This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  To keep from turning into el gringo gordo, I jog. Long-distance running is a bad habit I picked up in Colorado and haven’t been able to shake. I’m pretty good at sticking to a schedule. After trying out a few routes near my apartment, and after once getting hopelessly lost in my own neighborhood, I’ve started running along the river. I drive up to Olympic Stadium, where I park within eyesight of the groundskeepers, who watch over my car. I duck through a hole in a chain-link fence and cross the four lanes of the new and largely unused Pope John Paul II highway. The path I run on is dusty gravel that follows the curve of the river’s concrete canal. There are usually a few other joggers out there with me, though mainly I see horses and wild dogs and occasional packs of off-duty federales riding expensive mountain bikes. (Federales, with their college degrees and better salaries, are considered the yuppies of Mexican law enforcement.) I once ran stride for stride with a jogger visible on the other side of the fence, in Texas. I ran on the American side myself my first full day on the border, when I was staying at that El Paso hotel. Union Pacific Railroad linesmen yelled when I ran past. They thought I was a Mexican who had just snuck across.

  Border Patrol helicopters zoom overhead, following the concrete canal so closely they remind me of airborne bobsleds. I duck under the Stanton Street and Santa Fe bridges, continuing past the Puente Negro, a black steel railroad bridge commercially linking the two countries. Bass-heavy horns blast from the engines of trains stacked up on the El Paso side. I’m always startled by the sonic chain reaction when two cars crash together with an energy that reverberates all the way down the line. If I run beyond the point where the concrete canal ends, the path transitions into long and wild grass. I usually turn back at a riverfront shack where a pack of wild Chihuahuas once attacked me, initially to my amusement, then to my dread. The first gangster Chihuahua seemed mostly adorable. What are you going to do, perrito, nibble my ankle? But soon I was surrounded by five, then seven tiny dogs. They circled around me, yipping like mad, waiting for me to trip and fall so they could tear at my flesh. I envisioned the most embarrassing human death ever. “American Killed in Juárez,” wouldn’t be a shocking headline. The subhead, though, would slot my demise in the News of the Weird: “Face ripped off by pack of supercute Taco Bell lapdogs.”

  The return leg of my regular run passes a drainage canal always clogged with garbage. The first time I ran past it, I thought to myself that it would be an ideal place to dump a body, that thought perhaps a sign I’m becoming Juarense. (I was right, too. Within the month I read about a dead body found right there.) When I return to the main concrete canal, and if it’s dry, I like to run down inside it. The actual international border lies in the middle of the viaduct. I once jogged over the line, just to do it. Although I immediately darted back to the Mexican side, the U.S. Border Patrol dispatched a trio of officers on green ATVs to follow me the rest of the way. One early morning down in the canal, under the Puente Negro bridge, I leaped over a puddle of blood. I bet someone was killed there, I thought to myself, casually noting to pick up the paper on the drive home.

  Someone had been killed there. A Border Patrol officer had shot a Mexican boy. The kid had being trying to slip through the fence into El Paso. When the Border Patrol showed up, the boy abandoned his mission, darting back to the Mexican side, to that spot I ran past. U.S. officials say the boy was lobbing rocks at an officer who’d arrived on a mountain bike, on the American side. So the officer shot the boy in the head. Across the international border. Reading the story in El Diario, I could tell the shooting would be big news on both sides of the river.

  BIG WEECHO CLIMBS until he’s standing on the third and top rope. To simply balance up there without falling seems like a challenge. A row of three-year-olds in lawn chairs taunt him, boo him, and wish him great bodily harm in high-pitched little voices. He turns his mask to the left to showcase the fiery curlicues of Muñeco Infernal, his first wrestling alter ego. He turns his head to the right and now his black mask appears to be marked only with the simple white piping of Blackfish, a second character he played, until a knee injury knocked him out of the game for a while. Like the district attorney in a Batman comic, Weecho’s united the two luchadores into one, particularly imposing, new wrestler. His opponent, Punisher, lies in the center of the outdoor ring, illuminated by a single shop light, the kind you might hook to the hood of a car while changing the air filter. He’s on his back, Punisher is, rolling left and right, clearly drained but trying to muster the strength to stand and rip Weecho down from the ropes, which is what the kids want him to do.

