by Mark Bowden
Larry’s oldest brother, Justin, Jr. (the family called him Paul), and his sister, Mary (who was known as Jill), were quiet, hardworking, accomplished students. His other brother, Rusty, with his pink face and red hair and fearless personality, had a wild streak. Rusty ended more than a decade of feuding with teachers and school officials by dropping out of high school, the first member of his family who did not attend college. In a family fiercely intent on bettering itself, Rusty seemed defiantly downwardly mobile. He found work off and on as a trucker and moved into an apartment in Haverhill, spending most of what he earned on the ski slopes, where he became expert. Paul and Jill, for all their success in school, were sensitive, withdrawn, and sometimes troubled children. Jill fought with her father so much over politics and style—she was against the Vietnam War, he favored it; he wanted her to wear a dress, Jill preferred blue jeans—that she moved into an apartment with a girlfriend when she was only sixteen. Paul, who was more diplomatic than Jill, nevertheless found himself frequently at odds with his father. He would come home from college with liberal ideas that gave his father apoplexy. In the midst of all these battles with teenage children, young Larry, who looked so much like his father, was a blessing. He seemed to have acquired the best traits of all his older siblings with none of the worst. He was a straight-A student whose grades seemed to come even easier than Paul’s or Jill’s. If it was true that Larry possessed a touch of Rusty’s rambunctious style, he was blessed with a unique counterbalancing charm.
Once, after a teacher took exception when Larry threw a pencil out a classroom window in the middle of a lesson, he assigned the boy a punishment essay. Larry invented a story entitled “My Life as a Pencil,” envisioning the plunge through the open classroom window through the pencil’s eyes. As it fell earthward its life passed before its eyes, giving Larry a chance to invent a satire of the teacher and classroom as seen through the eyes of a pencil at rest on the sill under the chalkboard. As a final indignity, the pencil crashed to its death on the roof of the teacher’s car. The teacher, who had a sense of humor, thought the work so clever that he read it out loud to his advanced composition classes.
This and other incidents like it imbued Larry with a cocky individuality beyond his years. He was someone whom other children admired and imitated. When he violated the dress code at Sacred Heart School one spring morning by showing up for classes wearing bright yellow pants, which were a fad with Haverhill children that spring, he was taken to the principal’s office and sent home. The next day the school hallway blossomed from the waist down in bright colors.
Justin and Pauline learned early to accept warm compliments about their youngest son. Larry shoveled driveways and sidewalks for people in the neighborhood, raked leaves, cut lawns, delivered newspapers. When Justin drove the paper route one week while Larry was away at a summer camp, customers lavished praise on his youngest son. Along the way he discovered cards and notes left out by customers for “Dear Larry,” asking him to please deliver a loaf of bread or gallon of milk the next day, or reminding him to take out the garbage cans. Larry earned Boy Scout merit badges, served as an altar boy at funerals and weddings in Sacred Heart Church, and was twice elected president of his class at Cardinal Cushing Academy. When he was only fourteen, Larry talked himself into a job at a local restaurant. When the employment board found out and he lost that position, Larry hitchhiked out to a newly opened Friendly’s restaurant on Main Street and got hired there. Larry filled in extra hours helping his friend Glen Fuller’s father roast and package peanuts for sale to local bars, and often contributed his earnings to help pay late electric or gas bills at home. Larry’s parents were used to leaving their youngest son alone. He seemed gifted with some prodigious sense of inner direction. Unlike Paul and Jill and Rusty, Larry was not a child to cause them concern. To the contrary, Larry’s parents were continually amazed by their youngest son’s accomplishments.
