Arrested, fired from his job, and defeated; Frederic Leon has no choice but to relocate to Los Angeles to live with his lover William Huntington, who selfishly accepts a job abroad the day Frederic is set to arrive. Alone again, and suicidal, Frederic manages to scrape together a life for himself amidst the rubble. A year later, armed only with his journal, naive optimism and fifty-seven dollars, Frederic accepts a middle school teaching position back in the city that forsook him. His rebirth begins on the wheels of a Greyhound bus, as he returns to San Francisco, in a party-crashing, sex-filled journey where he is forced to face the aching duality of his troubled life. “My life felt contrived, some sort of lie that I agreed upon and lived out as if he was the puppeteer and I was the marionette puppet. Sometimes I can still feel the strings being pulled, and my lifeless, limbless existence moving on down the road. The WIZ is a bad mutha-fucka if you believe in all that lights, camera, and action mess. As if the character in this motion picture that gets dumped and left alone in a big city, selling himself in order to eat each day, turns out to be me. I mean sans prostitution and starvation, but I used to love him.” Narrated by Frederic, and at times by his journal — this poetic, yet sardonic 45,716-word novel tells the up and down adventures of Frederic, as he returns to San Francisco to start over, and finds out that you can’t always go home. A consummate lover, friend, naive child, and at times lost angel; Frederic makes no apologies, and rarely recognizes his own fault in the messes he creates. From weekend binges that spill into Monday, to the loves, and the lovers that linger — an array of colorful cast members and sordid adventures help answer the question: “when life hits from all angles — what happens, when you finally crash?” “The fact that I was a black man was clear. The fact that black men get arrested was clear. The fact that I was a teacher, but still a black man, was clear. I stood face to face with the stereotype of myself. It’s actually more like back to back, like in those westerns where people would draw their pistols and shoot to the death. We both have guns, the stereotype of myself, and my real self. We begin to take the five steps before we both must turn and fire, likely killing each other. When the count reaches five, we both turn to face each other and aim; but I scream loud breaking the plexi-glass barrier of remembering and this reality of being handcuffed to the hospital bed.”
