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.
“What propaganda?” El Mago asked. He sounded more curious than concerned.
“That rock music. The president said it ought to be censored, that it leads to anarchy. I for one agree. They closed the singing cafés, but what good does that do if people can still listen to this shit as they please?” El Güero said, and Elvis thought if El Güero could, he would have wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and rolled around the floor to emphasize his point.
Yeah, they’d closed a harmless bunch of singing cafés like the Pau Pau where all they did was play silly cover songs. You couldn’t even dance at a fucking café, and still the cops went and pulled people out of there when they felt like it.
He didn’t think anyone should get ruffled about a few songs; it wasn’t no sign of anarchy. He’d looked up that word one time and there was nothing, but nothing, that applied to Elvis. Besides, everyone knew that the rich kids in Las Lomas hired bands like Three Souls in My Mind to play at their private parties and they listened to whatever the fuck they wanted while sipping their rum-and-Cokes, so it didn’t seem fair to him that a few got cake and others got shit. But no one paid him to speak his opinions, so Elvis stood, hands deep in his pockets, all quiet.