chihuahua is known for the quality of its beef. I love the tender arrachera I get at this small restaurant in El Centro decorated with memorabilia from the bullfights city officials have suspended while the cartels duke it out. If I'm drinking with El Kartel in the Pronaf District, I'll usually stop on the way home for tacos grilled by this old guy I've gotten to know pretty well. Nothing better than Juárez street tacos.

To keep from turning into el gringo gordo, I jog. Long-distance running is a bad habit I picked up in Colorado and haven't been able to shake. I'm pretty good at sticking to a schedule. After trying out a few routes near my apartment, and after once getting hopelessly lost in my own neighborhood, I've started running along the river. I drive up to Olympic Stadium, where I park within eyesight of the groundskeepers, who watch over my car. I duck through a hole in a chain-link fence and cross the four lanes of the new and largely unused Pope John Paul II highway. The path I run on is dusty gravel that follows the curve of the river's concrete canal. There are usually a few other joggers out there with me, though mainly I see horses and wild dogs and occasional packs of off-duty
federales
riding expensive mountain bikes. (
Federales
, with their college degrees and better salaries, are considered the yuppies of Mexican law enforcement.) I once ran stride for stride with a jogger visible on the other side of the fence, in Texas. I ran on the American side myself my first full day on the border, when I was staying at that El Paso hotel. Union Pacific Railroad linesmen yelled when I ran past. They thought I was a Mexican who had just snuck across.

Border Patrol helicopters zoom overhead, following the concrete canal so closely they remind me of airborne bobsleds. I duck under the Stanton Street and Santa Fe bridges, continuing past the Puente Negro, a black steel railroad bridge commercially linking the two countries. Bass-heavy horns blast from the engines of trains stacked up on the El Paso side. I'm always startled by the sonic chain reaction when two cars crash together with an energy that reverberates all the way down the line. If I run beyond the point where the concrete canal ends, the path transitions into long and wild grass. I usually turn back at a riverfront shack where a pack of wild Chihuahuas once attacked me, initially to my amusement, then to my dread. The first gangster Chihuahua seemed mostly adorable. What are you going to do,
perrito
, nibble my ankle? But soon I was surrounded by five, then seven tiny dogs. They circled around me, yipping like mad, waiting for me to trip and fall so they could tear at my flesh. I envisioned the most embarrassing human death ever. “American Killed in Juárez,” wouldn't be a shocking headline. The subhead, though, would slot my demise in the News of the Weird: “Face ripped off by pack of supercute Taco Bell lapdogs.”

The return leg of my regular run passes a drainage canal always clogged with garbage. The first time I ran past it, I thought to myself that it would be an ideal place to dump a body, that thought perhaps a sign I'm becoming Juarense. (I was right, too. Within the month I read about a dead body found right there.) When I return to the main concrete canal, and if it's dry, I like to run down inside it. The actual international border lies in the middle of the viaduct. I once jogged over the line, just to do it. Although I immediately darted back to the Mexican side, the U.S. Border Patrol dispatched a trio of officers on green ATVs to follow me the rest of the way. One early morning down in the canal, under the Puente Negro bridge, I leaped over a puddle of blood.
I bet someone was killed there,
I thought to myself, casually noting to pick up the paper on the drive home.

Someone
had
been killed there. A Border Patrol officer had shot a Mexican boy. The kid had being trying to slip through the fence into El Paso. When the Border Patrol showed up, the boy abandoned his mission, darting back to the Mexican side, to that spot I ran past. U.S. officials say the boy was lobbing rocks at an officer who'd arrived on a mountain bike, on the American side. So the officer shot the boy in the head. Across the international border. Reading the story in
El Diario
, I could tell the shooting would be big news on both sides of the river.

BIG WEECHO CLIMBS until he's standing on the third and top rope. To simply balance up there without falling seems like a challenge. A row of three-year-olds in lawn chairs taunt him, boo him, and wish him great bodily harm in high-pitched little voices. He turns his mask to the left to showcase the fiery curlicues of Muñeco Infernal, his first wrestling alter ego. He turns his head to the right and now his black mask appears to be marked only with the simple white piping of Blackfish, a second character he played, until a knee injury knocked him out of the game for a while. Like the district attorney in a Batman comic, Weecho's united the two
luchadores
into one, particularly imposing, new wrestler. His opponent, Punisher, lies in the center of the outdoor ring, illuminated by a single shop light, the kind you might hook to the hood of a car while changing the air filter. He's on his back, Punisher is, rolling left and right, clearly drained but trying to muster the strength to stand and rip Weecho down from the ropes, which is what the kids want him to do.

The loudest shrieks come from a tiny girl wearing blue jeans, a flowery pink top, and a pair of sneakers that flash pink lights every time she takes a step. It's her party. She had been asked how she wanted to celebrate her third birthday. Would she like a bounce house? A pony to ride for a few hours with her friends?
“Lucha libre!”
she shouted, to the great pleasure of her father, a professional
luchador
who fights under the name Rey Escorpion and who happens to be Weecho's cousin. Even without family connections, finding
luchadores
to work a backyard birthday party in El Paso is an easy request to fill. A Justice League of masked wrestlers roam the border, fighting up to three times a week in venues from the Poliforo Juan Gabriel, in Juárez, to the nightclubs of downtown El Paso. Weecho invited me to the little girl's birthday party even though
luchador
law forbids him from acknowledging his masked alter ego. He brought me because he wants to show why he must don a mask to reveal his true identity.

