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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: 1942–1944
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two: 1946–1947
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Three: 1949
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Books by Harold Robbins
Praise for Harold Robbins
Copyright
For Grace
Prologue
FEAR IS THE surrogate for pain. It comes first. You look out the rear window, then the side window. You’re traveling at thirty miles an hour, in the correct lane, heading for the Wilshire turnoff on the San Diego Freeway. Everything is in order. Then you see the big trailer truck barreling alongside you, cutting in front of you from the left lane, racing you to the turnoff.
“Stupid!” I said, hitting my brakes to allow the truck to move in. It was then the fear began. The truck was still beside me. I hit the brakes even harder. The fear began clutching into my gut and throat. The trailer was tilting toward me, looming above me like a gray prehistoric monster. I turned the wheel away from it.
It appeared as if in slow motion that it was falling toward me. I think I screamed in fear. “You’re going to kill me, you son of a bitch!”
The truck jackknifed, turning its six headlights, glaring and blinding. Then the fear was gone, replaced by an agony of pain and I screamed again as a million pounds of steel tumbled down, pushing me into the dark.
I opened my eyes to the fluorescent ceiling lights of the intensive care unit. A nurse was staring at me. “How did I get here?” I asked.
“The paramedics,” she said shortly. “Your personal doctor was also here.” She turned and called to one of the doctors, “He’s awake.”
There were two doctors on duty, one man and one woman. The man glanced at me, then turned away, leaving the woman to stand next to me. “What did the goddam truck do to me?” I asked.
“You have a hip fracture, but it could have been worse,” she said consolingly. “It shouldn’t keep you from working, it’s not your writing arm.”
She was a young doctor, very pretty, pretty enough to be starred in the television medical soap programs. I looked at her. “Okay. So I can write,” I said. “But, what about fucking?”
Her face expressed her shock, then she answered quite seriously, “That will be a problem. You see, the fractures are located so that you cannot move your hips for that form of activity.”
I smiled at her. “Then oral sex?”
She looked down at me. “You’re sick.”
“I know that,” I said. “But that has nothing to do with the broken hip.”
She placed a reassuring hand on my arm. “You’re going to be all right. We’re getting ready to transfer you to a private room.”
I was curious. I felt that I had been there only a short time. “What time is it?”
“Almost ten in the morning,” she said. “You were brought in here about eleven last night.”
“I was out that much?” I asked.
“Just as well,” she answered. “You were in a lot of pain. We shot you up with enough dope so that you could get through the examinations and the X rays, then brought you back down here and put you on the life systems and monitors.”
“It was that bad?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said. “But we have a reputation to protect. We don’t want a patient with even a minor problem to sneak up and die on us.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said sarcastically.
“You were really in no danger,” she said.
She blushed. I looked up at her. “What made you so sure of that?”
“The moment we shot you with some Demerol, you got an erection and began talking dirty.”
“Like how dirty?”
Now she was laughing. “Pretty dirty.” She looked around to see if anyone was close. “Like in your books. You wanted me to play with you, suck you, fuck you and a lot of other things I don’t care to say.”
“Really,” I said. “And what did you do about it?”
“Nothing. Just worked together with the orthopedist to rig up your leg traction. By then you were asleep and it was over.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I’ll give you another chance when I have my private room.”
“I’m in IC,” she said. “I never go up to the private rooms.”
“Ever?” I asked.
“Only sometimes,” she said. She looked down at me. “I have several copies of your books at home. Would you mind signing them for me?”
“Of course,” I said. “But only if you bring them up to my room.”
She didn’t answer. I watched her turn as two attendants rolled a gurney over to my bed and stopped beside me. She turned back to me. “We’re going to transfer.”
I pointed at the traction hanging over my right knee and under the ankle. “How do you manage it with that?”
“We know how,” she said. “Just relax and let us do the work. We’ll try not to hurt you too much.”
“You don’t have to be so honest,” I said. “I’d rather you lied a little and gave me another shot of dope.”
“Don’t be a baby,” she said, the attendants helping me across to the gurney with the sheet under me.
I felt the stab of pain racing through and caught my breath. “Shit!”
“It’s over,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Promises, promises,” I said.
She bent over me, wiping a cool washrag across my face. “You’re okay,” she said.
“You’re okay, too,” I said as the attendants began to wheel the gurney away.
