Review
"Robbins dialogue is moving . . . his people have the warmth of life."-The New York Times
"Robbin's books are packed with action, sustained by a strong narrative drive, and given vitality by his own colorful life."-The Wall Street Journal
"Harold Robbins is a master!"-Playboy
About the Author
Born in 1916 in New York City, Harold Robbins was a millionaire by the time he was twenty. He lost his fortune by speculating on the price of sugar before the outbreak of World War II. Later, his fabulously successful career as a novelist, with many of his books turned into movies, would once again make him incredibly wealthy. For many years, Robbins enjoyed the high life among the rich and famous; he owned a huge yacht and had houses on the French Riviera and in Beverly Hills. His novels often mirrored his own experiences and were often people with the characters he had met. He died at the age of eighty-one, survived by his wife, Jann, and his two daughters, Caryn and Andreana.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Never Enough
ONESATURDAY EVENING, APRIL 20,1974Four of them were together that Saturday evening: Dave Shea, Cole Jennings, Bill Morris, and Tony DeFelice. These four had minor reputations as more than troublemakers.Dave Shea was a handsome young man, tall and muscular, a football player. He was very charismatic. Every girl’s dream was to date Dave Shea. He had been his school’s quarterback for two years, during which his team lost only one game. In his senior year the team went undefeated. Besides that, he was an outstanding scholar. He was inducted into the National Honor Society in his junior year. His special subjects were mathematics, chemistry, and physics. As of April he had accepted a football scholarship at Rutgers University. Without the scholarship he would have been unable to go to college. But he had the scholarship and his future seemed assured.But he had a dark side. It wasn’t alcohol. The fact was that Dave was a cheat. He did it on the football field, where he had an exceptional talent for knowing when officials weren’t looking and then clipping, face-mask violations, even for punching an opposing player in the nose. In close contact with a defensive lineman, he started his “trash talk.” Calling people names until he would get them to react. A trick that could get a star defense man ejected from the game, while Dave stood gaping and shaking his head, wondering what had caused the foul. In the chemistry lab he knew what results were expected from a problem in qualitative analysis and pretended to have achieved that result, when he really hadn’t. He was in fact a good player and a good student, but he had his little tricks to make himself look even better.“You’re good enough, Shea,” Cole said one day. “Why not play it straight … ?”“Look, Jennings. Your family will send you to college, no matter what. You’re smart, too, but you don’t need a scholarship. I do. I have to cover myself … be better than good …”“Gotcha. But you are good enough!”“Yeah? Well, I’m looking for a little insurance on it. The son of a wholesale grocery salesman who drives around the county begging for little orders … Hey! They add up their nickels every month, hopin’ there’s enough to make the payment on the car. I don’t want to live like that, Jennings!”He didn’t want to live without sex either. He first shoved his big penis into a girl when he was thirteen years old.She was seventeen.“Jesus Christ! The guys said you’re … Hey, I can’t take all that, Shea.”“Bet ya can,” he said, with a hard-on that ached for release.He began to enter her slowly until he was buried deep inside her.“God almighty! Hey! I wouldn’t have believed it!”Eventually, Amy, who also declared she couldn’t possibly, did. And complained it hurt. But he couldn’t get enough, and after the first time neither could she.Cole Jennings played basketball and was good at it. He was tall, six feet six, and had an indefinable agility on the polished floor that brought him recognition as a valuable player. His blond hair fell over his forehead as he dribbled toward the basket, dodging this way and that, avoiding the players trying to guard him, until at the last moment he passed the ball to a teammate close to the goal and charged in to take the rebound if the shot missed. He made most of his points by capturing rebounds and jamming the ball through the basket.He, too, was an excellent student. One of them, Dave or Cole, would be valedictorian of their high school class.As Dave had suggested, Cole did not need a scholarship, athletic or academic, to go to college. His father was senior partner in a major realty firm. His family could and would pay his tuition at any school he wanted to attend.From the time he was old enough to drive, Cole had his own car. That night he was driving his graduation present, already given him though graduation was seven weeks away. It was a black Pontiac TransAm. His parents had always indulged their son. His graduation was no exception.Cole was a responsible, thoughtful young man, and even if he could burn rubber