This Love Is Not for Cowards (25 page)

I enter a conference room crowded with reporters from around the country. The Chivas team videographer records a segment he'll post online. He's one of five people here from their press office alone, a glaring contrast to the two Indios—Ramón and Adir—who handle everything, and who can't afford to travel. Local
periodistas
grab free cans of Coke, the journalists already caffeinated just from sharing a room with Chivas's famous (in Mexico) president and with the team's even better-known (in Mexico) head coach. Before the press conference starts, they ask for autographs, a move strictly forbidden in the United States. (Try it and a team will ban you for life.) The Juárez reporters, excited as they are to have Chivas in their town, are also a little bummed that the team's emerging superstar, Javier Hernández, is not here with them.

“Chicharito will be missed,” says Chivas's head coach when the press conference starts, referring to Hernández by his nickname, which means “little green pea.” Only two days ago, Hernández signed with English power Manchester United. “But we are a team, not just one player.” The second question isn't even a question but a thank-you to the celebrated squad for visiting Juárez, a city “with a bad reputation in the wider media, but it is a nice city.”

“We're happy to be here,” the team president says, voice recorders humming on a table in front of him. “Juárez is beautiful. It's the people who are ugly.” The local reporters smile with pride; they know he means only the killers are ugly. “We're happy to be playing tomorrow. We will play our best, and we are confident we will win.”

They most certainly will. While the Indios went winless in their first eight games this season, the stars from Guadalajara won
all
of their first eight. Outright wins, not even a tie, the best start in league history. The talent and glamour of mighty Chivas generates a sellout on Wednesday night. Olympic Stadium overflows way beyond the official seating capacity. There's no place for me to stand in the press box. I can't sit with Gil Cantú, either, as his usual seats are occupied by men I don't recognize. I end up in a walkway, crushed up against a cement wall whenever
Clamato y cerveza
vendors pass with their trays. I'm on my toes watching the action when I realize that one of the many people along the wall with me happens to be Gil. Not even the general manager gets a seat tonight.

It's an electric crowd. The roar is supersonic when Jair Garcia scores the game's only goal. The Indios beat Chivas. Chivas! Gil Cantú, El Kartel, the vendors of the beer that everybody threw in the air when Jair scored—the whole city is ecstatic. Or almost the whole city. I race down to the locker room, expecting a party like the one after the Puebla win. I find the players slumped over in front of their lockers. They pull off their shin guards quietly, showering and changing into their civilian clothes without talking. That same melancholy that tinged the Puebla celebration has blown pandemic. We've won two games in a row. We just beat fucking Chivas. Chivas! We can play at this level. We're good. It hurts to think about what might have been. What obviously could have been.

Jair, the hero, lies exhausted and dehydrated on the massage table, attended to by the team doctor. After dressing, Marco goes out to sign autographs, which he sees as his duty. Dozens of fans crowd around him. Karteleros reach out to touch Marco as if he were an apostle, one of the eleven holy champions of Ciudad Juárez.
Va-mos Indios! Va-mos Indios!
I step off to the side, where I bump into Dany.

“It's because the pressure is off!” she shouts above the cheers and the team songs. “They were trying too hard. They were playing tight all season. They were too nervous!” She's as frustrated as Marco. I feel her pain. I'm frustrated, too. They didn't have to go down. It didn't have to end this way. We look over at her husband, a legitimate star. Marco's Sharpie flies across jerseys, T-shirts, and souvenir photos. The backlog of fans spills off the sidewalk out into the parking lot. Dany allows herself a smile.

“I miss this, the way he signs autographs afterwards, everybody coming up to him,” she says, sweeping her arm across the crowd. The fans are smiling, too, happy to simply stand next to a civic hero. “It's positive, you know?”

Chapter 19

Everything Must Go

Before the kickoff of the chivas game, the entire Indios team marched onto the pitch holding a large and professionally printed banner. Marco anchored one corner. Equipment manager Whisky held down the other end. Everyone else lent a hand or two to hold up the middle.

THANK YOU FRANCISCO IBARRA FOR YOUR HELP! WE ARE WITH YOU AND WITH JUÁREZ!

