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Copyright 2023 James LaFond

A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

A Proto-Script for Conversion to Audio-Visual Media by Oliver Home Technologies

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Dust Cover

Can is the hero of Phentland, the high-speed zombie landscape of postmodern Murica. Murica is inhabited by the “Slows” and the “Highs.” The Slows are ever diminishing working Muricans who are preyed upon by the Highs and their police, and politicians and corporations, driving Slows into Phentland. Phentland is the inner demon-haunted wilderness of Murica, where unemployed and unpersoned Slows may go to find rampant solace on the inner margins of Murica in a state of chemical adaptation, as “Highs.”

The doomed denizens of Phentland combine meth with phentynal to increase focus and deaden pain, entering a higher time frame than the enthralled Slows, who name them tweakers or crackheads, mistaking the time preference acceleration of their altered state as an unfortunate side effect rather than an elevated and even “holy” state. The Highs tolerate tweakerkind or Fasts, because they absorb discarded Slows, whose assets the Highs aggregate. But, when the Slows get out of line, or when their homes are wanted by the Highs, the Fast hordes will be sent in to preserve The Few World Order of the Highs.

Enter Can, a traditional urban crackhead from Wilmington, Delaware who finds the key to unlocking the superpowers of humanity, in The Name of God, on behalf of the sheepish Slows, through back alley chemistry.

Can’s origin is shrouded in mystery, as well as the meaning of his name.

Bendy Carwash a prostitute from Wilmington, swears that Can was so named for the fact that he would say to any challenge, any need, “Can,” in reference to his ability to rise to the needful occasion, and in such brevity that the hearer ever believed that he Can. [0]

Joe Gleason, crypto-journalist of Reading Pennsylvania, claims that Can was so named for being a Jamaican, and that he believes Can to be the transmigrant soul of the Philadelphia martyred John Africa.

Russel Drinks, of Sandtown, Baltimore City, claims that Can was so named for the magic that he wrought cooking dope on the bottom of an up-ended trashcan, a metal can, in April, 2015 after all Baltimore pharmacies were looted of their Phentynal on the last Tuesday of that month.

Sleepy Phatz of Saint Louis, Missouri, asserts boldly, putting forth her status as Can’s common-law wife as proof, that Can confided in her that his name had haunted him since his youth. When his Jamaican adopted mother, found him in a Camden, New Jersey trash can and that this shame, known to neighbor children in Wilmington where his adopted mother took him, impelled him to “own that name” by claiming that he could do anything, that no dare was too dangerous or unfair.

Finally, Sansa Jones of Sacramento, California, makes the case that the man who saved her life with heroics propelled by an oldschool crack pipe, was so named for his use of an aluminum soda can for mobile smoke dosing. [1]

Written for Craig Oliver Myles who posited the idea of a black crackhead super hero.

Informed by Paul Bingham who discussed with the author the recent Four States plague of tweakers on meth and pharmaceutical opiates that propels them to sustained violence, even with broken arms and legs, citing 2022 as the advent of an actual high-speed zombie apocalypse.

Inspired by the author’s Christmas Eve view of four tweakers, cooking some kind of drug on a sterno burner on the roof of the car they were living out of in the basement parking garage of the Safeway at Powell and Chavez in Portland, Oregon.

Dedicated to the ordinary working folks of Portland, who have confided in the author by the dozen, that their city has “gone to hell” in a shopping cart. [2]

“This country is in a shambles. I am ashamed that a minor change in weather has brought this nation to its knees. Timely mass transit is fascist. Inclusive democracy means dying in your car in the snow.”

-Lynn Lockhart, texting to the author about his delayed train, 12/27/2022

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Notes

-0. Bendy denies that she is or was a sex worker and likewise dismisses charges that Can was her pimp.

-1. Thus, the real secret of Can’s name origin might be in the specific chemistry of cooking meth, phentynal, crack cocaine and diet tablets, in an aluminum homogenization chamber.

-2. The Fan Interalliance for Can Empathy, or FICE, recognizes as the only actual, real, functional superhero Can, sometimes known as Crackman Can, Tweakman Can and CanCan, as an interfaith saint, who, through chemical dosing has saved seven souls from tweakers and carries a torch against the Highs. That Can suffered accelerated aging due to his selfless devotion to saving Slows from Fasts, marks his life as the advent, a beacon of hope, against the hierarchy of the Highs.

Told in Seven Scenes from East to West in the American Fashion

-1. Mamma Maroon

-2. Bendy Carwash

-3. Joe Gleason

-4. Russel Drinks

-5. Sleepy Phatz

-6. Sansa Jones

-7. Corby Ringtone