Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  I felt lighter as I rode home on my motorcycle. It wasn’t just the lack of an extra passenger on the back of the bike. It was the lack of the fear I realized I had always carried with me. How much does fear weigh? How much does the fear of righting the wrongs of our daily life weigh? More than I could ever have known. When I got home, I made myself a cup of coffee. I brought it out to the balcony of my small apartment. I looked at the men and women preparing for the rest of their day, sweeping up the ground, cleaning their food stalls, and carrying their heavy loads as they made their journey. I saw the hum of the city, and I felt like I was flying above it all, floating over the metropolis. I would not be able to save each prisoner, each person who had been wronged, but at least I had saved one.

  THE ESCAPE FROM MEXICO

  Looking back, the summer when I was twelve—I am in my early forties now—a young, horrible man, the head of a gang, tried to kill me. The day it all began, if you can really pinpoint a single moment when an avalanche begins, was on the soccer field, or what we called in Mexico the fútbol field, behind my school. Now I am an American, an immigrant of thirty years in the U.S. with my mother, but at that time I was a relatively poor Mexican. My mother worked as an elementary school teacher. My father was more or less a good-for-nothing, even then, someone who tacked from one side to another of quick jobs he made up and small entrepreneurial projects. He believed in making the fast buck, a deal for a small plot of land or to buy a bunch of tires, from a scrap heap, and turn them around to sell to another fool who might think lead had been turned into gold.

  The soccer field was so used, it was nothing more than dust. Grass was never planted on the field in any case; that was the kind of school I went to, a dusty building without grass, and as the players ran down the middle of the field, a cloud of dirt would slowly gather around the players as they duked it out and would follow the players, cycloning around them, until the curtain ebbed and flowed to and fro, moving toward me, the goalie, where a breakaway player would suddenly run out of the cloud and shoot with full force at me, a round, chubby boy, a bit taller than the others, and certainly wider, with thicker arms that might stop the ball from reaching its goal.

  The other boys sometimes called me Fatty, or Gordo, though I wasn’t really fat in the way of a boy who couldn’t move fast, and certainly not the way Americans, who are fat now, look. You see, at that time, to be even a bit chubby meant to be fat, because there really was no extra food and because everyone had a nickname. I was Gordi the Goalkeeper. The portero. My hands were very wide for twelve. I lived for soccer. I stood on the line and lunged with all the energy I could muster, when they kicked the ball. I pretended to be someone much older, one of the players in Europe who played in the World Cup or in the leagues of Spain. My favorite goalie was Toni Schumacher, a monster from Germany who led the German team in 1982, leaping in the air and snatching the ball from the other players, accidentally hitting a couple of them in the head as he waded through his opponents, saving the German team, almost winning them the Cup. You could say Schumacher was rough, and some said he was an animal, but I knew he had simply done what he had to, which is the way the game of life is actually played.

  The day my life began to turn, all the players had left their watches at the edge of the field, next to me, just in the back of the tattered net, with me in the center. That was what every player did, so they wouldn’t scrape the faces, arms, or legs of the other players as they jumped in the air, or as they practiced their slide tackles into the other players, like sliding in to first base, trying to gain the approval and praise of all the others. So, all the watches were left by one of the goalies, and everyone trusted me, El Gordi, the most. My nemesis in this story, a thin, tall player for his age, who at fourteen was two years older than me, with a bare chest that was already as big as a sixteen-year-old’s and with black hair always gelled back, neatly combed over and over, who could be pretty like a model with his body, if he hadn’t been so ugly in his face and if he didn’t have a tendency to sneer, was a guy named El Farito—The Lighthouse. He was called El Farito not only because he was taller than the rest but because he swiveled his head further than most could, to hit in a header goal. El Farito was also the head of a gang, whose territory included all the area that surrounded my immediate house, to the east side of the school. The west side of the school belonged to another gang.

  If this sounds strange, that one side of the school could belong to one gang and the other side to another, it is really no different than many other artificial lines in the world. As I tell you this story, I am now a bass player, who regularly plays in the back section of some of the best orchestras, and the line between the first violin section and the second violin section, or between the cellos and violas, is as clear as night and day. The audience sees only “the orchestra,” but the players know your whole life is different if you are one of the violinists slogging along the underlying melody in the second violins, or if you get to be the first violinist who plays the bright solo moments.

  The gangs in my neighborhood fought over who controlled each inch of the immediate city. El Farito was one of the leaders of a gang called the Nacos. Naco is generally a pejorative term for someone who is a complete good-for-nothing, an uneducated, trashy person who has no respect for others; but they wore the badge proudly. El Farito’s watch was plated with gold. He said he had bought the watch himself, and then another time he said his grandfather had given it to him, but everyone knew he had stolen it from one of the watch stands at an outdoor market that went up on Sunday mornings and down on Sunday afternoons. He walked around with that watch like he was a king. The king of Los Nacos. The rest of his outfit was completely incongruous, a sweatshirt with the skull-and-bones of his gang spray-painted by hand on the back, and some wide bell-bottom pants, even though bell-bottoms had gone out of style in the late ’70s and this was 1983.

