This Love Is Not for Cowards (24 page)

“I stopped going to games. I didn't want to see anybody in Juárez anymore. I had a wristful of El Kartel bracelets that I had to cut off. I couldn't take them, physically or mentally. The day after the funeral I cut them off and gave half of them to Charlie's girlfriend and half to my mom. I was really angry at Juárez. I said, ‘You know what, I'm never going back.' There's nothing to go back to. The city I love so much is the same city that took one of the people I love most. So why go?

“It's the team that made me go back. Not the city but the team. They're my therapy. They're what made me get better. I missed all last season and missed the beginning of this season. It was really hard. But when I went back it was comforting. The fact that the players had called me. The fact that all my friends were at the games, and they were all so happy to see me back. It helped me a lot.

“It's causing a big conflict with my family. My mom doesn't want me going to the games. She's been so happy every time the Indios lose. She knew that every loss was one step closer to my never returning to Juárez. My mom and my stepfather, they don't understand that it's a big part of my life. I don't know what else I would be doing if I wasn't going to games. I don't know what I would be doing without it.”

“I DIDN'T THINK it could happen!” Marco shouts, wrapping my hand in a watery grip. A white towel winds around his waist. All the Indios whoop and sing in the visitors' locker room at Estadio Cuauhtémoc. They have won again. They even scored two goals in a game for the first time this season, one goal more than the home team from Puebla. A cheer erupts as Edwin returns from the field, followed by Christian the goalie. Make that Christian the
winning
goalie. Maleno Frías looks blissful even as he ices a hamstring he pulled during the game. Banda rhythms oompah from a boom box. It's nice to win. A lot of fun, even if the elation is tinged with melancholy, a feeling, as Marco puts it, of “Ah man, we could have done this all season.”

We traveled to Puebla on a budget. The skeleton crew in the locker room doesn't include even the goalkeeper coach, who had to watch the victory on television back in Juárez. Money is so tight in the organization that before I could tag along, I had to deposit into the team's checking account the full cost of my hotel room, airfare, and even the four meals I'll share with the players. I always pay my own way, but in the past I've settled up a day or two after we've returned home. After I made the deposit and returned to the Yvasa training complex with a receipt as instructed, the power to the Indios offices had been shut off.

Despite the money troubles looming over everything, this road trip has been almost pure fun. With the stress of possible relegation lifted, the trip has felt like those two days at the mountain resort: time with friends and a chance to play outside on a field of green grass. On our way down, Juan de la Barrera raided an Abercrombie & Fitch at the Mexico City airport, not yet too broke to keep current. Two fans asked forward Tomás Campos if they could take his picture. Marco and Edwin bought lottery tickets. “If I win, then the whole team gets paid!” Marco told me with a smile. We chartered a bus over to Puebla, watching most of
The Hangover
on the eighty-mile ride. At the hotel, we all watched Barcelona play El Clásico against Real Madrid.

El Kartel made the trip, too. This morning we woke up to discover a hardcore crew of Karteleros camped out in the hotel parking lot. When we sat down to breakfast in the hotel restaurant, they watched us through a window, looking hungrier than stray dogs. (They'd invested all their money in the bus, leaving nothing to cover even food.) I invited a couple of them in to eat whatever they wanted, my treat. Edwin, Marco, and other players came over to the table to kick in enough pesos to feed the rest. Juan de la Barrera added money plus a stack of tickets so everyone could watch the game for free.

The breezy feel of the trip carried over to Gabino's pregame strategy session. In a conference room at the hotel, minutes before we rode over to the stadium, the head coach did not play any maudlin movie clips, nor did he air video montages of the horrors unfolding back in Juárez. He cracked jokes, and laughed along at the jokes cracked by his players. Puebla features the league's leading scorer, Las Vegas native Herculez Gomez. Gabino told Marco and Juan de la Barrera to mark him closely. But to have fun, too. It's a nice day, everyone, a big stadium, a pretty city.

Herculez Gomez scored no goals. The Indios' game winner was a long, arcing shot from way outside the penalty box. The Indio who shot it, one of the Argentineans Gil Cantú had imported, surprised me with the blast; I didn't know he had it in him. When the ball rippled the net, the shooter ran toward the El Kartel section of the stadium. Red shirts rushed down to the fence to return the affection. One of the Juárez fans held up a banner that stated MY LIFE IS YOURS. The Indios and El Kartel, in love once again.

