Saúl Armendáriz grew up in one of the world’s weirder double cities: El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Born in El Paso, he lived, always, on both sides of the border. “I went to school in El Paso, but on Friday my sisters and I would run over the bridge to Juárez,” he says. The fun and the family were mostly in Juárez. At the top of the fun list, for Saúl, was lucha libre—the flashy, popular Mexican brand of professional wrestling. Every barrio had a small arena where masked heroes (técnicos) and villains (rudos) grappled and whirled and tossed one another around on Sundays. Saúl loved the gaudy costumes. He loved the rowdy, passionate crowds. He idolized the larger-than-life luchadores. He was not a big kid, but he was athletic and quick and in desperate need of an alter ego.
“Being gay is a gift from God,” Armendáriz told me recently. That was not his experience as a child. He remembers being brutally punished, at a very young age, for playing patty-cake, a girl’s game, with a like-minded boy at school. His parents, particularly his father, were mortified by his effeminacy. “My dad was a machista,” he said. “He did not want a gay son.” His father, a truck driver, drank; he beat Saúl’s mother. They divorced when Saúl was thirteen. Other kids were also rough. “Boys in the neighborhood, including my own relatives, used me as a sex toy,” he told me.
Armendáriz, who is forty-four, stood at a dressing-room mirror in Los Angeles, putting on green-glitter eyeshadow, while recalling these horrors. He did not seem notably detached from, or perturbed by, what he was saying, but somewhere in between. “I am not a victim,” he said firmly. Then he gave a small sigh and started putting on lipstick—fire-engine red. “But I am still so damaged.” He glued on a pair of false eyelashes. He was transforming Saúl into his lucha character, the fabulous world welterweight champion Cassandro.
He quit school at fifteen and apprenticed himself to a lucha trainer in Juárez. He made his professional début, at seventeen, as Mister Romano. That character was dreamed up by a well-known Tijuana luchador, Rey Misterio, with whom Armendáriz had, as a promising student, gone to train. Mister Romano was a gladiator-themed rudo. He wore a scary black-and-white mask and costume and had a wicked dropkick off the top rope. Working his way up the match cards in arenas along the border, he lasted less than a year.
“It was Baby Sharon who encouraged me to step out of Mister Romano,” Armendáriz said. Baby Sharon was an exótico—a luchador who wrestles in drag. Exóticos have been around since the nineteen-forties. At first, they were dandies, a subset of rudos with capes and valets. They struck glamour-boy poses and threw flowers to the audience. As exóticos got swishier and more flirtatious, and started dressing in drag, the shtick became old-school limp-wristed gay caricature. Crowds loved to hate them, screaming “Maricón!” and “Joto!” (“Faggot!”). The exóticos made a delightful contrast with the super-masculine brutes they met in the ring. Popular exóticos insisted that it was all an act—in real life, they were straight. Baby Sharon was among the first, according to Armendáriz, to publicly say that, no, he was actually gay.
At his début as an exótico, Armendáriz wore no mask. “For my entrance, I wore a butterfly blouse of my mother’s. I wore the tail of my sister’s quinceañera dress. And then, to wrestle, a woman’s bathing suit.” He was billed as Rosa Salvaje, but the match was in Juárez, where everybody knew him. It was a terrifying night. “I thought it was a secret that I was gay, so I thought I was coming out. But everybody already knew. I was the only one who didn’t know.” Still, people yelled, “Kill the fag!”
Rosa Salvaje, like Mister Romano, was quick and tough. No limp wrists or squealing. Maybe a brief bump and grind after hurling an opponent from the ring into the first row of seats. Maybe a shock kiss on the mouth for some stud he had in a submission hold. The crowds adored the act. But some older wrestlers didn’t want matches with Rosa. They particularly didn’t want to lose to him. It was 1989, the height of H.I.V. and AIDS hysteria. Armendáriz’s mother, Maria, began coming to his matches. (His father has still never seen one, except on TV.) She did not let the drunken calls for homophobic homicide pass. “That’s my son!” she protested. No cry could give more pause to a Mexican heckler.
Rosa Salvaje often fought alongside another talented exótico, Pimpinela Escarlata. They kicked hetero butt up and down the state of Chihuahua. Were these legitimate wins? In sporting terms, no. There is a reason the Nevada Gaming Control Board would never allow betting on pro wrestling: outcomes are predetermined. But the fix involves a “story line,” in lucha libre just as in U.S. pro wrestling, and winners must be, at the very least, convincing athletes. Rosa and Pimpi fulfilled that requirement.
And the course of a story line isn’t determined only by promoters. When Armendáriz decided to change his stage name, he took a lucha de apuesta (“betting match”) against an exótico called Johnny Vannessa: the loser would forfeit his name. Rosa, as crooked fate would have it, lost, and Armendáriz fought his next match as Cassandro. The name came from a Tijuana brothel keeper, Cassandra, whom he admired. Cassandra was known for her generosity to the poor. With the profits from her bustling business, she helped street kids, and she had done the same, it was said, in her younger days as a high-priced prostitute. Cassandro found her blend of talents and sympathies inspiring. Maybe it was possible to be a bawdy entertainer—scandalous, sexy, successful—and a good person.
