A BACHELOR PARTY FOR ODYSSEUS
A Novel

Based on the novel by Albert M. Balesh
      Copyright 2015 Albert M. Balesh
     
      Contact: James Clois Smith Jr., Sunstone Press / (505) 988-4418
     
      LOGLINE: Aging owner and CEO of a large medical supply corporation in Chicago, Alex Bales has money, power, and good looks, but is devoid of the joy and vitality of youth. Thanks to a mysterious and perhaps duplicitous doctor and his potent elixir, “FOY1” (Fountain of Youth 1), Alex is given the opportunity to relive his life and take a lust-filled, round-trip joyride from Chicago to Rome to San Francisco, involving him in a series of twists, turns, and slights of hand that eventually lead to a surprise ending in the vein of a Faust story.
     
      ACT I
     
      October 2010. Alex Bales, owner and CEO of a large medical supply company in Chicago, Illinois, has it all, money, good looks, and power. Yet something is missing. Happiness has always been out of his reach. His flings with strange women and weekly drunken debauchery bring him no satisfaction in his late, middle age, and he has already begun to see the telltale signs of his body’s decline, the slight facial wrinkles, drooping eyelids, and dilated nasal capillaries that painfully remind him of the slippery slide down mortality’s road. He’s gone on like this for years, barely treading water between gulps of whiskey that threaten to bring all to end. A washed-out, Harvard attorney, Randy Danhurst, an alcoholic, drug addict, who is Alex’s confidant and best friend, and who is not faring much better than the former himself, is his traveling companion on the road to nowhere.
     
      A cold Chicago night finds them both at their favorite bar and skin factory, contemplating their failed existences, between hits of straight whiskey and those on the occasional inebriated vixen who doesn’t already know the history of their downward spiral. When Alex and Randy argue over the latter’s drug addiction, prompting Randy to exit the establishment in a fit of rage, Alex finds solace in the arms and bed of one of his hussies named Susie.
     
      An abrupt return to consciousness with naked Susie lying next to him, a race down Lake Shore Drive, and uninvited intrusion into Randy’s high-rise apartment on Chicago’s North Side, where he finds his friend on the bathroom floor in a darkening, clotted red pool of blood, serve as a wake-up call to the nightmare Alex is living. When Chicago homicide detective, Joe Marbry, calls Alex’s alibi into question, it becomes time for drastic action and a change of life, but where to start?
     
      Three months pass from Randy’s apparent suicide, and Alex wakes up daily, if at all, hung over. He no longer bothers to shave, with hygiene at a premium, and his bed sheets reek of perspiration, toe jam, and saliva, with a sprinkling of body hairs, whiskers, and snot. He is on the verge of palming the Beretta pistol he keeps in his dresser drawer, when a strange and mysterious ad comes to his attention one fruitless morning, buried in the Want Ads of the Chicago Tribune Newspaper.
     
      It appears that a new experimental drug called FOY1 is about to be employed in a research project, to be conducted in the suburbs of Chicago. After flipping off his friends, Bill Jacobson and Bob Reynolds, the owners of his local and favorite drinking establishment, the Loop Club, one night, then making off with Judy, another wench to be had, Alex finally gets down to business and calls the telephone number listed in the Want Ad to make an appointment. He makes the trek one fine morning to the address listed in the ad and meets the strange character of Dr. Edward Stawson, the principal investigator in the research project, as well as his Gestapo-like receptionist and nurse, Marie Comanescu. Stawson promises to give him a new mental and physical identity at very little expense, a minimum of comeuppance, and no risks attached. One week later, Alex enrolls in the three-month experiment, not knowing where this urban adventure will take him. Let Alex beware, however! Is Stawson a likeable old man, an uncompromising researcher, and master of the healing arts, or is he the representative of something far more sinister? Alex lives his life post-experiment, and goes down the “rabbit hole.” Was his participation in Stawson’s experiment nearsighted, at best? Along the way, he beds Nurse Comanescu, to boot.
     
