Paco is Dead

An excerpt from the newly released memoir, THE CONSEQUENCE OF STARS

This essay is from the memoir The Consequence of Stars: A Memoir of Home, newly released in a revised edition on September 1, 2023.

Photo: By Ghost Patriot

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A Note on the Essay

When time passes, those from our past remain. Sometimes they are close physically and other times their presence lingers in our hearts, not because of their impact of us but becayse they arrived at a special time in our lives, a period of newness, renewal, or significance. We are who we are because of who we have been with and where we have been. And many times, the power of that association sneaks up on us.

This essay—“Paco is Dead”—came to me unexpectedly, not unlike Paco himself and all those people that pass through our lives and have shaped us in in ways we rarely see without looking long and hard.

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Larry was my best friend in those days. Of the handful of college companions in the late 1970s, Larry was the one who stands out. First and foremost, he was funny. He would do just about anything for a laugh, including a silly take on the Robert Palmer song, “Bad Case of Loving You.” Larry regularly wore big, clunky hiking boots. I don’t remember the brand, but they were an unwieldy style that secured one’s foot like an astronaut’s moonboot tied with red laces wrapped through big metal grommets. When the Robert Palmer song would come on the radio or out of the speakers of a turntable in an off-campus apartment, Larry would leap up, balance on the large toes of those boots, and sing out his version of the lyrics, “Doctor, doctor, give me the news! I got a bad case of TIP-TOE shoes!” It was so ridiculous, and he did his signature move with such grace and flair, that it was impossible not to laugh. Other friends had wit, surely, but Larry was built for laughter, the kind of humor that was both self-effacing and part of his personal design.

Larry and I had a mutual friend. We called him Paco. I don’t remember anyone calling him anything else. That wasn’t his real name. He wasn’t Hispanic. Probably German or Irish, I’d guess. I don’t remember his true first or last names ever being mentioned with any regularity, at least not around our friends. Some of us may have been vaguely aware of his given name, but Paco was just Paco to us. No one was sure how he got the nickname, maybe in high school or in the early college days, but nicknames just kind of happened.

Paco and Larry lived together off campus for a time. There was plenty of dope smoked and cheap beer and bad tequila to be shared. The two of them didn’t always get along, if I remember correctly. It might have been something about girl- friends staying too many days at their place, or dishes piling up in the sink, or being late with the cash for the rent.

Many years after college, Larry telephoned me to tell me the news he’d heard from another old friend.

“Paco’s dead,” Larry said.

It had been twenty-seven years since our time at Clarion State College, a state school in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. Larry lived in Pittsburgh now. I was in Chicago. We did our best, not always successfully, to connect a couple of times a year and catch up.

“Didn’t he have cancer?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s dead. Something, huh?” Larry wondered. “Wow. How did we miss that?”

“All those years. So many people just disappear into the shadows,” Larry said.

They say your college friends are your friends for life. That’s not necessarily true. I still have friends from college, but the label “friends” may not be quite right anymore. Larry and I talk occasionally, and when I’ve been back to Pittsburgh to visit, we get together for a beer or dinner, and it’s a lot like old times. But that’s not true for most of the others in that college group. Facebook has helped to reconnect, but we really do little more than leave a brief comment on a photo of someone’s family dog or their kids, or LIKE something they’ve posted about the state of the world. We have not truly remained friends in the deep-rooted sense. And as for Paco, well, he had never been a Facebook friend.

I met Paco at the college radio station, like many of my other friends, a nearly inseparable group at the time. Almost all of us had dreams of becoming rock-n-roll disc jockeys, and some of us played live music together. I had an acoustic guitar. Paco played bass. Larry occasionally blew the harmonica. My girlfriend sang lead and harmony. Larry’s off-and-on girlfriend also played guitar. She taught me how to play Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” I taught her Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Helplessly Hoping.” Some of us played together at the local eatery inside the student union on campus, and Paco and I played a few coffeehouses together with another guitarist friend from my high school days. There was a lot of Dylan and Neil Young, but what I remembered most was when Paco started thumping out the bass line to Pink Floyd’s “Money” during a short break between songs at one coffeehouse appearance. The crowd immediately recognized it. Funny how bass lines can be a song’s signature—Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” or Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Paco knew the power of a great bass line. “Listen closely to The Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer.’ Fabulous. McCartney is a master,” he said after listening to vinyl one Friday night at a friend’s apartment.

Paco was a comer-and-goer in our group, moving in and out of our circle but always coming back to us. Paco had other groups of friends, guys he’d buy weed from and his Disco bud- dies. Paco loved K.C. and the Sunshine Band. I don’t know how he found any of that crap appealing and yet was still able to play the elegant bass line to Dan Fogelberg’s “Part of the Plan.” I think it had something to do with the underlying sexuality of Disco. His girlfriend loved the god-awful stuff, so if he was going to get some, he had to like Disco. That was my take. He married that girl while they were both still in school, and my girlfriend at the time and I stood up at their wedding at a little Lutheran church, just a few blocks from campus.

It was just after my graduation when I lost touch with Paco. He had a year or two to go, if I remember. Larry kept in contact for a time but then there was nothing for years. I had heard somewhere that Paco ended up in Atlanta working at a recording studio. Then there was talk about an illness for a time; someone said it was cancer, but it was never confirmed. Fact is—we didn’t really even try to confirm the story.

All those college friends are now pushing 60 years old (or older)— all of us who had once believed we were going to change the world. We missed the tumultuous but electrifying 1960s, graduating college in 1978, ‘79 and ‘80. We were in middle school and younger when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when Robert Kennedy was shot in the head, when cities burned, and campuses erupted. The Kent State shootings happened when we were freshmen in high school. The Vietnam War ended when we were high school seniors, some of us younger than that.

