Doctor Dealer

by Mark Bowden

  Because Glen helped out with his father’s peanut business, he had learned to drive a few years before the legal age. With his car, his relative freedom from parental supervision, his experiences with alcohol, drugs, and women, by age sixteen Glen seemed remarkably free of the fears and inhibitions that torment a normal teenage boy. At the resorts he had met people who could get him marijuana cheap, so Glen made extra money by dealing to his more sheltered classmates at Cardinal Cushing. He wore a jeans jacket with extra pockets sewed on the inside. On Fridays he would fill them with dope and exchange it for the money he needed to go skiing that weekend. He had friends a few years older who lived in their own apartments, friends like Larry’s older brother Rusty, so he was used to staying out all night. He knew girls who did more than kiss you good night at the front door. In different ways, Glen and Larry were two of the most extraordinary students in the school. Predictably, they were drawn together.

  To Glen, Larry was a smart kid from a rich neighborhood who didn’t look down his nose at him and who wasn’t afraid to break the rules. Glen would stop by Friendly’s while Larry worked the cash register and buy an ice cream cone. He would pay with a one-dollar bill, and then Larry would casually hand him back change for a ten. A half gallon of ice cream cost $1.19. It was easy in the course of a four-hour shift to ring up ten half-gallon transactions, nineteen cents each. If anyone noticed, Larry would smile and thank them and say he’d correct the mistake on the next purchase. Most nights Larry and Glen could siphon out at least twenty bucks, which was enough to buy an ounce of pot and a six-pack of beer.

  To Larry, Glen’s life came close to fulfilling every adolescent want. Larry went to work for Ken Fuller on weekends, helping to deliver roasted peanuts to local bars. Glen had, in addition to his old Cadillac, a deep green 1957 International Metro van, which looked like an old laundry truck. Larry would outfit the van with the stolen stereo speakers, albums, and the shag rug he had stolen from a classmate’s rooms. They called the van Fuller’s Fuck Truck. Out on deliveries with Larry, Glen had friends who would get them beer or whiskey. Then they would pick up girls. The girls Glen knew were chubby and unattractive, but they were willing to have sex. He introduced Larry to Sherry, who had a pornographic manual showing 1,001 ways of having intercourse. No matter that Sherry was no beauty queen; Larry fell in love. He and Sherry went to work on the book, page by page, in the back of Glen’s van.

  Glen broadened Larry’s experience in other ways. There was nothing Glen wouldn’t do. If Larry had an idea, Glen was at once ready to act on it, no matter at what difficulty or risk. Once, when Larry mentioned that his father needed lumber for a construction project at home, Larry and Glen took the Fuck Truck on a night trip to a nearby home construction site. The next day Larry told his father, “We found some lumber that somebody dumped out in the woods,” and directed him to it. Justin was delighted. Larry would always remember how happy his father was . . . and that he hadn’t asked any questions about the windfall.

  It was in December 1971, shortly before Larry was to start at Exeter, that he got his first taste of serious crime. Larry had talked his folks into letting him go off with Glen Fuller for a three-day ski trip, but when the friends got together they realized that their cash was short. Over a bottle of syrupy sweet Boone’s Farm Strawberry wine, Glen proposed a quick way of fixing that.

  “I know this guy in Salem who’ll give us a hundred bucks for a hot Ski-Doo, no questions asked,” he said.

  The Ski-Doo, a compact little skimobile, was the newest snow toy in rural New England.

  Glen added, “And I know where we can get a Ski-Doo.”

  That night, he and Glen visited two local dealerships, loading the Fuck Truck with two Ski-Doos, an engine, and a set of tools. At the first location, Mears Trust in nearby Plaistow, New Hampshire, Larry rigged an ingenious sequence of overturned barrels and a ramp to ease the heavy snowmobile up and into the back of the truck.

  With the truck loaded with booty, Glen and Larry drove out to the snowy New Hampshire hills and roared around on their new toys until dawn.

  They got caught the next day. Glen had sold the Ski-Doos to a fence in Salem, New Hampshire, but not before insisting on one last joyride. He threw a tread on that ride, and as he worked to fix it, stranded on the back lot of a local high school, a man had stopped his truck and walked across the field to help him.

  Hung over and strung out from the excitement and lack of sleep, Larry and Glen drove back into Haverhill later that morning. As they passed by Fifth Street, Larry noticed a police car parked in front of Glen’s house. They drove by without stopping. Larry was convinced they had been discovered already.

  “You’re paranoid,” said Glen. “How could they know?”

  Glen stopped the truck around the corner and dropped Larry off. Filled with nervous energy, Larry ran the four miles through a heavy snowfall back to his own house. When Larry got home, his father sent him out to help his brother, Paul, shovel the walks. As they worked, Larry explained to Paul what had happened. Paul was dumbfounded. Home from the University of Pennsylvania, he was completing his premed studies at the top of his class. He hadn’t been around his little brother that much over the last few years, but he had thought he knew him better than this! Larry would always remember the look on Paul’s face.

