The Gringo Champion

Thanks to Double-U’s article, which had been picked up by several local outlets, including the Chronica News and the Daily News Open, some Latinos were expecting to see “the descendent of Montezuma, the Quetzalcoatl of the Sumerians, the Inca of the Babylonians, the Aztec Hercules,” and any other description that occurred to that crazy broad as she was writing.

I saw myself as being in exile from myself. And I started to write, I don’t know why—to try to get Aireen to forgive me or so that I could gradually come to understand myself.

“But that’s not the same as having a paper copy that I can read in bed without having to plug it in.”

and, as we wrote in our previous article, this is where our humble hero is from, the young man who, through his hard work and initiative, has shown that heroes can be born anywhere on Earth and into any circumstances.’”

Not at all, I see now that there are lots of us fighting on the same side, but we don’t know each other so we could never help one another before.”

“No, boy, I never have. I was with a lot of women, of course, when I was young. You know, I had a promising future, and when you’ve got victory by your side, you always have lots of friends of both sexes. But once you experience your first setbacks, everyone runs away from you like you’re the plague.”

“You can’t achieve anything without sacrifice,” Coach Bald tells me the next day, his hand wrapped in a bandage. “Whatever talents you have, boy, if you don’t use them, you’ll never get anywhere. So we’re going to divide up your training into five simultaneous elements: physical training, technique, tactics, psychology, and theory. Each of these can be further divided into four elements: direction, volume, intensity, and recovery, and all of this in the pursuit of three fundamental elements: your athletic form, the maximum performance of all your abilities, and finally, boy, the optimum outcome. Understood?”

We barely see the puddles; I’ve already stepped in one and splashed everywhere, but then she stepped in another one and splashed me too. There’s not a soul to be seen, just the two of us running, like deer, through the crossfire of the rain.

Why is it there are hardly any women writers on the shelves, Jefe?”

“Good question, you deuteronomic dolt. I don’t know, maybe because shes are better kissers than hes and they don’t need fucking literature to work through their neuroses and all their other bullshit

I used to read because I didn’t have any other life to build there in the bookstore, and now I don’t know what I can draw on in order to say something, anything, that has any meaning. Life, fucking chingada madre, is not how they portray it in books. So all I can come up is this:

“Would you like to start a restaurant with me?”