To be honest, Elvis hadn’t expected this sort of attention. The Hawks regularly roughed up activists and dissolved suspicious small student meetings. The previous month a few Hawks had gone into a public high school and vandalized the library. No one really said a peep, or if they did, folks felt free to ignore the altercations.
But now it was all very delicate. People were printing names in clandestine circulars. Names like Alfonso Martínez Domínguez. Imagine that. He was the fucking regent of the city, not some low punk people could badmouth without consequence, but a fucking regent. President Echeverría kept saying he didn’t know anything, and overall Elvis had the impression the whole damn thing had turned into a disaster. Too many people were asking too many fucking questions.
No wonder that El Mago had ordered them to stay inside the apartment as much as possible. This would have pleased El Elvis quite a bit normally, since it gave him a chance to go through his Larousse dictionary and listen to his records, but with El Gazpacho out of commission and in another location, it was El Güero and the Antelope keeping him company, which was the same as having two vultures watching over his shoulder.
They were salivating, those motherfuckers, waiting to whine and tell El Mago all the ways El Elvis had fucked up the other day. El Elvis, as a result, decided to put on his headphones and attempt to muffle his worries away with a bit of Bobby Darin; he was sticky sweet, but Elvis didn’t mind a crooner with a good set of pipes. Who didn’t fucking like “Beyond the Sea”?
Elvis wasn’t going back to Tepito. He wasn’t. Tepito was a bottomless pit, a fucking cesspool. There was no future there for him.
He’d left home at the age of fifteen. Two years before that, he had been expelled from school. For no good reason, either. Elvis liked to learn and he liked to read, but when it came to writing words down he often switched letters around, his handwriting was poor, and it took him a long time to get assignments done. It was as if the words all clogged inside his head and he had to carefully fish them out one by one.
Well, his teachers didn’t think too much of him. When Elvis vandalized a lavatory, it was deemed enough to kick him out, even though he knew that other kids did far worse and they never got expelled. It was just that his teachers were wanting to be rid of one of the “dumber” kids in the class. Real nice of them.
He didn’t enroll in another school after that. His mother had four children to look after and no patience for him, so she hit him with the mop and told him to find a job. Elvis couldn’t find a gig that was better than bagging groceries, so he fell in with one of the little gangs in the area for pocket money and for kicks. Everyone in this gang was about his age, and they didn’t do anything that was real bad, limiting themselves to harassing the maids when they did their shopping rounds. For cash, they threatened to throw rocks at the windows of shop owners in the area. Most of them paid up.
There was one exception: the owner of the Andorra Pharmacy had a son a few years older and a few centimeters taller than the kids in the gang, and he warned them he’d get his uncle—supposedly a policeman—involved if they tried anything. He also beat a couple of them when they hung out too close to his precious pharmacy.
It hadn’t been Elvis’s idea to retaliate. God knew he had better stuff to do than pick fights. But one of the kids in their gang was real pissy because the pharmacist’s son had given him a black eye, and he wanted revenge. So they banded together, waited for the kid to walk home one night, and beat him up. He was big, but against the combined power of half a dozen teenagers it was a tough fight, and tougher still when it turned out that the boy with the black eye had somehow seen fit to bring a rusty old piece of metal to the fight and stabbed the pharmacist’s son.
Fortunately, the pharmacist’s son didn’t die. Unfortunately, it turned out that his warnings about his policeman uncle were real. Within a day or two the word was out that the cops were looking for every little fucker who had participated in the attack.
Elvis wasn’t eager to go to jail or reformatory school or any fucking place with an angry policeman, so he hightailed it out of the city. He was fifteen and had little understanding of the world, but he had heard from another teen that San Miguel de Allende was full of tourists who wanted to get laid, and he thought what the hell.
He was right about the tourists, though getting laid was a bit more difficult since most of the gringitas in the town were looking for buff, big-dicked men to fuck, and Elvis was a slim teenager, not a dude cut out for pornos and horny girls’ fantasies. But if he managed to look forlorn they usually threw him a few pesos, and he scraped by.
