“Do you like psilocybin mushrooms,” the wizened man asked me.
“Hey there,” I replied.
“You look like you like mushrooms. I’m a big fan myself. I’ll take ‘em, go to the blues club over on [address forgotten]. You look straight outta the sixties, my man.”
He fistbumped me.
“I’m a musician. Mason Casey. That’s Casey from the Irish: C-A-S-E-Y. Internationally famous. Got four albums out. Moved back here from L.A. two years ago. Before that I was touring around Europe.”
During this whole conversation, I stayed present and calmly open. Interested, but not pushing. Gently watching, like I would observe a curious and skittish bird.
He whipped a harmonica out of his pocket and began to play.
And I’ll be damned if this guy isn’t the best blues harmonica player I’ve ever heard. The lines in his cheeks suddenly made sense, showing the decades of contorting it this way and that, flicking and rolling his tongue, making more lip movements than I’ve ever made.
“You ever on YouTube?”
“Yes,” I say, pleasantly aware this is my first sentence since “Hey there”.
“Look me up. And you know the West Village?”
“Sure.”
“I play down in the West Village on Tuesday nights.”
Then Mason Casey, blues musician extraordinaire, fist-bumped me and strolled back into the tundra-like grid of New York City.
Julian Wise 