Cardenal, AKA “Carita (Pretty Face)”,”Alvarado was in trouble cuz he didn’t have any chuchos. He’d been out of them for some time, and he’d come to the end of road in a life he’d made from giving away chuchos.
The youngest child and only boy in a family of eight children, Carita was raised with a lot of fawning. His sisters carried him around like a doll and mothered him as if working on the skills they would use someday when they came to have children of their own. They constantly gave him treats. They also gave him his moniker: beautiful baby doll. They would have called him lollipop, but he wasn’t old enough. So Carita was as far as they could go.
This life led Carita to always having enough sweets in his pockets to give away. Who didn’t want chuchos?
Chuchos won him life-long friends in elementary school. They also got him out of trouble in high school, although by then they’d evolved beyond simple sweets and spanned a wide spectrum of favors, from juicy rumors to invitations to wedding parties and dances.
After graduating from high school, Carita decided to stay home—didn’t even try to get into college.
He got a job weeks after high school graduation. He then leveraged it and his chuchos to get a better job. He did it over and over again until he reached what was, in his mind, the tippy top job in town: mayor.
Unlike previous jobs, however, Carita had no chuchos to match this position.
“We don’t like the lowriders cruising all day Sunday wasting gas and jamming up traffic. When are you going to stop it?” a wealthy constituent complained to Carita soon after his inauguration.
Knowing he couldn’t stop the vuelta, Carita offered him a chucho, his usual way out of trouble.
“How about the city repaves your driveway?” he pitched to the constituent.
“Oh, if you do that for me and my girlfriend, I’ll stop complaining,” the man said.
“Done!” Carita said happily.
The word of this special city chucho soon spread. It was a big hit for Valentine’s Day.
“I want the same for my girlfriend,” became a recurring demand.
Four months into his administration, the Public Works Director reported that he was doing so many “sweetheart” driveways that he couldn’t do regular street maintenance.
A local reporter called days later.
“Is the city verifying that the sweetheart driveways are legitimate, not adulterous relationships?” the reporter asked.
Carita answered the only way he knew how.
“Lemme give you one too?” he asked.
“You can’t have my soul. I want yours,” the reporter answered.
