Word: paco
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Sick humor. That's what Paco loved, and he couldn't get enough of it. Gahan Wilson cartoons, Gary Gilmore jokes, National Lampoon raised to the nth degree--Paco took it all in and somehow managed to keep from gagging. His favorite, though, was a cartoon from Playboy or Penthouse or some other urbane excuse for a glossy fold-out with a staple in her navel. Wherever it was from, Paco didn't remember, he simply knew some friend had given it to him one night at a fund-raiser for the United Farm Workers which he attended because after...
Real sick. But Paco loved it, and laughed every day when he glanced at it right up there next to the UFW eagle. Then he'd go out and put on his ascot and pick up his briefcase and go right back to turning the handle himself...
...Paco didn't always wear an ascot and carry a briefcase of smoke thin cigarettes while huddles under the low ceiling at the Cafe Pamplona. Three years ago when Paco first blew into Cambridge from Southern California with its blistering fields and union speeches, he was all set to bring the workers' revolt to the Yard. Then he met his roommates--an obnoxious Jewish debater from the area who didn't know a thing about Cesar Chavez but knew Ralph Nader was gong to make Aermica safe for democracy, and a completely apolitical Indian chemistry major from Pennsylvania who liked...
First he started arguing, the innocent bullshit-kind of argument everyone has when he or she is a freshman and wants to reform America's social conscience instead of reading for Gov 30. Paco played his role to the hilt, all Viva Zapata and Man of La Mancha and Impossible Dream--socialism, cliches and stereotypes and fiery speeches like he'd seen out in California. He picked his favorite target, the other Chicano on the floor--a rich kid from L.A. whose father owned a big factory that built tanks and had put him on the company's board...
...Paco always knew it was the stereotypes that matter--like the fiery Chicano stereotype that had taken out of the migrant's school outside of San Francisco and had put him in the gringo school outside of Beacon Hill. But gradually that year he understood it was that other stereotype, that Harvard-Fly-Club-air-of-casual-scholarship phantom that was going to take him even further in the gringo world as soon as he could climb out of the long black robe on Commencement. Hell, he figured, there's Ropes and Gray and Rose Guthrie and Alexander...