don tacos: the chip of the masses

by j. baugher

While the bourgeois are sitting in the Soapland in Ginza, drinking their Grey Goose and munching on Doritos, we’re down here at the 100-yen discount strip club in Kabuki-cho, nursing bottles of Jinro and eating Don Tacos.  The girls here, they’re all-natural:  they aren’t sullied by implants, or four limbs, or even two functional eyeballs.  The atmosphere is congenial; doused in shame, alcohol, and the inevitability of continued oppression.

The history of the real Don Tacos is a largely apocryphal, hard-to-trace path of green peppers and tears.  Born Emmanuel Tacos in the Tortilla Flats in 1918, the hero of our story led a hard life, working donkey shows outside Guadalajara in his teens and leading a small uprising during the Mexico-South Carolinian War (that infamous war where none of the other states volunteered to help South Carolina) in 1948. 

Don Tacos is a hard-working chip, the chip of everyman.  It comes at you strong, with twice the flavor dust of that other chip, killing a layer of taste buds the same way that harvesting fruit for sixteen hours every day for three dollars and forty-eight cents will kill a layer of your self-dignity. 

This hero, this peoples’ champion, was not a rich man.  Every peso he had went to his Venezuelan prostitute ex-wife for child support.  When he wasn’t on one of his notorious three-week tequila benders, he was in his basement, experimenting with spices, trying to perfect his formula to create a chip that could be called ‘mediocre.’  His quest for mediocrity has been described as ‘potentially laudable’ by critics and friends alike.  It was a quest that would eventually claim his life. 

Señor Tacos contracted syphilis from the wife of a tortilla magnate, the CEO and founder of Conglomerated Nacho.  His intent was to use her to acquire the formula of their flagship product, but shortly after successfully reproducing their recipe in his humble kitchen, the syphilis had already spread to his brain; it was too late.

He spent his final days in a veterinary hospital, his condition worsening rapidly until the end.

After his death in 1968, the Japanese honored his memory with a chip to symbolize the bond shared by hard-working people everywhere.  To honor his principles, the chip was sold at a price accessible to even the most downtrodden pachinko-junkie after a three-day losing streak.

Don Tacos was a man with a dream, a dream about tacos (he was not a very ambitious man…) and in this dream, he saw tortilla chips combining with the flavor of tacos, a flavor which already contains the taste of tortilla chips.  For roughly one hundred and ten of your shiniest yen, you too can share in Don Tacos’ dream.