The First Step: Hi' Steppin': The Isometrics of Isolation and Power of Depression

By Al Lucas

Paul Undes, protagonist, starts out in the lobby of the Tampa VA, looking for shelter on the day of 9/11 from unabated crack usage. Unable to deal with reality on a person-to-person basis, he reads from his journal to anyone who will listen. It is a crying out. From the VA he is transported to Safe P

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lime Press LLC
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954304512

Al Lucas

This is the original 1st person version called High Steppin' off da Crack, first submitted as a 3rd person account under the name of simply Hi' Steppin' years ago. This 1st person version is more in keeping with an autobiographical style while still using fictional names as characters and was created before the 3rd person version, but lost, only to be found later after the 3rd person publication. It opens with an emaciated man standing on the day of 9/11 in the VA lobby, awaiting hospitalization for crack usage. One bizarre incident after another occurs leaving his sanity no longer in question. Being a Vietnam-era vet, he is screened and then followed up by two psychiatrists of Oriental persuasion who treat him rather realistically, to his chagrin. He is discharged with a nursing plan to attend Avon Park, a renowned dual diagnosis center in Sebring, FL, but first must go to SafePlace, a transitional housing facility in Tampa to protect him from the dealers while he awaits an opening in Avon. First, however, Paul decides to go home and have one more bout with crack, to get the high he never had, using his car as leverage. It doesn't work out so well. He thus attends SafePlace without a car. It should be noted, he has read to one of the psychiatrists his ongoing novel and continues to read or have read to any and all its contents. One person, a roommate, at SafePlace is so moved, he blows his brains out. At Avon, he is assigned a class coordinator, Manfred Mundane, an ex-military pilot, who is unsympathetic about Paul's writing skills. Getting kicked out for bumming cigarettes, Paul comes home with new verve. He will in fact attend AA and does. He fights his way out of bankruptcy and foreclosure blindly with no help from family or friends and miraculously incurs twelve years of clean time. The book ends with a surprise, reserved for the reader. It should also be noted, the narrative weaves between Paul's acid days in Morocco and his current plight. His journal is in the past tense; the book's outcome, in the present with both coming to an end in Paul's bedroom where reality merges in a sexual farce.

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THE STEP SERIES

The First Step:

HI' STEPPIN'

The Isometrics of Isolation and Power of Depression

Al Lucas

The First Step:

HI' STEPPIN'

The Isometrics of Isolation and Power of Depression

by Al Lucas

This book is written to provide information and motivation to readers. Its purpose is not to render any type of psychological, legal, or professional advice of any kind. The content is the sole opinion and expression of the author, and not necessarily that of the publisher.

Copyright © 2021 by Al Lucas

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form by any means, including, but not limited to, recording, photocopying, or taking screenshots of parts of the book, without prior written permission from the author or the publisher. Brief quotations for noncommercial purposes, such as book reviews, permitted by Fair Use of the U.S. Copyright Law, are allowed without written permissions, as long as such quotations do not cause damage to the book’s commercial value. For permissions, write to the publisher, whose address is stated below.

First Published (2010)

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-954304-52-9 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-954304-53-6 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-954304-51-2 (Ebook)

Lime Press LLC

425 West Washington Street

Suffolk VA, 23434 Suite 4

https://www.lime-press.com/

Contents

The Disclaimer

Chapter 1

Checking In

Chapter 2

The Screening

Chapter 3

2b South

Chapter 4

Roll Call

Chapter 5

God Talk

Chapter 6

Confidant

Chapter 7

Dr. Ow

Chapter 8

Frank Ameche

Chapter 9

Home

Chapter 10

The Old Song Is Sung

Chapter 11

Rachel

Chapter 12

Get In Front Of The Bus

Chapter 13

Humming Along

Chapter 14

Bus Stop

Chapter 15

Safeplace

Chapter 16

Bluegills

Chapter 17

A Meal

Chapter 18

Upstairs

Chapter 19

One On One

Chapter 20

A Bill Wilson Meeting

Chapter 21

Fish Fry

Chapter 22

Avon Park

Chapter 23

Farewells

Chapter 24

The Committee

Chapter 25

Brows Raised

Author’s Disclosure

Final Say

The Disclaimer

A preface is designed to reveal the author's inspiration and intent and to serve as a tribute to those to whom he is indebted. A prologue is supposed to provide a little backdrop for the story. This is neither a preface nor a prologue. It is a disclaimer, a serious attempt to disassociate the author from the fiction herein. It also explains how this book came to be known to the outside world.

I am the professor who found this manuscript, the book you now have before you. I am the man who brought it to the public eye. Let me expand a bit and explore how the author's half-brother is connected to this piece. Here, then, is Cason Epps, half-brother to the author, who is, at this point, was abstaining, but changed his mind at my request. More of him shortly.