I felt stupid as they pushed me through the corridors, lying flat on the gurney looking at my leg hanging on the traction over me and beyond that the ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw people moving aside to allow me to pass; I felt embarrassed even though I realized that most people paid no attention to me. This was normal living in the hospital. I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like looking at any people looking at me. I had had enough.
Strangely that clicking of the wheels of the gurney crossing the stone floors of the corridors brought memories of the subwa
y wheels on the tracks many years ago. I didn’t know. Maybe I dozed. I always dozed standing up on the subway, my back to the door, the crowd pushing against me holding me up. Then I woke up as the crowd moved off at Forty-second Street, and I would follow them to the station and up to the street toward the office where I worked.
July and August were always a bitch in the subway. The heat and sweat mixed, swirling the peculiar air down from the fans. I would always travel in my shirtsleeves, my jacket and tie folded across my arm. I was seventeen at the time and had a summertime job as a copy boy on the Daily News. The day I met her it was extraordinarily hot.
The crowd behind her pushed more tightly against me. She looked up at my face. “If you could turn your arm off your chest to the side, I would have a little more room.”
Silently, I nodded, moving my arm carefully against the post so that I didn’t lose my jacket and tie. She smiled her thanks to me, then turned around, her back pushing against me. The train began moving out of the station and the normal swaying of the cars began speeding up. I think it took less than thirty seconds and I was raising a hard.
I felt the sweat beginning from my face down to my shirt collar. I glanced down. She had her buttocks jammed into my groin. I began trying to think of other things but nothing worked. My hard kept getting more confined in my shorts. Trying not to let her learn of my predicament, I managed to slip my hand into my pants pocket and carefully moved my prick into a more comfortable position straight up behind my fly. I glanced down at her again. I began to feel better. I guessed she hadn’t noticed anything.
The train came to a stop in the tunnel between stations and the regular lights went out and the emergency lights pushed out a dim yellow flicker. The girl looked back over her shoulder up at me. “Are you comfortable?” she asked.
I nodded. I had to concentrate. I couldn’t talk too much. “Fine,” I said.
She smiled up at me in the flickering lights. “I can feel you against me.”
I looked at her. She didn’t seem angry. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how many men do that on the subway.” She waited for me to answer her but I didn’t know what to say. She nodded. “You’re the fourth man this week. I don’t like most of them though, they’re pigs. But I don’t mind you, you seem nice and clean.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She looked at me. “Did you come yet?”
I shook my head, no.
“Would you like to?” she asked.
I stared at her, but before I could answer I felt her hand reach behind her back and cup my testicles through my pants crotch. That did it all.
At the same time, the train lurched into motion, the regular lights came on as it moved into the station. My knees seemed to turn into jelly as my orgasm kept my prick slamming against my belly. I hung on to the post to keep from falling as I felt the hot viscous ejaculation spreading over my underwear.
Then the train doors opened on the opposite side and she turned to me and looked up smiling. “That was fun,” she said and walked through the open doors.
I watched her, still hanging on to the post, as she went out with the crowd onto the station. I would have followed her to call and try to make a date but I couldn’t walk. Then I felt the damp soaking through my pants with my jacket in front of my arms.
I tried to catch her eye as she walked along the platform as the train began to move again. But she was gone as the windows moved quickly away from her.
“Shit!” I thought. I was really stupid. I had it all in my hand and I blew it. All I had to do was talk a little bit more instead of being a dummy. I blinked my eyes to look back at the station but when I opened them, I looked up at my leg hanging over me in the traction.
I looked around the room. It was the private room. Washed-out blue walls and ceiling. I heard shoes on the floor and turned to see a nurse coming to me with a wet washrag.
She was a comfortable lady in her forties. She held out the washrag toward me. “Wash your private parts.”
“What for?” I asked, taking the washrag.
“You had a dream while you were sleeping,” she said. “But don’t worry about it. It’s quite normal when you have a few shots of pain killers.”
“I only remember being put into the gurney downstairs.”
“You were asleep when they transferred you here.”
“I remember the gurney reminded me of the subway,” I said. “That’s strange.”
“Clean yourself up and forget it,” she said. “You have been sleeping over three hours and your doctor should be coming in almost any minute now.”
Less than five minutes later, Ed came into the room. Looked around at my traction device and then pulled a chair next to me in the bed. “You’re pretty lucky, sport,” he said.
