The Gringo Champion

by Aura Xilonen

  I disentangle myself from the blanket and bang on the little window. It opens and the rays of sunlight stream solidly in. It carries me away. I wander around and pull my boots on; they’re totally shot, but they’re the only shoes I have.

  * * *

  [“So what are you spending your dinero on, you greedy prick?”

  “With what you pay me, Jefe, air’s the only thing I can afford.”

  “Don’t worry, you diabolical mooch, I’ll raise your wages soon so you can pay me the rent you owe me for that loft.”]

  I cautiously descend the stairs. The good thing about the fucking bookstore is that it’s like a ghost, an empty space between buildings; it’s as if it didn’t exist, a useless rubbish heap, a black hole. Hardly anybody used to stop to look at the books in the display windows. Sometimes an absentminded sparrow or two would flutter in, but they always left without buying anything. I get down on my hands and knees and, dodging the fallen bookcases among the naked tomes, head back to the little storeroom. The bookcase of starchy poetry is blocking the door—those sappy fucking books full of caramelized garbage; lovey-dovey, like cow innards when they’ve eaten a lot of grass and deposit beautiful, sweet brown patties. That bookcase is blocking the service door that leads to the alley I need to leave by. I pull down the books and put them in the case where the horror books used to go before they ended up rolling on the floor laughing. I finish and tug hard on the bookcase. One of the sides rumbles, but I manage to yank it loose and lift it so I can rotate the case and shove it into the corner where Jefe used to keep his most prized volumes, the ones he read over and over again.

  * * *

  [“You don’t need to read a lot, just the essentials. And as the years pass, you go back to your first books, and eventually you cut down on those till there’s only one left, till death do you part, you fucking numbskull.”

  “Now I get why people don’t buy any of this crap, Jefe: a single fucking book is more than enough for your entire life.”]

  I pick up a fat, heavy volume of Spanish poetry and bang it against the lock. The lock gives, and I push it to one side to remove it completely. I set it down and try to push the door open. It’s still stitched shut with cobwebs and dust, but there’s nothing a few batterations can’t fix.

  When I ram into it with my shoulder for the third time, the door gives way and I almost fly out into the little alley. I spring backward. I look around. And now how the hell do I close the fucking thing? I pick up a little book of the hundred best love poems in Spanish and wedge one side of the door. I push hard, and it remains jammed. I jiggle it to make sure it’s all right, and it doesn’t budge. “Damn,” I smile, “I finally found a fucking use for poetry.”

  * * *

  [And it fucking figures, later on I picked up a book of poetry—when I was moving on from picture books and that sort of thing—because it was skinny and didn’t have too many words, and I ended up having to read the soddamn massive fucking dictionary because I didn’t understand a thing the pinche poet was saying.]

  I come out of the alley and head toward 47th, where the gym is. I’m not about to spend a cent on the bus. So I start running to try to fill the gap in time I’ve just made. I dash past the chickadee’s building, past Wells Park, past the Century Theater. I reach the Ford Foundation’s university complex and keep going, and before the intersection that leads to the baseball stadium, I turn right and jog toward 39th. Once I pass 41st, it’s like another world.

  The houses ramshackle and garish. Torn chain-link fences, like the area’s a war zone. Fucking dogs digging through the garbage. The passersby are practically levitating off the ground. I think they’re more fucked than I am. I see some stoned addos smoking up and huffing Krakow ether out of little bags.

  There’s an overpass soaring above us with cars whizzing past, its columns covered with graffiti. There’s no grass in the planters here; they’re full of dry seeds. The trees are so stunted they don’t even sway in the wind.

  I head toward a row of close-set little warehouses by a large median strip across from a cluster of three- or four-story tenement houses that stink of bodies and poverty.

  When I finally get to 47th, I’m dripping with sweat. I spot some small lettering printed on a partially unfurled awning: CHUBY BOX NG G M. The gorillas’ mothership is parked outside. “Chingafuck,” I say to myself, “this fucking molluscular scruff isn’t gonna be able to pay me even half of what we agreed.”

