This Love Is Not for Cowards (4 page)

THE INDIOS PLAY their home games at Benito Juárez Olympic Stadium. That cracks me up: Olympic Stadium. There's even a cauldron welded above the south-end bleachers, waiting to be lit someday by Mexico's most revered athlete. (Who would that be? Soccer player Cuauhtémoc Blanco, I'm told.) It's considered Olympic because the red rubber track circling the field conforms to international standards, yet it's hard to imagine Bob Costas hosting the Summer Games here for his American audience, relaying the medal count along with the day's body count. The stadium is a shallow bowl of concrete, painted red on the outside, the west grandstand shaded by an aluminum roof. It's not impressive in size, only 23,000 seats, but it looks a lot more like a stadium than the bleachers-and-floodlights assembly at El Paso's Bowie High, visible right across the river. The land upon which the Indios play used to actually be in El Paso, back when the riverbanks meandered, before concrete canals were poured and President Lyndon Johnson signed the property over to Mexico in a ceremony marred by a blinding sandstorm.

The seats on the west and east sides of the Benito, as it's sometimes called, are red or white or black plastic buckets spelling out, when empty, INDIOS and, in smaller letters, UACJ, the initials of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, the big college in town, a regular, respectable school with philosophy majors and literature majors and a champion track team that trains at the stadium, which the university owns. The most striking thing about the Indios' home, if you can look past the cauldron, is the way the stadium's north end frames Franklin Mountain, El Paso's natural landmark, a brown pyramid illuminated at night by a white lone star.

Olympic Stadium first opened in 1980. Back then it was a joke. The Cobras, the only other team from Juárez to ever rise to the Primera (where they stayed for just one season before folding), played on an uneven pitch more dirt than sod. The Indios' grounds crew has solved the turf problem, winning admiration throughout Mexican soccer for a natural grass field that stays flat and green through all of the frontier's intense seasons. Or flat and at least reasonably close to green on this biting January afternoon. It's the Indios' last preseason exhibition. The opponent is Atlante, from down in Cancún, a last-second replacement after the scheduled opponent from Brazil decided not to visit what is being called the deadliest city in the world.

It's Sunday, three days after Marco and I shared our lunch at the mall. Walking to the stadium about an hour before kickoff, I step onto Avenida Malecón, a main street. I fall in behind a ragtag marching band: six bass drums, three snares, and two brass trumpets. Flags and banners trailing the instruments identify the band as El Kartel. Their logo, the letters E and K inside a gunsight, waves on their flags and vibrates on the heads of the bass drums. I even spy the logo tattooed onto the calf of the one man brave enough to wear shorts in the winter cold. Because of the low temperature, the group actually marching is fairly small, maybe fifty people. Most of El Kartel trail in their cars, where it is warm and where they can continue to drink.

“Hey, how's it going?” asks a guy leaning out of a white SUV, a Styrofoam cup in his hand. He speaks English perfectly, like a gringo. “Going to the game, I presume. Get in!”

He slides over in the backseat. “You want some?” he says, offering his big white cup, which is filled with beer, Clamato, Tabasco, and lime, the rim ringed with fiery red salt.
“Los Indios son mi pasión,”
cheers a young woman in the front seat. She's wearing an airbrushed Indios hat cocked to the side of her head. Her fingernails are painted in team colors. Her name is Sofia. She's a student at UTEP, she lives in El Paso, and she is the girlfriend of the driver, a guy who introduces himself as Ken-tokey. All three say I'm lucky to have found them. El Kartel, they insist, is the coolest club anyone can ever join. Of all the booster clubs, or
barras
, that support the Indios, El Kartel prides itself on being the most hardcore.

“I'm going to have to use Spanish to describe some things,” Ken-tokey says. “We're a
barra brava
. We're smoking weed and drinking beer and doing drugs. Cocaine, drugs, pills. Other
barras
are
las porras
—chill. We're not. The songs we sing have swear words and talk about cocaine.”

