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FREEDOMWAYS                  THIRD QUARTER 1973

ingly opaque sunglasses. What really grabbed me though was the rest of his togs. The main focus was at the top, a black leather cap. Then followed a black turtle-neck sweater, black suit under a black overcoat-although it was July-black shoes and socks. I walked in, found myself a small table and ordered a beer. The brother never turned his head and if he ever batted an eye behind those glasses you wouldn't know it without an x-ray machine. After about an hour, and still never turning his head in my direction the brother whispered, "Where you from, Mon?" That was my introduction to Monsieur Slim Sunday. He was-or had once been-Nigerian. No, he never wore anything but black and he emphasized the fact that his underwear which he dyed himself, was also black! He never sat with his back to anybody's door or window. "I got no trust, Mon," he explained.

The Monaco was a typical French working-class cafe which noisily raised its sheetmetal shutters at seven when the local clientele, butchers, bakers, hairdressers and little craftsmen, would begin drifting in looking for their cafe au lait, laced with cognac. They would look in again four or five times during the day for some additional fuel-usually vin blanc or rouge-until knocking-off time.

About nine every morning a radiantly angelic and obviously American girl would skip in and take her favorite seat, smiling at the morning like one of Raphael's virgins. There were always ten or twelve little saucers stacked up in front of her on the marble-topped table and I figured she played some kind of expatriate game until I asked one fo the brothers. "Well, that's the only way the waiter can keep the count," was the way he explained it to me. I had to ask what kind of a count the waiter was keeping. He stared at me, "You don't know? Where you been, Baby? Well, that's little Julie and she been stoned for near 'bout two years. Everyone of them saucers represent one rum!" Later I learned that little Julie's father was, in the words of another brother, "real big shit at one of them Ivy League colleges when he ain't down in Washington helpin' the Presdient to fuck up foreign policy." Julie sat there with her stack of saucers for another year or so and then one morning she wasn't there. Gone back to New England, they said. About six months later we heard that little Julie had hanged herself. "The trouble wid Julie," explained Ula, the Danish girl whose specialty was gin with beer chasers, "was she wass a decent kid. She couldn' stand dat shiddouse hypocrits was sellin' in dat fugginnAmerican collitch. So she stayed stoned!" I guess little Julie forgot to stay stoned.

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