To Hellholes and Back Page 20
Next, a sheet of beer sprays the back of my neck and I feel a sharp kick in the middle of my back. I turn around to see one of the shirtless Cruz Azul wankers drunkenly pirouetting to avoid the beer shower, so I figure the kick is accidental and let it go. Normally I wouldn’t even think about confronting a shitfaced soccer hooligan—a redundancy, I know, but I’m painting a picture—though I actually consider doing so for a minute before settling back into my wet seat. Accident or not, the guy delivered a hard boot, and I have no doubt that a few thousand enraged hometown fans would eagerly come to the assistance of a Puma brother in the ensuing fracas.
“This really isn’t bad,” Marty tells me. “Fans used to come to the stadium with plastic Baggies, piss in them, tie them up, then throw them.”
“At their own fans?”
“At whoever. It’s very upsetting to see their team lose.”
This all sounds like an afternoon of great action, but the game ends at 2–0 and other than the flurry of activity following the two scores, the match is as captivating as the liner notes from a Lawrence Welk CD boxed set.
Culturally enlightening though the experience might be, I bring a bit more than the usual red-blooded Yank prejudices to soccer. My problem with the game isn’t simply that I find it dick simple, hopelessly repetitive, low-scoring, and devoid of recognizable strategy; nor that I’ve spent a lifetime irritated by the marketers and TV networks that have tried to force every surefooted nimrod from Kyle Rote Jr. to Freddy Adu on me and the rest of the already sports-sated American public; nor that the primary justification given for all of this social engineering is that since soccer is the most popular game in the rest of the world it should ipso facto be proclaimed a major sport in the United States. (Hands down the number-one absolute dumbest argument in favor of anything, anywhere, at any time. By this logic, we should all be speaking Chinese, living with our parents into our thirties, and getting our peasant girlfriends pregnant at seventeen.)
Beyond these excellent arguments, however, the most empirical reason to abhor soccer is the corrosive influence it has on the sanctified American youth, whose innocence our child-infatuated country is always so quick to defend, even if the freedoms of tax-paying adults are compromised in the process. The ascending profile of the dismal game in the United States can be credited to two overriding principles.
1. Soccer is so easy to play that kids who aren’t gifted or gutsy enough to participate in real sports are able to put on glittery shirts and high socks and immediately regard themselves as “athletes,” all to the delight of their self-affirmation-craving mommies and failure-phobic teaching professionals.
2. The game’s astounding lack of complexity plays into a general trend of adults who are too lazy, busy, or impatient to teach kids games with actual rules and tactics; and of kids too unmotivated to work through the difficulties of any new activity because it’s too hard.
Call me reactionary but the diminution of the American juvenile, whose ingenuity and independence have been traded for Courage the Cowardly Dog pathos and adult-organized play dates, has left more than minimal risk and adolescent trauma in its wake. It’s led to a dangerous loss of spontaneity, intelligence, and gumption that follows kids well into adulthood. Perfect example: thanks to insidiously overdirected activities like youth soccer, neighborhood baseball games have become distant relics of childhood civilization, rubbing out such central concepts of the kid sports experience as “ghost runners,” “pitcher’s out,” and “right field closed.” With these devices, nine- and ten-year-olds of yore could creatively compensate for having just three or four players to cover an entire diamond and think their ways through whole games without a single adult inside whiskey-bottle throwing distance. Similar variants helped small groups of kids cover entire football fields. Amending the rules of play requires a working knowledge of a sport’s many intricate and intellectually satisfying parameters. Meanwhile, soccer’s dim bulb run-kick-walk-Capri Sun routine snares kids and parents with the obvious and undemanding, hemming them into a universe of low expectations until well beyond the years when they should be giving a shit about fake celebs named Becks and Posh.
Monotonous as the soccer game itself is, the skirmishing in the stands gets my blood running for action. By now I’ve grown confident enough to consider manning up to some stiffer tourist challenges. Foremost among these is the infamous barrio of Tepito. Renowned throughout Mexico as the breeding ground of the toughest boxers in the country and the acknowledged hub of black-market activity in a city where as many as 50 percent of residents live outside the boundaries of the official economy, Tepito is widely considered the essence of Mexico City.
