This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  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.

  Because the Rayados are the defending champions, the first game of the season, even if it is against the Indios, shines in the national spotlight. I discover how bright this spotlight is when I step inside a taqueria near Monterrey’s big bus terminal. I order a trio of beef tacos and a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I pour into a squat glass. On a television, a reporter interviews Rayados players as they check in to their hotel. (Home teams, including the Indios when they play in Juárez, commonly stay overnight in a hotel.) Indios players are not interviewed. An analyst uses one of those electronic pens to diagram formations and the probable plays the Rayados will use on corner kicks and penalties. He lists the Rayados’ expected starting lineup. The Indios are absent from his discussion. He shares no strategies for stopping Juárez from scoring. In the diagrams and charts, the Indios come across as empty red shirts for the Rayados to dance around.

  “Nobody respects us,” Ken-tokey told me on the bus. “Everyone in Mexico hates Juárez. They think it’s all maquiladoras, all narcos. They feel about us the way Americans feel about Mexicans!”

  I proceed from the taco shop to La Puerta, the clubhouse of the Rayados’ barra brava. The clubhouse is a bombed-out concrete bunker facing a vacant lot, on the outskirts of the Barrio Antiguo. I head over with about a dozen members of El Kartel, and as we get closer to the clubhouse I start to wonder if we’re going to, like, rumble or something. Barras bravas are often at war. Postgame rumbles between El Kartel and a team called Santos have devolved into rock-throwing riots. Yet there’s no apparent enmity between El Kartel and the Monterrey firm. We’re offered beer as soon as we step inside. Everyone wants to hear stories about cadavers and bullets and torsos hanging from bridges. We’re respected, it seems, just for living in the world murder capital. And maybe because our team poses no threat.

  The clubhouse is furnished with a couple ratty couches. Blue walls host old posters of Rayados greats, none of whom I recognize. A dented VCR unspools last season’s championship game. Outside, on a vacant lot, kids in jeans and canvas sneakers kick around a ball. It’s a mellow vibe, a lot more laid-back than I’d expected. The adrenaline that had spiked on the way over—it’s been quite a while since I was in a street fight—drops back down to baseline. I drink my free Carta Blanca and watch the game on television for a while, wondering what’s next on the agenda. When it becomes clear everyone is content to chill, I distribute a round of fist bumps, thank our hosts for the beer, and break away, back to the city.

  It’s still early evening. The sun has not yet set. I walk down cobblestone streets hemmed in by colonia buildings painted rich mangoes and loud pinks. Ornate iron bars protect and perhaps even improve the glass windows of cafés and boutique clothing stores. Bartenders post fliers outside rock clubs still several hours from opening. Lots of towns have a neighborhood like this, several blocks gentrified by artistic types and/or college students. I know an “arts” district doesn’t thrive without serious urban planning, but Barrio Antiguo feels more organic than, say, South Street in Philadelphia. It’s certainly not a pure tourism ghetto like Old St. Augustine or Key West. I step inside a gallery to find a collection of pop art that I enjoy even if it is a little too similar to Roy Lichtenstein. By the time I step back out the sun has gone down. Yellow streetlights climb up the Sierra Madre foothills, a rising vista of single-family homes that reminds me a bit of Seattle. The air is crisp, an invigorating cool that doesn’t make my teeth rattle like they do in January Juárez.

  I know there’s violence in Monterrey. On the trip from Juárez, at a convenience store El Kartel ransacked just before we slipped into the city, I read a local version of PM, a newspaper overflowing with bodies splashed in blood. The television in my room at the sex hotel broadcasts narcocorrido music videos celebrating drug-trafficking culture. I suspect that at least a few skyscrapers in downtown Monterrey were erected in part with laundered cocaine profits, as is the case in Miami. “It’s a hard-core drug city here, man,” Ken-tokey told me. “Make no mistake.”

  Yet Monterrey and Juárez feel nothing alike. I watch executives in suits duck into a bookstore to check out the latest titles. Women in wool coats circle the “
Lighthouse of Commerce,” a monument to moneymaking. Monterrey is the rough energy of Mexico smoothed by the waters of business, education, and the arts. It’s what a city in the North can be. It’s what Juárez could be, in theory: Juárez is all about making money, too. Yet if the violence in Juárez were to magically disappear—which isn’t going to happen—the border would never resemble this gleaming state capital. Cities get divided into classes. Even within cities, neighborhoods split into a yin-yang of beauty versus utility. Monterrey is the yin of El Norte. It’s where wealthy executives with Ivy League degrees make decisions. Juárez, the yang, is where those decisions are carried out, the products churned out, the money earned in the maquiladoras shuttled back to Monterrey to pay for free meals for professional soccer players and to buy big houses in the nicer neighborhoods where executives would rather live.

  I’m no different. I’d rather live here, too.

  “THAT WAS THE hardest game I’ve ever watched in my life,” Marco tells me after the Indios lose to Monterrey by the score of 4–0. “I felt powerless, helpless. It hurt to watch it. It was really painful.”

  He tells me this over the phone. Marco didn’t play in the game. He wasn’t on the bench, either. He didn’t even make the trip to Monterrey, a last-minute administrative decision that shocked me as much as him. Marco played a big role in the Indios’ rise to the Primera. He performed so well that no less than the New York Times lobbied for his call-up to the U.S. men’s national team. Yet Pepe Treviño, the new coach who sells smoke, is so unimpressed with the small midfielder he inherited that he left the American back in Juárez. He left him behind? I knew Marco was falling out of favor with Pepe, but this is absurd. Marco is in shape, he practices like a professional, and he’s still the most experienced defensive midfielder the Indios have. It’s a horrible coaching decision, I feel. Then there’s the economics: The budget is so tight the team wouldn’t even comp Marco a plane ticket and a hotel room so he could watch the game on the bench?