  If only I had watched the watches as much as I concentrated on the soccer ball. I will never know how the watch of El Farito disappeared. The watches of all the players were left next to me, at the very back of the net. I jumped and lunged, trying to reach the crossbar and the far corners. And in one of those lunges my whole life must have changed, as someone came and stole the watch of El Farito from behind me. Some son-of-a-bitch took it, claiming it for his own, just as El Farito had claimed the watch, initially, for his own, but you can see that in the eyes of a gang leader, what he himself has done to another isn’t what he sees as the same being done to himself. I imagine one of the sixth graders—or even younger, a boy I wouldn’t suspect as I was playing, looking forward—sneaking his hand into the back of the net, seeing the gold plating of El Farito’s watch glisten in the sun that barely peeked through the dusty clouds that day when my life changed, and I imagine him thinking the watch would bring thousands of pieces of candy if it were grabbed and sold, or maybe the child was thinking more practically of how to get more food for his grandparents and family.

  However it happened, when the players all came back to get their watches at the end of the game, El Farito said, “Where the fuck is my watch, Gordi? Where did you put it? Show me your pockets.” He came up to me, standing a full eight inches above me, sweating, his hair momentarily out of place until he would get his big blue plastic comb, and he put his wide hands around my chubby neck and told me that if I didn’t find his watch he was going to kill me.

  This wasn’t a fake threat, coming from El Farito. It was well known, in those days, that to be a member of the Nacos each gang member had to beat someone up until they nearly died, and occasionally, when the battles between the rival gangs of the neighborhood got particularly bad, someone pulled out a knife and stabbed another person, or if things turned really ugly out came a gun and a couple of the opposing gang members were shot. You see, death was a very real thing in my neighborhood. Not the death of old age and natural dying, but death chosen like savage animals marking their territory, peeing on it, like dogs. The goal of all the marking wasn’t ju
st to be the bad boys who were the sexiest, but to make money, to survive, to find a millimeter of space and class and sexiness in a world that didn’t give a shit about anyone in my neighborhood. We lived far away from the nice neighborhoods of Polanco and Las Lomas. We lived in Iztapalapa, on the edge of the city, where people from the wealthy neighborhoods were afraid to even say the name of my neighborhood. For the people in the rich neighborhoods, ours was forbidden territory, a place known about only in the newspapers where crime happened and the animals fought amongst themselves, and where a “civilized” person, someone much whiter than I was in skin tone, would simply never enter.

  For the life of me, I could not figure out how that watch was stolen. As I played, when I wasn’t looking at the dusty cloud of players as they moved down the field, I would occasionally look back to make sure everything was there. But without eyes in the back of my head, I had missed the—probably—young thief that took the watch, and El Farito didn’t blame the thief, he blamed me. In the neighborhood where I lived, “don’t shoot the messenger” had a literal connotation. It was assumed that if you had bad news to tell, you were the bad news, or you were hiding some kind of bad news you had caused. I was in the goal. Therefore, I was the thief. El Farito said, “I don’t care how you get the watch back, but you get my grandfather’s watch back by the end of the day, or I’ll kill you.”

  And, as ridiculous as that might sound, that’s how the bullying of me—the following of me by El Farito and his gang—started. Naturally, I couldn’t find the watch. I looked everywhere around the goal. I lifted the net and kicked the dirt, and asked everyone else around if they had seen who’d stolen the watch, but everyone that had been watching the game looked down at their feet or said “no” in that lying way we all knew we lied to each other. You didn’t snitch in my neighborhood. The only thing worse than snitching was failing to defend your mother’s honor if someone said something nasty about her.

  —

  Before the last class of the day is done, a math class that I need to concentrate in harder or I might fail the course, I run out the back door of the classroom, looking left and right down the hallway, hoping none of the members of the gang have noticed me. Three weeks have passed since the day when the watch disappeared, three weeks during which I have begged for anyone who knows what happened to the watch to tell me, but no one tells me. I don’t take the books out of my desk. It’s too dangerous for me to pick up my books to study, later. I take an unexpected exit from the building, not through the front door but through the gymnasium in the basement and out through an exit where they bring in food to the gymnasium to sell us snacks. I squeeze through the crates where milk is kept for the students, and crouch behind the crates, waiting like a frog hoping not to be eaten by an eagle swooping down from the sky. And like a little mouse, I finally run from my hiding place, outside, zigging and zagging, hugging the walls of buildings and houses, not stopping in the little stores where I would normally stop to buy a bit of candy, because those days are over for good, and I feel my chest filling with air, my lungs punching in and out, trying to support my legs running, as I stop and start, springing down the back streets convinced that around the next corner I will find El Farito. Faster, faster, I think. Cut left. Stop. Look around the corner, run more. They will see me. The walls of the city are full of people who will tell them. Is that man selling tacos on the street in cahoots with them? Is he informing them? Who isn’t informing them? Everyone in the neighborhood has some relationship with the two gangs. They cooperate or they are punished. The smallest punishment is spray-paint on their stores. People pay up, extortion money, or their windows are broken. Or, the bigger guys, the ones above the gangs, the real crime syndicates might come in, tipped off by the gangs. The city is a web of punishment and obeying. I am only twelve, but even at that age I already know you obey or they do with you what they want.