      ACT II
     
      Alex jettisons Chicago, the city of his youth and origin, with a new mindset and a new body in tow, thanks to Stawson’s handiwork, and makes the journey to Bella Italia, to begin what he thinks will be la dolce vita. During the transatlantic flight, he is inducted into the Mile High Club by Jill, a mature flight attendant. A fitting antipasto to the sumptuous cuisine and new life that awaits him in the Eternal City!
     
      As Alex begins to immerse himself in Roman pleasure, he becomes keenly aware of first things first. He requires living accommodations, and renting a furnished apartment in Rome is no easy task in an already overcrowded international metropolis. He enlists the aid of female Italian real estate agent Paola Grasso, who is successful in “bedding” him literally via new apartment lease and sexually via her legions of orgasms and incursions into the unexplored territories of her “American Caesar’s” G-spot.
     
      Alex’s weekly amplexis with Paola are not destined to last, however, and soon he finds himself again depressed, this time on foreign soil, albeit with a younger appearance, a new, honed body, and limitless energy reserves. Dr. Stawson has held up his side of the bargain, giving Alex a rejuvenated physiognomy, but the latter’s issues lay “more upstairs,” in those cracks and crevices where physical medicines cannot and dare not enter. In that light, he is back to square one, floating in a sea of Italian diffidence and fatalism.
     
      Six months pass slowly, with no hint of improvement in the status quo. As Alex begins to curse the day he was born, Edward Stawson, and the gods, he “gets what he needs,” as the Rolling Stones put it, in the form of an olive-skinned Italian beauty he meets at a U.S. Marine party at the American Embassy. Maria Lina D’Angelo is her name, and, after a Cinderella story and a sleepover, they become an inseparable couple and apples of one another’s eyes for the next three years, until wanderlust, domestic abuse, diminishing returns on FOY1, and creeping suspicion and paranoia that Edward Stawson is invisibly stalking him on Roman streets and byways begin to set in. At six years, the walls begin to come crumbling down, and Alex decides to leave Maria Lina for her own good, and seek out the man or monster, once his ally, who has infused the venom poisoning his mind. Not by mere chance or side effect, too, the age altering and energy rejuvenating benefits of the “good” doctor’s elixir are beginning to reverse, and at an ever accelerating rate. That can only mean that a showdown is imminent!
     
      ACT III
     
      Alex’s return to Chicago for “reacquaintance” with Edward Stawson is momentarily placed on hold, pending planned, extended stopover in San Francisco, where Alex hopes to reacquire a modicum of the happiness he once enjoyed as a youth. After a minor altercation with a homeless, ex-jailbird asking for spare change at the bottom of an escalator at San Francisco International Airport and check-in at the Fairmont Hotel, he becomes engrossed in the chance vision of a 28-year-old Nordic Amazon beauty in a Chinese restaurant just off Chinatown’s beaten track. That wholly unexpected apparition rekindles not only gastric juices, but also those between his legs. As leaves the eatery, he awkwardly drops a paper napkin, with his name, room number at the exclusive Fairmont Hotel, and telephone number hastily scribbled, on her table. He does not look back for a reaction, but, instead, bursts out onto the street, only to stop dead in his tracks when he sees no figment of his imagination, but the harsh reality of Edward Stawson, Marie Comanescu, Jill the flight attendant, and the homeless man from the airport staring at him from across the street. A shake of his head with return of his senses, and they are gone.
     
      Apparitions or not, Alex needs a long-term place to stay at a reasonable rate. He takes Bay Area Rapid Transit from San Francisco to the Berkeley Hills, where he sees a “For Rent” sign in the window of a backyard bungalow. Ringing the doorbell to the attached residence, he is floored by what comes next. Answering his summons at the door is none other than the beautiful young Amazon he had not had enough courage to speak to in the Chinese restaurant, days before. Things are getting more and more complicated, as people and images disappear only to reappear, and doubts grow. As he enters her home and learns that her name is Kalli Hallings, Alex decides to lay his cards on the table. He tells her that his nerves have been frayed for the last several years, and that he needs a room to chill out in and regain some semblance of mental composure. He leaves apparitions, hallucinations, and the potpourri of Edward Stawson & Co. out of his summation of the facts of the case. When Kalli offers to rent him the backyard apartment bungalow, he accepts immediately, after a cursory, but totally unnecessary, view of the abode and its accommodations.
     