I am Cason the Case Epps, lawyer and literary layman for Al Lucas, to whom I am related. I am not half-witted, wholly demented, homosexual, or otherwise perverted. Nor am I as fucked up as my snide half-brother may indicate. I have in my possession a manuscript of his, pompously entitled The First Step in the Step Series, the Isometrics of Isolation and the Power of Depression, a lengthy title and an imitation of Old English, inspired by a loquacious tome of John Barth, prose-poet extraordinaire, who wrote The Sot-Weed Factor. The late Mr. Nabokov, author of Lolita, also influences my half-brother’s writing style.

My half-brother sent the raw manuscript to me, hoping I'd honor him with an introduction. I won’t yet here I am. Barth's book is about a guy on a tobacco farm during our country's founding who had a close friend of a beguiling nature who often appeared unexpectedly. My brother smokes tobacco, and he has a mentor he often relies on for consultation, much as Ebenezer Cooke, Barth's protagonist did. My brother's mentor is an old friend who prefers communion from afar because he holds the author in the same disdain as I do. It was this telepathic hypnosis that enabled my brother to craft this book. He claims that it's his, although intellectually it is not.

It was Barth's disregard for literature, his put-down of the classics, that so endeared him to my brother. My brother presumes an air of idealism, as did Ebenezer Cooke. The struggle of his own protagonist, Paul Undres, is nearly as comical and circular as Cooke's.

Mr. Nabokov, on the other hand, also had an air of presumption my brother admires. In the preface of his book Lolita, Nabokov pretends that the story is a swear-to-God real memoir of Humbert Humbert, pedophile, known affectionately as H. H., progenitor of a torrid pedophilia. It's a huge farce and plays with the average American mind. Al Lucas would like to create a similar social catastrophe and alienate every free market proponent on the planet. He thinks the right wing will have his pension and his balls when or if his book ever hits the stands, so he wants to distance himself.

His looking up to John Barth and Vladimir Nabokov speaks of his childlike mind and is not a statement of intelligence. It is obsequious adoration.

Al wanted me to honor him by writing an introduction and sharing laudable details about him. I'll not accommodate him. The most striking thing about my brother is his immaturity. He just doesn't get it. Like Lolita's lover, he has trouble with kids. Children undermine his fertile mind. They're simply too inquisitive for comfort. But it's not just kids. Females, males, adults, primates, and animals of all descriptions create discomfort of guilt-like proportion because at one time or another each has been violated in its own turn.

I hate people as he does, but that shouldn't affect this introduction, which it seems I'm writing anyway. This is not about me; it's about a proper allocation for this book. The problem is, What do I do with the manuscript?

I, the fatly robed Joseph of the family, the appointed favorite because of my largesse, which contrasts sharply to my brother's penurious ways, must resolve this matter. My mother, a target, his real father, another target my father, who is his stepfather, also a target—all are denigrated to hell by this scurrilous piece. I beseech you. What do I do? Preserve his First Amendment right? I am a civil rights lawyer, but free speech has its limits. Furthermore, I'm not getting a commission.

I will salvage my reputation and rid myself and the world of this incriminating filth by taking it down to the drug holes and halfway houses my brother used to frequent. I will leave it on top of a decrepit, moldy mailbox. Some freak can pick it up and do with it what he will.

A crackhead might find it, shred it, put it in his pipe, and smoke it, calling it The Glimmer of Hope.

Yes, The Glimmer of Hope. Dopers, find identification in the loosely organized, poorly constructed thesis. May God shed a tear for you and my misbegotten brother. May his reputation remain tarnished forever in the heat and tempestuousness of his own authorship. Consider this an amendment to your constitution. Find enjoyment in its perusal and guffaw ad infinitum. Smoke your crack, drink your liquor, have endless epiphanies. Induce a comatose state, become a seer of your own eye. Hell is but a page away.

So Case has had his say. Not bad for someone who maintained he would not offer any contribution. I have to pat myself on the back for inducing him to lay it out. Now, a bit about me. I am the homosexual professor who found this priceless manuscript and wishes to say, before I include the author's retort, that true enough I discovered this manuscript atop a moldy, rain-soaked mailbox in a questionable part of the city. Don't ask me what I was doing there. Suffice it to say, I like to suck dick.

Apart from my own idiosyncrasies, this is a piece de resistance, a tour de force. Never before have I seen such an unmasking. Hopefully I can undress the real Undres, who is named as the main character. By character, I mean caricature, for Paul Undres is a distortion of Al Lucas. I know Al is a loving guy, my kind of man, and I will have him.

I'm going to publish this work on the internet. The antihero and author together will find their appellations brazen in lights among Hollywood's finest. Al will be on Oprah and make a scene.

Come out now, dear Al—service me with your compliance. Walk uninhibitedly around the gay and snorting crowd. I have found you on Facebook, then your website and I want you, just like the right-wing haters who will number legion soon enough concerning your blasphemies.