Once, in Guadalajara, an old woman stabbed him during a match, after the bout overflowed, as lucha libre often does, into the seats. Why did she do that? Cassandro shrugged. “I was beating up one of her heroes. She got me right here, under the rib cage.” In Juárez, another old woman once threw a cup of green chilies on his back. “I told her to calm down,” he said. “She was going crazy. I told her she was going to have a fucking heart attack. She did it anyway. My back was all sweaty. Those chilies really, really hurt.”
The most frenzied crowd I’ve seen at a Cassandro match was in Juárez. But that seemed to be a frenzy entirely of adoration. This was in March, at the Arena Kalaka. It had been a difficult night, I thought. The evening’s promoters billed it as lucha extrema. Children under twelve were excluded, ostensibly. Luchadores with more grit than finesse had been assaulting one another with steel chairs, boards wrapped in barbed wire, fluorescent light tubes of different lengths, a guitar wrapped in barbed wire, and, most alarmingly, a battery-operated power drill. The drill turned out to be fake—its application to the skulls of downed fighters was pure pantomime—but after half a dozen matches broken glass from the light tubes was everywhere, and the blood pouring off the wrestlers was real. It was hard not to see the festivities as a communal exorcism, considering what Juárez has endured in recent years—a scorched-earth street war between rival drug cartels that killed more than nine thousand people in one four-year stretch. The city’s murder rate, which was the world’s highest, finally began falling in 2011, but the post-traumatic stress runs deep and wide, and the ramshackle neighborhood around Arena Kalaka, which is in a battered old warehouse, has a ravaged, deserted, battlefield look.
In the mayhem of the early matches that night, I could hardly tell the rudos from the técnicos. Técnicos are supposed to follow the rules, rudos to break them, with the referee imposing order. But técnicos were attacking their opponents from behind on the entrance ramp. Referees were arranging barbed wire for maximum damage from a body slam. The audience, about two hundred strong, seemed gleeful. College girls and grandpas chanted in unison, “Culero!” (“Asshole!”), at an out-of-favor luchador named Aereo, who wore a gold-and-purple mask. When Aereo paused to catch his breath during a long, vicious beating of an opponent, someone yelled, “Invite him out to dinner!” That meant that Aereo was being too nice, and it got a big laugh. The violence of extrema was not too much for this crowd, apparently.
Still, the relief felt general when, late in the evening, Cassandro squared off against Magno, a big, powerfully built rudo, and the two of them shook hands—this was clearly not going to be _lucha extrema—_before starting to grapple. Magno was a full head taller than Cassandro, who is five-five in boots. A fresh tarp had been thrown over the mat, taking the glass shards out of play, and the wrestlers exchanged headlocks, arm bars, leg locks, ingenious escapes, dropkicks, flying scissors kicks, diving leg drops, body slams, and flips off the ropes in rapid-fire combinations too complex, at least for me, to follow. When they broke apart at one point, Cassandro threw a lone backflip in celebration and clapped his hands, smiling. The man standing beside me, a restaurant waiter named Luís Rubio, whispered, “This is classic.”
Lucha libre is, on the whole, more acrobatic than U.S. pro wrestling. The emphasis is on spectacular aerial maneuvers and rock-solid “chain-wrestling” technique rather than on sheer size and musculature. (The unemployed football linemen who have traditionally turned to pro wrestling in the U.S. would not thrive in lucha libre.) Purists complain that Mexican lucha libre has lost some of its artistry, its originality, since a long-standing government ban on televising matches was lifted in the nineteen-nineties, leading to a lucha more homogeneous and gimmicky, performed for the cameras instead of for live audiences. But that was not a problem at Arena Kalaka as Cassandro and Magno battled. Their high-flying, slingshot moves carried them through the ropes and deep into the seats, scattering spectators, who then helped them back into the ring. There was near-pin after near-pin, with Cassandro repeatedly bucking the big man off him at the count of . . . two and three-quarters. The crowd was on its feet, screaming.
Finally, Cassandro leaped from the top rope and kangaroo-kicked Magno in the chest. Both men hit the mat with a boom. Cassandro bounced up first, ran for the ropes, came hard off the second rope backward, his legs extended, and somehow, blind, caught Magno, who had just risen from the mat, around the midsection in a wheelbarrow hold known as a casadora. The next set of maneuvers happened in a twisting blur that landed Magno on his back with his lower legs raised and twisted painfully into a paquetito—a little packet—around one of Cassandro’s legs, and with all of Cassandro’s weight on his upper chest. Magno thrashed, throwing Cassandro back and forth like a doll in a dog’s mouth, but Cassandro held on. One, two, three—and the match was his.
Pesos rained down on the ring, an old-fashioned show of fan appreciation. Cassandro drank it in, panting, sweat-drenched, smiling, his eyes shining. He had lost one false eyelash. Somebody handed him a mike. “ÉSTA es lucha libre,” he declared. His gaze fell on the extrema trash heap of barbed wire, lumber, bent light tubes, and broken glass. “No pinches mamadas”—“Not fucking blow jobs.” Except that’s too literal. “Not silly tricks.”