The banner was signed by “
Los Jugadores
.” The Players. When I saw them walking the banner to midfield, my jaw dropped. The players hadn't been paid in two months. At the last practice before the game, a walk-through at the stadium, they bitched to Gil Cantú so forcefully that Head Coach Gabino asked me to leave the team alone for a while. I knew they hadn't been paid since. So why were they thanking the team owner, and so publicly? When the players reached midfield, everyone in the stadium turned to Francisco to gauge his reaction. He stood up in his box seat and raised his right arm twice in a gesture of gratitude. The very next day, he cut the players a check. It covered only about a fourth of what he owes them, but it was an appreciated start.
Los jugadores
know how to negotiate.

I've started seeing a new and creative Indios bumper sticker. Instead of the traditional soccer ball with a red sash around it, the new sticker features the red sash circling a brown paper bag, as if the ball is ashamed to show its face. That I've seen this new sticker in the parking lot of the Grupo Yvasa training complex is an indication of how low club morale has dropped. Even Francisco Ibarra's longtime personal secretary has been laid off. She'd served as the office manager, too. It's shocking how few people are left to run a team that, for at least a couple more weeks, remains in the Mexican major league. After one practice, when I visited the media office to check my e-mail, the receptionist was the only other person in the building. The Wi-Fi still worked, so I stuck around for an hour, maybe two. And nobody showed up the whole time. Francisco Ibarra's office sat silent, as always. The sales department sat silent, too, along with the business office. I may have actually been in charge.

Gil is the most burdened by the low morale. He tells me it's starting to affect his health. With Francisco nowhere to be found, Gil's the one dealing directly with the players. They're still angry. It's leaked out that Francisco just booked three weeks in South Africa to watch the World Cup. He's bringing five members of his family along, Paco included. Hotel, food, a safari or two, and tickets to all the Mexico games. He's charging everything to the Indios, the team that can't pay its players. Gil tries to temper this news by announcing that Francisco will cut a second set of payroll checks this week. That'll leave the players only a month behind, which Gil insists to me is no big deal, something common at all levels of Mexican soccer. (“It's not
that
common,” Puebla star Herculez Gomez tells me when I ask him for some context. “My heart goes out to those guys on the Indios. I know this is their livelihood.”) Even if late paychecks
are
standard operating procedure in Mexico, the players' grumbling is understandable. Like, why stay with a team this inept in a city this violent?

“If you want to leave, let me know and we'll make an arrangement and you can go,” Gil tells the players after practice as they sit at midfield. “If you're going to stay, focus and play like men, like professionals.”

Marco isn't one of the malcontents giving Gil problems. He continues to keep his head down, his mind on little more than his upcoming wedding. After practice, he hands Gil an invitation. The cover is a white jigsaw puzzle with four pieces dislodged and glued to the surface. One piece is “D” for Daniela and another is “M” for Marco Antonio, the name his family calls him. On the other two pieces are printed the wedding date. The space where the pieces fit is a vibrant green upon which are handwritten the words
“Nos Casamos!!!”
We're getting married! On my invite, I'm addressed as “Sr.,” for
Señor
.

“I thought about putting ‘Mr.,' ” Marco tells me when he hands me my envelope. “But you've been here long enough.”

The Indios lose their last away game, down in Chiapas, near Guatemala. So much for the winning streak. The final score is 1–0. The start of the game was delayed by a massive hailstorm, a deluge that gave way, almost instantly, to punishing tropical sun. Jair Garcia earned a red card on the sloppy field, meaning his Indios career is over: League rules require anyone with a red card to sit out the next game, which for the Indios will be the last game of the season, at home against a team called Pumas. I'd made plans to watch the Chiapas match with Francisco Ibarra, on television at his house in El Paso. He canceled on me right before kickoff, after I'd already crossed the river. He had his brother call me to say a
quinceañera
—a niece's fifteenth birthday—had come up at the last minute.

“I knew it,” Ramón Morales cackled when I told him I'd been stood up. “I knew he was going to do that to you!”