I stick with El Kartel all the way into the stadium. I'd like to write that we stormed the south bleachers, our conquest of the playing field thwarted only by the chain-link fence, the moat, and the line of municipal police dressed in riot gear. But our entry is polite and peaceful. “
Papas! Papas!
” Vendors hawk potato chips stacked in still more Styrofoam cups adorned with lime wedges, the chips drenched upon request in either Worcestershire sauce or, more often, in that orange Valentina hot sauce. A woman asks if I want Indios face paint. When I hesitate—is this a ploy for money?—she says, “Of course you do,” and drags red and white wax across my cheeks.
“Vamos Indios!”
Six curvaceous women in body stockings march around the track carrying placards for Tecate,
la cerveza oficial de Los Indios
. Six more women in spandex catsuits advertise the modest homes sold by Grupo Yvasa, the Francisco Ibarra family construction company. A giant Grupo Yvasa soccer ball, two king-size Tecate beer cans, and a colossal nylon cow advertising Lucerna-brand milk deflate as kickoff draws near. Billboards circling the stadium hawk Coke Zero and Gatorade and Total Fitness, the gym at Las Misiones where Marco works out. One billboard features only a black ribbon tied into a bow. I'm grateful to see that last one, which is for Pedro Picasso.

Marco doesn't receive special cheers when he's introduced onto the field. He's not featured on the banners that line Olympic Stadium's outside facade and hang on light posts in the parking lot. That ad space goes to Coco, a bald Argentinean who claims, incredibly, to be only thirty-four years old. No way. After watching Coco hobble around the training pitch, I'd bet my life he's at least forty-two. (“Yeah, he's probably lying about his age,” general manager Gil Cantú admits.) Also promoted is King Kong—Alain N'Kong—an African striker just signed to give the Indios punch up front, to score; he netted a laser-beam goal last week in the 2–0 preseason victory over León. Forty minutes into today's game, as the coming halftime is signaled by inflating nylon tunnels connecting the field to the locker rooms, offensive-minded Edwin pushes the ball onto the feet of a striker who darts sideways eight steps before beating the Atlante goalie with a powerful blast. One-nothing, Indios. Beer splashes onto my jacket.

“Toss your beer in the air,” I'm ordered. “That's what you do when the Indios score.” The second half is all Juárez. The Tribe dominates such intangibles as the time of possession and shots on net. They look really good. That the final score is a 1–1 tie doesn't dampen what feels like a win. Though Marco played only nineteen minutes, he started the game, and looked solid.

I rush with El Kartel over to the locker rooms, near where the players park their cars inside a chain-linked pen. Seven or eight reporters stand inside the pen, voice recorders ready for interviews. El Kartel waits outside. A defenseman comes out first and signs autographs for about five minutes. Marco signs, too, when he emerges. Across the parking lot, on an adjacent dirt field that belongs to the city, kids play their own soccer games. I spy a father holding the hand of a little girl in a pink winter coat. I don't want to insult El Kartel, but I feel chill—relaxed and happy. I've only been in Juárez a few weeks, and I carried a lot of paranoia over the bridge with me, obviously. But as soon as we pulled into the stadium parking lot I felt better. For two and a half hours I wasn't locked in my apartment. I didn't worry about my security. I didn't think about extortion or about being caught in the crossfire of cartel-on-cartel crime. Mostly I marveled at how well the Indios played. Maybe they really will pull off the miracle.

“We're looking better,” Ken-tokey agrees. He's a student at UACJ. He also works at his family's junkyard. He doesn't hold a visa to even visit his girlfriend's house in El Paso, but as a boy he lived illegally for twelve years with his father in Louisville. Hence his nickname, which has been twisted a bit for self-evident reasons.

“I smoke a lot of weed,” he admits. “I'm basically a pothead.” He tells me if I really want to have the Indios experience I've got to ride the bus with El Kartel to next week's season opener in Monterrey. It's an opportunity I can't pass up. “You're going to have the time of your life, man,” Ken-tokey promises. “I'm going to be a different dude on that bus, I'll tell you that.”

Chapter 2

Monterrey

Ken-Tokey slides his fingers across my open palm, finishing the exchange with a fist bump. “Hey man,” he says, releasing his words in a choked sort of burst, as if he'd been holding his breath for a few seconds. “I didn't think you'd show up.”

