There's a pond behind Paco's house in Westport, Connecticut, with a frog in it named Green Lips the Third. He trained it. He stands at the edge of the water calling ribbit, ribbit until something moves in the vegetation, and out it comes, every time. The original Green Lips lives across the yard. It's a Jaguar XK 120, British Racing Green over a biscuit interior, and head on, low and wide with those two big headlights, it really does look like a frog.
Paco is close to 80 now. He's been on the same three acres since 1969, in a house people keep mistaking for a Frank Lloyd Wright. He designed it himself. For 40 years he ran an art gallery and frame shop in town, which is why people around Westport still greet him with "Hey, Frames." The barn out back once held 18 cars. "Thoroughbreds," he calls them. Divorces thinned the herd. "Every time I got divorced, I lost a Ferrari, a Porsche," he says. He sets the terms early, before anybody can aim a question at him: "This is not about a car. It's about a man and his cars. A little weathered, a little scratched. But you got to keep on driving, right?"
The property runs on its own logic. The sculptures scattered around the yard he calls installations. Inside, a Manhattan manhole cover that found its way into the back of his VW Rabbit on 57th Street one night, an event he files under drunken escapades, sits where furniture should be. The rear of the Rabbit scraped the whole way back to Connecticut. His kids' childhood shoes are nailed along a beam in the studio, every pair. Upstairs there's a bed built out of a 1963 Corvette, and every divorce settlement he's signed carried one non-negotiable term: the Corvette bed stays. He's kept a journal every day since 1963, sixty-some volumes of weather and pushup counts. "Everything has a meaning," he says, and then he says it again for emphasis.
The round blue sunglasses he wears come with provenance too. In 1965 he was an art student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and a Phantom Rolls-Royce was rolled into a ground-floor studio for eight students to paint in psychedelic colors. Paco drew a rear fender. Two days later the owner came to collect the car, and the owner was John Lennon. The way Paco tells it, Lennon walked around the car, asked who did that fender, then reached into the glove compartment and handed over the sunglasses inside it. The originals are upstairs in the bedroom. He's worn the same frames ever since.
The painter's eye behind them is how the XK 120 got found. A friend was recovering from a motorcycle wreck at a rehab center up in Wallingford, and on the drive home Paco kept to the back roads, not hunting for anything, just looking. In a barn off one of them sat the bare frame of an XK 120. No paint, not even on wheels. He pulled in, met the man who owned the place, and made a deal. It took five years at a friend's body shop to become what it is now, British Racing Green with the biscuit interior. Real English, the way he wanted it.
Driving it is work. "It's like driving a Mack truck," he says. No power steering, no power brakes. Every summer he and his son Garrison would run it up to the Jaguar festival in Newport while the rest of the family made the same trip in an air-conditioned XJ6. They'd arrive rested. Paco and Garrison would climb out soaked through and breathing exhaust. Asked if it was ever a pleasurable drive, he doesn't dress it up: "It wasn't any fun." Asked why he kept doing it anyway: "Memories. Family and tradition."
Hollywood came around more than once. The T-Bird in the barn was wanted for L.A. Confidential, and the XK 120 was wanted for Batman, the one they shot with Jack Nicholson. Both deals died over insurance. He'll tell you an XK 120 ended up in the movie anyway, just not his. He keeps a name ready for all the almosts. "If I ever owned a racehorse, it'd be called What I Should Have Coulda."
The credits it does have are earned. The 120 in the name is a top-speed claim, and his car has been there. "You know why it's called the 120? Because it went 120 miles an hour," he says. Above 100 the bonnet would start to lift, so he had a leather strap custom made to hold it down. The car only came back to life a few months ago, and the strap has been waiting to go back on. Paco's Achilles won't let him work a clutch these days, and he doesn't drive at night anymore. The car runs a little rough too. "They're all falling apart like I'm falling apart," he says. "But in the end, that light at the end of the tunnel is what keeps me going. It keeps me driving."
The strap goes back on, Paco supervising every screw, offering philosophy from somewhere over the fender. "You can fix anything with duct tape, vice grips and wire." Then he lowers himself in, gets his good foot where it needs to be, pumps the throttle, and the straight-six argues with him for a moment before it fires. "That's the sound of the XK 120 getting ready for the road trip," he says.