Cassandro’s rise as a young luchador was swift. He moved to Mexico City and joined one of the major promotions. But he carried himself with more confidence than he felt. In 1991, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, he was booked to wrestle Hijo del Santo, Mexico’s most popular luchador. It was unthinkable that Cassandro might win. Hijo del Santo was a world welterweight champion. More important, he was the son of El Santo, the most revered wrestler in the history of lucha libre, and the silver mask he wore had belonged to his father. Many fans were outraged. “People were calling me a little homosexual, saying, ‘How could you possibly fight Hijo del Santo for the championship?’ Everybody was against me except the owner of the promotion. The pressure was too much.” A week before the match, Cassandro slit his wrists with a razor. Pimpinela Escarlata found him in a bathroom and saved his life. Cassandro showed me the scars on his wrists. He kept his date with Hijo del Santo. He lost the match, but he did not disgrace himself, which was important, and he kept wrestling at the highest level. In 1992, he won a world lightweight championship—the first exótico to win a world title.
He kept his confidence up, and himself numb, with large infusions of drugs and liquor: tequila, cocaine, marijuana. The world of lucha libre was attractive to powerful cops—federales—and to their underworld cousins, which insured an unlimited supply of illegal goods. For Cassandro, the party raged for more than a decade: “Using helped me become somebody. I believed in myself. I was famous, making money. I felt like Wonder Woman.” In the middle of it all, in 1997, his mother died. “I was still high when my mother passed,” he told me. “She was my greatest enabler. She loved me so much. I did her makeup in the morgue. I was high when I did it. It was terrible. The worst part is I would have ended up dead or in prison if she had not died. I have a lot of guilt and shame over that.”
It took him several more years to hit bottom. His career suffered from his addictions; he wasn’t wrestling much. Near the end, he was living in a friend’s back yard. His sobriety date—June 4, 2003—is tattooed on his back. He found strength in an eclectic mixture of radical honesty, his own brand of Catholic mysticism, and, especially, Mayan and Native American spiritual practice, which introduced him to his Nahuatl ancestors. “They say religion is for those who are afraid to go to Hell,” Armendáriz told me. “But spirituality is for those who have already been to Hell. That’s me.” He signed with a new promotion, and wrestled with a new attitude. “You know who I fight in the ring? Cassandro. The guy who needs to be famous. Your ego is not your amigo. It’s Saúl against Cassandro up there. I had to become humble.”
Unlike most sports, pro wrestling is unconcerned with numbers. Nobody seems to have a win-loss record. In lucha libre, the truly important matches, the bouts that make up one’s official record, are not even world championships. They are, rather, Mask vs. Mask matches, or Hair vs. Hair, or Hair vs. Mask. Luchadores wager their masks or their hair on the outcome of a fight. The mask is the more serious wager. When a wrestler is defeated and unmasked, his face is seen by the public for the first time. His name and his birthplace are published in the papers. His mask, which symbolized his honor, is retired and cannot be used again.
The loser in a Hair match is publicly shaved and humiliated, but lives to fight again. Hair grows back. Cassandro, whose hair is resplendent—it is currently dark blond and swept into what he calls his “Farrah Fawcett look” (“I’m so stuck in the seventies”)—has fought and won many Hair vs. Hair matches, as well as a couple of Hair vs. Masks. He has also lost a couple of Hair matches, including one to Hijo del Santo in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, in 2007. Videos of his public haircuts make for painful watching. Cassandro cries inconsolably and, with his cropped hair, seems to turn into a small, unhappy boy. Of course, unmasking Hijo del Santo was never going to happen. And the payday for losing that match—twenty-five thousand dollars—was a comfort.
Once a bad boy, Cassandro has become respectable. He gives talks on diversity at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and at the National Autonomous University there. Lucha libre seems to have seized the imaginations of many Europeans. Cassandro teaches classes in England and France. Pussy Riot has claimed lucha libre as the inspiration for the masks its members wear into cultural battle. In 2009, Cassandro and Hijo del Santo wrestled for two consecutive evenings at the Louvre. Cassandro won his current world welterweight title in a match in London, in 2011. He’s been a guest on “BBC Breakfast.” His only complaint about the British is that they insist on calling him a transvestite. He is a drag queen.
Even Hijo del Santo, the most conservative of Mexican males, got that right on his solemn TV interview show, “Experiencias.” When he had Cassandro on, in 2011, he praised him not only as a luchador but as a pioneering gay man. He listened thoughtfully to Cassandro’s tales of discrimination and overcoming. Hijo del Santo is a supremely odd figure. He’s a big fellow. On his show, he wears a stiff, very old-fashioned business suit and, of course, his mask. It’s a primitive mask, compared with more modern confections, with eyeholes that give the eyes a lashless, unsettling look, and a mouth hole that makes the lips look puffy and the mouth unnaturally straight and wide. But the mask can never be updated—any more than the Virgin of Guadalupe could be—without shaking the foundations of Mexican iconography. (Here’s how powerful that silver mask is. In 1984, El Santo, the superstar father, having retired from wrestling, removed his mask, extremely briefly, on national TV. It was the first time his face had been seen in public since 1942. A week later, he died of a heart attack. The mask was back on for his wake and his burial.) The oddest part of the “Experiencias” interview came when Hijo del Santo took viewers into his “sanctuary”—a circular glass cabinet surrounded by swirling fog. He removed a small glass box from a shelf. Its contents: Cassandro’s hair. It was the cabellera that he took from Cassandro in 2007. Hijo del Santo kept it with his greatest treasures, including more than fifty masks that he had taken off other luchadores, ending their careers.