“Glad you think so,” I said sarcastically. “It hurts like a bitch.”
“It could have been worse. Your fractures will heal in time, but I’ve known of some others that would have put you into a wheelchair for life.”
I looked at him. For the first time I saw his weariness in his watery blue eyes lined with red from lack of sleep. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I screwed up your dinner date.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “You’re going to be out of action for a while so you can send over some of your reserve stock.”
“How long will it take me to heal?”
“It’s not easy to say. It all works in steps. First step, you stay in this traction in the hospital for about a week until we make sure that the various bones are lined up in place. Then you can go home. You start very slow. Walk carefully, with a walker, later with crutches, always slow and a little bit at a time, get a lot of rest and bed time. After a month of that we shoot a few more X rays. If that goes well then we can let you move around a little more but still on the crutches. A month after that, more X rays, and the fractures should be healed. Then working with one crutch or cane you walk slowly for another few months until we’re sure that your cartilage and the articulation in your hip socket are cool. Then you can get into your usual routine.”
I added up the time. “Six months?”
“About,” he said.
“Can I work?” I asked.
“I suppose,” he said. “But you’ll be in constant pain so you’ll have to go slow.”
“How much time will it take for the pain to go?”
“At the scale of ten being now, three months will bring you down maybe to five, and when you’re completely healed you’ll go down to two or one, but that is something that you will learn to live with. It won’t interfere with any of your activities.”
I looked at him. That was one thing I respected about him—he told the truth. No pie in the sky. “Really fucks up my schedule,” I said. “This weekend I was supposed to turn in the bible for a television series. A week after that an article for a British newspaper. Then I was supposed to begin my new book and have the first part of it in three months.”
“I don’t think you can make that schedule,” he said seriously. “But what do you have to worry about? Your last book is still on the best-seller list and it’s been there more than a year.”
“It’s also about more than that year that I spent the money I received for it. I have a big machine to keep running.”
He was silent for a moment, then he nodded. “I guess that’s true. Life in the fast lane is not cheap. Just with homes here in Beverly Hills, on the Riviera in France, a villa and a yacht, and a winter place in Acapulco, how do you manage?”
“The same way you do,” I said. “I keep working.”
“You also piss out a lot of money on booze, parties, dope and girls. Cut out some of that and you’d save a lot of money.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Paul, my lawyer. What neither of you understands is that it’s the icing on the cake that binds it all together and makes it worthwhile. Just putting money in the bank doesn’t bring you
any fun. At least I spend my money on a lifestyle that brings me pleasure and enjoyment.”
“But you still have to work,” he said.
“So? Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “But people don’t think like that about you.”
I laughed. “They think about my books and it makes them think of me that the books and I are the same thing.”
“Do you mean you always worked like that? Even when you were beginning?”
“Always,” I said. “Maybe even more so.”
Part One
1942–1944
1
“JOE!” HIS MOTHER’S voice echoed faintly through the closed bedroom door. He rolled over slowly and peered at the alarm clock next to the bed. It was eleven in the morning. He turned back and covered his head with a pillow.
This time his mother’s voice sounded louder. He peeked out under the pillow. The bedroom door was open and his cousin, Motty, was standing outside in the hall. He stared at her. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Your mother wants you,” she said.
“I heard her,” he said truculently. “I’m still tired.”
“You better get up,” Motty said. “It’s important.”
“It can wait another half an hour,” he said, ducking back under the pillow.
A moment later, he felt the blanket pull away from him. “What the hell are you doing?” he said, covering his genitals with his hands.
Motty laughed at him. “You’ve been jerking off again.”
“I was not,” he said angrily, sitting up.
“Bullshit,” she said. “I see the come stains on your sheet.”
He looked down at the sheet. “I was sleeping.”
“Yeah,” Motty said sarcastically. “You always say that. I know better. I’ve known you since you’ve been a kid.”
“What makes you such an expert?” he asked. “You’re only a little older than me.”
“I’m twenty-five,” she said defensively. “That’s old enough. I remember when I used to give you baths when you were practically a baby.”
“And you were playing with my prick most of the time,” he replied.
“I was not!” she said emphatically.
He took his hands away from his genitals. “I got a hard on now,” he said. “Would you like to give me a bath again?”
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