The Tutti Frutti quintet, our brotherhood. We’ve been together since our school days, and we’re forever pelaos, still chinos, still those same dudes despite the passing years, despite the fact that we’re already in our thirties and will be slow and soft before we know it.
Time passes and doesn’t pass and here we are and here we’ll be, every Saturday, on the grounds of our old prep school. Parked outside: Píldora’s Mercedes, Duque’s BMW, and Tarabeo’s Audi, expensive cars awaiting their owners’ returns like loyal dogs.
Muñeco is missing from the field until he jogs down from his tower on the hill, with its incomparable view of the whole city. And as for me, with no car or tower to my name, I’ll arrive on foot because I live close by. There’s a bit of belly on us now, the magnificent five. Just a hint of paunch, not too noticeable under a loose T-shirt.
We, the Tutti Fruttis, are in the first stage of decline, all of us except Muñeco, who arrives shirtless and showing off his sculpted torso and a body as hot and athletic as when he led the marching band in his high school glory days. That was him back then: a handsome troublemaker, excelling at sports, like all the males in his family for the past three generations. Not very tall, around the middle of the line we’d form by height out on the courtyard, but burly, that’s for sure, Muñeco was an oak, as well as charismatic and abusive—the younger kids were scared of him, made way for him in the halls—and above all a giver of hugs.
And now a bit of self-praise: those famous hugs from Muñeco spurred a triumph in my own spiritual development. I, who shun all contact because I can’t stand to be touched, had to learn to take his hugs as a sign of his savage esteem.
It’s different with Malicia, her closeness doesn’t bother me, in fact it’s just the opposite, perhaps because with her the challenge isn’t physical, at the end of the day she’s Duque’s girlfriend and Duque is my friend and, for what it’s worth, the founding member of the Tutti Fruttis—and hats off for that. Any crossing of the line with Malicia is beyond forbidden, a mortal sin, banned to the max, for a friend must never be betrayed, you can’t ogle his girlfriend or sleep with her behind his back. Nor right before his eyes, let’s be clear, even though that shouldn’t need any clarifying; all I’m trying to say is, don’t even think about it. Malicia is taken.
Muñeco hugs you out of pure affection, coming over and pecking you on the cheek and squeezing you bear-tight in his muscular arms, so you really get it through your skull how much he loves you and how strong he is, though later he’ll pulverize your heel to take control of the ball. And immediately he’ll say, “Sorry, dude, I’m just so clumsy, I didn’t mean to, man.” And of course you forgive him, even though you know it was on purpose because that’s Muñeco’s deal, and that clumsiness thing is a lie, because the guy isn’t clumsy, but who wouldn’t put up with his rampages when he’s also so affectionate, that Muñeco, the most beloved of us all.
My man Muñeco, with his two faces: on one side, he’s a Ken doll with all his charms, and on the other, he’s Chucky, the doll turned creepy killer. But then again, who isn’t like that, nobody’s perfect. Muñeco is as shallow as his own reflection. And prone to the cult of his personality, as we all are—we’ve turned it into a monotheistic religion.
There he is before our eyes, Muñeco, in cleats, old jean cutoffs, and no shirt. Muñeco light and airy, made of sunshine, without mystery or shadows, the polar opposite of the man who woke me last night with a phone call, and who now appears smiling, fresh from bed, bathed, perfumed, infusing me with Eau Sauvage by Dior with each hug, leaving me limping after each shove. Solar Muñeco. The other side of his nocturnal face.
Drenched in alcohol, marijuana smoke, and Marlboro butts, our Muñeco, a.k.a. Baby-Boy, dazzles the Bogotá nights: the most sleepless and volatile one of us.
The creepsters are two, and the smaller one looks like you. There’s a nostalgic aftertaste to that refrain, an orphaned feeling that moves and terrifies at the same time. I think I can protect myself from creepsters when they stir fear, but I’m helpless when they come bearing sorrow.
What have they been like, these bizarre escapades of Muñeco’s, his brushes with dangerous people? I suspect none of us really knows these days. Until a year or two ago, Tarabeo would go out whoring with him, helped him do it; I know because they used to crow about it. What were they looking for among paid women? Those two, the Divine Boys, who could conquer any girl they wanted without lifting a finger. Who had so many beautiful women offering themselves up for free. What the fuck—pun intended—they could be trying to find with hookers is something only the two of them could know: what pleasure in degradation, what gutter thirsts.
“You pay whores so they’ll let you give it to them hard,” Muñeco used to brag.
How hard? With him so proud of it? Better not to ask. Leave him to his Colombian Psycho complex. Even Tarabeo stopped accompanying him. Or did he? Who knows what goes on with Tarabeo?
Deep down, Muñeco is a piece of cake: a difficult guy, but predictable. The surprises he can spring on us won’t be anything new, nothing entirely foreign from himself, at most a condensed version of who he’s been before. That is: the same Muñeco as always, identical, but raised to the nth degree.
Muñeco isn’t the enigma, with his foreseeable rise and ruin. I know him, or I think I do. The real mystery is Tarabeo, my cryptic friend, with more edges than a polyhedron and more alphabets than I can possibly decipher. Tarabeo, a.k.a. Dino-Rex, a.k.a. Táraz. He’s the one with the key to success. A real con artist, master of disguise and subterfuge, Táraz scrambles my thoughts as I read his face: the stark contrast between his welcoming smile and the pit bull tightness of his jaw. Which to believe?
Though, deep down, we never know anything. I believed that Muñeco, always social and compulsively friendly, was incapable of isolating himself because he’d get royally bored in the solitude of his empty head, as insubstantial as a helium balloon.
My mistake.
Turns out that Muñeco does have his own deep psyche, and it’s terrifying.
Back in the day, the Tutti Fruttis were like guppies: wherever one went, we all went, and whatever one did, we all did. No secrets among us. And yet, Muñeco would occasionally appear with a black eye or a busted lip because he’d been brawling after school with some lowlifes, the kind you should take seriously when they say they’ll break your face. Muñeco didn’t miss us when he was off with those strangers, in his tank top and jeans so tight you had to pour yourself into them, so tight they showed off your whole package like you were a bullfighter.
Muñeco could show up late to class, at ten thirty, even eleven, slinking in with a look on his face like he was hiding some mystery that made him more important, as if he’d gotten larger or older overnight. He came late because he could, because he’d slept through his alarm or just the opposite, because he’d never gone home the night before. Still, he’d arrive refreshed and bright eyed, while the rest of us were still shaking off sleep. His cutting comments only made him more of a god.
He never explained. If we asked, he didn’t respond. Or he’d lie: he liked to do that. He’d trick us or ignore us, especially the teachers. He’d started living a double life, though we wouldn’t understand this until later.