Ever since he was a boy, the Hellhound had tended to run with his passions. If he wasn’t as good as the dog, he would learn from the dog. And so his relationship with the mongrel La Familia had given his father deepened; the dog became his family, his teacher, his closest friend. It was during those days that he perfected his killer St. Bernard Kick. The Hellhound had always been an outstandingly physical child, ever since he was born, and he was always landing flying kicks in his classmates’ stomachs at school whenever he flew into a rage. He’d been doing this since almost the first day, even attacking the older tough-guy types.
At the same time, going to school introduced a new worry into his life. Until then, he always assumed his family’s business was perfectly above board, but now it began to dawn on him that the activities they were involved in were criminal. His classmates’ parents weren’t involved in organized crime. What? You mean we’re doing illegal things? Drug dealing and stuff? Killing people? But… isn’t that… isn’t that bad? The boy began to be tormented by moral qualms. Then it was 1957. The year the dog died. The boy’s family, teacher, and closest friend—gone. The boy was twelve, and it hit him hard. He felt as if a hole had opened up in his heart. He visited the local Catholic church every day to pray for the repose of the dog’s soul. Then one Sunday three months after the dog’s death, something happened. During the sermon. The pastor, as it happened, had spent the previous night with a cousin who had come up to the city from their hometown, and since the two men hadn’t seen each other for four-and-a-half years, the pastor imbibed a bit too much tequila. So he wasn’t doing too well. His voice, as he stood declaiming from the pulpit, was so toneless that most of the congregation started nodding off. The boy, too, felt himself falling under a sort of spell, as if he were succumbing to hypnosis. Only in his case, it wasn’t hypnotism of the You’re getting very, very sleepy type. He was having an actual hallucination. Hearing a mysterious message. First, he heard a voice. A male voice: “Hello? Hello? Hel-low!” It was an adult voice. What? Who is that? The boy glanced around the church, then froze. Up there behind the priest, a little to his right, at the rear of the pulpit, the statue of the crucified Christ was moving its lips. Their gazes met. And BAM, a bolt of spiritual lightning slammed through his body.
“Hey!” Jesus Christ’s voice bellowed in his brain. “Don’t you think you’ve got some things to take care of before you come here to pray for a dog? What about all this immorality you’re part of? You gotta make amends for that stuff first!”
All at once, just like that, the boy felt the hole the dog’s death had left in his heart close up, plugged by the wisdom he had been granted.
Whoosh. In it went, just like that.
Bear in mind that the Hellhound had always been unusually passionate. He was particularly susceptible to hallucinations. Physically prepared, you might say, to receive the word of God.
Age fourteen. The young man made his first appearance in the ring. He was a luchador now. He had spent the last two years training four hours daily, and expectations were high for this newcomer able to pull off impeccable high-flying moves. In Mexico, fourteen was not considered a young age to debut as a wrestler. And of course lucha libre was the preeminent form of popular entertainment. People watched, captivated, as the struggle between good and evil played itself out in the ring. Cheering for (or jeering at) the luchador who stood for goodness and jeering at (or cheering) the luchador who stood for evil offered a means of letting out the stress that accumulated in day-to-day life. Wrestling was a world of fantasy. And so the boy entered the ring. Watch me. Be happy!
This was his solution to the moral dilemma that plagued him.
His family’s business was evil. Well then, he would serve the public by becoming a luchador, showing his audiences a good time!
Thus he assuaged the prickings of his conscience.
His ring name was the Hellhound. He had chosen a dogman as his character, obviously, out of respect for his father’s dog—his family, teacher, and close friend. The various techniques he had picked up horsing around with the dog as a child played an important role in his fighting, albeit in more refined forms. That was how, at the age of fourteen, the Hellhound became the Hellhound. He was transformed from an ordinary human into a human capable of turning, at any moment, into a dogman.
The Hellhound was never, however, exclusively a wrestler. He continued attending school until he turned sixteen, and then he started helping his father. By then he had already found his way out of his moral quandary. He was doing good as a luchador, so even if he was involved in organized crime, and organized crime was evil, that was okay. By giving himself over to these two different aspects of his life, he achieved a kind of balance.
Once again, two.
The public face, the hidden face.
His father was assassinated by a competing organization in the winter of the Hellhound’s twenty-second year. The Hellhound took over the leadership of the cartel. Of course, even then he didn’t retire from the ring; the Hellhound remained his public face. Two. He was now the second man in his family to run the cartel. For two years, he struggled to keep things going, both in public and behind the scenes. By then everyone he worked with as a luchador—from his manager to his handlers, his drivers, everyone else—belonged to the organization. They made certain that security at stadium entrances was very strict and took extra precautions to prevent information relating to the Hellhound’s true identity from being leaked. The Hellhound’s underworld doings kept him so busy early on, when he first took over, that he competed in matches only in Mexico City and the small cities nearby. Even so, he managed to appear in 150 matches a year. At the same time, he worked hard to keep his other business thriving as it had when his father ran the organization. He found ways, little by little, to get in with corrupt state police officers and buy off tax officials, gaining a reputation as a promising newcomer in the world of North and Central American drug trafficking.
All this in order to be recognized by La Familia.
To convince the Don to give him a dog like the one his father had received.
That, ultimately, was his dream. That was the future he could hardly wait to make real. Then I’ll be just like you, right, Dad? He heard no answer from heaven, but he knew that if only he could get that dog, he would be number two. The second leader, a powerful presence in the underworld with a dog, an alter ego, as a symbol of his status.
He turned twenty-four. At last, he was presented with a dog. The Don sent the Hellhound a male pup, three months old. The dog’s father—his seed—was a boxer, and something about his features brought to mind a bulldog. Young as he was, he had incredible fighting instincts. When you got him going he would rear up on his hind legs, looking as if he were really getting ready to box. At the same time, he obviously had more than boxer blood; the traces of his mongrelization were unmistakable. Traces, that is, of everything he had inherited from his mother. That dog was you, Cabron. You.
The dog on the twentieth parallel north. You.
Here you were at last. You had made your way south from Texas to Mexico City. As a pup, you weren’t known by the name Cabron. When you lived on your family’s original territory, on the Mexican-American border, people had called you by a different name. The Hellhound had used that same name until you were a year and three months old. But then he renamed you. He christened you Cabron.