The shadow of World Wrestling Entertainment, the fantastically successful company that dominates the American market and broadcasts its events globally, falls across lucha libre to varying degrees. W.W.E. is where the big money is, and a few lucha libre performers have made the jump into its cold spotlight. Anti-Mexican abuse is often part of the deal when they get there—luchadores have been obliged to ride to the ring on lawnmowers—and W.W.E. story lines are notoriously gnarled and tightly scripted. Indeed, they are written by professional screenwriters. Elaborate feuds are the narrative mainstay—there is even a Feud of the Year, formally awarded—and the emphasis on foam-flecked interviews, on threats and bluster, seems undignified to some lucha libre devotees. “W.W.E. gives you twenty minutes of trash talk, then two minutes in the ring,” Cassandro sniffed. Still, he is thrilled when his protégés go North and start pulling down W.W.E. paychecks.
He has wrestled on cards all over the U.S. The problem with gringo wrestlers, he says, is that many of them never learned to catch. “In a pay-per-view in Charlotte, I did a topetón”—a dive out of the ring—“onto a Ring of Honor dude, and he didn’t know what he was doing. I went straight through his arms, and when I hit the floor I broke my leg. Fractured my left tibial plateau.” That was in 2010. Cassandro was laid up for months. “But now I know why I got that fracture. It was so that my dad would finally take care of me. And he did. He brought me a big bowl of pollo he made himself. I never knew he could do that.”
Cassandro’s house looks out on the Fence. If you throw a rock over all that razor wire, it will land in the Rio Grande. A Border Patrol S.U.V. parks at the corner. The neighborhood, a few miles east of downtown El Paso, is modest, with little shade and many unbuilt lots. Armendáriz’s house itself is small, beige, flat-roofed. He lives alone. Inside, it’s neat, calm, dim, almost ashramic. But open a closet in the massage room (Armendáriz is, in his spare time, a licensed massage therapist) and suddenly you’re back in Cassandro’s hotly colored world. The closet is crammed with custom-made lucha outfits, all lustrous and spangled.
One day, I got him digging through plastic bins of keepsakes for evidence of Baby Sharon’s career.
Baby Sharon died in 2008. “We buried him in Juárez,” Armendáriz said. “We called his family in Guadalajara, but his daughter didn’t even tell her family that he died. They were ashamed of him. Baby Sharon came out in the seventies. It was really difficult then. He was a tough cabrón. Every exótico that started had to go through him. He was also really good on a sewing machine. When he died, they put him in a red warmup suit. No, no, no, no, no. That’s ugly. We bought him a pin-striped suit and tie and lifted him out of the casket and changed his clothes. I had been clean then for only four years. It was the first time I had lost a loved one sober. I thought I would get loaded for sure. But no. I was very attached to him. He called me ‘mi hija.’ ”
Armendáriz found a photograph of himself sitting on the ground outside a ring, looking stunned, his face and chest covered with blood. “Baby Sharon did that to me,” he said. “He hit me with a bottle.”
Your beloved mentor hit you with a bottle?
Armendáriz shrugged. “It was an honor to be wrestling him.”
I already knew that I had the wrong end of the stick when it came to lucha extrema. Cassandro didn’t really disdain it. In fact, he fought in an extrema match himself two years ago. “I never get scared in the ring,” he told me. “But I got scared that day. Muñeco Infernal poured a bag of thumbtacks into the ring, then threw me face first on the mat. I was O.K. with the light tubes, the barbed wire, the ladder, the trash-can lid, but the thumbtacks freaked me out. I had tacks sticking in me everywhere. They also lit my hair on fire.” He sighed. “But it was an adrenaline rush. I might do it again.”
Seeing my head drop over my notebook in disbelief, he went on, “I’m not going to embitter myself by thinking that these other things—W.W.E., lucha extrema—are bad and they’re going to kill our beloved lucha libre. I just don’t like to think that way.”
Lucha libre has always been, in truth, full of gimmicks and improvised weapons. I originally pictured the 2007 Hair match that Cassandro lost to Hijo del Santo as a stark, even sombre affair. I later learned that it started with twelve wrestlers in a steel cage—Hijo del Santo fighting a mob in a steel cage!—and only ended with Cassandro’s scalping.
There are limits, though, to even Cassandro’s tolerance for assaults on tradition. “It used to be much stricter,” he told me. “You had to show up at the arena well dressed, with a nice suitcase. Nowadays, luchadores show up at the arena in sandals and shorts. Last night, at Kalaka, I saw a guy carrying his stuff in a Walmart bag.”
There are many kinds of pain—aesthetic, emotional, moral, physical. Cassandro, like wrestlers generally, suffers for a living, publicly, physically. People pay to watch it—to see what he and others can inflict and endure. He seems to cry after every match—not for him the superhero mask of invincibility or, these days, the comforts of intoxication. He feels his feelings, both good and very, very bad. He seems intensely attracted to physical pain. In July, he takes part in a Lakota Sioux-style Sun Dance. “We go four days without food and water,” he told me. “Dancing in the sun with Lakota priests. Sweat lodges. We put four hundred and four prayers into the Tree of Life, and then we chop it down by hand. It’s super-intense, especially the no water. It’s like a funeral for a parent. Father Sun.” Armendáriz was preparing—meeting every week with his danza group, readying his prayers—for the Sun Dance, and claimed to be looking forward to it.