  “Oh, my God, Larry! Why in the world would you do that?”

  The police phoned while Larry was outside shoveling. Glen had been arrested when he got home, and he had given Larry’s name to the police.

  Justin fumed as he drove his son to the police station.

  “How could you do this?” he kept asking. “Why?”

  “I did it for you,” said Larry, and he tried to explain that he was going to use the money to help buy something for the house.

  This just angered his father further.

  “How can you say you did this for me! I would never condone stealing!”

  Larry thought of the lumber, but his father was so angry that Larry didn’t dare bring it up. To Larry, the only difference between this and the bricks, the mulch, and the lumber was that he had gotten caught.

  And that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Glen. At police headquarters Larry learned that the man who had stopped to help them align the tread in Salem had recognized the skimobile as one that he had recently returned to the dealer—it had been his machine! He had jotted down the license number on the truck and called the police, who had just taken the robbery report from the dealer. The license number led police directly to Glen Fuller’s door.

  Because of Glen’s previous troubles it was assumed that he had planned and instigated the theft, and that Larry was just an innocent kid who had been drawn along. Larry, of course, knew there was more to it than that, but he kept his mouth shut. The case was handled by a judge who used to live across the street from the Lavins’ old home in Bradford. Larry got a lecture, and the charges against him were dropped. Glen was convicted and received two years’ probation. It soured their friendship for a time. Larry was angry at Glen for being stupid enough to insist upon joyriding all over the place, and for giving his name to the police. Glen was angry because Larry had let him take the whole rap.

  But the most memorable consequence of the incident for Larry was the write-up the crime got in his local newspaper. His name wasn’t in the article because he was a minor, but a local policeman was quoted as saying he doubted that two kids could have pulled off such a professional job by themselves, that someone else must have been behind it.

  Larry liked that—“such a professional job.”

  Larry wrote an account of the skimobile incident for a creative writing class at Exeter. It was the first writing assignment since “My Life as a Pencil” that excited him. He tried to re-create every little detail: cutting through the padlock to break in; Glen starting up a forklift motor all of a sudden as they fumbled through the garage; the ironic way they had gotten caught. He was proud of the story. So he was surprised at the c
ritical reception it got from his teacher. The writing teacher, perhaps alarmed by the evident pleasure his student took in the caper, said something was missing.

  “Haven’t you learned anything from the experience?” he asked Larry when they discussed the paper. “This does nothing more than tell the story, blow by blow. What does it mean to you? What’s the point?”

  Larry didn’t have answers to those questions. He was disappointed by the paper’s reception, but decided against trying to rewrite it. He just accepted a C, and concluded creative writing just wasn’t his thing. He was no good at putting things between the lines.

  * * *

  Few of Larry Lavin’s classmates were surprised when he got kicked out of Exeter in his senior year. With his aptitude for pranks and disregard for school rules, it was bound to happen. Housemaster Walker had checked Larry’s room one evening when he wasn’t there, and had spotted the smoking den with its three big fans and waterpipe. The room was chock-full with contraband. Larry had a box of munchies that had been taken from a storage shelter under the cafeteria, and a cassette tape player that belonged to the library, where he worked part-time as one of the terms of his scholarship. Evidence of dope smoking alone meant expulsion.

  Larry’s trouble with the administration was, in its own way, a victory. Dope smoking was so universal on campus that getting caught elicited an underground outpouring of sympathy and respect. More than thirty students had been thrown out that year alone. The awkward townie with the scholarship job in the library became an overnight campus hero. His skimobile story got passed around and repeated until the long, loose guy with the thick mop of black hair was seen as a romantic rebel, a cheerful eccentric who thumbed his nose at uptight administrators. Girls who would never talk to him before stopped by his room to wish him well. Larry basked in his newfound status.

  Six weeks before graduation, Larry was summoned before Dean Donald C. Dunbar and the seven-member discipline committee. He was formally charged with committing two of the seven offenses at Phillips Exeter for which a student can be dismissed.

  Larry had to be escorted to the disciplinary hearing by Mr. Walker. He showed up at the housemaster’s quarters downstairs without wearing a tie, which was required at Exeter.

  “Is this the kind of impression you want to make?” asked Walker. Despite the trouble Larry was in, Walker liked him. Larry was such a cheerful, friendly kid. Walker had mixed feelings about sending him up on charges, but rules were rules.

  “It’s no use anyway,” said Larry.

  “You’ve got to at least give it the old college try,” said the housemaster.

  In a grand room with a high ceiling, wide fireplace, rich wood-paneled walls, and an oriental rug, around a great oblong table watched over by the glass-eyed stares of wide-horned trophy heads, Dean Donald Dunbar’s disciplinary committee met in solemn session to consider the charges against scholarship student Lawrence W. Lavin. Wearing a tie borrowed from Walker, Larry pleaded his case. He had tears in his eyes. He really had only borrowed the cassette player. Library workers often didn’t bother signing things out. The cereal from the basement had been left there by some underclassmen. The fans in his closet, well, sometimes things got real stuffy up there. . . .

