High Steppin off da Crack, the Original: The Isometrics of Isolation and Power of Depression

By Al Lucas

The story roughly correlates mine. I have nineteen years of recovery, total sobriety, total clean time, but more, I have an energetic mind that enjoys playing with words and making fun of what is truly laughable. Yet I'm reasonably unhappy for no book can alter the truth no matter what the spin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lime Press LLC
• Release date: Sep 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955255004

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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High Steppin’ off da Crack,

The Original,

The Isometrics of Isolation

And Power of Depression

High Steppin’ off da Crack,

The Original,

The Isometrics of Isolation

And Power of Depression

Al Lucas

High Steppin’ off da Crack, The Original,

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 (2005)

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-955255-00-4 (E-book)

ISBN: 978-1-955255-01-1 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-955255-46-2 (Hardback)

Lime Press LLC

425 West Washington Street

Suffolk VA, 23434 Suite 4

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

Also available at: https://lucaslore.com:

The Step Series

The Bon Mot Series

and more. Visit: http://lucaslore.com/ to shop and order your next adventure!

Al

Table of Contents

Prologue, Part 1: Author’s Brother

Prologue, Part 2: The Finder of Manuscript

Prologue, Part 3: Author’s Rebuttal

Chapter 1: Checking in

Chapter 2: The Briefing

Chapter 3: Roll Call

Chapter 4: The Bitter Pill

Chapter 5: This will be the Last

Chapter 6: Consultation

Chapter 7: In Back of the Bus

Chapter 8: Blown Away, Part 1

Chapter 9: Blown Away, Part II

Chapter 10: Blown Away, Part III

Chapter 11: Avon Park

Chapter 12: The Committee

Chapter 13: Brows Raised

Author’s Note

Prologue, Part 1: Author’s Brother

•

I am Cason Epps, The Case, Al’s half brother, who is neither half-witted, wholly demented, homosexual, nor perverted. Nor am I otherwise fucked up as my snide brother may indicate. I have in my possession a manuscript of his pompously entitled, High Steppin’ off da Crack, the Isometrics of Isolation and the Power of Depression, an offshoot of a loquacious tome by John Barth, prose-poet extraordinaire, who wrote The Sotweed Factor. Al also imitated the theme in Vladimir Nabokov’s book, Lolita. The fact he fell in love with John, Vladimir, Freud, Marshall McLuhan and sundry other visionaries lends speaking toward his own adolescence and is not a statement of intelligence.

Personally, I hate people, but this book is not about me. I’m a lawyer. My problem, legally, morally, and practically is what to do with this manuscript.

He claims to have written the original on the shores or banks of Eastern Morocco, a haven for druggies, that tips the African continent and is on the same parallel as his native Tampa. There the Atlantic’s cold waters rush ruthlessly out to sea circling northward into the ebb of the calm, clear waters of the Mediterranean. Temperate cirrus skies beckon a climate of warm welfare for the traveler, or ‘tourismos’ as they’re called. Living is cheap. I say he never got beyond the hash houses and gay baths of Amsterdam, however.

But who am I to say anything? I am a lawyer, skeptic of the worst proportions myself. But the defense of my family, I must speak out. I don’t harp on all the miscues of my life and attempt to drag my family, God, and myself into the public domain. I am not that vain, pompous, or ignorant. Let me repeat myself. I am not that vain, pompous, or ignorant. I am assured, confident, and unregretful - to a point. But as to this script, I got hold of it in a matter of pure intrusion. It popped up in my mail one day. The sender: Barabbas, the Beggar, my brother Al’s alias; the contents: his personal exposé.

Al’s big handle in college was Barabbas. Al had turned his back on God so vehemently, he personally identified with the poor beggar/thief of Biblical lore. But Al never stole. That was to his credit. He robbed only himself. In carnal fact, he robbed himself. He has little to show for his seed. He never married, probably never will, and has blood blisters on the end of himself, is token to his merrymaking. As far as artistry goes, he is the beat artist of our time. Does it bother him? Of course it does. But at this stage, his attitude is total indifference, if not arrogance.