Rummaging through another bin, he turned up a small plastic bag full of hair—a cabellera he had won in Monterrey. This wasn’t the most respectful place, he noted, to keep that. Then he found the photograph of Baby Sharon that he was looking for. It showed a big, strong-featured guy with shoulder-length platinum hair, heavy dark eyebrows, a five-o’clock shadow, and hairy arms sticking out of a lacy gown. Baby Sharon was cradling a bouquet of flowers as if it were an infant. He seemed to be cooing to it.
Armendáriz studied the photograph. “He was a coke addict to the end,” he said. “He died in a tiny room in Juárez, with nothing. He was a beloved teacher, a gifted costume-maker. He made a lot of money wrestling, but he blew it all. It’s very sad, the life of an exótico. We all end up alone.” He put the Baby Sharon photo aside. “We’ve come a long way. But now I know that all my problems, all my addictions, come from my sexual orientation. All the rejection. Why do you think I’m alone?”
I didn’t think of him as alone. He was everybody’s favorite person. Did he not have relationships?
“I spent twelve years with a straight married lover,” he said. “From the age of eighteen to thirty. It was very damaging. There were five, ten, fifteen minutes of heaven in bed. Otherwise, he was bitching at me. He was a luchador. We both went to Mexico City. But only my career went up and up and up. He was with his wife, in Juárez.”
He gave me a level look. “On the stage, I feel all the love,” he said. “It’s me, the world champion, Cassandro.”
He put away the keepsakes. “My life is an open book,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. I try to be good to myself, love myself. Take long baths, with lavender and Epsom salts, candles, my meditation music. I know I’m blessed.”
We moved to the kitchen, where Armendáriz made us coffee.
“Homosexuals still have a big stigma,” he said. “We’re considered to be prostitutes, drug addicts, seducers, etc. But we’re not all the same. Some of us are seen now as positive role models. I’ve had straight people tell me that they’re more accepting of gay people because of me.”
When his wrestling days are over, he said, he might like to become a parent. He loves kids, and feels that he understands them.
Armendáriz’s father, Sabas Galindo, stopped by the house, bearing takeout enchiladas. He had remarried and lived nearby. He was retired—stout, red-faced, soft-spoken, watery-eyed. We ate. Then he and I chatted in the living room while Armendáriz worked on a laptop. Yes, he was very proud of Saúl: the first time he won a championship fight, his trips to Japan and Europe. No, he was not a lucha libre fan. Baseball, yes, and boxing. Yes, he and Saúl had been out of touch for a long time. Galindo blushed. “It was difficult for me to see that he was gay,” he said. “Machismo—you know. That was why we didn’t talk. But now I accept him, thank God. And we talk all the time.”
Galindo had been brought up in Juárez, but now went there only for emergencies. It was just too dangerous. All of his five children lived on this side. Out the window, we could see Juárez. Galindo had to leave. He and his son embraced.
Here’s how stark the border has become. In 2010, there were more than three thousand murders in Juárez. In El Paso, there were five. El Paso’s leaders like to describe it as the safest large city in America. Hundreds of thousands of Juárez residents—out of a population of about 1.5 million—are believed to have fled the city because of the violence. Many of them, particularly from the middle and upper classes, have settled in El Paso.
Armendáriz, using his contacts at the U.S. Embassy and among American wrestling promoters, helps Mexican wrestlers apply for visas to come to the United States. He has so far assisted more than a hundred luchadores. I happened to cross the border with one of them, a rudo called Akantus, one afternoon this spring. We were coming from Juárez. He said that border guards sometimes asked him to prove that he was a wrestler, since that was the work specified on his visa, so he always carries his mask with him. On another occasion, at the same crossing, a border guard questioned me closely about what I had been doing in Mexico. When I told him that I was reporting on lucha libre, he told me to name a luchador. I mentioned Cassandro. He scowled. Why him? I wanted to ask, Why not? But antagonizing him seemed unwise. He had too much power over me at that moment.
In Juárez, I found myself studying old posters on the walls inside Arena Kalaka. Cassandro, I could see, had fought all kinds of characters there. I even knew some of the names, including Super Crazy (“That was my third defense of my belt. I won. He lives mostly in Japan. He’s unpleasant”) and L.A. Park (“He knocked out three of my front teeth. I was so pissed, I really fucked up his face under his mask”). Cassandro’s photograph stood out from those of the other luchadores. Nine furious masked figures, each crazier- and angrier-looking than the last—each with bigger arms and shoulders—and then little Cassandro, his head thrown back, smiling like Judy Garland. His teeth, all replaced, gleamed with unnatural brightness. Apparently, Arena Kalaka did not book many exóticos, or, at least, not smiling ones.