He saved up enough money from his paper route to help pay for his own braces, which corrected a pair of incisors so misdirected that Larry had long suffered the nickname Fang. He helped to offset the cost by doing odd jobs for the neighborhood dentist, who took such a liking to the boy that he would spend hours talking to Larry, explaining his procedures and detailing the advantages dentistry offered over other kinds of work—comparable pay with general medicine and more regular hours, and a profession that was immune to the shifting economic fortunes that had ruined his father’s business and so undermined the whole town. Before his sophomore year of high school Larry announced his choice of career. When Cardinal Cushing Academy was forced to close after Larry’s freshman year because of dwindling enrollments, Larry, on his own, signed up to take a competitive examination that admitted one or two local boys each year to the nearby prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. After less than one semester at Haverhill High School, Larry won the scholarship, which paid more than half of the $3,800 yearly tuition. His parents were reluctant to send him to the public school, which was rougher and less academically challenging than the private Catholic schools his brothers and sister had attended. But they knew they couldn’t afford anything better. Suddenly, on his own, Larry had found his way into one of the oldest, best preparatory schools in the country!
Exeter was a big challenge for Larry. He had to work hard to catch up to classmates who had more than a year of the school’s demanding curriculum behind them already. In French class—Larry had always earned A’s in French at Cardinal Cushing—he found himself competing with students who had spent summers, even years, living in Europe. He took a heavy load of math and science courses, which were considered the hardest. Larry learned quickly that, unlike at the schools he had attended before, doing well at Exeter meant spending hours preparing for classes, and days preparing for tests. Many classes had fewer than ten students, who sat around a big table in a room heated by a crackling fire. It was impossible to escape notice and censure if you came unprepared. Likewise, the intimacy of life at boarding school made all failures and successes public. He felt a steady strong pressure to succeed.
Larry found an outlet for his interest in writing by contributing accounts of sporting events to the Plain Dealer, a campus newspaper that had been founded by an embattled minority of Nixonites to counter the fuzzy-headed liberalism that then prevailed on the Exonian, Exeter’s official, better-funded, and more polished student newspaper. Larry himself soon abandoned his conservative political convictions, but he did enjoy the Plain Dealer’s freewheeling rebel posture. He was named sports editor in his second year, but lost interest in the paper; his name dropped on and off the masthead from week to week. His colleagues remember that even after losing interest Larry had a talent for recruiting others to turn in stories. His scholarship job in the school library gave him a chance to get acquainted with just about everyone at the school. When Exeter’s dramatic new Louis Kahn Library opened across the street from the main campus, Larry helped to organize the student chain that moved more than sixty thousand volumes from the old building to the new. He played water polo and joined one of the school’s club lacrosse teams, and was considered fairly good with a stick. His grades soon recovered from the initial shock of dealing with Exeter’s demanding course load. All this would have been enough for a normal student, but as those who came to know him soon realized, it was all just the surface Larry Lavin.
This exceptional scholarship student was usually as engrossed in some illicit caper as he was in his schoolwork. On the surface Larry displayed such innocent charm that the faculty at Exeter counseled him to avoid the more rebellious of his classmates, fearing they would lead him into trouble. The truth was, Larry was into things even these students wouldn’t dare. He snuck a TV into his room, against dorm regulations, and then crawled with a wire out on the ledge and up onto the sharply angled roof, a good fifty feet up, and attached it to the housemaster’s big antenna. Somehow Larry had obtained a master key to the dining hall, so he could lead his friends on midnight raids to the commissar
y storehouse in the basement. Even more impressively, he was the only one who dared sneak a girl into his room and have sex with her, a chubby, unattractive girl from Haverhill named Sherry whom Larry had a crush on in his senior year. It was funny how Larry seemed to get as excited about the logistics of sneaking Sherry into his room as he was about the sex. To Larry, risk was like foreplay.
As it was in high schools all over the country, marijuana smoking was common at Exeter in the early seventies, despite the prep school’s rigidly enforced expulsion policy. Easily half of the students at Exeter smoked dope. It wasn’t just infatuation with the drug; it was a form of cultural expression, a clear litmus test of cool—an intoxicant with fewer harmful side effects than alcohol, a magical substance that only adults and the uncool condemned. Larry couldn’t afford to buy dope, something that was no problem for his wealthy classmates, so he held up his end by shouldering the risk. He moved his clothes to a room next to his in Langdell Hall and rigged his own walk-in closet as a smoking den, with a bong at stage center, with layers of screens and wall hangings shielding the inner sanctum from the outer room, and three fans, including one area fan that stood eight feet high, to blow away the smoke. Larry had devised an alarm system, an intercom wired to the room of a friend downstairs who alerted him whenever David Walker, the housemaster, left his first-floor quarters to come upstairs. It was the safest place on campus to get high.