And now as coerced from the author:

So the professor found me and cuckolded me. My wife is this book; my love affair is this book. The professor now gets the royalties, and I am still the contaminated seed sprung from germs, germs of death and disease and that of an ill-conceived marriage. I am bacterioli spermatoidus, affectionate terms of the imagination, the spitting image of my father, all lit up, and my mother, all but lost. But I am the real thing. My central character is not, nor is his story. You see, this is a tale of two directions—his script describing himself and the script he follows while doing so. We are all incomplete sentences Undres likes to maintain.

The journey is far from over. Since when has anything ended with a period? It's always a question of unfinished business.

The main man, Undres, is a character of fun and folly with a modest touch of intelligence. Is his story an accurate barometer of how my life went? There are embellishments. Paul prevaricates now and then. The entire effort is playful indulgence of a condition almost as bad as death. Stupidity. I look back and in looking back have seen. The agony has been first-rate. Only the acquisition of knowledge has eased the suffering.

So, as you might have determined, I mailed the only copy of The First Step to Cason. It was with the intent that he should humor me by writing a disclaimer. He blasphemed me, as you saw, and, upon the urging of the professor, said unsavory things. He then—and get this— discarded the entire work, again as you well know.

The professor has found it and has serendipitously located my website. My site, Barabbas's Button, in which I stoically detail details concerning the fate of the nation and the insufferable nature of the human condition, has attracted him. I spoke of my book in guarded references. The professor read between the lines, put two and two together. He surmised it was I. He blackmailed me, saying he was going to e-publish The First Step no matter what. He offered me an opportunity to write a disclaimer after inducing my half-brother to do so. How did he locate my half-brother? They're neighbors. The professor followed him down to the moldy mailbox, hoping to cop a little action. Can you imagine my indignation!

The book is now a product of the professor's doing, not mine! I'm out in the cold! He'll get the acclamation. I envision myself unknown. However, fate will turn, Oprah will find it and recommend it, and I will be in the limelight eventually. The razzle-dazzle I find so abhorrent, so refracting, so full of paparazzi and inquisitive cameras awaits me.

So take a view. To all humanity, I say let's go to the lobby and hang.

Chapter 1

Checking In

Paul Admits It.

It doesn’t get any better, he mutters madly. His mind is more than dizzy, and his breathing is heavy as he wheezes. He is spending Tuesday in the emergency room of the Tampa VA, a fine, upstanding hospital catering to uninsured vets, where medical treatment is top-notch and free. This he can dig. He suffers as he has suffered everywhere—from Mexico to Casablanca, and from New England to the Deep South—with drugs. Drugs he has inhaled and swallowed with determination. The real scourge is that it hasn’t killed him.

Paul experiences a peculiar déjà vu. He senses he is missing something. To add to the discomfort, there’s not a bone in his body that he likes; there’s not a piece of flesh not riddled with bad association. Between his mind and his body, there’s nothing but a piss hole in the road he must step over.

Fuk vu, he murmurs. The original expression was fucked up but later modified to read fuk vu. This is Paul’s favorite expression. There’s a certain melody to the phrase. It is unique, definitely his. Never has he heard it used. It warrants further exploration. The stylistic modification of vulgarity. Yes, that’s it—making the unacceptable acceptable. The snappy phrase has remained with him through years of unabated alcoholism and dire straits. He has carefully re-crafted it time and time again. A lopsided grin begins to form on his lips. His mind wanders again. He wishes he could retain what is going down around him. He is, after all, Paul. - a literary man, who can strangle truth from fiction- or so he would like to believe. But the relevant fact of the hour remains- he must come to grips with it—namely, where he is now in the lobby.

His latest addiction is crack cocaine, the monstrous phenomenon of the eighties, in which the only compensatory reality is the impervious high. His present bottom is the impervious high. His present bottom is the lobby. He is at ground zero. The finest treatment for the dollar is to be found at James Haley, and this is where he is making his stand. It is full of amputees and wheelchair retirees from the Big War. He notes the guy over in the corner. He’s half-dead. The man looks at Paul expectantly. And the guy next to him, he gazes with red-eyed opacity. Baby boomers have trashed the place. The heroin users, the potheads, the detritus of lower-middle-class whites, and ghetto blacks from the ranks of the street, in a war to mock all wars. Here, the hopelessly undisciplined and out of shape lost to smaller, more determined Orientals. You find mostly sullen, angry lads schlepping here. You find the older guys too. They are painful reminders of real stamina. They are the true men of Haley’s VA. They are mad at the quality of care. They fought, came back, maintained, and got maimed. Paul, on the other hand, entered, got lost, got discharged, and secured a pension on a nerve condition. He lives on government money. His tour was short-lived, very short-lived.

Paul wanted to be all that he could be. Yet here he stands at fifty-five, no less a disabled vet than he was thirty years ago. It occurs to him that his life is as bankrupt as the fuk vu phrase he promulgates. He twitches, absorbing the embarrassment shooting at him like another enema.

Speaking of phrases: people, places, and things are phrases, which come in handy and are a