  The loudest shrieks come from a tiny girl wearing blue jeans, a flowery pink top, and a pair of sneakers that flash pink lights every time she takes a step. It’s her party. She had been asked how she wanted to celebrate her third birthday. Would she like a bounce house? A pony to ride for a few hours with her friends? “Lucha libre!” she shouted, to the great pleasure of her father, a professional luchador who fights under the name Rey Escorpion and who happens to be Weecho’s cousin. Even without family connections, finding luchadores to work a backyard birthday party in El Paso is an easy request to fill. A Justice League of masked wrestlers roam the border, fighting up to three times a week in venues from the Poliforo Juan Gabriel, in Juárez, to the nightclubs of downtown El Paso. Weecho invited me to the little girl’s birthday party even though luchador law forbids him from acknowledging his masked alter ego. He brought me because he wants to show why he must don a mask to reveal his true identity.

  When Weecho picked me up on the Texas side of the Free Bridge, he looked like the same giant Kartelero I’ve come to know. Big round face. Full lips. Ears perched unusually high on his head, his eyebrows so thick and wide they appear to have been finger-painted on. His meaty hands connect to strong arms that are in turn welded onto a barrel chest. The impact of his physique is softened by an ever-present smile. The first time I met Weecho, on the bus to Monterrey, I wrote in my notebook that he was a teddy bear, a big softy. Nothing I’ve seen since has changed my impression. He’s a super-nice guy. Almost everyone on the border is warm and generous—“Mi casa es tu casa,” Marco Vidal said to me only two minutes after we first met—but Weecho seems kind at the very core of his gargantuan frame. And he is gargantuan. I once asked him if luchadores take steroids to blow up their bodies. “You do what you have to do to get big,” he replied. “It is what it is.”

  Weecho was born into a wrestling family so serious about the sport they’ve set up a regulation octagon in the backyard of their El Paso house. Lucha libre has taken his brother to fights in Paris and London and currently in New York City, where he’s trying to develop a luchador television series. In the show, Weecho’s brother hopes to adjudicate disputes—and also grocery shop and care for his TV kids and share meals with his TV wife—all while wearing his wrestling mask. It really is a violation of the luchador code to be seen without the mask. Weecho had to show up at the backyard birthday party long before any of the invited guests. When the kids arrived, I ate chicken and cake with them out in the backyard while Weecho waited in a bedroom with the other wrestlers. He wouldn’t step outside until he was fully outfitted and it was time to fight.

  I appraise his figure in the ring. Weecho’s not exactly in top shape at the moment. He blew out his knee about a year ago while moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer, an injury that left him unable to fight but free, apparently, to smoke weed, drink beer, and down bag after bag of potato chips. He’s carrying a gut. Soft skin hides the musculature of his arms. His legs aren’t even visible. I thought all professional wrestlers were required to wear tights and a tank, but Weecho’s sporting baggy black leather pants embellished with green lightning bolts. Still up there on the ropes, he continues to goad the kids heckling him from their front-row lawn chairs. Will Punisher rise off the mat? Will Weecho get his comeuppance, his punishment? Suddenly, Weecho leaps skyward, flipping heels over head to land chest-first atop his opponent, pinning Punisher with every one of his 34
0 pounds and I can’t even calculate how many extra Gs of force. Wham! The mat shakes with a sonic boom. The kids—the adults, too—shriek in shock. When our brains catch up to the spectacle our eyes just witnessed, when we see the ref slap the mat three times and we realize Weecho has just won in the most spectacular way imaginable, our shock gives way to awe. That might have been the greatest physical feat I’ve seen in my life. Axl Rose takes over the stereo system. Weecho ducks under the ropes, exiting to a shower of hosannas. He stops to pose for a picture with a baby a woman thrusts into his arms. A dozen little kids scamper into the ring. Several of the boys and even a few of the girls sport luchador masks of their own. They climb on the ropes and flop onto the thinly padded ring, taunting and preening like the superhero they just watched.

