Marco didn’t succeed with the Indios at first. The team’s head coach (a new guy, not the Tigres executive who had recommended Marco) didn’t think much of the short midfielder. Can the kid not grow a couple more inches, please? Marco passed a whole season on the bench, once again not seeing even a minute of game action. The only reason he stayed with the club, the reason he didn’t run back to Dallas and his girlfriend and his job at the radio station, was the creation of Indios USA. Gil Cantú had started up a side project, strictly amateur, a team based in El Paso, where Gil has lived for years. There’d be no salary, but Marco would finally see the pitch.
What happened in El Paso is what has always happened when Marco’s been given a chance. He played great. In its first season, right out of the gate, Indios USA won a title, the United States Amateur Soccer Association National Cup. Marco emerged as a team leader, such a star that Gil demanded a spot for Marco in the Juárez Indios’ starting lineup. Back in Mexico once more, Marco’s poise helped the main Indios club win its fall 2007 season and the right to face León five months later, after the spring season, in that two-game series for promotion into the Primera.
“Those two games were the most important games of my life, obviously,” Marco tells me. “We were big underdogs going into the games. But we took it seriously. We went to Monterrey for two weeks just by ourselves, just to train. We …” He stops talking for a moment. He puts down his plastic spoon, then looks at me with a nervous smile. “It’s making my hair stand on end just to think about it.”
As YouTube can confirm, the Indios won the promotion that sent la gente of Ciudad Juárez into the streets. Down in León, at the stadium after the decisive game, Marco crumbled into his locker. He cried as hard as a twelve-year-old left alone in Guadalajara. He cried like he told me he’d cried when he washed out with Tigres and believed his career was over. He thought of his family and what they must be feeling. He thought of his dad most of all. Marco was twenty-two, in the tenth year of a professional career plucked from the remainder bin. And now, with the victory over León, he was what he’d always wanted to be: a player in the Primera. At the top, back in Mexico.
Marco bought a house in Juárez with his promotion bonus. His new wife, a Juárez native, came attached to an extended family that all live close by. The immediate goal, Marco tells me, is to save the Indios, to keep the team in the Primera. He wants to stay in the big leagues. He wants to remain in the city that gave him his opportunity.
“I go to Dallas now and it’s not home anymore, you know?”
MARCO AND I don’t go to lunch every day. I might eat at the Indios’ clubhouse commissary and catch a ride home from someone in the front office. When Marco and I do hook up, and when we finish eating, we usually swing by his house to pick up Dany. It’s a nice address they share, especially for Juárez. Modern, two stories tall, with a garage and a small yard in the back where Dany’s purebred shih tzu can play. This afternoon I try climbing into the backseat so Dany can sit up front, but she won’t hear of it. She’s twenty-one, just back from her classes at UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso. Her hair is jet black and straight, shoulder length. She favors skinny blue jeans and severe black stilettos the way Marco favors Ed Hardy T-shirts. Her parents own a bus company that transports workers to maquiladoras every morning, taking the workers home again in the afternoon. She and Marco have been married for eight months.
“Aren’t you scared to be here?” she asked when we first met, about a week after I’d arrived. “Yes,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
I’d spent my second day on La Frontera searching for an apartment. After touring what I had been told were the better parts of town, I ended up choosing Colonia Nogales, one of Juárez’s oldest neighborhoods. The other options were way out there, isolated from the city and hidden behind guard gates. I wasn’t blasé about my safety, but I didn’t want security to consume me. Colonia Nogales is about a mile square, a neighborhood of mature houses in the Mexican style, meaning from the street they appear to be only a wall and a door; everything interesting hides on the inside. Several of the houses are impressively large, real mansions sprawling across as many as seven lots. The other houses are more modest, and are often kind of cute. There are only a few apartment buildings, the largest of which I’ve decided to live in.
My place is a furnished two-bedroom, one of forty-five identical units dispersed among five rectangular buildings—or barracks, if we’re going just on looks. Each building is two stories tall, and each is painted a different, admittedly obnoxious pastel, making the complex look like military housing for an army of Teletubbies. My billet isn’t fancy, I’ll admit, but it only costs me three hundred dollars a month. (“Still too much!” I’ve been chastised.) There’s a small park nearby and a decent burrito restaurant up the street. I can walk to a gym that I’ve joined, and also to two grocery stores, a butcher, and a full-on shopping mall. Although practice is held too far away for me to taxi, I can at least walk to the stadium where the Indios play their home games.
On the day after I moved in, the front page of PM, a bloody tabloid newspaper, featured a photo of a gasolinero murdered in the men’s room of his station. I’d washed my hands in that same bathroom the day before, which was the day the man was murdered. Not three days later, still in my first week in the city, I tried a torta for lunch. Tortas are a Juárez staple, the functional equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: chicken or ham or beef plus pineapple and avocado on a bun. Not really my thing, but I was glad I tried it. And glad, in retrospect, I left the restaurant when I did. That night, Channel 44—the popular broadcast equivalent of PM—showcased the bleeding torso of a man lying outside the same restaurant, shot more than a hundred times by bullets fired from three different guns.
Nothing has spooked me as much as the murder of Pedro Picasso. He was the head coach of the Indios’ youth program. He was shot dead, along with his uncle, inside his uncle’s cell-phone shop. I learned about his murder on the very day I signed my new lease.
“You know the real story behind that, right?” Marco asks. We’re still in his car, not far from my apartment building. We’ve just zipped under the Rotary Bridge, Dany reminding me that it was only a few weeks ago a body was found hanging from its girders, then smiling because she knows that freaks me out. “It was extortion,” Marco continues. “Like I’ve been telling you about. They targeted his uncle’s cell-phone shop. They said if he didn’t pay up they would kill him. Picasso happened to be there on the day they came to collect. The uncle refused to pay, so they killed them both.”
Marco delivers this analysis casually, like it’s no big deal. Everyone around the Indios has been acting as though the murder was just a bad break Picasso suffered, the emotional equivalent of a lost wallet. In the days following my arrival, not even a week after his murder, I never heard Picasso’s name mentioned. No one seemed particularly distraught, even though when I’d ask about Picasso everyone would insist he was a great guy, a humble family man, the last person to ever get mixed up in the drug game, totally innocent of all wrongdoing. A tragic loss, in other words. But not tragic enough to keep anyone from their business.
Marco pulls up to my street, rolling his fronterizo to a stop so I can climb out. I thank him, I help Dany out of the backseat, and I give her a kiss on the cheek. After dropping me off, they usually proceed to one more restaurant for Dany’s first and Marco’s third lunch of the afternoon. A three-hour workday with three lunch breaks—nice gig. I speed-walk to my apartment, turning the four locks on my front door and slipping inside before quickly bolting the locks behind me.
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 i
magine 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
Mo
nterrey
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.”
This Love Is Not for Cowards Page 3