I asked Alejandra Carreón, a devoted Kalaka fan, who said that she preferred rudos, what it was about bad guys. She was a twenty-eight-year-old digital-systems engineer, still living at home. She said that she came to Kalaka every Sunday, without fail, usually with her younger brother. Her favorite rudos were funny, she said, and shouted back at the crowds. She loved to yell, but felt brave enough to do so only when her brother was with her. Cassandro was a special case, she said. “People here have a lot of respect for him. I’ve never heard anybody yell anything at him.” She meant insults. She liked the masks and had no interest in knowing what even her favorite rudos looked like without masks. She did not care for lucha extrema—it looked as if people were really getting hurt. On the insides of her wrists, I noticed, Carreón had tattooed, in English, the words “Angels” and “Heroes.” What she especially liked about Kalaka, she said, was how it felt “like entering a small town in this big city.”
I knew what she meant about small-town-ness. There was a concession stand cut into one grimy wall, out of which two young women sold drinks and chips. The venders called their specialty a preparada. It was a bag of Tostitos that they slit open lengthwise, and filled with avocado, onion, tomato, cheese, and a big splash of sweet-and-sour sauce. They stuck a plastic spoon in the top.
On a shining high-desert afternoon, Cassandro was leading a training session in Magno’s mother’s back yard, in El Paso, a few blocks from the border. There were seven luchadores, ranging in age from their late teens to their forties, all wearing sweats. The students included other pros, such as Akantus and Magno. The ring was high and simple: a metal frame, with a mat floor built with two-by-twelves covered by a two-inch layer of padding and a fraying gray canvas tarp. Cassandro, wearing a white fleece with the collar turned up, started the class off with rolls, everybody circling and rolling forward twice. After a few of those, they switched to backward rolls, still circling. Cassandro was markedly smaller than all of his students except one, and his rolls were smoother and quicker. The pace picked up as Cassandro added a jumping twist between rolls, and then made the rolls faster and fancier: left, right, left, right—make the two versions identical.
The first two-man exercise required a rope rebound and a split jump with a partner shooting between the jumper’s legs. The split jump was beyond the abilities of a heavy teen-ager. Cassandro and Magno flew high, clean, relaxed. Cassandro added a body slam to the sequence. People began to pant. Now everybody stepped outside the ropes in order to give the wrestling pairs room to work. The slams shook the frame and gave off rhythmic booms that echoed across the barrio’s back yards. Then Cassandro took a big, twisting dive off the second rope, and was expertly caught by Magno; everyone did his best version of it. Far more important than the quality of the twisting second-rope dive was the quality of the catch. There were now a dozen obvious ways to get hurt with any slip or miscue—wrenched necks, torn shoulders, sprained ankles, smashed knees, bruised backside. Akantus came down wrong, twisted an ankle, and rolled out of the ring, falling to the ground. He was done. The concentration of the six men remaining was unbroken. There were grunts and gasps. Everyone except Cassandro seemed too winded to speak. He sailed through the moves, the dives and catches, the planchas and slams, with a calm, intent expression, setting an example with his form, and occasionally barking a bit of advice.
Finally, he called a halt. While the others tried to catch their breath, he showed them a series of finishers—takedowns and submission holds meant to end a match. He gently demonstrated slow-motion moves that, done with more speed and force, would render an opponent helpless. He gradually intensified the moves to clarify the logic of each. Now the sun was down, and a chilly breeze was kicking up. As a final exercise, Cassandro spun each student into an upturned paquetito—the strangely simple leg lock he had used to defeat Magno at Kalaka. The strain on the lower legs of a paquetito’s recipient was apparently severe. Each luchador bellowed in pain, while the others laughed, and Cassandro tried to show exactly how the hold was built. When the last student yelled too loudly, Cassandro lowered his voice and growled, “Cállate, cabrón,” and pretended to put his free foot in the student’s mouth. This was the next level of lucha libre—the comedy inside the technique. After a beat, Cassandro released the student from the paquetito.
The dressing room in Los Angeles was filling up with wrestlers. Cassandro embraced each one. “I’m a hugger,” he said. El Bombero, El Jimador, Niebla Roja, two tough-looking dwarfs (“los minis”), a grizzled referee called Platanito. Street clothes came off. Liniments were rubbed into muscled necks and shoulders and calves. Neon spandex tights and shorts and spangled costumes were eased and squeezed into. The startling part was the donning of the masks. Genial young Sergio from Mexico City vanished in an instant into eyeless, predatory Niebla Roja (Red Fog).
Niebla Roja had recently returned from Japan. Lucha libre is big in Japan. Cassandro has toured there several times. “They hit hard,” Niebla Roja said, tenderly touching his enormous biceps. “They got heavy elbows. But they give you masseuses whenever you want.” He pulled off his mask. He was trying to decide which of three versions to use tonight. He would be in the headliner match against Cassandro. They were sharing a hotel room in, as it happened, the Little Tokyo neighborhood of downtown L.A.
I had watched them inspect the ring together that afternoon. “Too small,” Sergio said. “And the seats are weird.”
Armendáriz agreed. But this wasn’t going to be normal lucha libre, with the seats close on all sides. This ring was on a stage, in an old theatre called the Mayan. It was a big place, fourteen hundred seats, and their two-night gig was sold out. The show was called Lucha VaVoom. It had burlesque and a rock band between matches. The audience would be mostly L.A. hipsters—not a knowledgeable crowd. Niebla Roja had never done VaVoom before. Cassandro had done it many times. In fact, he had toured Europe with the show, and had become the de-facto producer, as well as star, of its main attraction. He had recruited Niebla Roja.