      The following four months, from August to November, are among the happiest he can remember, with Alex and Kalli becoming inseparable friends, allies, and lovers, in that order. Then it happens! It always does. The gut punch to end all others comes out of nowhere! One early morning, no different from the two hundred or so that precedes it, when Alex is supposed to be sleeping soundlessly in his bungalow, he awakens prematurely and goes for a stroll that leaves him shivering in his tracks. As he turns the corner from the backyard to the front of Kalli’s residence, he is greeted by the sight of the latter conversing with none other than Stawson, Marie, Jill, and the airport mendicant. Although they do not see him, Alex’s mind is made up. He will confront Kalli, before making a beeline for the San Francisco International Airport and a “silverbird” for Chicago. Who is this Edward Stawson, and is he morphing into Mephistopheles?
     
      ACT IV
     
      Choosing to take the moral high ground for once in his life, or “two lives,” Alex confronts Kalli, but does not pursue the “why” of the connection between Edward Stawson and her. Instead, he bids her a cold adieu and returns to his apartment bungalow to collect his things. Crossing the threshold, he becomes immediately aware of something lurking in the shadows, and, then, a familiar voice. That of former Detective Joe Marbry. The six and one-half years since the irresolvable Randy Danhurst case leaves a bad taste in the detective’s mouth, and he is here to confront and, if he has to, put down Danhurst’s suspected assassin. Then the icing on the cake! After learning how Marbry found him, Alex becomes unglued when he hears that Marbry is also a client, or should we say patient, of Edward Stawson.
     
      The detective states that Stawson has confided to him that FOY1 is an utter fiasco, and that FOY2 would most certainly sever his depression and fatigue at being drummed out of the force. Furthermore, FOY2 is free of the terminal side effects inherent in FOY1. At mention of the latter, Alex decides that he will go it alone, even at Marbry’s request to join forces. Alex has a debt to settle, and one that may involve damnation to a prison cell or for eternity.
     
      As the jet calmly arches northeastward to an imminent showdown in Chicago, Alex’s outward demeanor does not betray the inner turmoil into which his psyche has been thrown. He draws up a game plan and choreographed, anticipated chain of events. Forty-eight hours later, man would be pitted against monster. As solid oak door is thrown open in Oak Park, Illinois, to reveal the blood-red scowl of succubus Marie Comanescu, nearly seven years to the day of their first encounter, Alex becomes a bit unnerved to learn that the doctor is awaiting him in his office. It all comes down to this!
     
      Closing and locking door to bar escape, Alex enters Stawson’s lair, to find a sight to make the blood chill. There, as if seated on a throne, sits a 35-year-old version of the good doctor. How could this be? Is Alex being used as the foil for some sick joke?
     
      When Edward Stawson reveals who he really is, and brazenly demeans Alex’s audacity for leveling an ineffective 9 mm Beretta artifact at his being, the former’s final grim realization provokes a lunge for Stawson’s throat. The rest is, as if in a dream. As Alex comes to on the cold tiles of a bathroom floor, he feels the searing pain of the gashes in his wrists, as he looks up to see the face and hear the comforting words of his friend, Randy Danhurst. As paramedics work frantically to resuscitate heart and lungs, Alex is lifted into an ambulance. Sirens blare, and the ambulance takes off, with Alex glancing up to see Edward Stawson at the wheel. He flatlines, however, when he meets the gaze of the person in the passenger seat.
     
      AUTHOR’S NOTE: Opening credits, Visual: fire and brimstone, with modern-day views of Chicago, Rome, and San Francisco fading in and out. Title captioning appears, and states, “Any resemblance of the protagonists of this story to real persons, living or dead, or to beings not of this world, is purely coincidental. What follows is the fictional story of one man’s resurrection from living death. It is a good thing that only cats have nine lives!”