In First Stop in the New World, David Lida writes, “The Barrio de Tepito is a seemingly endless labyrinth of alleys encrusted with merchandise…contraband, pirated, even some legitimate. Its hidden patios, once residential, now tend to be warehouses that secrete huge caches of goods, drugs and guns.” Back at Bar Montejo, I told Lida that I was considering a visit to Tepito, hoping that he’d offer to come along as a guide—it’s never a bad idea to have someone who knows what to do in case of kidnapping riding shotgun. So it was a disappointment when he shook his head. Lida won’t be joining me for my Tepito sortie. He was willing, however, to offer advice.
“Don’t bring a camera or credit cards or anything that it would really hurt you to lose,” he said. “If you should get mugged, don’t panic. It’ll be very professional and over in five minutes.”
Before leaving the apartment I’m renting in the comparatively docile Roma Norte neighborhood, I gather my cash, credit cards, ATM card, camera, and sunglasses and jam them into the room safe. Despite the fact that nothing I’ve seen so far has given me even an instant of hesitation, I take Lida’s words of caution seriously.
Then I look at the sunglasses.
Prior to this year, I’d spent a lifetime protecting my eyes from the retina-charring rays of the sun with a revolving collection of convenience-store sunglasses. I prefer ten-dollar shades for many reasons, not the least being my tendency to break, lose, and forget them. Also, I’m cheap about things like polarization so that I can be indulgent about others—impulsive iTunes acquisitions, field-level Mariners tickets, the most expensive bottle of white tequila on the shelf, etc.
Aware of the high-intensity tropical sunlight I’ll be exposed to during much of my year of traveling dangerously and also endlessly annoyed at having to walk around with someone in preposterously unfashionable eyewear,15 at the beginning of this journey Joyce had generously presented me with a pair of Ray-Ban Flight Extreme sunglasses. Stylish, well-fitting, more protective than a Mongol bodyguard, I’d never owned glasses that minimized glare so mercilessly, let alone came with their own hard case. Just holding them made me nervous. My anxiety was not at all reduced when I finally beat the price out of Joyce: $175. That’s the kind of tag Drew Carey flips over on The Price is Right that makes you go, “Oh, bullshit, who pays that for a pair of sunglasses?” Which is exactly what I said to Joyce when she told me how much they cost.
I contemplate the Ray-Bans in the safe. Like me, they’re survivors. Zambian baboons, Congolese shakedowns, Indian markets, they’ve seen it all. I’ve secretly vowed not to let a pair of $175 glasses change me, but now I’m not sure what to do. The Mexican sun is brutal and I’ve gotten pretty attached to the little guys, but wearing them in Tepito seems like an unnecessary risk. I’m not even chancing the Jansport on this mission.
Still, if the investigative intent of this project is to be respected, diving into Tepito without bearing some mark of the tourist beast will feel like a cop out. I reach into the safe, fix the Ray-Bans at a spry, just-in-from-Cali angle atop my head, stick fifty dollars worth of pesos in my shirt pocket, a U.S. hundred in my pants pocket, and strike out for the blackest of Mexican markets.
Tepito begins just north of the Zócalo and Centro Histórico, but the differences are noticeable as soon as you exit the metro. All of the buildings are in worse
shape—crumbling, chipped, and faded, with broken windows, strings of balcony laundry, and webs of telephone and electrical wiring that turn the sky into a snarl of industrial profanity. Sidewalks are cracked and broken. Gutters overflow with trash.
An unusual number of young men wear bandages across the bridges of their noses or have red eyes and swollen lips, telltale signs of bar fights or side-street scrapes. Many of these men are either working at or hanging around one of the neighborhood’s literally hundreds of automotive part and repair yards. Tepito’s streets are filled with old Fords, Chevys, Hondas, and Volkswagens, not one without a rash of visible problems—bashed out taillights, missing bumpers, cardboard windows, wires spilling out of places wires don’t normally spill from, blue smoke pouring from under hoods at stoplights.