He had sent me the logistics in an e-mail. I needed to be at the Olympic Stadium today, Thursday, at four in the afternoon, which it is right now. Bring twelve hundred pesos—for the bus, a ticket to the game, and two nights in a Monterrey hotel. That's about a hundred dollars, a reasonable fee to change my life forever, as Ken-tokey has promised will happen. I'm carrying a duffel bag of clean clothes, a toothbrush, a couple empty notebooks, and some pens. Ken-tokey reaches into an Indios-branded knapsack to pull out a long-sleeved T-shirt featuring the silhouette of Sebastián Maz, a player cut by the Indios when new coach Pepe Treviño assumed command. Maz knows how to score goals. El Kartel was not happy to see him go, or satisfied by Treviño's explanation for the dismissal: that Maz's supposedly bad attitude had been dragging the team down. On the back of the shirt, in large red letters: TREVIÑO VENDE HUMO. Treviño sells smoke.

“Wear this and you'll fit in,” Ken-tokey assures me.

Some forty young men—there are maybe twenty females, too, mostly girlfriends—mill about the parking lot, which is otherwise empty save for the bus we're taking to Monterrey. When the Indios first rose to the Primera, everyone in El Kartel followed the team on the road. It took three buses to transport the
barra brava
down to Mexico City to watch the Indios' first game in Estadio Azteca, against Club América. With the Indios playing so poorly of late, only the true hard core of El Kartel remains. I'm introduced to this hard core: Kinkin, Sugar, Chuy, Juvie from Las Cruces, Mike the Capo, Big Weecho, and too many others. The names go by in a blur. Weecho stands out because of his size, which is enormous. He stands six-five and weighs 340 pounds. Ken-tokey presents him to me as a
luchador
, one of those professional wrestlers who wear masks in the ring. “It's true,” Weecho admits, “but I'm not supposed to talk about it, you know.”

The bus is dented in several places. Its hull has been battered by rocks or maybe baseball bats, or perhaps the whole bus once fell into a ditch. The windows are too dirty for me to see who has already climbed into the cabin. El Kartel trashes its rides so routinely they can secure only the raggediest vehicles: buses with bald tires, torn seats, and a driver who may not be able to stay awake, or sober. “Just don't do anything stupid,” I was advised on my first day in Juárez, back when I was checking out the city. I recall that quote as I swallow hard, throw my bag in the hold, and step on board. There's a seat open in front of Ken-tokey and Sofia. He's drinking a Tecate, and he hands me a cold red can of my own. Someone else hands me a bottle of Clamato and a giant Styrofoam cup, telling me to mix the spicy tomato juice with my beer.

“These trips are like fucking addictive, man,” Ken-tokey says. “These buses get rowdy. I've seen a girl go down on ten guys back here.”

The January sun is already down as we slip out of the city, passing a military checkpoint where Marco Vidal's
fronterizo
would be ordered to turn around. It's too dark to make out even the dunes of the Chihuahuan Desert we are slicing through. I am drinking my
Clamato y cerveza
. Ken-tokey slams his Tecates straight up while Sofia tips a bottle of sickly sweet wine to her lips, her Night Train up and running. None of us are in our seats. Everyone stands, hands gripping the luggage rack for stability. Ken-tokey lights a Marlboro Red. Big Weecho and Mike the Capo tap a vodka punch somebody has mixed in a five-gallon plastic water bottle. Banda music—accordions, fuzzy tubas, the soundtrack of El Norte de Mexico—crackles over the speaker system. My seatmate aligns cocaine on the back of his hand, tapping it out of what looks like a restaurant sugar packet. Ken-tokey switches to marijuana cigarettes. The energy alone is making me high. This bus is rocking. I'm surprised when we stop for food, maybe only an hour in. Roadside flagmen wave us over to a stretch of concrete food stalls sheltered by a high tin roof, a setup that looks like a combination food court and school-bus parking garage.

Juárez claims, with scant credible evidence, to be the birthplace of both the margarita and the burrito. Add the quesadilla to that list. This little pit stop, officially located in the small satellite town of Villa Ahumada, insists it's the first place to ever serve the simple meal of smooth white Chihuahua cheese grilled between two flour tortillas. Big Weecho orders for me, and won't let me pay when I'm handed my cheesy meal, folded and wrapped in a paper towel. I pull apart the tortillas to drizzle on a sauce of cream and green chiles, as instructed. I take a bite and, well … it's great. Of course. Obviously. Human DNA is programmed to love it. The quesadilla tastes so good I order two more, my second attempt to pay almost violently rebuffed by the
luchador.