  I enter the gym through a glass-and-aluminum door. Inside, the lights are off and the only illumination is filtering in through some skylights that make you lose all sense of lice. The ceiling is high, like a warehouse. There are a couple of racks with weights over to the left. Then there are some benches for weights and dumbbells. In the middle there’s a boxing ring where a couple of scrawny kids like me are whaling on each other. Across the room are some lockers, and toward the back is a sign that says BATROOM. A door marked OFFICE is next to a window with closed blinds. Another couple of kids are punching a bag that’s hanging from a chain, and an older dude is stroking a speed bag with his fists all wrapped up like a fucking mummy. A guy’s doing crunches on a black incline board. The whole place is painted blue, and a huge luchador mask is peeling off in the middle of the wall, next to several posters of some really ripped white dudes. A few mirrors make the gym look bigger than it is. I pause at the entrance. I feel like bailing right then and there. “It’s not too late, nobody’s seen me yet.” Yeah, fuck these fucking vatos. I didn’t come here to screw around. I turn around and smack right into a shaved-headed addo who’s just come in. He shoves me hard in the chest and moves off.

  “Hey, asshole,” I say, but he apparently doesn’t understand Spanish.

  He heads for the office and slams the door. I see him lift up a slat of the blinds and glare out at me. I flip him off, and he immediately disappears. “Fucking cunt-ass bastard,” I muse, “he must think he’s a super-gringo,” one of those descendants of naturalized immigrants who make life difficult for their own fellow citizens, their own blood, their own people, rejecting any origin tattooed on their chromosomes.

  I push the door open and spit on the ground outside the gym. I start walking toward the median and then feel the mollusk’s clammy embrace again.

  “Fuck you, güey,” he says, “why so late?”

  “I got lost,” I tell him so he’ll let go. I see he’s got a white bandage on his nose where I head-butted him yesterday.

  “Dónde you going?”

  “To get some sun. It’s cold as the fucking grave in there.”

  “I know the place is a little rough, but just you wait, güey, as soon as I turn out a champion campeón, it’ll take off.”

  “The only thing you’re going to turn out in that place is hemorrhoids,” I say. He looks at me dumbly. Probably has no idea what the hell I’m talking about. “Hemorrhoids are little fishies you get in your tushie.”

  His expression doesn’t change.

  “Where are your gym clothes?” he asks, changing the subject.

  “What?” I say.

  “Well, you’re not going to need them anyway—you’re not going to be training. Like we talked about yesterday, you’ll just be espareando a little.”

  “And are you going to pay me what we agreed?”

  “Sí.”

  “All right,” I tell him, and we go back into the gym. He’s leading me by the arm—no, that’s not fucking true, I’ve got his gelatinous arm around my neck; it feels sticky, like it’s covered with suction pads. I guess the fatso takes up more eyespace than I do, because now everybody’s looking at us; bland little morsels like me must not even make a mark.

  “See, man, after falling into the fucking abyss, taking all the shit I could get my hands on to bulk up and ending up with nothing, man, little by little I’m getting by, making do. It’s not much, but I learned my puto lesson, bro. I
’m paying for it as I go,” he says as he drags me toward the ring, where two guys are hopping around like little girls. “Look, Yorkie, here’s a sparring partner for El Crazy Loco.”

  A black guy with graying hair, kalamatic from torrents of sun, sits up on a bench hidden behind the ring and yawns, grendling like a cat. “He skinny,” he says. “Your Loco’s gonna break ’im in two.”

  “Are you sleeping?” the octopus kaslurps.

  “Naw, man. Jus’ gettin’ a wink.”

  “Stop fucking monkeying around!” says the gigantic mollusk.

  “No, no monkey,” the black guy says with a toothless cackle, “dormouse mebbe.”

  “Goddammit, York, instead of keeping an eye on the ring, you’re back there snoozing. What happens if those kids end up killing each other and ripping each other’s guts out and you don’t even notice, huh?”

  The black guy looks over to where the guys are feinting, bouncing, swinging wildly and missing, dancing back and forth. Yorkie smiles.