he didn’t. Conservative, compared to Dave.Dave envied Cole when he saw the beautiful black TransAm. Someday, he thought … someday … but he never even got to drive his father’s old Chevy. That car was too important to making a living for his father to allow his son to drive it.Bill Morris played both football and basketball, though he was not the star that Dave and Cole were. He spent most of his time on the bench. Even so, he “went out” for sports and was considered a jock. All of these four were. He was not the scholar his two friends were, either; and his parents had been squirreling away money for years, in anticipation of his college tuition. Bill would not win a scholarship.He was a solid young man, not heavy enough for football and not tall enough for basketball. On the basketball floor he wore plastic-rimmed eyeglasses held in place by a rubber strap behind his head. On the football field he wore no glasses and relied on a slightly blurry vision of the developing play. Since he was a guard and all but invariably was blocked after he did or did not block his man, it made little difference. He was dark-haired, and oddly was already showing, on his forehead, the initial evidence of baldness.Of the four, many would have called Tony DeFelice the one most likely to succeed. They were all jocks, but Tony was a jock in a very different sense. He was a Golden Gloves boxer with a promising future.He was a welterweight, knife-thin, with muscles as hard as the steel of a knife. Many were afraid of him, but he had been trained to restrain himself and never use his boxing skills outside the ring. His ambition was to go to the Olympics and then to turn professional.He was an extremely intense young man, with hard eyes. People who knew him well were aware that he had a ready sense of humor and found amusement in all manner of things and people.His family owned a score of packer trucks and collected trash and garbage over a wide area of Bergen County. They were said to be “connected.” They were a family of shrewd, hardworking Italian immigrants, who had hauled first in a single mule-drawn wagon and had gradually worked their way up to the considerable business they now owned.
On this humid April Saturday night it was the same old thing: nothing to do. They were silent as they listened to Bruce Springsteen sing his latest hit. The four boys had bought six-packs of beer and drunk twenty bottles between them. The remaining four bottles were on the floor of the backseat of Cole’s car. A little after ten Cole drove into the parking lot of Pizza Palace on the edge of Wyckoff.The Palace might more realistically have been called the shack. It had only four small tables. Customers were expected to take delivery of their pizzas and drive them home. The boys ordered two pizzas and returned to the car to wait the twenty minutes until their pizzas would be ready. They opened their last four bottles of beer and talked about whether or not they should drive off during the twenty minutes and buy another six-pack or two.They had sat there, drinking their last beers and talking aimlessly when Jim Amos came alongside the car.“Well, if it ain’t Slaw,” he said in a beer-slurred voice. Slaw was a nickname sometimes fastened on Cole. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “New wheels, Slaw?” Amos goaded.Amos was twenty-four years old and had served four years in the United States Navy. He was known in the town and area as a drunk and a bully. He would walk up to a smaller and younger boy on the street and ask him what was the finest service in the United States Armed Forces. The boy might not know that Amos had been in the navy and might say United States Marines or something else. If he didn’t say navy, Amos might deck him.Or he might say, “You’re wrong, and I’ll let you buy me a few drinks to make up for it.”In any case, Jim Amos was a bully. He’d been beaten up two or three times, for having taken a swing at the wrong man; but that had not discouraged him, and he remained a two-bit punk, looking for someone to intimidate.Tonight he was feeling aggressive.“Slaw and his Three Muskeeters. Mommy and Daddy get this for baby boy?” he said as he hopped up on the fender and sat.Dave came out of the passenger side, fast, and rushed around the car. “Get your ass down from there, Amos,” he yelled.“Y’ gonna make me?”“I’m gonna make you.”Cole was out of the car now, followed by Bill and Tony from the backseat.“Oh. All four of you. Fine. Suits me. Who’s first?”Dave grabbed Amos by the legs and threw him off the fender, onto the gravel of the parking lot. Amos was drunk, but he was quick and strong. He scrambled up and charged Dave, throwing a shoulder against his chest and knocking him back against the car, where he was vulnerable to the punch to the chin that Amos threw. Dave was dazed for a second.Amos set himself to throw more punches to Dave’s face and down one of his opponents. But Cole grabbed him from behind and wrestled him away. He punched him hard on the kidneys.Amos broke out of Cole’s grip, turned, and punched him...