IN THE RUN-UP to the last game, El Kartel rents out a nightclub and hires three live bands to play what might as well be the EK prom. I get a lot of mileage from the lines I learned in Cancún—that sophomore year sucked, but junior year has been awesome, and next year we're going to rule the school! The rented club is in the Pronaf District, on the third floor of the same building as Vampires Karaoke. The decorating committee goes all out, inflating balloons and draping the ceiling, the stage, and even the windows in red and white satin.
Maybe El Kartel really is an arts-and-crafts club.
One band goes garage to cover the Doors and the Rolling Stones. They're followed onstage by a sixteen-piece orchestra slinging salsa, which draws Saul Luna onto the dance floor. That's followed by banda, of course, the tuba-centric music of the North. One of the Kartel girlfriends collects ten dollars from everybody at the door. Her lockbox overflows with cash; the whole
barra brava
shows up. The kids who pound bass drums at the stadium on game days, the 915s in El Paso and the young guys in Los Fabulosos Muertos, all the subgroups, a ton of people. Saul Luna buys me an icy bucket packed with bottles of
cerveza
Sol. I buy Saul a bucket of
cerveza
Indio. Oskar buys me a shot and I buy a shot for Oskar, and then I buy a shot for Ken-tokey, too.

“Hey man, I've got Marco Vidal on my instant messenger and he doesn't even know me,” Ken-tokey says, laughing and showing me his phone. “I'm sending him messages about the Pumas game. And he keeps responding with ‘Who is this? How did you get this number?' ”

Everyone's upbeat, enjoying the social event of the season. Big Weecho is here. Arson, too. Don Roberto, Chuy, Sugar, Angel, Sofia and her sister. (Kinkin and his girlfriend have moved to Cancún.) One guy limps by, one of his legs noticeably shorter than the other. He fell off a fence at an Indios game, and it was a miracle that he lived, Saul Luna tells me. He also killed his son in an accident. I'd heard he was a drug dealer, I tell Saul. “Not anymore,” Saul responds. “He got his act together.”

Chicharrón (her permanent name since her arrest in Monterrey) smokes a cigarette and sips from a can of her beloved Coors Light. She tells me her visa to enter the United States expires in three months. Fortunately, she adds, her daughter, born in El Paso, will turn twenty-one over the summer. “So she'll be able to pull us all over.” Over to Texas, and permanent residency.

“I see these people in El Paso on the ramps to the highway, and they have these signs saying ‘anything will help' and such,” Chicharrón tells me. “Doesn't the government take care of them? They are lucky to live in a country with social security.” I find it cute, her misconceptions. She's not the only one here who believes the United States mothers its citizens for life. Medicare, enough welfare to live on. I want to tell her about the big check I cut every month for health insurance and how my insurance is functionally useless; a simple broken arm would wipe me out. Social Security does nothing for me now and will probably implode before I turn sixty-five. (If I even get there.) But then she brings up the Statue of Liberty and how badly she wants to see it. I let my grievances slide. I should probably step back and appreciate how attractive my country is, misconceptions or not.

We all get really drunk. So drunk that Oskar talks freely about his side job. He's disgusted at the young generation of
sicarios
coming up, unskilled boys who kill for as little as fifty dollars and who spray cars with gunfire rather than leave a tight circle of bullet holes, like a real professional. Oskar sports a German army jacket over a hoodie, the jacket olive green with a patch on the shoulder of yellow, red, and black stripes. He injured two knuckles last night in a fight, he tells me. The other guy bumped into him. Oskar told the guy, “Hey man, I don't want to fight.” The other guy goaded him, so they fought.

“
Boom
, one punch, the guy goes down!” Oskar recounts. He followed up the punch with a flurry of boot kicks—he's been studying kickboxing. There was another fight a week before that, with one of his cousins and some Mexican soldiers. I kind of lose the thread of who was fighting whom in this earlier skirmish. Whatever happened, Oskar's cousin ended up in Juárez's city jail. It took seventeen hundred dollars to spring him. Oskar said if his cousin had been sent on to federal prison, Oskar would have killed the soldiers who'd started the fight. When he kills, he tells me, it's for real money, for ten or twenty thousand dollars. Not like these kids today. They give it away. They have no pride in their craft.