When he met Sally things improved. She was an American lady who they said had a thing for youngsters and some sort of fetish for “authentic” Mexican culture. Elvis was in need of a place to stay and hot meals, so he traded his shoes for huaraches to tickle her brown meat fantasy. For a while it was fine. He did errands for her, took care of the plants in the house she rented, ate her pussy when she demanded it. In return, he had full access to her record collection and a room, a bathroom, and a TV, though no pocket money.
The record collection was the best part, truth be told. That’s how he’d picked the name Elvis, after listening to several records from the King. He thought there was a certain resemblance between the young Elvis and himself, so he bought a black leather jacket like the one the singer wore in one of his flicks. His real name was lousy, anyway, and he began playing a guitar Sally had hanging in the living room and never touched.
He liked Sally, which is why it came as a bit of a shock when he discovered she’d picked up some other guy—a little older than Elvis, but not much—who must have had a bigger cock or licked pussy better, then kicked Elvis out. Just like that, from one day to the next. Elvis had no problem calling it quits with the dame, but only after he sneaked back into the house, stole the money he knew she kept in a box, and also absconded with six vinyl records.
He did what any dumb kid with sudden riches would do: spend it at the pool halls around Guadalajara, which was his new home. Outside an ice cream parlor, while eating a nieve de mamey, he met Cristina, a girl about his age who ended up getting him involved with a weird little religious cult near Tlaquepaque.
Elvis was a fool for pretty women, and Cristina pulled him in like a damn vortex with her soft, soft voice and her even softer glances. By the point when she asked him if he didn’t want to go hang out with her friends in Tlaquepaque, Elvis couldn’t have cared if she went around Guadalajara suckering in and recruiting guys on the regular, which he later figured out she actually did.
Cristina led him to a shabby house with funny folks who dressed in white and talked about magic mushrooms, auras, and healing crystals. Many of them had come from Mexico City, where they met doing yoga around Parque Hundido, and they’d spent time at Real de Catorce and Huautla, like any middle-class wannabe hippie did, before they stumbled onto Jalisco. Their leader did nothing but fuck the pretty young women in the congregation, while the uglies and the men were sent to work around the farm the cult used as a base of operations.
It turned out their leader didn’t like modern music very much, insisting on playing records featuring wind chimes and gongs, which was the last straw. Elvis liked Cristina, maybe he even loved her, but not enough to stay around watching another dude plow her from behind while Elvis had to feed the chickens or shovel manure, all without the comfort of even a rock ’n’ roll song or two.
He was seventeen by the time he stumbled back into Tepito, back into his mother’s apartment with no money and no prospects. His mother looked none too pleased to see him. He didn’t really feel like joining a gang again, though he half-heartedly hung out with his old friends and spent his days bored out of his skull for about two months until the afternoon when he stole the Illustrated Larousse from a Porrúa bookstore. He’d known a classmate who’d owned one of those, and he’d found it fascinating. It was a big, bulky b
ook to steal, but he managed it and thought that maybe his future lay in books.
Books! He, who couldn’t spell when he was stressed, the letters still jumbled in his head. But he did like to read, and having stolen one gigantic book he figured he could steal more, then resell them through the vendors along Donceles. He quickly got to stealing, reading, and reselling. Then, realizing that the used bookstores and those pricks from Donceles paid him a pittance and made a huge profit, he installed himself in an alleyway near Palacio de Minería. A few vendors brought folding tables; others simply set their books on flat pieces of cardboard. Elvis brought a tablecloth and stacked his wares.
After a little while he figured out the most profitable line of commerce: textbooks. University students would come around, ask if he had something, and he’d promise to obtain it for them. This meant he’d steal it from whatever bookstore was easiest and then sell it to the student.
