Mose Allison, My Brain

HYMO

Hymo was a hipster of the Haight-Ashbury variety. A Grateful Dead high priest from the Haight at its dismal height. If Allen Ginsburg had met him he would have used these words from Howl to describe him: “angelheaded hipster burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” His blue eyes sparkled with a glimpse of the infinite sky they reflected, smiling as the jokes formed in his mind. “Let me help you laugh” they seemed to say from behind a schnozz that would make Jimmy Durante green with envy.

On a volleyball Sunday afternoon in Himmel Park (we used to call it Hymo’s Park) we needed another player to even up the sides. “Hey,” Hymo yelled to a passing stranger, “Do you wanna play?”

“No,” replied the stranger, somehow managing to resist Hymo’s beatific charm.

“I’ll give you a quarter.” He persisted in a most unmenacing fashion. Belly laughs ensued.

One night at a party wanting to direct my attention to a particularly pretty woman, he whispered, “Didja check out the action in the corner?” as I stood next to him at the line for the keg.

Quietly lounging in hot springs twilight, with the crickets chirping their rhymes in the emptiness of the Gila Wilderness, I chilled in hot water until Hymo returned from our campsite carrying a six-pack and wearing only a smile. He was the first to pull the tab on his beer, sighing when he heard the hiss of CO2 rushing from the can. “Ah,” he said, “the second greatest sound in the world.”

“What’s the greatest?” I asked, playing the straight man for a Dead Head.

“The sound of Jerry Garcia’s guitar.” He smiled.

I first got to know Hymo during the apple harvest of ’74 in Washington State. We shared the women and we shared the wine, like Jack Straw from Wichita. We met through Bonnie, whom. I had met hitchhiking up the West Coast a few weeks earlier. They were members of a “family” of Dead Heads that were emigrating from the deteriorating Haight-Ashbury. In fact, Bonnie was headed back to Cave Junction, Oregon, where she was sharing a cabin with Damon, from a Grateful Dead concert at the Oakland Coliseum. I was picked up by the same driver who had picked her up somewhere south of Crescent City.

I was a stray, a pilgrim with Woody Guthrie dreams of finding glory in this land of broken promises. Sal Paradise revisited, or so I dreamed as I wandered small and alone in the deep narcosis of the American Dream. A fool on an errand of self-discovery and awakening within the grander dream, I followed the sun; North in the Spring, and South in Fall. At the time I was headed for the apple orchards of the Wenatchee Valley to pick apples for some travelling money. I was so broke that I still had the dime that I’d left San Francisco with three days earlier– even in those days you couldn’t buy anything with one thin dime.

This is a work in progress, I'll be adding thoughts as they come to me.