Freddie Huk

You meet a lot of people on your way through this life. By the time you get to 55 like me you’ve met a ton of folks. Some of them are fringe dwellers and never really get a foothold in your story and others become fixtures in your tale. The trick is that you have to learn to meet everyone openly because you never know when someone special will walk in unannounced.
Age gives you that grace. But when you’re young it’s easy to miss their influence.
When I was 17 I met one of those unforgettable characters. I was working under age in the tavern of a dilapidated old hotel call The Embassy in St. Catharines, Ont. The owner liked me and gave me the job because he could see that I needed it. The tavern at The Embassy was a seaway bar and sailors from ships on the St. Lawrence Seaway came in to drink and relax. The place could be tough and hard but I could make people laugh and the clientele took to me right away.
I hadn’t been there long before I met Huk. His full name was Fred Huculak and he’d been around a long time.
He was fully inked with tattoos and carried a thousand stories. I lived in the room directly beneath his on the third floor. He liked me for some strange reason, found me easy to talk to and we became friends.
When I wasn’t working we’d cook together, share a few beers and Huk would tell me stories. He’d been to jail a few times, lived on the street in various cities, wandered the country, worked various times as a lumberjack, a welder, a camp cook and had spent many years on the boats on the Seaway.
He was tough, a coarse talker and he had the respect of a lot of rough people.
Freddie was the first real rounder I ever met.
He looked out for me. He made sure no one ever messed with me in the tavern and he watched my back whenever things got wild in there like they tended to do a lot of times. Having Huk behind you was definitely a good thing when the bar fell into mayhem and the fists would fly.
I’d been on the carnival and had seen a few good tilts by that time but nothing like a room full of drunken seamen could create.
He cared about me but Huk had issues of his own. He was a speed addict and prone to two week methamphetamine benders that eventually saw him crippled by wild paranoia and I would have to talk him down sometimes or make sure he ate or nurse him through the withdrawals when he went cold turkey.
It was a hard way to get to know a person but it brought us closer.
I was pretty much a lost kid back then. I’d left home after only finishing Grade 9 and confronted the street, welfare, unemployment and the hard life of the disenfranchised.
I was searching for meaning, for identity, for a place to hang my hat and a peg to hang my life upon.
It wasn’t an easy search. I was lonely and scared and prone to the typical craziness of youth.
Once after a wild party that ended badly, I sat with Huk and told him about it. We sat there having lunch and a drink and I tried to make him laugh about the episode.
He just sat silently for a long time. Then he said, ‘You got more in you. You’re bigger than this.’ He looked at me with clear, hard blue eyes and I nodded even though I was young and naïve and didn’t really understand what he meant. But his words had weight.
I left shortly after that in a $100 car to explore Canada. He walked out with me and stood in the parking lot and waved until I disappeared. No one ever waved goodbye to me before. I had to clench the wheel until the bruised feeling eased into something gray and manageable.
Almost 40 years later I think I understand.
Bards sometimes sit in crummy rooms scoffing a six pack and a hoagie, smoking roll-your-owns and drowning in old mariner tales. What makes this country tick for kids like I was then are guys like Huk, tough as hell and ‘givin’ ‘er’ the best they can and letting young guys know they got better in them because they learned somehow to see contrast through the gloom.
Pass it on the best you can because what you know is what you know.
You’re a richer man for seeing what you’ve seen and a port in the fog is still a port, regardless. Thanks Huk.