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HMB at HONK!fest West!

HMB at the MOMA's one millionth visitor to free fridays event!

When the war finally ended (surely you remember those times) there were 20 of us left at the orphanage. Or maybe 30. It's hard to remember exactly. Anyway, the adults who survived had all fled and there was nothing left to do but work it out for ourselves. The obvious thing was to fix up the truck and head out, so that's what we did. None of us had any real skills to speak of - we all knew just how much starch the superintendent (called "the warden" more often) had wanted in his laundry, but beyond that we were pretty amateur at everything. The truck broke down a lot (it still does), the food often came up short, and sometimes the rides were long and tedious, but the one thing we all knew for certain was that the only real sin is to stop moving. So we moved, and by now we've been moving for eight years or more (not that anyone's counting).

We got by on scavenging and petty larceny for those first few months, though no one seemed to think anything of it. Living was wholly day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, rootless. Not for too long, though. After a few months of aimless wandering, we pulled up alongside a river. It wasn't on any of the maps we had found (honestly, apart from a few pastis-logged patches and some crusted-on bits of human cud, we're still not sure what's on those maps, though they do look nice), but it finally seemed like the right place. We followed the river for a few more days as though it was an old friend who knew the area, and sometimes we stopped to fish or pick berries and mushrooms nearby. Life was almost starting to seem routine when we blew a tire one day near a steep, overgrown embankment. After a lot of pissing, hooting, and gnashing of teeth (there was no spare), we moved on to the reality of our situation. After scoping out the area, we walked toward the only building in sight: a dilapidated hotel on the other side of a small hill with the words ''Miss Floyd's Bar and Grill - All You Can Eat Mondays and Thursdays'' on a sandwich board next to the front door. There was nobody inside; it looked like they took off in a hurry. A few shots were left out waiting for some dry throats. After a few hours of looking around, we found a stash of instruments that, looking back, must've belonged to the house marching band. We didn't really know what to do with them at first - they seemed to work better as objects of our rude jokes than anything that might've sounded like music. It wasn't a conscious thing yet, but their shapes and their potential gradually began to root in our collective imagination and, almost as an afterthought, we loaded them all into the truck before we shipped out.

Sometimes it occurs to us that we should look for that hotel again, but it's been a long time now, and even if it still exists, it's not likely that we'd ever be able to find it.