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.
Photography by: Jacob Hopkins
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