The Oregon: Year One - The Tale of Young Pancho

The time was early 2001. The boys and I had just moved into a one family dwelling that made the people on our street think we were either running a meth lab or were, in fact, pirates. “The fucking jerk kids down the street threw a scotch bottle in my mailbox!” And “those pirates are crazy, honey. Don’t make eye contact!!” The day was sometime in May or June of that year. I had just gotten off from a super boring day shift at Subway in East Canton and wanted to go home, take off my work clothes and chill out. I get there and Mike is sitting on the couch watching SpongeBob or Pokemon or something on Cartoon Network. Beside him sits a boy of around 10 or so. “Hey Mikey, what’s with the kid?” I asked as I grabbed 3 cokes from the fridge and gave one to Mike, one to the boy and opened one myself. “Oh, him?” he asked as he poured his Coke into a beer stein that I’d never before seen. “Dan and I got him at a garage sale. Dirt cheap. Got like 3 of these beer steins too. You should check it out. I think his name is Pancho or something. Well…that’s what I’ve been calling him all day. He didn’t have a collar on or come with a manual or anything. It was a garage sale, he came ‘as is’ ” and Young Pancho just smiled, nodded and said thanks for the Coke. At The Oregon this kind of explanation would fly. You could be wearing a brightly coloured outfit with a mask and a cape, saying you were going to fight crime and the only response you’d get is “Buy some more beer while you’re out!” Mike bought a kid at a garage sale. Good enough for me. We were officially a REAL family like the lesbians down the block.

I guess what had really happened was Mike was going to the garage sale down the street and as he was walking back he saw a young boy who I guess looked sad. Now I’m not sure how, but he started up a conversation and decided to ask the kid back to the house to watch cartoons and hang out with people much older, and thus in 10 year old logic - much cooler, than himself. As much as your parents tell you not to talk to strangers as a kid they don’t expect someone like Mike to be the one trying. The guy is a big kid himself. And he doesn’t look all creepy like the people you see in the PSAs about kidnapping. So Mike asked the kid if he liked cartoons, dubbed him Pancho, and brought him home to hang out. If he’d used that power for evil, you’d all be bowing down to Lord Calhoon and his Tiny Army of Terror.

Now before you freak out and think we made a 10 year old do keg stands, taught him to short change strippers, or corrupted him in some way, we didn’t. We’d just hang out and watch cartoons, drink Kool-Aid and eat pizza. I don’t even think we swore around the kid. In fact no one really even drank if Pancho was there. Sure, he’d show up after wed been drinking, but still. It’s all semantics.

From what I gathered Pancho didn’t have a dad at home. His mom worked long hours and I guess kind of left him there alone or something. I never got the whole story, but that’s kind of what I’d figured out from talking to him a bit. We’d play catch in the backyard, or sit around and play board games and stuff. Mike or D.W. would take him down to Dairy Queen to get ice cream. It was like a completely surreal version of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program they advertise on late night television. He was just a cool kid who had nothing else to do really, and did what people twice his age did: hung out at The Pirate House. But in a way it was different. Sure he was hanging out, but we were teaching him stuff that a father or older brother would. I remember DW taught him how to shave. I taught him the proper way to grill steaks and burgers. Mike taught him about Star Trek and wanted to teach him how to drive (we didn’t let him drink, so there’d always be a sober driver by that logic), and from what you’ll read later, maybe gave him a few lessons.

Young Pancho hung out on The Oregon for most of that summer. We never let him drink, never let him smoke, and it didn’t hurt anyone’s standing with the ladies that we’d “adopted” a street urchin and bought him tacos on a regular basis. But our time with Pancho was cut short. Turns out a chick named Holly that partied with us used to baby sit him, and knew his family. She went over and told his mother where he’d been while she was at work the whole summer. She’d heard the stories of our antics, probably signed the petition to get us kicked out of town, and while never having met us, knew us by reputation. Pancho was ratted out by a girl who was one time groped in exchange for gas money. Irony at its finest. So from that day on, Young Pancho was banned from coming over and watching cartoons, eating hamburgers that he’d grilled himself and drinking his weight in Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid.

So sad and angry were we that young Pancho had been banished by a working single mother and half naked Holly that the news of what happened next struck a chord in our black hearts and brought a tear to our booze and PS2 blurred eyes. He’d tried to come over and hang out many times, and had gotten caught by his mother, who by this time had enlisted the help of another babysitter to actually WATCH her child. But Pancho had the ultimate P.S. to this Epic. Turns out that a few months later he STOLE A CAR and tried to drive it over to The Oregon to impress us with his homecoming in style. He was picked up by the police for running a red light, or hitting a mailbox or something, several blocks from our house. I really don’t remember the whole story. When I heard The Epilogue to The Tale of Young Pancho I was too busy laughing at his boyish antics and making a toast to his Tale and rechristening him as Grand Theft Pancho. Perhaps if he’d been able to have some positive male role models in his life, he wouldn’t have gotten arrested. Or, more likely, we’d have loaned him one of our cars. And at the very least taught him how to steal a car and not get caught. And as for the deed? I for one was COMPLETELY fucking impressed.

So if you’re reading this, Young Pancho, you should email me. It’s warm outside and I could really go for a hot fudge sundae and some burgers.

Dr. R

P.S. Mike, if I got any of the details wrong, I’m sorry. This is how I remember it; I mean it was 5 years ago. Maybe you taught him how to shave, D.W. taught him how play Blackjack, and I taught him about Star Trek, I’m really not sure. Point is this all really happened, details be damned, and is a great story that I had to share with the world.