There is a man in the Gumby suit. He lives in Van Nuys. : ‘Dumby? Dumby? What is this Dumby thing?’

Gumby sat across from me in a Burbank coffee shop, eating a chef salad.

“I eat a lot of greens,” he said. “They’re good for my complexion.”

In the awkward process of forking food past his perpetual smile, he occasionally missed. “You’ve got a piece of cheese on your lip, Gumby,” I said.

He batted it off with a verdant, fingerless hand.

It isn’t easy being green.

Gumby is almost as famous as Donald Duck, and weirder.

The creation of Topanga Canyon resident Art Clokey, Gumby is the angular boy-creature who first cavorted with his pony pal Pokey through a popular TV cartoon series of the 1950s and ‘60s. I hesitate to say popular because I was there, logging my first million hours in front of the set, and Gumby wasn’t a hit with my third-grade crowd.

We all thought he was a wimp--”creep” was the term in vogue--and much preferred Rocky and Bullwinkle. They weren’t real either, but at least they weren’t made of clay, and their jokes were wry, although the word we actually used was “neat,” and they both looked like they were perfectly capable of lying to their little brothers.

Gumby was so nice you could puke.

Indeed, Gumby looked like his idea of a hot time was sweet-talking his teacher weak-kneed. He looked, in other words, as if he couldn’t be trusted, unlike, say, Magilla Gorilla, who obviously wouldn’t blow you in if you copied his homework. But nobody asked us, and about five years ago Gumby suddenly got hot. He was rediscovered, like Gary U.S. Bonds, and trend-making stores like Heaven and aahs! began selling Gumby and Pokey T-shirts.

That seems odd to me, but not nearly as odd as sitting in a Burbank coffee shop interviewing Gumby. The Big Green Guy began belting out “I was born in a slab of clay, born in a slab of clay” to the delight of teen-agers in a nearby booth who asked him to autograph their arms. Gumby gave his standard answer to the frequent inquiries about Pokey’s whereabouts: “He’s home with a hoarse throat.”

I never got to do stories like this before I moved to L. A.

You probably think Gumby is just another hungry actor in a green costume, someone who’d dress up as a singing won ton, if necessary, to pay the rent until his Big Break came.

Wrong.

There is a man in the Gumby suit, a 27-year-old actor named Mike--he won’t tell me his real last name, so why report it?--who lives in Van Nuys. But being Gumby is what Mike does full-time. This is it, Mike’s Big One. Seven years ago he made himself a Gumby suit, and, philosophically at least, he hasn’t taken it off since. “This isn’t a suit. It’s a way of life,” he said. Mike may be the only actor in the entire world who conceals both his surname and his face.

For seven years Gumby has been Mike’s sole means of support. B. G. (Before Gumby), he was a street performer who once sat cross-legged for six months on a sidewalk in Westwood imitating a eucalyptus tree. After that he was a pay TV. Then he put dresses on parking meters. One day, trying to think of something outrageous to do, he came up with you know what.

It’s been Gumby ever since. As a result, he said, he has “reverence” for the cartoon character much like that the Plains Indians had for the buffalo. “It brings me everything I have in life,” he said. I am tempted to remind Mike that the bison disappeared, leaving the Plains Indians up Sand Creek, but I resist. I bet his mother has already brought that up.

Mike is the only individual licensed by Clokey to impersonate Gumby. Mike has a contract, which forbids him to curse in costume or perform in movies with titles like “Green and Greedy” or “Gumby Does Tujunga.” Mike puts greens on his table by donning a now somewhat shopworn Spandex suit padded with foam and delivering singing Gumby-grams to nonplussed people with puckish friends. The charge to Rent-a-Gumby is $50 and up. Clokey has never asked him for a licensing fee.

Mike said that neither he nor his girlfriend is materialistic, so it doesn’t matter that business isn’t exactly booming. But his immigrant father worries, and so do his relatives. “Dumby? Dumby? What is this Dumby thing?” they ask when they corner him at family gatherings and want to know what a nice, talented, good-looking boy like Mike is doing dressed in an outfit like this.

Mike’s answer is that he is happy sharing Gumby’s message of innocence, playfulness, nonviolence and love. Clokey was a friend of Alan Watts, the late writer on Eastern thought, and Gumby and Pokey were the only TV pals that ever rendezvoused at the Zen Cafe. For Mike, Gumby is karma, not commerce.

Indeed, Mike would like to start a charitable organization called the Friends of Gumby. Imagine a cross between Howdy Doody and the Little Sisters of the Poor. It would minister to the needs of those who can’t afford to rent a Gumby of their own. “If people have family problems or they’re depressed or lonely and they need Gumby, he’d be there,” Mike explained.

This is the sort of talk that scares Mike’s relatives. But, if he sometimes sounds like the last flower child, he has a practical side as well. He may be nonviolent, he may have chosen a line of work that makes grandmothers mutter, “You shouldn’t know from it,” but he isn’t so Gumby-fied that his brains have fallen out.

“What I’m looking for is a manager,” he said. “I’m willing to pay 25% of everything I make to someone like the man who took the San Diego Chicken and turned him into the legend he is today.”

Mike left Burbank as he entered it--big, green and in character. “Have a Gumby day,” he said, and waved goodby with the Gumby benediction: “Be flexible!”