The Mexican government has a remarkably laissez-faire approach to motor vehicles and the people who operate them. For instance, acquiring a driver’s license in Mexico City requires no test of any kind. All it takes to get licensed is proof of residence and forty-three dollars. “No one asked if I knew how to drive,” one chilango tells me. “They didn’t even make me take a vision test.” Lack of testing is just one reason why if you see a turn signal in Mexico, your only assumption should be that someone in the front seat of the vehicle is having an epileptic seizure.
Walking through the long blocks of Tepito chop shops appraising Gran Marquis and Galaxies and Dodge Aspens moored behind chain-link fences, I get the sense that a stolen car could arrive here, be completely stripped, and parted out in a few hours.
“Ninety minutes,” the English-speaking owner of one of the shops corrects me. “But we don’t accept stolen cars.”
While not as tightly packed as Chandni Chowk or Nizamuddin in Delhi, Tepito offers just as many singular thrills. I turn off an alley filled with shops selling bridal gowns, bras, lace panties, and freshly butchered shanks of meat—you don’t make up this sort of irony—and am stopped in midstride by the sight of a full-size boxing ring set up in the center of the street. Inside the ring, two light heavyweights are flinging leather like heroes in a Hemingway story. A young referee dressed in jeans, white T-shirt, and baseball cap circles them while a crowd of three hundred or so men, women, and children stand by cheering. An announcer on a PA that sounds like it’s had a cactus needle dragged across its speakers calls the action with cattle-auction panache.
It’s two thirty in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Eighty-five degrees outside. People are fighting in the street. I ask someone what’s going on.
“These are amateur fighters from gyms around the city,” a man in a Carolina Panthers shirt tells me. “They hold fights once a year here to celebrate the anniversary of this market.”
This seems like an odd way to drum up anniversary-specials business, so my first thought is that I’ve misheard his rapid Spanish. Then again, maybe I haven’t. In front of us, a tiny tot wearing a freshly purchased Mexican wrestler’s mask is sitting on his father’s shoulders and urging on one of the boxers. The combatants wear padded blue or red protective headgear with matching gloves, allowing spectators to shout their support for fighters by calling out their color—Azul! Rojo!
The bouts are scheduled for three rounds but one between teenage flyweights ends in the second when the blue fighter opens his stance just in time to receive a lightning uppercut to the testicles. This results in the only knockdown of the afternoon, a slow-motion, limb-by-limb failure of the blue fighter’s body that resembles the pancaking of a skyscraper being systematically demolished by explosives.
I assume the debilitating low blow will force a draw or no decision, but apparently shots to the wedding tackle are legal in the streets of Tepito. The red fighter receives a trophy and huzzahs from the crowd as he parades around the ring. The disabled blue fighter crawls out of the ropes with his head down, presumably to continue the process of dry heaving and extracting his gonads in a private alleyway. No trophies are handed out to the losers. No ribbons for second place. No certificates that say, “Thanks for showing up and getting your sack inverted.”
Yet this isn’t even close to the most surreal fight. That one takes place between two small girls that can’t be more than seven or eight years old—the red one in Indian braids, the blue one with a long ponytail—who climb into the ring, roll their heads on tiny necks, shrug birdlike shoulders, beat motivating warm-up blows on their own headgear, open wide to let managers stick plastic guards in their mouths, touch gloves at the center of the ring, then come out throwing haymakers like Rocky Balboa roaring back against Apollo Creed after begging Mickey to cut his eyes.
At first, few punches land and the girls end up pushing and shoving each other into the turnbuckles. The crowd laughs it up and the referee smiles as he breaks the li’l pugilists apart and drags them back to the center of the ring. For the Mexicans it’s all unbearably precious, a Norman Rockwell picture slathered in hot sauce.