Thieving turned out to be Elvis’s talent. After a couple of weeks he decided to augment his book sales with vinyl records, which was a sensible choice. He had aspirations to open up his own little shop, down in Donceles, and sit behind a cash register, book in hand and his Presley records playing.
That didn’t happen, because one day a bunch of fuckers appeared in his alleyway and started beating the vendors. Elvis had heard of things like this happening around the city, with cops, or other motherfuckers who must work for cops, chasing away the street sellers and beggars. They wanted to clean up the city for the Olympics.
But despite simmering violence, Elvis had been lucky. Well, not anymore. Everyone began to grab their wares and run away. Elvis began picking up his wares too, intent on simply making a quick exit with no fuss, but then an asshole decided to smash the copy of “Jailhouse Rock” Elvis had been proudly displaying, and he lost it.
Though he wasn’t terribly strong, though he wasn’t really a fighter, Elvis grabbed a thick tome of Rousseau and started beating the son of a bitch in the face with it. Within a few minutes some of the guy’s buddies realized what was going on and intervened, treating Elvis like a human piñata, until after several punches and spitting, he heard an older man speak.
“Let him be,” he said.
The thugs holding Elvis stopped punching him. He sat down, out of breath. The older man stood in front of Elvis. He was dressed impeccably, with a suit jacket, a burgundy tie, and shiny shoes. He looked at Elvis curiously.
“You put up quite a fight,” the man said, reaching into his pocket and holding out a handkerchief.
Elvis stared at the man’s hand. The man waved the handkerchief again, and Elvis slowly grabbed it and pressed it against his mouth, wiping the blood away.
“If it’d been fair I would’ve messed up that guy real good,” Elvis said.
“I know. You are fast. Good reflexes.”
“I guess,” Elvis said, not wanting to specify that stealing requires good reflexes and the ability to pick up speed in case an employee catches you in the act and you have to sprint your way to safety.
“Is this your merchandise?” the man asked, leaning down and grabbing a book: 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.
“Aha,” Elvis said.
The man ran his hands down the spine. He glanced at Elvis again. “How old are you, boy? Eighteen? Nineteen?”
“Almost eighteen, yup,” he said. “But what’s it to you?”
“A job, maybe,” the man said. “They call me El Mago. You know why? Because I can get people out of tight situations, like Houdini. And I can also make things appear and disappear.”
“And these guys,” Elvis said, pointing at the thugs who were shooing away the last remaining street sellers, “are these the people who help you pull rabbits out of hats?”
“Every magician needs an assistant, does he not? Maybe you have the chops for it.”
“I wouldn’t look too good in leotards or being sawed in half, mister.”
El Mago smiled. He had a treacherous smile. It was warm and made you think he was your best friend in the world, even when he was watching a guy get his kidneys ground into nothing by one of his men, as Elvis would later find out. But right then he didn’t know better, and he thought it was a pleasant smile.
El Mago gave Elvis a card with his phone number and told him to call him if he wanted to stop fooling around and make real cash. Elvis made an appointment to meet with El Mago. He hadn’t been too confident anything would come of it, but he remembered that Colonel Tom Parker had discovered Presley and plucked him from the shadows to turn him into a superstar. So obviously weird shit like that did happen sometimes. Maybe El Mago was the real deal, an important man, or maybe he was nothing. But Elvis needed to find out. He went to El Mago’s apartment, curious and unsure of what to expect.
It was a great apartment. El Mago had bookshelf after bookshelf lined with fancy tomes and an amazing stereo console. Interesting records too. Not rock or anything Elvis had heard about, but jazz. He had a bar cart, with a decanter and matching glasses and a cocktail shaker. When he asked Elvis if he wanted a smoke, he took out a silver cigarette case.
Cash. Yeah, Elvis smelled cash, but more than anything he was enchanted by El Mago’s way of life. This is exactly what he wanted: to have an apartment with high ceilings and bookcases going all the way up, the hardwood floors and the coffee table of glass and polished metal.