Larry thrilled to these things—the master key and the TV and the girl, the hot plate he had smuggled to his room against regulations. He would host postcurfew pot parties, serving warm hot dogs filched from the commissary fridge. These were his delicious secrets, little illicit triumphs. If you were his friend he would let you in on them, give you a glimpse of the real Larry.
But he wouldn’t tell you everything.
Only Larry’s best friends knew just how wide was his larcenous streak. To adults and to those who knew him only casually, Larry was a bright, pleasant, promising kid. This wasn’t just a facade, either. Larry really was all those things: hardworking, ambitious, sensitive, caring. He took pleasure in treating other people well, in keeping his word and doing favors. Yet, despite this, he already believed that beneath even the most spotless reputation, most people were dishonest. Everyone was hiding something about themselves, pretending to be more than they really were. Authority figures in particular tended to be hypocrites. This gut-level cynicism excused all manner of moral quibbles from Larry Lavin’s conscience. Even though he did dishonest things, Larry felt he was, in fact, more honest than most people because he did not deny the truth about himself. If he saw a chance to improve his own lot at someone else’s expense, well, why not? Wouldn’t they? Once you got to know him well, Larry wasn’t hiding anything. What the hell! Larry was positively cheerful about his bad streak. If you’re going to work a caper on the side, why be bashful? Why, he’d even cut you in on it, for fellowship’s sake. And Larry always had something cooking. . . .
One of those who saw this side of Larry Lavin was his childhood friend from Haverhill, Ricky Baratt. At home, on vacation from Lawrenceville School, Ricky was Larry’s constant companion. They would drive aimlessly for hours in Ricky’s father’s car. In the wooded hills outside Haverhill they would get high and drink beer and take whatever drugs they could find. One night they swallowed horse tranquilizers at Ricky’s house while his parents were away. They wound up crawling down the hallway from Ricky’s bedroom to the living room. Larry didn’t want to drive, so Ricky volunteered. Larry and Ricky and their friends have vague memories of riding on top of the car with Ricky driving, and waking up the next morning sleeping on a cliff called Big Rock, an outcropping that was the highest spot in the area. Normally Ricky was afraid of this spot. He couldn’t remember how they got there. Last thing he remembered was crawling down the hallway of his house.
Blackouts were not new to Ricky. Ever since the eighth grade it seemed he stayed stoned or drunk most of the time. He was a nervous, chubby boy with pale blue eyes, curly brown hair, and a skin problem. Ricky’s father was a successful Haverhill obstetrician/gynecologist. Ricky had grown up in the house next door to Larry until the Lavins moved. Both boys had older brothers who excelled in school and in sports—Paul Lavin had been a high school and college track star and was on his way to a distinguished career in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ricky’s older brother, Bobby, was a champion wrestler and skilled equestrian who planned to pursue a career in veterinary medicine. Ricky and Larry had always been an unlikely pair: Ricky short and chubby, nervous and shy; Larry tall and skinny, bold and outgoing. Larry’s grandmother had a house by Sunset Lake close to the Baratts’ summer home, and during the summer Ricky and Larry had learned to water-ski and ride horses. Some of those summers Larry had seemed to belong more to the Baratt family than his own. He openly admired the Baratts, with their big suburban home, their lakefront second home, and their boat. “This is the kind of life I want to have someday,” he told Ricky.
For his part, Ricky knew his parents would like him to exhibit some of Larry Lavin’s levelheaded, hardworking gumption.