Showered and dressed, Marco walks to the bus, crossing himself when he passes the stadium chapel. Edwin steps into the chapel to say a few prayers, finding Kong already on his knees. Juan de la Barrera gives an interview to ESPN, then steps on the motor coach. El Kartel slaps the side of the bus when we slowly pull out of the lot. The players signal back with upturned thumbs. Lose 7–1 to Atlas and the bus ride is somber. Beat Puebla on the road and the ride is a party all the way back to the Mexico City airport, where we'll be spending the night in a sweet hotel. Banda on the stereo, the rest of
The Hangover
playing on video screens. Marco sits beside two brown boxes, gifts from his grandparents, who'd driven from Mexico City to watch the game. They own a printing shop in the capital. In the boxes are the invitations to his wedding.

Chapter 18

Chivas

After the puebla win, as the team and I fly up to Juárez from the airport in Mexico City, Francisco Ibarra flies the other way, down to the capital. He's going to address the media, to tell them that relegation is a setback for his team, but it's not the end. In a rented conference room at a hotel near the airport, he will report that the Indios aren't going anywhere. Ciudad Juárez needs soccer. His club will forge through its economic struggles, and will solve its problems on the pitch, too. He will sit alone at a table draped in white cloth facing reporters from Fox Sports, ESPN Deportes, and all the newspapers that matter, none of which are the papers in Juárez.
Juárez doesn't exist.
Cameras will flash as Francisco reads a script he hopes will inspire a government or two—the state of Chihuahua? The Calderón administration?—to step in and back his “social program.” What he will actually end up doing, from the moment he opens the floor for questions, is make the situation on the border look more hopeless than ever.

Yes, he will admit, he feels unsafe in Juárez. Police have stopped him—with guns drawn—at least six times. And, yes, a goalie quit the team after
ladrones
threatened to kill him, a story we all know in Juárez but which will be news to the national press. The violence is probably the main reason why the team dropped down, he'll speculate. When asked to elaborate on how the violence has affected the squad, Francisco will let slip that
extorsionistas
have demanded money from at least a dozen of his players. While he feels lucky that he personally has not yet been shaken down, he's afraid to even investigate the people threatening his strikers and midfielders and goalies.

“I'm not naming names; it is very delicate,” he will say, hopelessly off-script. “I do not want to know where it comes from. If you live in Juárez, the last thing you want to know is who is behind the bullet.”

The still-unpaid Indios players and I return to a city crowded with even more police. Calderón has dispatched another surge of
federales
to the border. More than fifty of the new officers have moved into my complex. I always thought my place looked like an army barracks. Now it definitely looks like military housing, a police academy. Officers sleep and watch TV on both sides of my unit. They're below me, too, and crowded into apartments in all five of the complex's buildings. Two officers—the poor bastards—have even been assigned to Alaska, my old digs. My new neighbors march around in blue uniforms and black boots and flak jackets, automatic rifles in their hands or slung around shoulders. Blue Dodge Ram police cruisers occupy every parking space in front of my building. Any thought that I might be safer with these cops around vanishes when six
federales
are murdered, ambushed while on patrol. The referees at the Associated Press recently declared that the Sinaloans have won the game, that El Chapo and his cartel now control the Juárez Plaza. J. L. and La Línea killed the
federales
—in a spectacularly cinematic way that reminds me of an Italian mafia hit—to refute the article. Their letter to the editor—a
narcomanta
painted on a wall near the ambush site—said, essentially, “We're still here.” Game still on.

My apartment building is now a big fat target. Great. The violence in my neighborhood is already on the rise. Somebody dumps a dead body a couple streets up, the male corpse crammed into a pair of women's panties and a bra. Another man is decapitated and strapped to a fence next to my regular burrito place. (His head is found a block away.) A
federale
is murdered down my street. Also on my street: Gunmen break into one of the finer homes and kill the owner, his wife, and their eldest son. Oh, and still on my street, three more people are massacred outside a different apartment I came very close to renting. Walking Benito the morning after I got back from Puebla, the neighbor I've come to know best asks if I'd heard the bullets. Which ones? She'd been walking her dog in our little park when shots rang out. She ran over to the giant Zaragoza mansion and pounded on its security door until she was let in.

“It was funny,” she says.