In the second round, however, the girl in red seizes the upper hand. Having completely figured out her opponent, she begins battering her head with terrifying control and impunity. Not a single body blow, all the action goes upstairs. The blue fighter either hasn’t been taught or doesn’t remember how to protect herself—or she’s just worn out. Throughout the barrage of red gloves, her arms droop at her sides like palm fronds in a hurricane.
The blue girl’s ponytail swings wildly as her head is punched from side to side. In a final act of desperation she turns her back on her opponent and tries to escape the ocean of blows by simply running away. The girl in red catches her in the corner and whales away without fear of retribution. At this point the crowd surges forward and begins chanting, “Roja! Roja! Roja!”
This is insane. Three hundred people demanding that a pint-sized girl in Indian braids put away her helpless victim—and me without a camera! Fuck David Lida and his paranoid advice. I don’t care if my Ray-Bans get ripped right off my face. I can’t believe I’m not getting any video of this.
Turned by the crowd’s bloodlust, my sympathies now lie entirely with blue ponytail. If only she could slow down the red monster with a miracle shot to the solar plexus. “Go downstairs,” I want to shout. “Blast her in the kidney!” I know all of this is wrong, but, like smirking through all the putos and puta madres at the soccer game, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the machismo collective.
Blue ponytail puts on a courageous performance; she simply refuses to go down. But her face is puffing like a biscuit. When the ref finally comes back from his coffee-and-cigarette break and stops the fight, I actually hear a couple of scattered boos from spectators angry at the fight being stopped prematurely.
The bouts continue for another half hour. Like the girl fight, it’s almost all head shots, no bodywork at all. The ethic is instant kill. After the last bell, I approach the card table where the ring announcer is putting his things in a black leather briefcase. His name is Marlon and he sports a Founding Fathers mane of coiffed white curls. Sheer confidence. No Just for Men camouflage for this guy.
“I am a ring announcer for professional fights but I offer my services for this event each year,” Marlon tells me in English. “It’s a good way to see young boxers.”
“Very young,” I say. “How old were those girls?”
“Rodriguez is twenty years old. She is one of the best amateur females in Mexico.”
“No, the really young girls.”
“Oh, the chiquititas? Both are eight years old. They were very good. Did you enjoy them?”
“It’s strange to see people so caught up in a fight between eight-year-old girls.”
“In Tepito, if it is a good fight it does not matter; the people will appreciate it.”
I’ve kept Tepito more or less at arm’s length all day—circling warily, engaging at favorable moments, but mostly taking stock of the sights from a safe distance: a three-legged dog hopping down a sidewalk with a Pamper in its mouth; a guy passing a small packet to another guy, both looking in opposite direc
tions as though nothing is happening, as though even a gringo passerby couldn’t guess what’s wrapped in that paper; a dozen more young guys in wife beaters hanging around a concrete bunker with Gimnasio Box—Escuela Técnica Deportiva painted in large black letters on the side.
With the sun dropping below the grimy rooftops, I wander past a barbershop on Carpinteria Street and recognize an opportunity to mix things up. As in the United States, old-timey barbershops with red, white, and blue poles out front and stalwart owners with horn-rimmed glasses and combs in their shirt pockets are vanishing in Mexico. Unisex beauty salons dominate the hairscape here, but the barber on Carpinteria is as old school as an Archies lunchbox and a paddle across the ass from the vice principal.
It’s generally not a good sign when a business is empty—this is particularly true of restaurants and barbershops—nor when prospective patrons have to wake up the elderly owner by tapping on the side of the chair he’s snoozing in. After the awkward introduction, Fernando shakes himself into consciousness. With elaborate gestures and roundabout Spanish—I do OK in bars and hotels but specialized conversation about bangs and layering remains beyond my linguistic horizon—we arrive at a shaky agreement as to what each man expects from the other.
Fernando drags a straight-edge razor up and down a leather strop attached to the back of the chair like he’s been doing it for fifty years and goes to work around my ears. I start in with some small talk I imagine is typical of edifying cultural exchanges such as this one. But Fernando is either the uncommunicative sort or simply dislikes foreign dingbats who come into his shop near closing time expecting to inject their Borat-level language skills into a delicate professional task.