“Luke, soy tu padre!”
Over near a bathroom stall, two Karteleros—Sugar and Chuy—have found a box of long fluorescent light bulbs. Sugar twirls a bulb over his head, acting as if he's Darth Vader and the bulb is his light saber. Chuy, a red-and-black baseball hat turned backwards on his head, raises his light saber for a duel.
Thwack
,
crash
, the tinkle of frosted glass falling on concrete. Oh, it is hilarious, we decide. Hilarious! Even the quesadilla vendors laugh, as does a man guarding glass bottles of Coca-Cola, as does the woman selling squares of toilet paper for one peso each. Such theatrics are to be expected from El Kartel, which, I'm told, stops here to load up on fat and flour at the start of every road trip. Before motoring on to Monterrey we stop one more time, at an OXXO convenience store just down the road. I watch bags of chips and cookies and even thirty-two-ounce bottles of beer walk out the door under Indios jerseys and jackets. “These guys are crazy, man, it's great,” says Weecho, speaking to me in English. He grew up in El Paso and still lives there. “We're, like, you know the word ‘hooligan,' don't you?”

Fully fueled, we shoot off into the night. Music videos flicker on television monitors spaced out every six rows of seats. I'm offered more coke, to be inhaled through a rolled-up hundred-peso bill. There is enough smoke compressed into the cabin to give a canary an embolism, or at least a major craving for birdseed. I feel like we're in a nightclub, one that's long and narrow and overcrowded and just happens to be in motion. As we hurtle toward Monterrey, Banda El Limón, to my surprise and also at least a little bit to my relief, gives way to Vampire Weekend. I'm presented with still more coke. Tequila sloshes into the mix. Even as I'm falling into intoxication, I'm not worried about my safety. I'm happy, in a groove, able to see exactly why Ken-tokey is addicted to these trips.

Juárez was founded in the 1600s, a way station for Spanish explorers trekking from Mexico City to Santa Fe and back. El Paso del Norte it was called back then, just one town on both sides of the Rio Grande. In time, a treaty with the United States divided ownership of El Paso between two countries, though the border remained so porous as to be almost theoretical; Mexicans and Americans crossed sides freely until 1917. Prohibition changed the once lawless character of the American side, and altered life on the Mexican side, too. Untouched by temperance, Ciudad Juárez—the city was renamed in 1888 to honor liberal president Benito Juárez—evolved into the real land of liberty. Texas bars and brothels relocated to Mexico to serve Americans drinks, or prostitutes, or even a quickie divorce; Juárez is where Marilyn Monroe legally split from playwright Arthur Miller. The Santa Fe Bridge buckled on Saturday nights with UTEP students and Fort Bliss soldiers strolling over for margaritas at the Kentucky Club and to see the “live girls” dancing at the Hollywood Club. Savvier visitors slipped twenty bucks to random Juárez street cops in exchange for a password that would protect them from the possibility of arrest.

Anything you wanted you could get. Heroin? Coke? An escort to share the drugs with? Just name it. Looser law enforcement on the Juárez side differentiated the city from an El Paso that was growing staid and perhaps even boring. The vast distance between the border and the rest of Mexico also liberated Juárez from a conservative national culture.

“It was a better city than any other in the republic,” says my landlady, a woman in her sixties named Guadalupe. “We had freedom. When I was young, I used to go to catechism school. I would come home at two in the morning with my girlfriends, and we would be singing while we skipped down the street. Our families knew where we were and they didn't worry about us. If it was a warm night, people in the neighborhood would be out sleeping in the street.”

Those days are over. Every morning I read about at least one or two nightclub shootings from the evening before. Eight people were slaughtered at the “77” bar. Four Americans were shot leaving the Arriba nightclub. Even house parties are growing dangerous:
Sicarios
have begun hunting down targets too scared to visit the bars. Juárez has grown so violent that its Freedom City label has been turned upside down. Mexicans of age (and who hold the proper paperwork) now cross to El Paso to drink at old Juárez bars and pool halls that have reopened safely on the other side.

If they can't cross, like Ken-tokey, they go on the road with El Kartel. No one's going to burst onto this bus and open fire. The long ride to Monterrey is an opportunity to party—hard—with the only lethal threat coming from alcohol poisoning or overdose. Road trips, I recognize, are a responsible way for El Kartel to engage in all the irresponsible things these hooligans like to do.