Barabbas, Paul Undres, whoever my brother calls himself, claims the secret to his original writings lay in the village of Diabet, a small tribal community south of Essaouira, a small town, 80 kilometers further south of the metropolis, Casablanca, the New York of the African hemisphere - in Morocco. He claims further to have divined the effort in three days of tempestuously pitched fever in the year of ‘70, still in the heat of the Vietnam conflict and two years after his college graduation. That would make him twenty-three at the time.

Map of Morocco from CIA World Factbook

Let me recount how he got there: he broke up with a whore in Tampa, wrecked his beautiful Hudson in a pot-crazed trip across a rain-soaked bridge, borrowed five hundred from my old man to augment his severance pay from GTE, wired a fellow in Amsterdam he hardly knew, and with knapsack in hand took a plane from Miami to Luxembourg. And so the story of derangement began.

Al was one for conniptions. The drama of learning was his only lacking attribute. He was fascinated by THOUGHT. He tried to capture it down to its wispy essence. He thought THOUGHT was essentially a symbol limited by shape and form, its content, the meaning. He felt if man could eliminate the form, he could liberate himself from shape and configuration. He called this de-atomizing. Al would usually break out in huge guffaws at this point. You might identify that notion as a peculiarity of Mid-Eastern thought, but don’t worry about that, Paul is uniquely American. He ranks, however, right along side the suicide bombers in the lands of bizarre bazaars.

Freud had a weird hold on him. Paul thought it was neat that subjectivity could be captured by such a grand scheme. He felt it removed a lot of Christian superstitions. He would spend hours wondering if this or that was a result of his id, or his ego, or God forbid, his libido. He got so mired in that contemplation that the consequences of immobility dissipated the merits of action in the first place. The early bird gets the worm, I used to tell him. He replied, I don’t like worms. He dug many holes for himself.

He also dearly loved Marshall McLuhan. He felt, like the good Marshal, that the bombardment of sensibility by multimedia events meant a substantive perceptive change in the viewer. The printing press, the radio, the television, the satellite, and now the internet, wireless communication in general radically changed the mind of man subliminally he was told. It is a rather commonly accepted thought. But Al saw the world as a global head-trip, and in telepathic moments of world crisis, dominated by the ONE IDEA. That idea glossed from his work is that if everyone being on the same wavelength at the same time could voluntarily decide to blow themselves up, thus break the form/shape hold on the Universal Mind. Hey, why not? De-atomization by popular consent - escape from the bondage of self through the meltdown of the metaphor would be a final blow to God, Himself. We, as a collective society, would show that Bastard that man could generate their own path. E=mc squared.

To expound: he thought existence was all THOUGHT. He tried to explain all things in the vein of pure logic. He wanted the unified field theory for literature, originally, Cousin Cracker created in Diabet, now pasteurized at home to High Steppin’ on da Crack.

Existentialists like TS Eliot, a coffee-spoon at a time and the beat poet, Ginsberg, appealed to his contradiction of life. His loathing of work, money, and women approached the same. If meaning transcends shape as Paul was bent, his book is a smear. No one will be able to understand it. It’ll go right by you.

So what am I to do with it? I ask you. I, the fatly-robed Joseph of the family, the appointed favorite due to my largesse and his simultaneous abrogation of family, mother, in particular, a target in his writing, real father yet another target, my father, his stepfather, also denigrated to hell in this whole messy affair, beseech you. What do I do? Preserve his first amendment right? I think not.

I can salvage my respect as a lawyer and social abiding citizen and distance myself from Al entirely by ridding myself of this incriminating garbage. I’ll take it down to the drug holes and halfway houses my brother used to frequent and leave it on top of a rain soaked mailbox. That way some ex-hippie, drug freak, whore, or tramp can pick it up and do with it what they will. Maybe a crackhead will put it in his pipe and smoke it calling it the Glimmer of Hope.

I go now, satisfied with my decision. This is ass-wiping material - pure toilet paper. Sots will find identification in the loosely organized, poorly constructed parts therein. Further, God will shed a tear on my misbegotten brother whose reputation remains burnished forever in the heat and tempestuousness of his authorship.