The ring had other problems. Armendáriz sprang up on the top rope. Sergio held his hand as he stepped along the rope. “It’s too soft,” Armendáriz said, bouncing.
“O.K.,” a mechanic called. He was working under the ring’s raised floor.
“You like my sissy boots?” Armendáriz asked me. He was wearing high-heeled black boots, close-fitting jeans, a rhinestone-studded belt, and a tight lava-splash-patterned shirt with silver buttons opened to show a silver crucifix against a lot of brown chest. His balance on the rope was impressive.
“Rudos that corner, técnicos here,” he said to Sergio, who nodded. “Oh, God, look at this corner post.”
An inspection beneath the ring revealed a broken weld on a key cable—“the tensor,” Armendáriz called it.
That night, in the basement dressing room, as showtime approached, Cassandro warned each wrestler to test the ropes when he entered the ring, and not to trust the turnbuckles in the suspect corner.
The dressing room was becoming frenetic. Performers—opponents—rehearsed their bouts. “So I go up, you hit me here, bam, bam, plancha, suplex, spin.” Tag teams pantomimed long sequences in the cramped quarters. The critical move was clearly the catch. “So I fly”—leap out of the ring—“and you’re down there” (breaking my fall) “and we go into the seats. You got it?”
“Yes.”
It was pre-battle choreography. The main theme was safety. People talked about “finishers,” but victory seemed to rank, on the list of concerns, far below a good performance and not getting hurt. I asked Niebla Roja who would win in his match with Cassandro. He shrugged. “Cassandro probably knows,” he said. “I’ll just fight.” He was strapping on heavy kneepads, wrapping his ankles in Ace bandages, lacing up high red shiny boots. A photographer stuck his head in, and Niebla Roja snatched one of his masks and put it on. People didn’t know who Niebla Roja was. On his Facebook page, there was one shot of him not in costume, holding his infant daughter, but his face was completely hidden by the brim of a hat.
Cassandro’s hair was still in curlers. He had a wheeled, too-big-for-carry-on suitcase from which he briskly pulled bottles and jars and spray cans. Foundation, powder, blush, perfume. Hair spray, pain pills, hot ice, kneepads (two types—volleyball pads on top, chiropractic pads with steel sides underneath). Panty hose. Rosary. Eyeliner, glitter, eyelashes, lip gloss. Versace Crystal Noir, Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue, L’Oréal True Match. He brushed, sprayed, painted, smeared, and pouted at the mirror while fielding a barrage of questions from anxious performers. No, the luchadora from Brooklyn could not wear false eyelashes under that mask—they wouldn’t fit. Yes, even the tag-team matches needed to be quick, one-fall. Who was outside, wanting a photo with him? Boy George! Yes. Cassandro scampered away.
I watched one of the minis settle across the top of a red velour couch. He had stuffed himself into a black-and-red warrior suit. He was silent, serene, not young. He looked remarkably comfortable.
Many of the night’s characters were strictly Lucha VaVoom. El Bombero (the Fireman), for instance, told me that he was actually Manik, at least when he wrestled as “the token mask” for Total Nonstop Action—a Stateside promotion whose bouts aired weekly on Spike TV. In Mexico, he fought as T. J. Perkins—a gringo character. He was pale, black-haired, with a beautiful, possibly chemically enhanced physique. El Bombero, in his fireman’s mask and tight red briefs, looked like a Village People extra. He seemed tightly wound, bouncing on his toes and shadowboxing in a corner of the dressing room. Another purpose-built character was El Jimador—the evening’s sponsor was El Jimador tequila.
Cassandro flipped through thousands of pictures on his phone to find an X-ray of his knee. I counted seven pins—they looked like tenpenny nails—spiking through the joint at odd angles. The knee badly needed more surgery, he said. He just had to figure out when he could do it—and then how to pay for it. He smeared the knee with hot oil “made by luchadores, with cinnamon.” He did this before every match, and then used a numbing agent. And his double pads.
A voice rose in anger behind me. El Bombero was accosting the black-clad mini nested atop the red velour couch. “It’s a yes/no question,” he barked. “Are you or are you not looking at my penis?”
The mini, perched at eye level with the body part in question, did not reply. He seemed unimpressed with the young fighter’s indignation.
Somebody brought Cassandro a giant bottle of El Jimador. Raucous whooping filled the dressing room. Cassandro sternly announced that no tequila would be dispensed until after the show. Then he relented. One slug each. He made the rounds. Most of the ten or fifteen luchadores in the room took a belt. A stage manager called the wrestlers for the first match. They headed upstairs. Cassandro and Niebla Roja were throwing back Red Bulls. Niebla Roja began doing rapid pushups, dozens of them. Other people were jumping rope, yanking on flex bands. Cassandro roared, “Where the fuck are my pills? I need my hot stuff! I can’t believe I left them in the hotel!” He meant niacin. He usually took two. He decided to give his knee an injection of Vitamin B12.
“Repeat after me,” the announcer boomed. “I, state your name—”
The audience, already liquored up, obliged.
“Do not fucking believe.”
“DO NOT FUCKING BELIEVE.”
“What I am about to see.”
