Fan club

Photo by Caroline Kim

Recently, I went to a lackluster Sunday afternoon of lucha libre at the Arena Coliseo. The wrestlers, however acrobatic, only seemed to be going through the motions. Indeed, more energy was expended between fights by these two guys, who claimed to be students from the Autonomous National University, and who certainly knew the "Goya" cheer chanted by fans of the Pumas, the UNAM football team. After the luchas, I ran into them on the street. They claimed to have been at a baseball game before the wrestling matches, and were on their way to look for a cantina from which to see a football game on TV. Here, the three of us practice cheering.

Fun for the whole family

I tend to have words for every occasion, but the other night, when my friend Richard Verdoni, who comes from the family that runs the Hermanos Atayde Circus, invited me to see the show, it left me speechless.

It had been literally decades since I'd last seen a circus. Writers are not supposed to use clichés, so forgive me for the following: I felt like a child again. My mouth gaped through many of the acts, particulary the tightrope walker.

As a boy my favorite story was Toby Tyler, about a child who runs away to join the circus. Does the fact that to be Toby's story was my dream say too much about the kind of family in which I grew up? Or do all kids dream about running away and joining the circus?

Click here for more information about the Hermanos Atayde Circus, which is playing throughout the summer. If you go, you can see this tiger doing the moonwalk to the tune of "Billie Jean."

A good one-dollar cigar

Sometimes an old man waits on customers behind the counter at Hermanos Petrides, a cigar store on Calle Uruguay between the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas and Calle Bolívar. He has a weathered countenance and an extremely patient manner toward the uninformed customer. He is almost old enough to remember the era when Thomas Riley Marshall, vice president to Woodrow Wilson, summed up the U.S.'s woes and said, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."

The old man's sons most frequently take care of the customers these days, with equal grace. I don't smoke, but this is where I steer people from the U.S. who want to buy legitimate Cuban cigars. I also suggest -- as the old man suggested to me, when I was buying Cubans for friends in New York -- that they try Mexican cigars from San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz. They only cost a dollar or two, and my cigar-smoking friends tell me they are as good as stogies that generally cost five or ten times as much.

Yabba dabba do

I thought that I knew Mexico City pretty well, but only realized the other day that the Flintstones had moved here.

Mickey Rourke, move over

On July 1, Alberto and Alejandro Jiménez, better known as "La Parkita" and "Espectro Junior," their monikers as professional wrestlers, were found murdered in room 52 of the Hotel Moderno, around the corner from the Arena Coliseo, where they had each fought countless times. They had rented the room, accompanied by two prostitutes, who left later that day without the Jiménez boys. Hotel management was suspicious, knocked on the door several times, and as there was no answer, went inside and found the cadavers.

Unfinished alcoholic drinks were found in the room, and police sources suspect that the girls put eye drops in the Jiménez boys' cocktails. This would have been with the intention of knocking them out to rob them, but eye drops can be deadly. In 2007 a band of women known as Las Goteras -- the Droplets -- was arrested for the murder of various men with this modus operandi.

Here is a link to the coverage of the Jiménez murders in Ovaciones, Mexico's premier sports newspaper. For those who cannot read Spanish, here is a version from that most esteemed of British tabloids, The Sun.

The wrestlers were twin brothers. They also happened to be midgets.