Remembering Huff, Revisiting the Sixties

Dear Editor:

It was with mixed emotions of nostalgia and surprise that I learned recently of the death of Albert Huffstickler, or "Huff" to his friends. The nostalgia arises from the memory of spending many an afternoon at Les Amis, drinking cup after cup of very bad coffee and getting impossibly wired while drawing on napkins and watching the world go by. The surprise comes from remembering all the cigarettes he smoked 40 years ago and thanking the gods that Huff was able to enjoy as long a life as he did.

I once had a very prophetic palm- and tarot card reading from his daughter, whose name unfortunately escapes me. She was right then and probably still is. His son, also nameless in my shamefully inadequate current recollection, was an essentially gentle soul who'd encountered too much acid by '71 to be accountable for his behavior in our only interaction. Aside from occasional glimpses of him standing on street corners near the Drag waiting for buses that never came, our paths crossed significantly one winter evening in the kitchen of the house I shared with Stella Scherr near Hyde Park.

We'd gone out somewhere, maybe to Les Amis for coffee and pie or off to a Lost Austin Band gig, and when we came back, we found Huff's son in the kitchen. He'd walked out of the state hospital and broken in through the flimsy back door in search of something to eat: leftover chili, if I remember, cold leftover chili from the fridge. He'd gobbled the lot, then been sick in rather spectacular fashion. He'd also thoughtfully but imperfectly tried to clean it all up, leaving a ragged layer of "bean paste" all over the floor, refrigerator, countertops, and part of the wall. I remember Stella being less than pleased. One of us called Huff and got him to retrieve the unfortunate lad, and the story of the kitchen break-in became part of John Clay's impromptu Lost Austin Band monologues for a time. (I have this on tape somewhere and may get around to putting it on the Internet).

I remember Huff's loving acceptance of the situation at the time and how he dealt with my furious girlfriend. I left Austin soon after that and never saw Huff again, but when my brother Bob told me he had gone, I felt pleased that someone else had picked up the thread and passed it back to me.

These days I'm hard at work on a book that covers the Austin years just preceding the above-described incident, a back-to-the-land saga called "Yellowhammer Farm" (for adults only!) that follows me from Austin to exile as I leave for Arkansas in a Volkswagen bus with a tent, an easy chair, two guitars, 50 pounds of brown rice, and a book written by a yogi entitled "How to Know God." (Parts I & II are available now via PDF e-book subscription from <www.jhfarr.com>.) If anyone in town who lived it all with me is still there and downloads a copy, I hope love and tolerance will prevail, whoo boy.

Huff isn't in the book, but he was certainly there at the time. So were lots of other people who deserve mentioning, and I'm not done yet.