“No joke,” Ken-tokey agrees. “That's exactly what it is. My mom and dad, they feel better when I'm on these buses than when I'm going out in Juárez. There is
nothing
to do in Juárez anymore. Nothing.”

I'M NOT FEELING so sanguine some sixteen hours later, when we finally pull into Monterrey. Alcohol and THC spike my bloodstream. Sleep has not been allowed. (“Gringo, wake up! Wake up, gringo!”) The bus broke down as expected; it took almost two hours to replace a flat tire. The hoodlum named Kinkin, turning nasty as the sun first emerged on Friday morning, spent hours hazing me. He threatened to beat me up. Later he handed me a cell phone with orders to call my family for the ransom money. I'm so happy when we finally get to our hotel, I don't care that it's dirty and small and located among a warren of auto-body shops. I'd planned to share a room with five or six others to save money. Impulsively, instinctively in survival mode, I invest in a private room. When I open the door to this room, I discover eighteen mirrors hanging on the ceiling, on the headboard, on the walls beside and behind a king-size bed. In the middle of the bed, visible on all eighteen of those mirrors, a very naked man and a very naked woman caress their very naked bodies. I close the door quickly. Back at the front desk, a lady sitting next to a glass bowl of condoms gives me keys to another room. It's unoccupied. I crash for hours.

Marco loves Monterrey. When he played for Tigres—or at least when he tried to play for them—he felt like Monterrey royalty. Fans paid for his meals at restaurants in the Barrio Antiguo, a neighborhood well preserved over the five hundred years since the Spanish discovered the city. After eating, Marco and a teammate or two might stroll to one of the many nightclubs in the barrio, stepping inside for free, a hostess guiding them to tables behind the velvet ropes of the VIP section. Monterrey is prosperous and physically beautiful and a day trip from Dallas. It was nothing for Marco's parents to zip down for a Tigres game to watch Marco warm up, stretch, and then rust on the team's bench.

I may be in love, too. Already. Monterrey is very appealing. It's a big city, the Mexican Chicago. Some four million people live and work here, a population eclipsed nationally by only Mexico City and greater Guadalajara. Rail lines run directly to Laredo, a strategic link with Texas that has helped Monterrey evolve into the industrial hub of Mexico's North. FEMSA, the global brewing and bottling concern, started and remains here. Tec de Monterrey, a school founded by a brewery scion, has evolved into one of the best research universities in the world. Glass skyscrapers rise downtown, but most of the buildings in Monterrey are one or two stories tall, giving the city a livable scale. Emerald mountains frame everything. They're Monterrey's most distinctive physical trait, the Sierra Madre, gentle green folds wrapping the city in a soft hug.

Baseball was Monterrey's first sporting love. Back in the 1920s, executives at the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc—that's the brewery—formed baseball teams to entertain a growing staff of brewmasters and bottlers. These start-up leagues flourished, and became such a part of Monterrey's identity that when the Montreal Expos fell into receivership, Major League Baseball seriously considered relocating the team here. (The Expos ended up becoming the Nationals of Washington, D.C.) I learn this at the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame, located inside the red-brick brewery. There isn't much to the Hall of Fame: a statue of Fernando Valenzuela, some uniforms of the Yucatán Lions and the Pericos de Puebla. I look in vain for the empty vials of Mexican steroids used by Mark McGwire and Ken Caminiti.

Soccer was the lesser game in Monterrey, at first. The Rayados, the more popular of the two teams in town and the Indios' opponent this weekend, formed after the Second World War, primarily as a social program. “We want our players to be positive role models for our youth,” declared a Rayados founder. What the players became in time, above all, were moneymakers for Mexican industry.
Fútbol
trounced baseball everywhere else in Mexico, quickly establishing itself as the national sport. Brewers who slapped the logos of Carta Blanca and Tecate on the backs of team jerseys reaped a windfall in associated customer loyalty. (It's no coincidence that Ken-tokey's favorite beer, Tecate, is the brand advertised on the backs of the Indios' jerseys.) FEMSA, the parent company of the big Monterrey brewer, bought the Rayados outright in 2005. The conglomerate's cash infusion transformed the team from a middling outfit into the best squad in Mexico, and one of the top thirty-five clubs in the entire world. The Rayados won the Primera last season. They've broken ground on a new stadium. Soccer is clearly Monterrey's main sport these days.