Larger context for ALWAYS in Corpus brown_strip.txt DBL-CLICK WDS FOR DEF
He had talked one other member of the group to stay with him, but that friend had tired of not eating regularly and returned to Savannah.
But Mercer hung on, living, after a fashion, in a Greenwich Village fourth-flight walk-up.
"The place had no sink or washbasin, only a bathtub", his mother discovered when she visited him.
"Johnny insisted on cooking a chicken dinner in my honor- he's ALWAYS been a good cook- and I'll never forget him cleaning the chicken in the tub".
A story, no doubt apocryphal, for Mercer himself denies it, has him sporting a monacle in those Village days.
Though merely clear glass, it was a distinctive trade mark for an aspiring actor who hoped to imprint himself upon the memories of producers.
One day in a bar, so the legend goes, someone put a beer stein with too much force on the monacle and broke it.