THE SKY IS just starting to lighten at seven in the morning, which is when Ramón Morales likes to meditate. The temperature will probably climb into the nineties today, but at dawn, in the desert, it's crisp enough for sweatshirts and sweatpants. We first walk a few languid laps around a dirt track hidden behind a Wal-Mart and close to the Rotary Bridge. Ramón, the head of the Indios' media department, used to start his day with thirty minutes of jogging. He's powered down his routine on doctor's orders, something about an old hip injury. As we walk, a sprinkler system turns the track's sandy infield into milk chocolate mud. Three ladies in wide-brimmed black hats—almost bonnets—power past us, one of the women wearing those sneakers with the curved soles that supposedly tone the legs. A man with the hood of his windbreaker pulled tight around his face really grounds out the kilometers, lapping us twice before Ramón points to a quiet spot near some bleachers and underneath the thin canopy of two shade trees.

Ramón's job with the Indios was his destiny, he tells me. He grew up in Juárez, leaving only because he wanted to get ahead professionally. Puebla first, where he helped out a minor league soccer team. Then on to Guadalajara, a city he loved so much he planned to stay there the rest of his life. An unplanned pregnancy brought him back to La Frontera. “I won't even say she was my girlfriend,” he shares, “but I wanted to do the right thing by her so we got married.” She was a Juárez native, too. Because she wanted to raise their child near her family, she and Ramón returned to the border. Yet the marriage dissolved almost immediately, and mutually: They both felt staying together would make their newborn daughter miserable. Ramón divorced, moved in with his parents, and delved deeper into meditation, a relaxation habit he'd discovered in Guadalajara. While meditating one morning, a vision of Indians popped into his head. Soon afterwards, Francisco Ibarra announced he was bringing soccer back to Juárez, and that the team would be called the Indios. It struck Ramón as fate. He applied for the head media job and got it.

I see Ramón almost every day, either at the Yvasa complex or up in the press box at Olympic Stadium. He looks like a professional when he's at work, like he's the right guy for his position. He wears blazers and dress shirts, keeps his hair short and his brown beard always trimmed tight. The lenses on his fashionable eyeglasses darken when he steps into sunshine. This facade of proficiency cracks a bit when he's writing up press releases. As he types, he likes to blast his favorite Canadian classic-rock power trio, which always makes me laugh.
Juárez loves Rush!
Ramón and I connected pretty quickly, just as people. He was the first to call me El Gringo Loco, a nickname that caught on way too quickly in the press box.

“Are we going to talk or are we going to get started?” Ramón asks. Have I been posing too many questions? I stop my interrogation and sit Indian style, as instructed. Ramón tells me to touch my sacral chakra, three fingers below my belly button. Together we pray for kindness, to let our anger go and to let love in. It's Reiki, a specific style of meditation Ramón's been practicing for about two years and which he's been delving into deeper and deeper as the season has progressed. He flips through Reiki study books while in the office. A red kabbalah string circles his right wrist. Recently, after sending out the Indios press release of the day, Ramón has started following up with a second e-mail full of quotes from Gandhi and tips on how to release stress. This second communication goes to every reporter on the Indios' mailing list, though Ramón makes sure to send it from his personal address.

“Breathe in,” he tells me. “Big breaths.” On Ramón's lead, we claw the energy from our right arms, using our left hands as the claws. We switch arms and then we shake out both hands (claws?) to release the bad energy. On the dirt track, a trio of older men start into their own slow laps. One man sports a hat advertising Chivas, the Mexican superteam and the Indios' opponent tomorrow, Wednesday, an unusually quick turnaround after the Puebla game, which was played only two days ago.

“Embrace love,” Ramón commands. “Let anger out … Breathe deep … Just sit.” Ramón hits a button on one of his cell phones, which sounds a melodic gong. He stands up and circles a palm near my forehead, gliding his hand close to my arms and down my back as he follows an invisible aura. “Out with the bad energy,” he says. “Think about love.”

We end the session by chanting five-word phrases I know I won't remember later and am too much in the moment to write down now. I try to chant just loud enough to let Ramón know I'm participating, but not so loud as to be showy. I'm a humble meditator. Or I would be if I did this sort of thing regularly. I don't. A large part of me can't help but think that as relaxing as this is, it would be even more relaxing to have simply stayed in bed. I showed up today because I've been curious about Ramón's growing spirituality. And because Ramón has been signaling that he wants to talk about his frustration with the Indios. He has some bad energy he needs to let out.

