The Guilty Read Free Page A

brains out in the Mexican countryside.
    When I landed in Mexico City with still no word from Catalina, I discovered that the country adored me in a very strange way. Leo handed me a press folder full of praise for my foray into independent film. The words “manliness” and “virility” were repeated as often as “film in its pure state” and “total filmmaking.” My take was that Mariachi Baby Blues was about a story inside a story inside a story, where at the end everybody was very content doing what they hadn’t wanted to do at the beginning. A great achievement, according to the critics.
    My next concert—in the Auditorio Nacional, no less—was tremendous. Everyone in the audience had a penis-shaped balloon. I had become the stallion of the fatherland. They started to call me the Gallito Inglés, the Cocky Little Rooster; one of my fan clubs changed its name to Club de Gallinas, The Hen Club.
    Catalina had predicted the movie would make me a cult star. I tried finding her to remind her of that, but she was still in Spain. I got offers from everywhere to show up naked. My agent tripled his salary and invited me to see his new house, a mansion in the Pedregal neighborhood—twice as big as my own. A priest was there. He held a mass to bless the house and Leo thanked God for putting me at his side. Then he asked me to go with himto the garden. He told me the actress Vanessa Obregón wanted to meet me.
    Leo’s ambition knows no limits. It was in his own best interest for me to date the bombshell of banda music. But I could no longer be with a woman without disappointing her or having to explain the absurd situation the movie had created.
    I gave thousands of interviews but no one believed I wasn’t proud of my penis. I was declared Sexiest Latino by a magazine in Los Angeles, Sexiest Bisexual by a magazine in Amsterdam, and Most Unexpected Sexpot by a magazine in New York. But I couldn’t take my pants off without feeling diminished.
    Finally Catalina came back from Spain to humiliate me with her new life: she had become the porn star’s girlfriend. She told me this in a restaurant where I demonstrated the poor taste of ordering a tomato salad. I thought about the porn king’s diet, but I barely had time to distract myself with that irritation because Cata was asking me for a fortune in palimony. I gave it to her so that she wouldn’t talk about my penis.
    I went to see Leo at two in the morning. He took me to the room he calls his “study” just because there is an encyclopedia in there. He ran his bare feet back and forth over a puma skin rug while I talked. He was wearing a robe with dragons on it, like an actor playing a lurid spy. I told him about Cata’s extortion.
    â€œThink of it as an investment,” he told me.
    That calmed me down a little, but I felt drained. When I got home, I couldn’t masturbate. A plumber had madeoff with my copy of Lord magazine and I didn’t even miss it.
    Leo kept pulling strings. The limo that arrived to take me to the MTV Latino gala had first picked up a spectacular mulatta who was smiling in the back seat. Leo had hired her to accompany me to the ceremony and increase my sexual legend. I liked talking to her—she knew all about the guerrillas in El Salvador—but I didn’t try anything because she was looking at me with measuring-tape eyes.
    I went back to therapy. I explained that Catalina was happy because of an actual big dick and I was unhappy because of an imaginary one. Could life be that basic? The doctor said this happened to 90 percent of his patients. I quit therapy because I didn’t want to be such a cliché.
    My fame is too strong a drug. I need what I hate. I toured everywhere, threw sombreros into grandstands, got down on my knees and sang “El hijo desobediente.” I recorded an album with a hip-hop group. One afternoon, in the main square of Oaxaca, I