  “I did that just for you, man!” Weecho says after he changes back into his civilian clothes, after he slips out of the house unseen by the kids and as he drives me back to the Free Bridge. Adrenaline continues to flow through his veins. (Mine, too; that backflip was awesome.) “I wanted to show you something you’d never forget! I just want you to see the good side of us. I fucking hate stereotypes, man. We’re not all gangbangers.”

  Weecho’s right forearm is a canvas for a giant black tattoo in honor of the California metal band Tool, whom he worships. A second tattoo higher up the arm features a stylized eagle’s mask, a logo I’ve seen on T-shirts in Juárez and on food packaging at the S-Mart grocery store I frequent. HECHO EN MEXICO. He was born in Juárez, though he was raised and still lives in El Paso.

  “I’m all about roots,” he tells me. “I love my Mexican roots. Mexico pretty much made me who I am, you know? Just the whole culture. We wear masks in the ring because the Aztec warriors, when they went into battle, they wore masks, too. Morally, personality-wise, everything I am is Mexican.”

  I’m often struck by the fluidity of the border. Radio signals flow freely in both directions. If I’m driving around Juárez at midday, I’m in the jungle with Jim Rome. In the mornings and late afternoons I’m usually following Washington politics on NPR. Often, even when I’m in El Paso, I like to listen to Orbita radio out of Juárez, the most eclectic radio station in the world, home to a playlist that bounces from a French torch singer to Ozzy Osbourne to an Appalachian folk song. Juarenses ask for “sodas” when they order a soft drink, using the English word although everyone else in Mexico says “refresco.”

  Yet the border is so concrete. The woman who cuts my hair in Juárez has never set foot in El Paso despite living along La Frontera for thirty-six years, her entire life. When I’m surfing the Web at the burrito stand near my apartment, I can’t watch clips of The Daily Show over the Internet, because they are available only to people physically inside the United States. Ken-tokey is unable to visit his girlfriend, Sofia, at her house in El Paso. To him and to hundreds of thousands of other Juarenses, the border is as impregnable as the Indios’ defense against Cruz Azul. How impregnable? The U.S. government will kill to secure it.

  After the Border Patrol shot that boy, I heard Buzz Adams, El Paso’s best-known radio personality, talk about the incident. Adams worried about the Border Patrol officer. “I really hope they don’t throw the guy under the bus,” he said. Under the bus? How about throwing him in jail? I think the shooter is a murderer, straight up. Killing a fourteen-year-old? (That’s what was initially reported. The boy turned out to have been fifteen, which to me is no different.) Because he was throwing rocks? I don’t care if the kid chipped the officer’s tooth, which he didn’t; there’s no evidence the officer was struck by so much as a pebble. That’s no reason to take a boy’s life, I believe, an opinion not popular on the American side. Listening to El Paso radio, or especially reading the hateful comments posted after articles in the El Paso Times, I think the entire city of Juárez comes across as irredeemable, Juarenses as subhuman scum. Of course the border must be fortified! We don’t want any of them coming over here.

  “They call us frontchis,” says Saul Luna. Saul was born in El Paso, to a Mexican family. “I wanted to stay in Juárez, but my parents were caught up in the American Dream and all that. I’m really proud that I can speak two languages, but when I was young I was embarrassed about it.” Weecho tells me that when he was in high school—not that long ago—one of his teachers told him that, as a Mexican, he shouldn’t want a Starbucks to open in his barrio.

  “I’m like, Fuck that, man,” he told me. “I love coffee every day, man.”

  Weecho is an American who literally fights to promote his Mexican heritage. When he talks, his words slip from English to Spanish, probably without his even realizing it. He loves premium American coffee and he also follows a Mexican soccer team with a losing record. His feet straddle two cultures, like so many people living along the border. Cultures that are often violently divided. Which is why I love the intentionally misspelled name he currently wrestles under: Fussion.