There were actually several announcers. One was a soap-opera star from Argentina. He spoke Spanish, in hammy rolling phrases, imitating an old-time ring announcer. Then, there was a panel of local comedians, stepping on one another’s snarky lines. One was, in real life, the voice of SpongeBob.
“Let’s start off with a little . . . violence,” one comic said. The others, sounding titillated, groaned into their drinks.
The first bout began.
I asked a woman in the crowd why she was there. “It’s been on my L.A. bucket list for a while,” she said. Her name was Dhyandra. She worked as a curatorial assistant at the county art museum. “It’s one of those things people talk about.” She was twenty-seven and had no idea what to expect. “I’m here for, like, a kitschy night.”
Two young engineers, Brooks and Margarita, echoed the bucket-list thing. “I’m expecting a laugh,” Margarita said. Brooks had just bought a bright-blue lucha libre mask in the lobby. He planned to wear it on Halloween.
Quite a few people in the crowd wore masks. I saw two preppy-looking guys in full lucha costumes, with capes. The decadence quotient was probably a notch or two higher here than it would be in Portland or Seattle, where lucha libre is also said to be popular.
The first bouts were crowd-warmers. A character called Dirty Sanchez threw the contents of his diaper out of the ring, prompting small screaming stampedes. The minis were shamelessly hilarious, strutting, scurrying, tripping up their much larger opponents. The character who interested me the most was Platanito, the referee. He did a fine job of being diabolical. He would seem to be imposing order, keeping the rudos in line, but then, at a critical moment, he would fail and reveal his weakness, his corruption. A técnico would be getting unlawfully stomped by a three-man tag team, and Platanito would suddenly jump in and join them, unable to resist the fun. Lucha libre referees have complex, only semi-managerial roles. They are much like the Mexican government, only funnier. But it was hard to tell how many people at the Mayan were in on the joke.
When El Jimador got the best of an exchange, an announcer said dryly, “Let’s hear it for product placement.”
Cassandro first appeared on a big video screen, making his way up the stairs from the basement at a processional pace. He wore a white bullfighter’s jacket with a tremendous white brocaded train, which fell at least six steps behind him, over a skintight olive-green women’s bathing suit with a décolletage that plunged to his midriff. On his feet were white boots with big rhinestone butterflies on the sides. The sound system blasted La Sonora Dinamita’s “No Te Metas con Mi Cucu” (“Don’t Mess with My Butt”), a Colombian cumbia hit, as he danced his way through the theatre to the ring. Niebla Roja was waiting for him there, but Cassandro, after shedding his gown, took the time to show off some Menudo steps on the front apron of the stage, inflaming a crowd that was already fairly crazed. His cucu, thanks to the racy cut of his suit and the swift rolling of his hips, drew waves of applause by itself.
It was actually a tag-team match, but their partners, perhaps by design, couldn’t begin to compete with the high-speed, high-risk, dazzling moves and countermoves of Cassandro and Niebla Roja. The only thing I remember about Niebla Roja’s partner, a flabby heavyweight who called himself Dr. Maldad Pepieux, was that Cassandro carried him around on his shoulders for a while, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, purely to show off his strength. Platanito eventually lost control of the match, which tumbled out of the ring, then off the stage, and then deep into the seats, with spotlights following, as spectators scrambled and Niebla Roja and Dr. Maldad whaled on Cassandro’s hapless partner. But where was Cassandro? The spotlights suddenly picked him out, high on a balcony, tiptoeing along a rail. Was he planning to swing down to the rescue from there? No, he was planning to dive. He dived. It must have been fifteen feet to the floor. Cassandro plummeted into the fray at full Superman stretch and, from my angle, disappeared.
Next to me, a bald guy with a long-necked beer in his hand started yelling, “That guy’s crazy! He’s over sixty, and he missed it! He usually springs right up, but he’s down! He missed it!”
The bald guy was right about one thing. Cassandro had missed it. Or, rather, the security staff whose job was to quietly help break his fall had messed up. One of them had put his head in the flight path, and Cassandro had cracked a rib. But it was such a ridiculously dangerous dive that he could hardly expect to come away from it unhurt. He later admitted as much to me. “I just felt like I had to do something special, like I’d let the crowd down,” he said. “That corner post was so bad, I couldn’t do any of my usual flips off the top rope. None of the big moves.” I thought that he and Niebla Roja had actually done some spectacular flips.
Cassandro eventually got to his feet, holding his side, and hobbled down to the stage, the crowd urging him on. He and Niebla Roja climbed into the ring and went back to work, somehow producing a perfectly credible version of a fast and furious lucha libre finish. Cassandro’s team won, which brought down the house.
Back in the dressing room, the party was on. Cassandro ignored it. He sat in his corner, breathing shallowly, crying steadily, taking off his makeup, painfully peeling off his bathing suit. No, he didn’t want an ambulance, or ice. Certainly not tequila. Niebla Roja had a split lip, encased in ice. He was packing his bag. “Same thing tomorrow, Cassandro?”
Cassandro gave a pained, distracted nod.
Well, maybe not the balcony dive.
Also, he wanted to take Sergio shopping before tomorrow’s show. There was a Persian garment district in L.A., with a fantastic selection of shiny, stretchy fabrics, some of them perfect for lucha costumes. And there was a wholesale perfume district, with prices lower than any place in Mexico or El Paso. ♦