  “Those fuckers don’ even touch when they’s kissin’ each other’s ass. Heh!”

  I, too, abruptly break out in laughter, just like that, natural-like, winging it. The mollusk eyes me casuistically, his expression suddenly angry. In a cavernously ectopic voice, he says, “Get those two fags out of there and put this raggedy-ass prick in. That way he can learn to love God in a foreign country, and we’ll see if he’s got what it takes.”

  Grumbling, he strides off toward his lair.

  Cheerfully, York says, “The fat lady has sang. I’ll be prayin’ fer ya, funny guy.”

  He gets up heavily from the bench, and I see his feet are more twisted than the fucking tree branches outside.

  “Lez go,” he says. “You got clothes?”

  “Yeah,” I tell him, “I’m wearing ’em, puto geezer.”

  He turns and looks me up and down and then emits another toothless cackle.

  “You keep that up, you ain’t even gonna make it to geezer.”

  He moves off, walking like his balls are dragging on the floor, and rummages in a crate under the ring. He pulls out a mask and some red gloves.

  “Used this before?”

  “Yeah,” I tell him, “on my cock.”

  The black guy doesn’t crack a smile. He tosses them at me.

  “Put ’em on then, asshole.”

  I catch them. I have no idea which way the laces go, but I’m not a total idiot so I copy the ballerinas the black guy is shooing out of the ring:

  “Hey, ladies, come on down from there ’fore I has a heart attack from all ’at sugar.”

  The dudes are sweatily reluctant, but they obey. They detach from the ring, wriggling between the ropes, and head over to plop down on one of the ringside benches, exhausted. They look like two fucking pigeons that have been electrocuted on a high-tension wire. They take off their head guards, and I see their hair’s trimmed short with mazelike designs shaved into it, like a fade but way more intricate. I put on the mask and strap on the gloves. My fists ball up inside them. I feel like a goddamn cat in house slippers.

  “Hey!” yells the black guy. “Ain’ ya gonna take yer shirt off?”

  “Nah.” I shake my head. Anyway, I’ve been wearing it so many days and nights in a row, one more isn’t going to make a difference.

  * * *

  [“What are you doing, kid?” a paisa once asked me back in my picker days when he saw me putting on my underwear inside out.

  “Nothing, I’m just recycling my clothes.”

  Because it was the only underwear I had and there was no water to wash it with, let alone soap. And the same with my sockrags: I turned them inside out again and again so they could air out and not reek to high heaven of bubonic paw-pits.]

  I finish adjusting my gloves and tug on the laces with my teeth to tighten them. “Now what?” The black guy goes over to the pigeons to take off the pads they’re wearing and starts throwing them into the box of odds and ends under the ring. “All righty,” I say to myself. I turn around and size myself up next to the posters of the buff gringos. “Shit, I’m scrawnier than my fucking mother, and with these big red gloves and this huge red mask, I look like a goddamn beet with its balls al fresco!”

  Chuby comes out alongside the motherfucker I ran into in the doorway, who’s now swathed in a gold robe that covers his head; he’s bouncing along like a diarrheal grasshopper and punching the air. I suppose in order to think you’re a champion, you have to look like one. He’s got a towel draped around his neck.

  Behind him comes the earringed gorilla, who’s filming him with his iPhone.

  They reach the ring. The mollusk yells at the black guy, “Fuck you, Yorkie, I told you to get him ready. He’s still wearing his shirt and he’s got his fucking mask on upside down.”

  York gurgitates from behind me, “Beats me, he didn’t let me near him. This kid’s like a rabid dog, a bad seed.”

  The mollusk stands in front of me, takes off my mask, and puts it on the right way. I adjust it under my chin. I can’t see a fucking thing. I feel like a horse with blinders on that can only see straight ahead. Then he ties my gloves, making a Gordian knot so they’ll never come off.

  “Did you bring a mouthguard?” the mollusk asks me.

  “Qué?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re just going to be a stand-in so we can see whether you’ll work or not. Just don’t stick out your tongue—you could bite it off if he clocks you one, sabes!”

  “Qué!”

