The Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

One can be a product only of one’s own era, not anyone else’s.

This is not California, where your car accounts for fifty percent of your personality.

Good help is still harder to find than a good lay.

Well, no one ever said the truth would make you happy—only free.

What had happened to me in the last few days, I thought, was both apostasy and apotheosis; I had abandoned my old faith, and in the process had acquired new godlike powers.

“Okay. Now you got to make a big decision, because you’re jerking me around and yourself around. So you stand up, you turn around, and you go out that door. You get your wife and you leave, and you’ll never hear from me again. Or, you have a drink with me.”

Nations sometimes go to war. Married couples live in a state of perpetual war, broken occasionally by an armed truce.

you got a war between the jackasses in the government and the smart people outside the government. The jackasses in the government want the poor and stupid people to think they care about them.

“If you betray family, you are damned to hell for eternity.’’ He added, “If family betrays you, then no punishment is severe enough.” That sounded like something you’d pull out of a fortune cannoli if there were such a thing.

A boat is sort of a litmus test for relationships, the close quarters and solitude compelling people into either a warm bond or into mutiny and murder.

I addressed my parents. “We have almost nothing in common and never did, so I would like to end these meaningless dinners if it’s all the same to you.”

“God sends you the weather, kid. What you do with it or what it does to you depends on how good a sailor you are.”

Go for it; it’s later than you think.

“Something else you got to remember, Counselor—what you say you’re doing and what you’re doing don’t have to be the same thing.

I still smelled that horrible fishy sauce and that garlic on my breath. No wonder Italy was the only country in Europe without vampire legends; they turned back at the Alps.

Most American men of the upper middle classes never really grow up unless they are fortunate enough to go to war or go through a bankruptcy or divorce or other major adversity.

In truth, I was angry, hurt, and vindictive every morning, but by noon I was philosophical, resigned, and willing to let fate take its course. By late evening, however, I was lonely and ready to forgive and forget, unconditionally. But then the next day, the cycle would start over again.

So there I was, a lonely house husband, living in my wife’s residence, nearly broke, still on the hook as a witness for a Mafia don, the possible target of a rubout, a social pariah, a captain without a boat, and an embarrassment to my law firm.

In some perverse way we can all relate to the rebel, the pirate, the outlaw. His existence is proof that this life does not squash everyone and that today’s superstate cannot get us all into lockstep.