Let me make one more point. I am Al’s half brother in a real sense. The only thing real he knows. The main character, Paul Undres, is his altered ego. Very much altered. Both he and his writing are schizophrenic by virtue of drugs he consumed. Take this meandering manuscript and wander off with him. Your soul will fry like the burnt skin on his forehead, which he inflamed on an acid trip. He thought he was going to disappear. Unfortunately, he reappeared.

If, in fact, one does find enjoyment in its perusal, my brother in the self-made hell of your innocence can guffaw with you ad infinitum. Smoke crack. Drink yourself into a stupor. Have endless epiphanies and orgasms. Chemically induce your brain. Become clairvoyant. Hell is calling, a page or two away. Peace, homophobes.

Prologue, Part 2: The Finder of Manuscript

•

I’m the professor who found this priceless manuscript. I discovered it atop a decrepit, moldy, rain soaked mailbox in a questionable part of the city. Don’t ask me what I was doing here. 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 have I seen such an unmasking.

I’m going to do my best to publish the work. The Internet is the perfect outlet. May his character, Paul Undres, and his creator, Al Lucas, find their appellations brazen in lights among Hollywood’s finest. Come out, Al, receive your due accolades and walk uninhibitedly among the proud and successful.

Kudos kid.

Prologue, Part 3: Author’s Rebuttal

•

I am the contaminated seed. I am sprung from germs, germs of an ill-conceived marriage. I am bacterioli spermatoidus. I am the spitting image of my father, all lit up.

My half-brother fucks with me, but half is better than whole, is it not? Do we both sound alike? We think we know it all and we do. It’s a conspiracy between us. I tell you this: I surreptitiously mailed him my only copy of the High Steppin’. A professor at my old college found it and located me on the Internet. I had a web site, Barabbas’s Butt. I wanted Case to write the disclaimer, which he fell for like a young admirer of an older brother who stands taller than life. The professor, meanwhile, has published it, of which you have before you now.

Cason loves me more than he hates me. If I don’t write another word Cason will recant all he’s said and he’ll be on the bandwagon supporting me no matter how cryptic my ways. But I’ll stick to the less painful. This story is a complete fabrication.

High Steppin’, on the other hand, is an attempt at personal acquittal if the truth be known.

My parents, all four… You see, both of them remarried and had the nerve to ask my guidance at age 9, if you can believe it, whether I actually ‘liked’ my new ‘Mom’ and my new ‘Dad.’ Hey, I wasn’t big on the originals. My siblings, be they half, step, or real were also troubling.

When I showed up in my jalabiya at the doorstep of all four, seeking comfort at the inconvenience of their middle-aged lives, they were horrified. They thought they had been done with me. They thought I had gone my ‘merry’ way. They thought Christ, here we go.

And so I went. I enlisted. It was, however, too late for honorable duty. I had too many hang-ups. One was killing. I became the first casualty in modern medical history. By ‘first’ I mean ‘foremost.’ I was consigned to one treatment facility after another - then and now. And that is the story.

So where’s the good? I like you druggies out there. I want to help you.

My original work was absconded with. The secret of a Moroccan village was forever vanquished. That very same village that harbored me in my peak time of discomfort and illusion, took back its treasure. This version is the new deal. It soothes the grouchiest of ill-tempered manics. They will stomach it. Their children need what I have, an enduring voice that reaffirms us baby boomers around the world.

Am I an iconoclast? I love people. Am I self-serving? Why of course. Am I the uncaring brother of the ‘community’ as civic books have it? Yes. but I do not want people to feel my pain. Do I have a valid voice? I’m hoarse from listening to myself.

Dopeheads decide: do I want quick publication without the ends and outs of query letters and SASE envelopes in this day of illiteracy? Will I kowtow to the snobby interests of publishers? The professor has done me a favor and saved me from radio, TV, and Barnes and Noble. like the dick sucking fool he is.

Cason can have the royalties. I owe him that. He edited the damn thing. He has spent precious time on me more than befits