When Jess died in Florida I tried to give his old clothes to the Salvation Army but they wouldn't pick it up. There was a lot, fifty years of clothes. So my upstairs neighbor, from Haiti, asked to have them and I gave them to him and so, I now assume, Jess's clothes became pepe.

At work the other day I had an ancient French couple who lived in Miami. When I asked them where in France they were from the wife, who spoke a little English, said they were from Haiti. A thunderbolt struck me: these were the colonialists out of Graham Greene's "The Commedianes" I've always heard about but never met! I told a co-worker who was born in Haiti about this and she just moaned about "her country taken over..." like she always does. She knows French, but doesn't like to speak it, only the patois, and is of no help in dealing with French customers, especially colonialists, I guess.

We have a certain amount of "damaged goods" on the floor at Macy's Men's Lacoste and I wonder if they end up pepe?

More on pepe: http://www.reason.com/news/show/127435.html