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LOOK HOMEWARD BABY                   HARRINGTON

The Monaco was something the likes of which had never been seen in the "land of the free." The word to describe it was "harmony." There were the regular French patrons and there were les amis. Of these, half were American, about 20 of these were brothers. The rest were English, Canadian, Swedish, a few Danes, one Czech, one Nigerian, two Senegalese and one Indian "untouchable." "All these beautiful s.o.b.'s are here trying to become human beings," explained the ex-cowboy who sat in the window seat all day making quick sketches of everyone who came in. There was a jukebox but it seemed that the only thing anyone ever wanted to hear was "Pops" (Armstrong) singing:

I see friends shakin hands
Sayin how do you do
What they're really sayin
Is I love you.

There were quite a number of U.S. bases spread about the French countryside in those days which were not the spiritually uplifting places their commanders claimed them to be in their reports to the Pentagon. The more decent GI's couldn't wait to get the hell out on weekends and quite a few dug what was happening in Monaco. The base security sections were considerably less than pleased with the idea of exposing clean-cut and freedom-loving American youths to the Left Bank with its "French immorality" or "treasonable niggers." This probably accounted for the two or three flamboyantly inconspicuous "journalists" who joined the Monaco family.

Another kind of bloodhound eventually showed up, sniffing around the tables and grinning lasciviously. An outlay of a few pre-inflationary dollars to cover the price of vin rouge and beers for some of the cafe's thirsting brothers unearthed enough life stories-invented on the spot-for him to fill out a prefabricated masterpiece called The Black Expatriate, which eventually surfaced in a well-known news magazine. One could say that in spite of its clumsily concealed liberal racist paranoia, the cover story was "a step forward." But only because Black Americans hadn't yet been discovered in the United States as people! Yet it would be safe to assume that the main inspiration for its appearance was a dearth of news. Pickings in the heap of human chaos which usually inspires what William Randolph Hearst called "great American journalism" were scrawny. There were no earthquakes, famines or train wrecks. Billion dollar bank heists had dried up on the editors and of course airplane hijacking hadn't

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