El Mago was kingly. Elvis had never seen anything like it, such assurance in manner, such class. He was a gentleman. Elvis had never met a gentleman; he had grown up with scum and shitheads, and here was this man, extending his hand—and it felt to him it was the hand of god, that’s how impressed he was—and lifting him from the muck.
The only thing that Elvis had ever won in his life were the plastic Hanna-Barbera figurines that came in Tuinkys. This was like finding a damn diamond inside the snack.
Of course Elvis accepted El Mago’s job offer and joined the Hawks. He became one of Mago’s boys. That’s what he called them: my boys.
It hadn’t been easy, all the training and the rules. The Hawks were run military style, and since a bunch of the members had been lowlife assholes like himself, picking up routines and following commands wasn’t first nature. But he persevered through the drills, mastered the tactics they were taught: how to bug a room, how to tail someone without being found out, the works. Apparently some of the Hawks had even been trained by the CIA, who didn’t want commies in Latin America and were assisting the Mexican government, which meant that Elvis received a top-notch education.
After a few months of initial prep he’d been assigned to a group, then reassigned to the one led by El Gazpacho, with El Mago overseeing them. His training didn’t end, but slowly he was given more and more assignments. Two years of that unit and he thought he had the whole thing figured out, that it would be an easy climb. Until now.
No sense in getting spooked, though. Not yet, Elvis told himself. Right. That meant more music—Mr. Sinatra was always a sure bet, and no one could belt “Fly Me to the Moon” like he did—and checking out his dictionary. He tried to learn a word each day, and when he really liked a word he wrote it out on a little notepad, cherishing it that way. It’d been three days since the operation had gone down and Elvis was trying to maintain his routine. His pushups, his music, timely meals, the word of the day.
Boys need routines, that’s what El Mago told them. But Mago hadn’t showed his face around the apartment, and all he’d said when he phoned was that everyone was to stay put. Elvis limited himself to buying the papers and cigarettes, eyeing the city wearily.
Three days now.
Eclectic. He looked at the dictionary. E-clek-tik. Elvis tried the word, whispering it to himself, then saying it louder. When he was done memorizing the word he put on a Beatles record and adjusted his headphones. Not everyone liked The Beatles, especially in his line of work. Other Hawks grumbled that this rock shit
was dangerous, it smelled like communism. But Elvis didn’t see any harm in music, and El Gazpacho secretly loved Lennon’s voice.
He tilted his head, regarded himself in the mirror, and when Lennon said the line about better running for your life, he made a motion with his hands and pretended to shoot himself in the mirror.
He didn’t speak English but he knew a few phrases. El Gazpacho had gladly translated lyrics for him, and Elvis had a decent memory.
Elvis kept thinking about how El Gazpacho loved all those Japanese movies and the time they’d gone to see a Godzilla film and pelted the screen with popcorn.
How was El Gazpacho? Would he return soon?
He frowned, reached for his sunglasses, and put them on, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. He made the motion with his hands again, pretended he was holding up a pistol, then let his arms fall to his sides.
He could have gone to El Gazpacho’s room and grabbed a real gun, but he didn’t dare walk in there.
Around seven El Mago showed up, summoning them to the living room. El Güero immediately launched into an explanation about how Elvis was a dipshit and not much could ever be expected from a lowlife who hailed from Tepito, while the Antelope mostly nodded and added a loud “aha!” here and there.
“If you allow me, sir, if I may be completely honest, El Elvis is sorta a fag,” El Güero said, sounding like a professor who was giving a very important lecture on nuclear physics or some shit like that. “You can’t trust him to do anything right. What did you call him, Antelope?”
“A wimp,” the Antelope said.
“No, the other thing.”
“Chamaco baboso.”
“No. A shit-flinging chimpanzee from the dirtiest cage in Chapultepec. No offense to the real monkeys. And he listens to all that propaganda, like a fucking degenerate anarchist,” El Güero said.
Velvet Was the Night Page 4
