Six Hours Past Thursday

Respected family man. Successful business broker. Enough? Not for Steve Draves.

He crosses the boundary that rings in his seemingly moral, ethical life in the suburbs. Habitually, in fact. His high-risk exploits include the sale of a prime development property in his own suburb through a "Straw Man," that, if exposed, could force him to take his family and run. And, a massively profitable mining stock sale of a company about to file for bankruptcy. Also, sale of a shoe manufacturing company which generates eight separate fees, four times the sum he would normally collect.

His favorite style of business practice? Various. They range from under-the-table deals, kickbacks, timely escrow placements and withdrawals, and other forms of "legal" crime known only to him. His smell of money is acute. Others' notion of "ethics" rarely distract him from his primal principle: pocket every last dollar you can--legally--collect. Initially, he does not anticipate that a heavyweight mobster will soon rock his supposedly safe little boat.

Not only "Master of the 'Legal' One-Sided Deal," the enigmatic Draves' daily sorties to the Far Side additionally embrace his lecherous (multiple) pursuits of a restaurant hostess, a fashion model, and even his own secretary. To further compound: as a strong believer in diversity, he does not restrict himself to these few. The bounds of his prodigious prurience are stretchable enough to include a wide assortment of the female gender: anything physially desisrable, tempting, provocative.

But, inevitably, his ostensibly well-managed lifestyle slips gears. It manifests an overconfidence which triggers miscalculation and subsequent grevious error. This, in turn, leads to domino-effect, from-all-sides conflict.

It is when he allies with the mobster to construct an ambitious gambling-Mecca, island-nation off the coast of Florida that the inadvertent error occurs. He had planned to be finished and out of his contract before any illegal activities commenced. Failing this, he stumbles into a series of personal disasters. Then, accelerated slippage takes place. His morass is further complicated, intensified, by his unwitting involvement with the mobster's off-limits daughter. When his lifelong friend, a fired advertising agency executive, Mark Brightly, becomes embroiled in the mix, he finds his Utopian, well-ordered life collapsing into self-doubts, soul searching introspection, outright fear.

While the mobster's daughter stalks Draves in a series of amorous pursuits, her father's "Enforcer" stalks him with far different motives.

Once on the run, surviving a vicious beating, hiding, he weaves a pattern of deception supported by threads of lies and deceit to escape his blossoming nightmare. But, the quicksand-pull of his own guile sends his reach-for-the-stars ambitions crashing into a bizarre montage of the unexpected: twists and turns in his relationships, and careening, out-of-control contortions in his life. These extend to the most intimate of his relationships, to his wife, Betty, always carefully shielded from the unsavory realities of his double-life.

Ironically, even through its torrid pace this transparently cacophonous dissonance re-assembles into a most unusual love story. Clear to see. Easy to understand.

Cascading misunderstandings and mistrust germinate, proliferate, and finally come to dominate. They conclude with lies no longer sounding like the truth...the truth now sounding like lies...as Draves' story lunges toward its inexporable, hammerlike climax.