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MUÑECO (A.K.A. KEN, KENTO, MI-LINDO, BABY-BOY, CHUCKY)
“The creepsters are two, and the smaller one looks like you.” It’s Muñeco on the phone, waking me at three or four in the morning. That’s all he says before hanging up.
I’m sitting up in bed, startled, heart pounding. Muñeco’s playful, alcohol-drenched voice strikes like lightning in those early hours and jolts me, splitting my previously peaceful night in two. I was gently navigating some deep inner landscape, and now it’s shattered because of Baby-Boy, also known as Muñeco. His words come from far away, slipping rudely into the silence of my room, roiling the waters. And here I am, left blank, my dreams chased off with no way of getting them back, and with that voice of his ringing in my ears: the creepsters are two, are three, are four, are five.
He’s a pain, that Muñeco. Bugging me like this. If he feels like partying all night or squandering all his cash on mariachis or getting wasted with a bunch of lowlifes, that’s on him. His damn problem. Let him do whatever he wants. But can’t he leave the rest of us alone?
Me here, in the refuge of my bed, and him there, wherever he called from, wallowing in the abyss. He must be out on the town. In the background, I hear dark noises, gusts of wind, blurry presences. Shit, it cracks me up. Fucked-up Muñeco. Why couldn’t he pick some other poor slob to unload on? He can’t bring himself to wake up Duque? Or Tarabeo? Píldora maybe, and me, of course. He’s demented, Muñeco, getting worse each day.
From the safety of my room I can see him as if he were right in front of me, I know that guy by heart, I can even mimic his walk, sultry and sinuous, like Elvis Presley. I know how he shines, and the way he curls his mouth in mockery or as if for a kiss. I know the rhythm of his steps, in time with a restless inner beat. Hips thrust forward, ass tight, the pride he projects, the way he flaunts his absolute ignorance. His whole attitude—I’ve got it all figured out. The one thing I can’t imitate, no matter how hard I try, is the energy that radiates from his being.
He’s not here but I can still see him: shirt unbuttoned, chest bared to the icy dawn as he roams around spreading mayhem, asking for trouble and doling it out too, exposing himself to the Bogotá night, which can be a sordid place. A no-man’s-land in the spasms of dawn. Everyone knows how it is out there: war is war, and whoever wants a better life just crawls under their blankets and asks their mom for a cup of warm milk while the streets hum with alarms, mercenary gangs, rabid dogs, and armed security guards. The blackness broken by some chilling scream or ambulance sirens. Welcome to murderers’ night in Stab-Wound City.
But him? Nooooo. Muñeco doesn’t even notice. He escapes his own bodyguards and goes adventuring, out in the open, risking his hide. Exchanging threats and dares with gangsters and child snatchers as if it were some sort of joke, Muñeco, drunk and pushing boundaries, cutting loose on street corners, humiliating beggars, goosing asses, and kicking at walls. At this damn hour of the night.
That ringing phone almost gave me a stroke, the creepsters are two and what the fuck do I care? But deep down, I do: since I was little, I’ve been haunted by slippery, amorphous phantoms, the kind that let themselves be felt, but hide from view.
Muñeco, my friend, my almost brother: he’s out there, alone in Comanche territory, obeying who knows what impulse or desire. That’s how he is, more so each day, his appetites more twisted, his urge to satisfy them all the more intense. A destructive seesaw from pleasure to anguish, up and down and up again.
He’s a man of wild appetites, and when he starts to get bored of one thing, he’s spurred toward sharper passions. Whatever happens, we can’t say we didn’t know.
A sack of air, that’s what he is, my Baby-Boy. An empty sack he tries to fill with luxuries and excess.
What’s he looking for, I wonder. What the hell is going on with him? What kind of shit is he after at this hour in the bowels of the hungry city?
The creepsters are two, and the smaller one looks like you. That’s all he says. And then hangs up.
At least his call lets me know he’s still alive, though who knows where, in what seedy dive, strip club, love motel, or Bogotá-flavored fight club, surrounded by who knows what kind of loose women. But alive, in the end, and that’s something. For now, at least, the wild partying hasn’t killed him.
The creepsters are two. The phrase says nothing, but it’s disturbing. It sounds like a nursery rhyme, which only makes me more uneasy. The other day, I asked Malicia about it. I wanted to bring her up to speed on these dawn outbursts. There was no need, though, she already knew. Could it be that Muñeco calls her too, turns to her? I’m stung by jealousy.
“Who could the creepsters be?” I said to Malicia.
“They are heralds of our misfortune,” she said.
That’s how she talks, Malicia; she fancies herself a witch, and not without reason. She knows how to predict problems, or maybe she just incites them with her words.
“Something thick is brewing,” she warns me, disfiguring her pretty brown face with a frown.
Later she comforts me by running a hand through my hair, and it doesn’t freak me out, which is rare for me because I have a fear of touch.
Somewhere out there, far away, Muñeco is searching, digging, seeking, on the hunt for something. He won’t calm down. This urge to debase himself, to run aground, must come from a need to disappear. To be someone else, to open himself, get shaken up, finally become himself. He is drowning and needs a way back to the surface.
Let him drown once and for all and stop this bullshit.
There goes Muñeco, out on a bender, and only he knows where, or maybe not. As Tournier, my teacher, would say: “An invisible thread guides his steps toward a mysterious outcome.”
Sometimes he’s out on a tear for two or three days and nights, and we don’t hear a word from him, not even a call about creepsters. When we’ve almost given him up for dead or bleeding his life away at the ER, he shows up midmorning on our Saturday soccer field, as if it’s nothing, glowing like a newly resurrected man with a martial arts headband across his forehead, hair still thick like an adolescent’s even though it’s thinning at the temples, chest bare, of course: Muñeco shows off his spray tan and admirable six-pack as he dives right into our weekly game, bathed and cologned, dispensing kisses as well as kicks.
He dribbles like an angel, Muñeco does, massacring his adversaries and evading red cards, bending the ball to his will and sending it spinning into exquisite arcs. And he often commits infractions, because when Muñeco gets pissed off he acts like a brute and starts fighting and driving us crazy, even though they’re supposed to be friendly, these little games among former classmates from Quevedo Prep on our alma mater’s field, where we’ve been playing for years.
He’s a real talker, and affectionate too, Muñeco, though he’s also a bully, a partyer, a whoremonger, short fused and prone to rages. But he’s warm, and that’s the truth; he can be a good friend at times, and affectionate, or, to put it another way, Muñeco is loved.
He’s always been loved, that guy. That chino, as we say—but where does that term come from when the man isn’t from China? We say chino or pelao, by which we mean not a bald man but a kid, a young man, a dude who never grew up, who never became an adult, someone as immature as us, the five Tutti Fruttis: inseparable, luminous, immortal.