  THEY BURY THE boy in a cemetery up in the Juárez hills. On the television news, red and white ribbons flutter on wooden crosses marking dozens of other fresh graves. I watch his parents sob in grief. A glass window cut into the lid of the coffin reveals the boy to be wearing a soccer jersey. His friends wear T-shirts that state, in English, IN MEMORY OF KEKO. A couple days before the funeral, the boy’s aunt walked down to the river with a broom and a pail of soapy water. She washed the bloodstains off the concrete canal where I’d jogged back on that early-morning run. We’re calling this dead body el joven Juarense, the boy from Juárez. That’s a rare honor, to be named. Usually we try to wash the murders from our minds as quickly as possible. Almost seventy more people have been murdered in the week since he was shot by the Border Patrol. The officer who shot him has not been named, much less charged with a crime. (His name has since leaked out in court documents, as has the disquieting fact that he continues to patrol the border.)

  Not long after the funeral, I walk over the Free Bridge to watch Weecho wrestle once again. Marco has taught me not to drive across the line if I can avoid it. Instead of waiting up to two hours for my car to clear customs, it’s easier—and dirt cheap—to just park in the secure lot near the bridge, walk across, and have the El Kartel shuttle service come pick me up. Usually that’s Weecho or Saul Luna or Saul’s close friend Angel. Tonight when I reach the narrow parking lot on the Texas side of the bridge, I find a rusty Malibu waiting for me. I see Weecho in the passenger’s seat, but I can’t tell who is driving. Only when I get right up to the car do I realize it’s Arson Loskush behind the wheel. I throw him a fist bump and climb in the backseat. “Big night tonight, Fussion,” I say to Weecho.

  “Hey man, I’m not supposed to acknowledge that,” he responds. Weecho—I mean Fussion—is headlining at the Wild Wild West Ball Room. It’s his official public return to the ring after his knee injury, an occasion advertised on fliers posted on both sides of the river. Daddy Yankee thumps on the stereo as Arson steers east past the Ascarate Drive In and the Chevron refinery, continuing until we come upon a squat and square warehouse that is the ballroom. Arson finds a space in the crowded gravel lot. Weecho raises his duffel bag, signaling that he must head over to the back entrance to maintain the luchador illusion. The rest of us walk toward the front door, passing a bronze statue of a buffalo before we slip inside.

  Sofia’s already here, standing next to her sister and her father, Rigo. Mike the Capo, legally trapped in El Paso, hovers nearby in a pack of six or seven other Karteleros. We have to pay to join them, ten dollars each. Any tickets Weecho might comp would come out of his modest purse. I hand over my money happily, proud to support the wrestling arts. I wave to Sofia as I enter the ballroom, blinking my eyes as I adjust to the darkness.

  “We’ve been laughing so hard,” Sofia says, kissing me on the cheek. “We were joking that when the lucha libre ends, then the quinceañera begins.”

  The Wild Wild West Ball Room has the feel of an underground fight club. Bare concrete walls, linoleum tiling the floor, a ceiling so low they had
to remove the blades on two overhead fans before setting up the ring. Sofia’s joke that the wrestling will be followed by a coming-out party for a fifteen-year-old girl is not far off the mark. There will be a wedding reception here tomorrow afternoon. In a dark corner I spy a giant paper heart, arrangements of white plastic flowers, and several folding tables covered in white paper tablecloths, all to be pulled out as soon as the ring is broken down. For now, metal folding chairs fan out on all four sides of the ring, almost every chair occupied. Little girls blow bubbles and tap on tambourines illuminated with glow-stick technology. A man rests his arm on his wife’s shoulder as their son shadow-wrestles, aping the moves the pros execute in the ring.

  The undercard is under way. A seemingly endless supply of luchadores parade forth, fight, and are dispatched back to the dressing room. I watch four luchadores dance around a fat referee costumed in the mandatory black-and-white stripes. One wrestler sports leather pants embroidered with the word NASCAR. A small man in a blue mask grapples with an even smaller man in a silver mask decorated with what look like red wings over his eyes. Two female luchadores leap over the top ropes and tumble into the ring, the traditional entrance. A trio of bumblebees—wrestlers in black singlets and yellow masks—buzz around the action. There’s a sonic, cymbalic crash every time a luchador falls to the canvas, wooden boards under the thin mat clanging on a steel framework. The ring is loud by design, each crash intended to rise above screams that are predominantly high-pitched, female, and preadolescent.