When Weecho picked me up on the Texas side of the Free Bridge, he looked like the same giant Kartelero I've come to know. Big round face. Full lips. Ears perched unusually high on his head, his eyebrows so thick and wide they appear to have been finger-painted on. His meaty hands connect to strong arms that are in turn welded onto a barrel chest. The impact of his physique is softened by an ever-present smile. The first time I met Weecho, on the bus to Monterrey, I wrote in my notebook that he was a teddy bear, a big softy. Nothing I've seen since has changed my impression. He's a super-nice guy. Almost everyone on the border is warm and generous—“
Mi casa es tu casa
,” Marco Vidal said to me only two minutes after we first met—but Weecho seems kind at the very core of his gargantuan frame. And he is gargantuan. I once asked him if
luchadores
take steroids to blow up their bodies. “You do what you have to do to get big,” he replied. “It is what it is.”

Weecho was born into a wrestling family so serious about the sport they've set up a regulation octagon in the backyard of their El Paso house.
Lucha libre
has taken his brother to fights in Paris and London and currently in New York City, where he's trying to develop a
luchador
television series. In the show, Weecho's brother hopes to adjudicate disputes—and also grocery shop and care for his TV kids and share meals with his TV wife—all while wearing his wrestling mask. It really is a violation of the
luchador
code to be seen without the mask. Weecho had to show up at the backyard birthday party long before any of the invited guests. When the kids arrived, I ate chicken and cake with them out in the backyard while Weecho waited in a bedroom with the other wrestlers. He wouldn't step outside until he was fully outfitted and it was time to fight.

I appraise his figure in the ring. Weecho's not exactly in top shape at the moment. He blew out his knee about a year ago while moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer, an injury that left him unable to fight but free, apparently, to smoke weed, drink beer, and down bag after bag of potato chips. He's carrying a gut. Soft skin hides the musculature of his arms. His legs aren't even visible. I thought all professional wrestlers were required to wear tights and a tank, but Weecho's sporting baggy black leather pants embellished with green lightning bolts. Still up there on the ropes, he continues to goad the kids heckling him from their front-row lawn chairs. Will Punisher rise off the mat? Will Weecho get his comeuppance, his punishment? Suddenly, Weecho leaps skyward, flipping heels over head to land chest-first atop his opponent, pinning Punisher with every one of his 340 pounds and I can't even calculate how many extra Gs of force.
Wham!
The mat shakes with a sonic boom. The kids—the adults, too—shriek in shock. When our brains catch up to the spectacle our eyes just witnessed, when we see the ref slap the mat three times and we realize Weecho has just won in the most spectacular way imaginable, our shock gives way to awe. That might have been the greatest physical feat I've seen in my life. Axl Rose takes over the stereo system. Weecho ducks under the ropes, exiting to a shower of hosannas. He stops to pose for a picture with a baby a woman thrusts into his arms. A dozen little kids scamper into the ring. Several of the boys and even a few of the girls sport
luchador
masks of their own. They climb on the ropes and flop onto the thinly padded ring, taunting and preening like the superhero they just watched.

“I did that just for you, man!” Weecho says after he changes back into his civilian clothes, after he slips out of the house unseen by the kids and as he drives me back to the Free Bridge. Adrenaline continues to flow through his veins. (Mine, too; that backflip was awesome.) “I wanted to show you something you'd never forget! I just want you to see the good side of us. I fucking hate stereotypes, man. We're not all gangbangers.”

Weecho's right forearm is a canvas for a giant black tattoo in honor of the California metal band Tool, whom he worships. A second tattoo higher up the arm features a stylized eagle's mask, a logo I've seen on T-shirts in Juárez and on food packaging at the S-Mart grocery store I frequent. HECHO EN MEXICO. He was born in Juárez, though he was raised and still lives in El Paso.

“I'm all about roots,” he tells me. “I love my Mexican roots. Mexico pretty much made me who I am, you know? Just the whole culture. We wear masks in the ring because the Aztec warriors, when they went into battle, they wore masks, too. Morally, personality-wise, everything I am is Mexican.”

I'm often struck by the fluidity of the border. Radio signals flow freely in both directions. If I'm driving around Juárez at midday, I'm in the jungle with Jim Rome. In the mornings and late afternoons I'm usually following Washington politics on NPR. Often, even when I'm in El Paso, I like to listen to Orbita radio out of Juárez, the most eclectic radio station in the world, home to a playlist that bounces from a French torch singer to Ozzy Osbourne to an Appalachian folk song. Juarenses ask for “sodas” when they order a soft drink, using the English word although everyone else in Mexico says “
refresco
.”

Yet the border is so concrete. The woman who cuts my hair in Juárez has never set foot in El Paso despite living along La Frontera for thirty-six years, her entire life. When I'm surfing the Web at the burrito stand near my apartment, I can't watch clips of
The Daily Show
over the Internet, because they are available only to people physically inside the United States. Ken-tokey is unable to visit his girlfriend, Sofia, at her house in El Paso. To him and to hundreds of thousands of other Juarenses, the border is as impregnable as the Indios' defense against Cruz Azul. How impregnable? The U.S. government will kill to secure it.

After the Border Patrol shot that boy, I heard Buzz Adams, El Paso's best-known radio personality, talk about the incident. Adams worried about the Border Patrol officer. “I really hope they don't throw the guy under the bus,” he said. Under the bus? How about throwing him in jail? I think the shooter is a murderer, straight up. Killing a fourteen-year-old? (That's what was initially reported. The boy turned out to have been fifteen, which to me is no different.) Because he was throwing rocks? I don't care if the kid chipped the officer's tooth, which he didn't; there's no evidence the officer was struck by so much as a pebble. That's no reason to take a boy's life, I believe, an opinion not popular on the American side. Listening to El Paso radio, or especially reading the hateful comments posted after articles in the
El Paso Times
, I think the entire city of Juárez comes across as irredeemable, Juarenses as subhuman scum. Of course the border must be fortified!
We don't want any of
them
coming over here.