But Ricky knew things about Larry that his parents didn’t. He knew that despite appearances, Larry was as much of a drinker and doper as he was, only these things didn’t seem to have the same debilitating effect on Larry that they had on Ricky. He had introduced Larry to pot, hiding in the Lavins’ garage with Jill and Rusty and Larry passing around a joint awkwardly, enjoying the nervous titillation of doing something illegal! After that, Larry and Ricky smoked just about every chance they got. Yet, while Ricky floundered, Larry continued to breeze through school. With Ricky, the drugs and alcohol seemed to crowd everything else out of his life. His first blackout came when he was in the eighth grade. One day in the same year, he dropped acid before going to school. His father had to come and bring him home. It was a terrifying experience. A week later Ricky tried mescaline and barely made it through the day. His grades were terrible. His parents, who were heroically understanding, grew increasingly frustrated. When Ricky nearly overdosed on pills at home one afternoon, his father saved his life, forcing him to vomit and pulling him into a cold shower to keep him awake. Despite such catastrophes, despite declining performance in school, despite all his parents’ loving patience and pleadings, nothing seemed to help. Ricky would feel so overwhelmed that the only thing to make him feel better was to get high. So he would call Larry. During summers and vacation breaks he partied night after night with Larry, and marveled at him.
On one of those lazy, stoned days, in the spring of 1972, Larry had an idea. He showed Ricky a key.
“Not just any old key,” he explained. “I borrowed a master key to my dorm at Exeter from a senior proctor, and copied it. You should see some of the stuff these guys have in their rooms.”
Ricky and Larry drove together the twenty miles to the redbrick Colonial campus. Larry opened the front door of the dorm adjacent to Langdell Hall with his key, and then took his friend from home on a tour. He led him down the hall, using the key to open doors to his classmates’ rooms. Ricky felt queasy about it, so at first he resisted taking anything for himself, but he helped Larry carry two big, expensive Advent speakers from one kid’s room. They hauled the speakers out the front door in broad daylight, with Larry grinning, and loaded them gently into the trunk. On one of the last trips Ricky picked up a typewriter. Larry gathered additional stereo components, a shag rug, and helped himself to a tapestry he had admired on another classmate’s wall. He paused to flip through record collections, and picked out albums by groups that he liked: Yes, Pink Floyd, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens. Larry felt no qualms about doing this. These were things that the privileged people at school had that he did not. To Larry, there was something wrong about that.
In the car on the way back he told Ricky, “These people are all so rich it’s like nothing to them.”
Some people blamed Larry’s bad streak on Glen Fuller. Larry was at Cardinal Cushing Academy whe
n he started running with Glen, a thickset rebel with light brown hair and wild pale blue eyes. As a student in elementary school Glen had been the butt of his classmates’ humor; there was something indefinably cockeyed about him. By the time he met Larry in high school, Glen had learned to fight back. First it was just to defend himself against the bullies who had poked fun at him for years. Then it became something else. Glen learned that the secret to being tough was to be unafraid of getting hurt. All of a sudden, he was a student whom others feared—and respected. There was hardly a day at school when Glen wasn’t in a brawl, his long, tangled brown hair flying and a wicked grin on his broad, round face. School didn’t interest Glen half as much as the ski slope, where he could compete on the downhill slopes of Vermont and New Hampshire with young Olympic hopefuls. His parents, who wanted to encourage Glen’s talent for skiing, began allowing him to stay away on weekends in ski resorts at a time when most children still had strict curfews.
At the ski resorts Glen learned about a lot more than skiing. Most Academy students lived on campus and came from well-to-do Catholic families. They had been raised in genteel suburbs, where breaking the rules meant raiding Dad’s refrigerator Friday nights after basketball for a six-pack of beer. Glen came from a working-class Haverhill family. If the Lavin family was determined to avoid being mistaken for middle class, the Fullers seemed to rejoice in it. His father, Kenneth Fuller, had known Justin Lavin when they were both in school, and they hadn’t gotten along then either. Justin had grown up believing that success was due to hard work and dedication over many years. Ken Fuller had a different approach. He was more of a free-form entrepreneur, someone who believed that success was not so much earned as snared, by taking chances, by making a sudden daring move in the right direction at the right time. Glen’s father had done well, but until Glen and his siblings had grown up and moved away, the family stayed in its modest corner home on Fifth Street in downtown Haverhill. They kept an assortment of Cadillacs parked in front, a new model for Glen’s parents and an old one for him.
