Wild Greens

We open with a sleepless night. Outside, the sounds of early birds, inside the ticking clocks and creaking floors keep the speaker of the poem awake in Christian Ward’s “Rebelling Against the Night.” A sleepless night grows into a furnace in Elisabeth D.’s poem “a fire in me.”    

Lorette C. Luzajic’s creative nonfiction story “The Man in the Golden Mask” tells the remarkable true story of Fray Tormenta, a Mexican Catholic priest who supported the children in an orphanage by fighting as a luchador, or masked wrestler, at night.  

Angela Patera’s “Reclaim,” a drawing in watercolor and ink, depicts nature overtaking an abandoned manmade structure; a wild rebirth of growing things. “Ursula Knew,” a poem by Matthew Ellis, oracularly imagines the end of exploitative capitalism and a birth of something new. Odi Welter’s poem “Your body is a temple—” reclaims words used to shame and control queerness, gender, and identity.

Guillocheau’s “Nadia,” painted in acrylics, depicts a defiant and bored looking woman; her expression and posture refuse to appeal to the viewer’s gaze.

“Bang the Eardrum,” a personal essay by Angela Townsend, playfully takes aim at the idea of altering your creative work to fit some imagined editor’s taste. “Stand Strong,” a digital drawing by Melissa Lomax reminds us to stand for ourselves and stand for each other.

-Rebecca

Rebelling Against The Night

by Christian Ward

The Man in the Golden Mask

by Lorette C. Luzajic

“No one would have taken me seriously as a wrestler had they known I was a priest." —Fray Tormenta

Sergio Gutiérrez Benitez, Cieneguillas, Mexico. Population 200. Seventeenth of eighteen mouths to feed. They do their best, but his father is a lowly carbonero, a charcoal peddler, who travels to sell his wares. The closest town is fourteen hours away by donkey.

When the young boy’s uncles are murdered by banditos—or is it a family feud?—the whole clan makes their way to the big city. The brothers grow up in the slums of Mexico City, in the Tres Estellos barrio under Tepeyac Hill. The shrine of Guadalupe is where Mary first appeared in a blue-starred mantle to a poor shepherd, speaking softly in Nahuatl, his own Aztec language: “¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?” (“Am I not here, I who am your mother?”)

Sergio is a gang member by the tender age of ten. He takes work at a pencil factory and sells popsicles at the circus. But punching and brawling are natural to him. He is constantly fighting, proudly collecting scars from every battle. He has been stabbed like a turkey Christmas carcass. He has been shot. He has been smashed with broken bottles. Sergio smokes; he drinks himself blind from the roadside buckets of pulque. He takes the pills, the powders, the pipes, and the needles.

Perhaps Sergio’s story is the same story as every luchador. Mexican wrestling is a surreal theatre of men in cosplay beating the shit out of each other. It is performance art, and a gladiator sport, both. It is a ritual enactment of the battle of good and evil. It is wildly popular throughout the country. Audience members have their favourite players in the drama. The arena gives glamour and glory to the masked men, who may otherwise have a terrible existence. Every little kid wants to grow up to be a luchador fighter. For those entrenched in violence and poverty, it is a way out, a way of being or becoming something else, a glimmer of grandeur.

Sergio reads the same comic books and watches the same movies as other boys his age. He is a teenager when he sees the films El Señor Tormenta and Tormenta En El Ring (Mr. Storm, Storm in the Ring). Sergio dreams about becoming a luchador. He also dreams of a bigger fight, a fight for God, becoming a priest to help the children who have been forgotten. Both movies were about a hero with a double life—a luchador who is secretly a priest, or a priest who is secretly a luchador. The hero uses his rewards to help orphans. It is exactly the kind of story that Jack Black will tell later, from a comedy perspective. By then, because of Sergio, it will be based on a true story.

When Sergio is barely 20, his friend is murdered in the mayhem of it all. He is the one accused, but he manages to prove his alibi, a cantina far away from the scene of the crime.

But now he wants out. He walks into a church, and he prays.

He is tossed away. He tries again. Eventually, he lands in a rehab in Tlalpan. When he joins a seminary, he can’t help throwing punches. “How are you going to break a wild colt from night to morning?” Sergio asks Vice Magazine in retrospect, at age 70.

He is determined to become a priest and struggles against the demons that have him in their grip. He is sent to Navarra and to Rome, and learns psychology, theology, philosophy. He is especially interested in sociology and psychology and studies to understand juvenile delinquency. He becomes a priest with the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools. He is a fighter through and through, in every way.

His first post is in Veracruz, the Gulf’s port city, loved by pelicans and by pirates. Sergio’s parish is filled with the least of these, “drogadictos, prostitutas, y delincuentes.” Some ruffians taunt him, tempt him to blows. They say they can’t trust someone who doesn’t fight. 

This is the beginning of the long secret, the Man in the Golden Mask. Father Sergio understands he has been called by the Almighty to a most unusual task, to becoming the legendary Storm in the ring. By day, he feeds the hungry, and gives the Bread of Life to hungry souls. By night, he wrestles under the cover of a red and gold satin mask. He will wear it in his cameo later, in the movie Nacho Libre.

Father Storm begins collecting destitute and damaged children. He does not abandon them when he moves, but rather takes them along when his priestly duties change. He grows his roving orphanage through the funds he earns as a clandestine luchador. He takes on thousands of fights in his homemade masks. “Gold is for the Divine. Red is for the blood I shed for His children.”

One day, when the cat is long out of the bag, he christens the orphanage “La Casa Hogar de los Cachorros de Fray Tormenta”—that is, “the House and Home of Fray Tormenta’s Puppies.”

Today, Sergio is nearly 80. Though he retired from the ring more than 20 years ago, he occasionally makes guest appearances. He continues to work with his charity for underprivileged children, because he will always be one of them. He trains them in grapples, rolls, and dives because they dream of wrestling. But he also teaches them reading, writing, and arithmetic. He feeds them. He gives them medical attention. Fray Tormenta has raised over 2000 children.

Today Father Benitez still does the mass in his Texcoco parish, and he does it wearing a cape, Spandex, and the famous golden masks. Only in Mexico!

Truth is stranger than fiction, as anyone who’s read the Good Book knows.

Ursula Knew