"The drink helped me stay awake, slow down the thoughts to only double and not ten-speed. Those nights without sleeping, processing everything, feeling it scream at times, inside. The weak cunt versus the sociopath. Something raising up through the battle... Someone.... And some nights I'd sit up because I knew the sleep would never come. I'd sit and watch outside... this big tree, black outlined against the sky, swaying slightly in the wind. Then framed by the red and grey and purple of a sunrise. And I'd trace the branches to the end, trace every one, a thousand tiny ends, budding up. " [Steve Hussy, Steps]
Steps' narrator has no name... but he does have plenty of problems. A teaching career full of empty-headed liberals, a boarding-house full of semi-retarded grotesques, a girlfriend who finds everything a joke... and a brain that won't let any of it rest. But maybe, maybe, there's one final lesson for a teacher to learn.
Steps is a 44 page full-colour chapbook that features an introduction by Tony (Digging The Vein) O'Neill. In it, he asserts: "To read Steps is to experience the thrill and disgust of real human emotion, to see the absurdities at the heart of all relationships revealed under the spotlights glare."