  When I am not running, when I lie in my bed at night, trying to sleep but failing, I dream of buying a gun. A gun is what I need to make El Farito and his guys realize they shouldn’t fuck with me. A gun is not easy to find, a gun is illegal, is almost impossible to purchase, especially for a boy like me who has no more than a few savings stored in a clay pig that was given to me by an uncle from Guadalajara. There are coins in there, stuffed until they have filled up the pig, and a jar, but the coins are of small denomination and there are no bills; the coins are from my parents, coins they have given to me or coins I have taken out of their bedroom at times when they are not looking.

  The coins I usually use to buy some candy, but I have been saving them up for a long time to buy an instrument, an electric guitar that I have seen in a store in the center of town, far away from my neighborhood where they don’t sell items of luxury like electric guitars. I listen to heavy metal music in my room when I am alone, closing the door that my parents tell me to leave open, not to hide, and I have posters on the walls of AC/DC and KISS and Judas Priest, and I play records because this is the era before CDs and we wouldn’t have the money to get a CD player until much later, in any case, long after most kids have CD players, and I throw my hands around in the air, standing with my chubby body in front of the mirror of my room, imagining I am a rock star. The music pulses through me as I run—electric screeches and jams and scales—and this is the first taste I get, as I run and run and run, hoping to come closer to home, that music can be the thread that saves us, that literally comes down from the sky into the brain like a gift from God, even though I am not a believer in God, but at that time the music came in a pulse of a gift to keep my legs running to give me faith that there might be some way through the slim streets and alleyways. I stop. There in front of me is El Farito. He tells me, “Why do you bother to go running so hard? You know we can find you anytime we want. There’s no escape.”

  “I don’t have your watch,” I say. “I confess I don’t have it. I wish I had it. I didn’t steal it. Someone else has stolen it. I told you that. It’s the truth.”

  “But everyone knows the watch was mine. And who would dare to do something so stupid and brave and foolish, but you?”

  He has called me brave. Maybe there’s a chance. Maybe he wants me to join his gang. Maybe he will not try to find me in the hallways anymore.

  “And brave is stupid,” he says. “Do you know that? Brave is what gets a little punk beaten up.”

  Maybe I can reverse, run back from where I have come from, but the time it will take me to turn will give him the time to come on my heels and tackle me. So I run forward, thinking that with the music in my ears like a crescendo of harsh, scraping, rising notes I can break through him to the other side, behind him, floating in and around and above and over, back to my home, and I run as fast as I can, straight at him, straight into his stomach with my head down, like a torpedo trying to ram into a ship that I hope will disappear, a move so unexpected I hope he will let me pass through. I am only twelve and foolish and full of hopes, and he steps aside, and with my eyes closed as I run it seems he will let me go because I have not hit him yet, but then a foot comes out and he trips me and I fall flat on my face with my chubby chin hitting the ground.

  El Farito towers above me and I can’t see him because I am splayed forth on the ground, lying like a dead man on the pavement. “Tomorrow you will bring me all of your money. Every peso you have. You will come to me, personally, and give me the money. I’m sick of watching you run, Gordi. This time, I’m letting you lie on the street like a baby. I could run over you and stomp on you. But I prefer to watch you squirm. Bring it all, tomorrow, and don’t say anything to your mother or your father about this, or I will truly kill you.”

  All this he says with his voice much deeper than you might expect for a guy so tall. His words come from the depths of his body like from the depths of a sewer, bubbling slowly up and out. He comes from behind me, where I lay on the pavement feeling the wet of the rain of earlier in the day mixing with the dirt of the street, and he kicks me in the groin until the sig
ht in front of my eyes switches from the grains of sand and dirt and the black of the pavement to a momentary yellow, a flash of pain. One kick and he is gone. I hobble home, dragging my legs, bent forward, feeling the pain in my crotch. When I come into the house, my mother is there. She looks at me and her eyes well up in tears, a glossiness I hate to see, which comes only in the worst of times I have seen on the face of my mother before, and she says, “Gordi. Tell me now. Tell me, finally. You haven’t said a thing for three weeks. You have barely eaten for three weeks. What is going on?”

  But I won’t tell her. I don’t want her to worry. There is nothing she can do. There is nothing my parents can do. My father is barely present, in any case. He comes home, frequently drunk. My mother is the one who meets me at home with snacks and food made just for me. She teaches kindergarten, and she is home, early, before me. She has a plate of tortillas with cheese and green chili sauce waiting for me, and a freshly blended glass of carrot juice, but I can’t begin to imagine having any of this now. I go to my room and shut the door.

  My mother comes to the door and opens it, and I have already thrown myself on the bed with my face down, crying into the bed. There is no escape. None. There is no way out of this trap except to get a gun or to tell El Farito that I will join his gang. Join his gang. Get a gun. Join his gang. Get a gun. I go from one to the other, considering the only two options.