I leave the party around four in the morning. It's very windy out, and very cold. I walk down López Mateos, cutting into my neighborhood of Colonia Nogales a little early because the side streets leave me less exposed. I laugh out loud as I close in on my apartment. Oskar, man. It's not funny at all, what he said, but I can't stop laughing. I laugh and laugh. That twenty-thousand-dollar claim really cuts into his credibility. I could have the
mayor
killed for a fraction of that. Ha-ha. No way he's telling the truth, right? Obviously he doesn't really kill people for money, firing his bullets in tight clusters like a professional. I mean, no way. Right?

PUMAS REPRESENT UNAM, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a major university in Mexico City. They're school ambassadors exactly the same way the Wolverines football team represents the University of Michigan. Except Pumas players are paid above the table, and none of them go to class. The team Estudiantes, in Guadalajara, is sponsored by a university, too. Ohio State, Auburn, and USC should take note. UNAM graduates root for Pumas on game days, just as if the players were so-called amateurs. And no one has to pretend the team and the players—and the school—are engaged in anything other than a business.

The last full practice before the Indios' last Primera game is bittersweet. It's a light workout, as usual two days before kickoff. Maleno Frías sits on some aluminum bleachers, a bag of ice wrapped around his still-torn hamstring. I'm on the bleachers, too, along with Edwin's two young daughters, who are holding teddy bears. While the rest of the team plays soccer volleyball, old man Coco Giménez confronts the reporter from
El Diario
. The newspaper, in an article about the future of the club, printed that Coco is unlikely to be re-signed, as he is at least six years older than his stated age of thirty-four. That's a fair claim, even conservative; my eyeball carbon dating continues to reckon Coco is no younger than forty-two. Coco jokes around with the reporter, but he also crowds the reporter's space, leaning in close. He pokes the reporter in the chest to make a point. It's all light and friendly, but there is an undercurrent of
Hey, amigo
,
this is my livelihood here
. I recall a series of photos of Lyndon Johnson convincing a Senate colleague to bend to his agenda.

When practice ends, Edwin's girls run out to greet him on the field, holding hands as they leap off the last bleacher step. Edwin hugs them both, but his mind is elsewhere. He stares at the construction pit, then up at a clear sky. He turns to inspect the stone walls that fortify the complex and then he looks down at the grass. Edwin was a charter Indio. He scored the first goal in team history. He's probably going to be released from his contract, same as Coco. I know he wants to stay in the Primera if he can. A boy, the son of another player, approaches Edwin for an autograph, which Edwin gladly signs. Coach Gabino snaps a photo with the reporter from
El Diario
, who remains the best journalist here no matter what Coco thinks. Marco splashes his face with water to rinse off the sunblock, then poses with the reporter, too. Jair Garcia lingers on the grass longer than anyone. He asks the team masseur to help him stretch out his back. He spreads his legs and alternates deep bends toward one knee and then the other, limbering up even though he can't play against Pumas. His career in the Primera is over. He's not a young guy, and he scored only twice all season. It's unlikely a Primera team will pick up his contract. So this is his last practice in the major league, ever. He stays on the grass for a very long time, loitering, really. I notice him take an especially deep breath at one point, as if he's committing to memory the acidic tang from the gravel pit. As if he'll miss even that.

LITTLE YELLOW LEAVES color the trees that ring Benito Juárez Olympic Stadium. Twenty-four hours before the final kickoff, workers blow desert sand off the stadium's bucket seats. A woman steps into the empty press box to mop grit off the concrete floor. The refrigerator in the owner's box is restocked with bottles of Coca-Cola and Tecate. Advertisements for the Home Depot and Gatorade are reattached to the billboards ringing the field; most of the ads blew down in a sandstorm earlier in the week. The grounds crew lines the pitch, using buckets of white paint and the same common brushes you'd use to paint a windowsill. The field has already been cut in a crisscross of light green and dark green squares. “We've got a great field, I'm really proud of it.” Gil tells me as he surveys the preparations. The cauldron sits unlit, waiting for an Olympiad. A few students from the university sprint laps around the track. In the parking lot, vendors of T-shirts and tacos set up their booths.