  “Now get in the ring.” He smacks me in the back of the head.

  “See here, dickwad,” I protest, but he doesn’t hear me because the bald, be-earringed ape comes up with his iPhone and says, “Aren’t you going to weigh them, Chub?”

  “No,” the octopus says. “Seems like the kid’s right about the same size as our campeón.” He walks away and goes up to his flashy rockstar, who’s flexing, doing squats, shadowboxing.

  Instead of walking over to where there’s a little staircase up into the ring, I boost myself up and roll under the ropes. I stand up, shaking off the white powder that’s stuck to my jeans and my bookstore shirt. I look around.

  The earringed ape is still buzzing around like a bumblebee, filming everything. The dudes and scruffs approach the ring: the guy with the speed bag, the guys from the punching bag, the abs dude, one coming out of the bathroom that I didn’t see earlier. I feel their eyes on me; it’s like being in a display case in a fucking museum.

  The fat mollusk comes up the stairs and stands in the middle of the ring. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says the first thing that comes to mind, addressing me:

  “Just don’t ralph on the canvas or I’ll kick your ass.”

  “What am I gonna chuck up,” I think, “when all I’ve got in my guts is nothing?”

  He waves the Crazy Loco over with one hand. The guy clambers into the ring, accompanied by the black guy and the earringed gorilla. Vato’s still hopping; he looks like a possum with a lit match in its snatch. Yorkie takes off the guy’s robe and hangs his towel around his own neck. “Oh, man,” I think, “check that guy out: even his six-pack’s got a six-pack.” His muscles are like a racehorse’s: you can see the veins in his arms, neck, and legs, and I could swear you can see his pulse if you get too close; those thick arteries must be making the air throb around him. He’s got one tattoo on his shoulder and another on his back of a pair of goat horns—literally, the kind of goat that bleats. His shorts are blue with red trim. They’ve got “Crazy Loco” embroidered on one leg in golden letters, and on the back, emblazoned across his ass, it says, “American Champion.” He clenches his jaw, glaring at me with hatred.

  Yorkie puts Vaseline on the fighter’s face so the salsa will just slide off.

  The earringed gorilla wanders around, capturing it all with his iPhone. He records the people sitt
ing down, the guys wandering around and staring. When they’ve finished primping El Crazy Loco and putting in the noxious ape’s mouthguard, Chuby signals to us to move to the center of the ring. With his tentacles, he takes the two of us by the shoulders, but he addresses his protégé first:

  “Take it easy now, campeón, we’re just softening him up a little; we want him to last longer than the others did. I don’t want you causing any problems like you did last time. If I say estop, you estop: you back off immediately. None of this keeping-going lunatical-ass bullshit, got it, Crazy Loco?”

  The crazy dude is still dancing, but he nods. He doesn’t say boo. I see he’s got several inches on me.

  “And you, bro”—the mollusk’s talking to me now—“hang in there, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul, sabes!”

  I nod, because that’s what you have to do in this shitty world, just nod: say yes until no comes about of its own accord.

  The fatso slaps us on the back, pushes me toward my corner, and starts acting as the referee.

  “Give him hell, fucking Loco,” he tells his fighter, “we’re going for gold, sabes.”

  He makes a signal to the ringside, and Yorkie bangs on a bell with a little mallet that goes ting or ding like a ricketish boat.

  Immediately the Loco leaps at me in a mighty fury; I know it because I see his eyes inflamed with rage, burning to tear me apart however he can. I see him with his jaw clenched so tight that his teeth and the veins in his temples might explode at any moment. I see him so determined to kill me that my only instinct, before that pinche Loco takes another step toward me and tears me apart, is to kick him hard in the giblets to settle him down. Zooooom fuuuuuck! I give him a sharp kick between the legs and watch him drop like a leaf in autumn, a crispy, suicidal leaf tumbling down from the yellow trees, and spit out his mouthguard, which sails off past the ropes. He crumples forward and then, like an anesthetized sleepwalker, spills backward. He plunges down like a meteorite in the middle of the ocean, raising a billow of dust from the canvas.