“That press conference disappointed me so much,” he says after a final chime sounds on his phone and after we salute the sun one last time. He's referring to Francisco Ibarra's disaster in Mexico City. “Talking about extortion was such the wrong thing to say.” Everyone in Juárez gets extorted over the phone, he reminds me. As crazy as that sounds, it's true. A poster on the door to my gym warns of criminals working their way through the phone book, calling people at random as they phish for someone gullible enough to divulge personal information. It's not much different from the mass e-mails sent by supposedly wealthy Nigerian businessmen. The only people who end up actually extorted are the one in five thousand who engage with the callers. Francisco's highlighting of this crude con is only the latest in a long string of bad decisions, Ramón insists. The main reason the Indios are struggling financially is not because of the violence, as Francisco claimed in the press conference. It's because Francisco doesn't know what he's doing, and he won't listen to anyone else. Ramón tells me he might have to quit the team, just on principle.

“I'm kind of pissed off that we let this happen,” he says, referring to Juárez's expulsion from the Primera. It was not even a year ago that the Indios needed a miracle to beat Cruz Azul and stay in the majors. “And yet we didn't learn from it. We were almost relegated back then, but we got this synergy going with the fans and the media and the internal work we did, work that [Francisco's] not doing now. We had to go to all these meetings in El Paso because he couldn't come here. When he was trapped over there, it was better in a way, because we had the power to make decisions.”

Ramón and I walk over to the bleachers and sit down, normal style. I'm feeling exceptionally chill, relaxed. I've just let out a lot of animosity and let in love and clawed the anger out of the veins in both my arms. Ramón, in contrast, is unusually riled up. “Gabino and Gil, they know the right things to do,” he continues. “But Francisco, he won't give up the power. He has to be in control. And he doesn't make the right decisions.”

Ramón's not the first person in the front office to say this to me. The team's lawyer, Mario Boisselier, once told me that the Indios' big victory over Cruz Azul had disappointed him greatly. Not the victory, which thrilled him, but what happened immediately afterwards. The team had been struggling to make payroll even back then. The win earned Francisco enough bonus money to cover the gap between revenues and operating expenses. If only he hadn't handed it all over to the players in fat bonus checks. That generosity made Francisco popular with Marco and Jair and everyone else on the team, for a while. But it exacerbated the problems that are making the players so angry now: There's zero money left to pay them. The miracle win over Cruz Azul also presented the Indios with lucrative endorsement opportunities that Francisco never capitalized upon, the lawyer complained. Francisco Ibarra, basically, is getting all the blame.

“Where is he?” Ramón asks, referring to the team owner. “Have you seen him lately?” I haven't, actually. Not for a while. “I'm angry because we invest so much in the team. I don't mean money, but I've invested my time, my labor, my experience to make this team successful. I want to do my best for the Indios. We were on the same level as the greatest teams in Mexico, and yet our media office has only two people? That's crazy.”

Ramón needs more than just a larger staff, he insists. There must be a travel budget, too; if he'd gone to Mexico City with Francisco, he could have prevented his boss's self-destruction. Other people close to the team have told me that Francisco “suffers from attention deficit disorder,” that “he's difficult to work for,” “he's anxious,” “he's hyperactive,” and “he likes things done his way and only his way.” It's a rare instance when the scapegoat label hangs on the guy at the top.

“This team isn't just for him,” Ramón concludes. “He says that it's not for him, that it's for Juárez. We all believe it. But then it doesn't seem like it's for the city when he makes decisions that benefit only him. He says it's for the city, but it's clearly not. This team doesn't belong to Francisco Ibarra or the Ibarra family. Not anymore. They started it up, but this is for the city.”

THE MIGHTY GOATS of Chivas check into the Camino Real hotel across from Central Park and close to Las Misiones Mall. It's the same hotel Felipe Calderón prefers when he's in town, and security is as tough for the team as it is for the president. Several guards, all armed with assault rifles, grill me for three minutes before they let me in.
Let's see your passport. Now your Indios media credentials. What paper do you write for?
I don't write for any paper, which causes a problem. Luckily, a reporter for
El Mexicano
steps in to vouch for me, El Gringo Loco. Left out in the parking lot are a hundred Chivas fans. They sing team songs and wave team jerseys over their heads like red-striped Terrible Towels. Chivas is beloved. If they played baseball in the States, they'd be the Red Sox and the Yankees and the Cubs and the Cardinals combined. Maybe even the Dodgers, too. No team in Mexico is more popular. Number two, Club América, in Mexico City, is way back there. Chivas is so adored in large part because only Mexicans are allowed to wear the team's striped shirts. The club charter forbids imports from Argentina or Brazil or Gringolandia. Even though Marco Vidal's only passport was issued by the United States, his innate Mexicanness was certified when Chivas signed him back when he was twelve.