to a gym where, through cracks in a wooden fence, he’d watched two men gliding about a ring. The men were kickboxers and used both their hands and their feet. Their bodies were corded with muscle, streaked with sweat. Armando, still under the influence of his first and only movie, could imagine nothing finer.
It was a somewhat unusual dream for a boy from Tierra Blanca, where the corridos that spilled from the cheap plastic ghetto blasters and funky dives sang the praises of mota and the principal shrine was that of Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of narcotraficantes . Still, Armando began. He soaked his face in brine and hardened his hands on the fence posts that ringed the old corral. He called himself El Diablo de Sinaloa. His stepfather called him a dick and a clown, for which Armando beat the old drunk till he couldn’t stand, stole what money the family had managed to save, and left for Tijuana in complete ignorance of just about everything.
He lived at first with a second cousin, in a room with half a dozen other nacos . The word denotes undisguisable Indian blood and carries with it the usual connotative aspersions—ignorant, irredeemable, mustachioed, and generally appalling . . . And if Armando had never exactly thought of himself as any one of these things before, then he would learn to do so here, in the Zona Norte, amid the colored lights and banda music, amid the hookers and slumming white boys, in this apartment with his coppery brethren.
The men in Armando’s apartment spent their days in the service of the Japanese, assembling televisions in one of the many factories that ringed the city. Some of them tried to talk Armando into joining them. Armando, not yet convinced that he was one of them, went on with his plans. He went in search of a gym where he might be discovered, for a lovely prostitute with whom he might fall in love. He did not have to go far. There was a boxing club around the corner and prostitutes aplenty, a block away, in the heart of the old red-light district. The club was located on the second floor of a crumbling wooden building, above a bar known as El As Negro, and it was here that he made the first in a series of unfortunate discoveries. He discovered that the other fighters weretougher than he had imagined. They did something the fence posts around the old corral and his drunken stepfather had not, they hit back. And by the hard light of day, his nose packed with gauze, he made the further discovery that the hookers all were fat, many appearing to be dwarfs or hunchbacks. Still, he persevered. His nose refused to stop bleeding. In a strip mall replete with palm trees and a McDonald’s restaurant, a doctor removed the cartilage. At least he said he was a doctor. Armando learned from a nurse that the man’s specialty was injecting rich white women with live cells taken from the organs of sheep. The cells were meant as a kind of tonic, a fountain of youth. Armando was reminded of the execrable sex-strangler Goyo Cárdenas, reputed to have brought one of his victims back from the dead through the use of adrenaline obtained from the adrenal glands of another unfortunate. Armando would have liked to ask if this were possible. He would have liked to ask about the cells. The doctor, however, was short on time. He dismissed Armando’s curiosity with a brief grunt, a wave of the hand, then wielding an instrument that might have been used to shuck oysters, removed the boy’s cartilage without ceremony, after which conversation was all but impossible, took the last of Armando’s money, and sent him packing with half a dozen pain pills in a small white envelope.
Winter came shortly upon the heels of this humiliation and with it the rains. The city turned to mud. The canyons with their vast encampments of the homeless ran with raw sewage and the toxic waste of factories. Entire neighborhoods slid away overnight. The air stank. Training was difficult if not impossible. His money
It was a somewhat unusual dream for a boy from Tierra Blanca, where the corridos that spilled from the cheap plastic ghetto blasters and funky dives sang the praises of mota and the principal shrine was that of Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of narcotraficantes . Still, Armando began. He soaked his face in brine and hardened his hands on the fence posts that ringed the old corral. He called himself El Diablo de Sinaloa. His stepfather called him a dick and a clown, for which Armando beat the old drunk till he couldn’t stand, stole what money the family had managed to save, and left for Tijuana in complete ignorance of just about everything.
He lived at first with a second cousin, in a room with half a dozen other nacos . The word denotes undisguisable Indian blood and carries with it the usual connotative aspersions—ignorant, irredeemable, mustachioed, and generally appalling . . . And if Armando had never exactly thought of himself as any one of these things before, then he would learn to do so here, in the Zona Norte, amid the colored lights and banda music, amid the hookers and slumming white boys, in this apartment with his coppery brethren.
The men in Armando’s apartment spent their days in the service of the Japanese, assembling televisions in one of the many factories that ringed the city. Some of them tried to talk Armando into joining them. Armando, not yet convinced that he was one of them, went on with his plans. He went in search of a gym where he might be discovered, for a lovely prostitute with whom he might fall in love. He did not have to go far. There was a boxing club around the corner and prostitutes aplenty, a block away, in the heart of the old red-light district. The club was located on the second floor of a crumbling wooden building, above a bar known as El As Negro, and it was here that he made the first in a series of unfortunate discoveries. He discovered that the other fighters weretougher than he had imagined. They did something the fence posts around the old corral and his drunken stepfather had not, they hit back. And by the hard light of day, his nose packed with gauze, he made the further discovery that the hookers all were fat, many appearing to be dwarfs or hunchbacks. Still, he persevered. His nose refused to stop bleeding. In a strip mall replete with palm trees and a McDonald’s restaurant, a doctor removed the cartilage. At least he said he was a doctor. Armando learned from a nurse that the man’s specialty was injecting rich white women with live cells taken from the organs of sheep. The cells were meant as a kind of tonic, a fountain of youth. Armando was reminded of the execrable sex-strangler Goyo Cárdenas, reputed to have brought one of his victims back from the dead through the use of adrenaline obtained from the adrenal glands of another unfortunate. Armando would have liked to ask if this were possible. He would have liked to ask about the cells. The doctor, however, was short on time. He dismissed Armando’s curiosity with a brief grunt, a wave of the hand, then wielding an instrument that might have been used to shuck oysters, removed the boy’s cartilage without ceremony, after which conversation was all but impossible, took the last of Armando’s money, and sent him packing with half a dozen pain pills in a small white envelope.
Winter came shortly upon the heels of this humiliation and with it the rains. The city turned to mud. The canyons with their vast encampments of the homeless ran with raw sewage and the toxic waste of factories. Entire neighborhoods slid away overnight. The air stank. Training was difficult if not impossible. His money
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