Arrested at his job, humiliated, and alone, high school teacher Frederic Leon escapes to Los Angeles to live with his lover William Huntington, who Frederic learns upon his arrival, has spontaneously accepted a job abroad. Alone again, Frederic scrapes together a life from the rubble.

A year later, armed only with stubborn hope, fifty-seven dollars and his journal, Frederic ventures back to where he lost it all. His journey, beginning on a Greyhound bus, is a reckless and debaucherous romp back to San Francisco — and, ultimately, to William — with Frederic forced to face all of his demons along the way.

“My life felt contrived, some sort of lie that I agreed upon and lived out as if he (William) 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.”

The 46,133-word novella Frederic Leon, is a fast dash into the life of Frederic: educator, friend, poet, dreamer, lover, and unapologetic bad-boy. Narrated by Frederic, and at times by his journal, this lively and poetic, yet sardonically written story answers the question, what happens, when we 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 and still, since I was a black man, I could be arrested in school was clear. I was face to face with the stereotype of myself. It’s actually more like back to back, like in those westerns when 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, eventually killing each other.”