“Don’t you want something meaningful to protest, like the students did back then?” I asked Larry once on a drunken and weed-infused night.

Larry raised his fist in the air like the black athletes at the Olympics in 1968 and blurted, “Power to the people!” The gesture and comment were both serious and sarcastic. It was easy to think we would have been part of the demonstrations that rocked the country, but I wondered if we would have simply stayed on the sidelines, like most college students.

Paco saw it differently. He laughed at my question and Larry’s fist, and asked, “Seriously guys. Isn’t it better to live in the present than the past?” He was our Zen master, without even trying, without even knowing.

Sometime later in the semester, Larry and I and our respective girlfriends set off on a road trip to Cedar Point, a big amusement park near Toledo. It was about a four-hour drive from campus, and to get there, one had to travel the highway just outside the campus of Kent State. We all agreed to stop and “see where the kids were shot.” It was an eerie visit, an awkward drive through campus asking students some six years after the shootings where we might find the school’s Commons. “Those kids were us,” my girlfriend said, walking from where we had parked the car to the spot where the body of Jeffrey Miller once laid, the dead student in the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph.

All of us were silent for a long time on the drive from Kent State to Cedar Point until I wondered, “Isn’t that Paco’s name?”

The three others thought for a moment. “The dead kid?” Larry asked.

“Paco’s name is…ah…Jeff? Isn’t it?” my girlfriend wondered.

“I have no idea,” Larry’s girlfriend said.

“Martin,” Larry said. “It’s Jeff Martin. Jeffery Martin. He writes it on his checks. And I had a class with him last semester. The prof wasn’t going to call him Paco.”

“Jeff Martin might as well have been Jeff Miller,” I said.

A few days after the trip, I saw Paco outside the campus cafeteria hall.

“How was the road trip?” he asked. “We stopped at Kent State,” I said.

“Where?”

“Kent State.”

“You know someone who goes there?”

“No. Wanted to see where the students were shot.”

“Kids shot?” he asked.

“You don’t know about Kent State?” I was distressed. “Wait,” he said, with minor recognition. “The song ‘Ohio.’ CSN&Y. ‘Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.’”

I nodded. “We saw the spot where one student was killed.”

“We played the song at one of the coffeehouse gigs,” Paco recalled.

“We did.”

“Fucked up, man,” Paco said. Then his mind quickly turned. “You going in to get something to eat? I’m starving.”

Paco didn’t see the incident at Kent State as I did, and I was upset he hadn’t put it in the perspective I thought it deserved or hadn’t considered, as my girlfriend had, that any of those students could have been one of us, our group, our friends. My relationship with Paco changed on that day. I real- ized we were different people who just happened to cross paths through radio and music. We remained friends, but things had changed. Still, decades later, as I talked about his death with Larry, deep sadness came over me.

“It doesn’t feel right. I should have known about Paco dying,” I said.

“Long time ago,” Larry said, trying to justify the detachment.

“But he was one of us,” I said.

There was silence on both ends of the phone.

Before hanging up, Larry and I pledged not to allow so much time to pass before speaking again. We pledged to get together someday soon, visit in our respective cities, but we knew it would be less than likely. And we promised to try to keep in better touch with those old friends, but we both knew that, too, was doubtful.

Some weeks later, Larry telephoned again. “Are you ready for this?” he asked, excitedly.

“You’re going to be grandfather?” I joked.

“Paco?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s alive.”

“What!?”

“Paco is not dead,” Larry laughed. “We had the fucker dead.”

“But what about the cancer?”

“Survived it. He’s fucking alive!”

Larry must be wrong, I thought. I was just getting used to Paco’s death.

“I talked to him,” Larry added. “What the hell?”

“He called me. Out of the blue.”

“I feel cheated,” I said, sarcastically. “I fucking grieved.”

“Bastard,” Larry said. “He got a kick out of the story, though, all of us thinking he was dead.”

Paco was still in the Atlanta area, where he had first traveled after college. He was in the music industry, as he’d been for years, selling something or another related to studio work. Larry said he wasn’t really sure what he did, couldn’t remember exactly what Paco had told him. But it didn’t matter. “He’s fucking alive,” Larry said again. “The guy is alive.”

Larry and I talked about old times with Paco, brought up a few other names from that group of ours, and wondered where they were living, what they were doing, if any really were dead. We were like the old men at a veteran’s hall. I missed the military draft. It was abolished just before I turned eighteen and went off to Clarion State. I never had the “brotherhood” of Army life, the kind of experience my father insisted bonded him to other men like nothing had or ever would again. My brotherhood came in another way.

Minutes after hanging up with Larry, I considered calling him right back. I should get Paco’s phone number, I thought. I should reach out to him. But I didn’t. Still, I couldn’t help recall what Paco had said that night in his apartment so many years ago: It’s better to live in the present than the past. In that new moment, in that here and now, Paco was no longer the guy who was once so ignorant of Kent State, no longer the guy who loved shitty Disco music. Instead, Paco was the old, albeit nearly forgotten, friend who once had given us advice we all would be better off heeding. I’m certain we didn’t think much of what he said at the time he said it. In the realm of significant thought, what Paco said was entirely minor in scope, far from profound philosophy. However, it was said at the right time and the right place, when all of us in that group of college friends were discovering how we fit in the big world, who we were, and why any of it was important. Paco’s words, words from a friend, simple and offhanded as they may have seemed at the time, can be unwittingly profound. They stick. Those words, like the old friends who are forever tethered to us, linger in the subconscious, and remain imprinted on the heart.