  A faculty member on the committee grinned. “One fan, Larry. Two fans. But three fans, Larry? Three fans?” Larry could see that he wasn’t helping himself.

  “How could you let down your friends on the lacrosse team this way?” asked Dunbar.

  Larry didn’t know what to say. Dunbar was the lacrosse coach, and although Larry wasn’t on the team, most of his friends were (including the dean’s son), and Larry was considered a good enough player to practice and scrimmage with them. How could he tell the coach that few team members had not visited Larry’s closet, usually bringing their own supply of marijuana and hashish?

  In the previous semester, the same committee had expelled Larry’s friend Jeff Giancola for a different offense. Larry had made a joke of it when he wrote the lines that would go beneath his photograph in the 1973 Exeter yearbook. His words about his friend had added meaning when the book came out and Larry Lavin, too, was gone. They read, “This year the seven mortal sins became but venial. Woe were the Giancolas who were forced to confess them to Father Dunbar and his committee of angels.” Larry’s attitude was: Can’t these people take a joke?

  Larry called his father when the verdict was in.

  “Are you sitting down?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Are you sitting down? I have some news and I want you to sit down before I tell you.” His father erupted with anger when Larry told him he had just been thrown out of school. Larry interrupted his father’s outburst.

  “Okay, forget it, Dad. Don’t bother to pick me up. I’ll just hitch out to California.”

  Justin Lavin picked up his son the next morning. He had cooled off overnight. As he sat and listened to Housemaster Walker’s explanation he felt more and more like his son was getting “fed the wrench,” as he put it. On the way home he told Larry that Walker had seemed to him like a “typical WASP wimp.” Larry defended Walker, but his father was convinced they had had it in for him because he was Irish Catholic. Larry’s mistake had been in giving them an excuse to come down on him that hard.

  Larry never did get his high school diploma. Methuen High School refused to accept him for just a few weeks of classes. Larry signed up to take a high school equivalency exam that summer, but before the date he got word that the University of Pennsylvania, where he had applied before getting thrown out of Exeter, had accepted him in their freshman class. A sympathetic administrator at Penn agreed to overlook the lack of a diploma in Larry’s case. So with no further need to take the high school equivalency exam himself, he signed his brother Rusty’s name at the top, and aced it nonetheless.

  Just before Larry left for Philadelphia to begin his freshman year in the fall of 1973, Justin Lavin warned his son, “The skimobiles, that was strike one. Getting thrown out of Exeter, that was strike two. Three strikes, Larry, and you’re out.”

  TWO

  From Nothing to Zoom

  Marcia Clare Osborn met Larry Lavin on her first day at the University of Pennsylvania. A day-long series of freshman orientation sessions was done. There was a loud party on the Quad lawn. It was too warm even in early evening to be indoors. A local band was playing country rock, and Marcia had positioned herself on the edge of a third-floor balcony overlooking the scene.

  Marcia was from a small, insular Catholic family. Her father had been an elevator repairman at the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center until severe heart and circulation problems forced the amputation of his right leg in 1962. Her mother had worked as a cardiac intensive care nurse for nearly as long as Marcia could remember—she had gone back to work full-time when Marcia was four years old. Marcia was the baby of the family—she had an older brother and sister—so she grew up resenting her mother’s long workdays, as though she had been cheated out of the childhood her brother and sister had enjoyed. Her father became increasingly reclusive and despondent after the loss of his leg, rarely leaving the house. At night he was in the habit of wedging a two-by-four between the bottom stair and the door of their suburban home in Dumont, New Jersey. It was added insurance against break-ins, but the door shut, locked, and tightly wedged was a fair image of the Osborns’ relationship with the rest of the world.

  Marcia had never been away from home. She had excelled in the Catholic schools she attended in Dumont and Englewood, and had decided, after years of witnessing her father’s struggle with disability, to become a physical therapist. In 1973 it was a growing field, offering ample employment opportunities. So Marcia had applied to and was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Allied Health.

  At seventeen she looked like a young hippie, still childlike, with a figure too short and wide to be flattered by the wide-belted, lowslung bell-bottom jeans and tight blouses with no bra. Marcia wore those clothes
, but she preferred to wear a dress. She had a wide face with full cheeks and long full eyebrows over big brown eyes. Marcia shunned makeup, and wore her brown hair long, parted in the middle on top and hanging down below her shoulders. There was nothing arresting about her, but she had the quiet wit and inner calm of someone who was comfortable with herself and who knew what she wanted in life. Unlike most incoming freshmen, her choice of career was set. It was based on hard personal experience. But, beyond that, unlike most young women in Ivy League universities in the midseventies, Marcia Osborn knew that physical therapy was going to be secondary to bearing and raising children. She wanted a family, and she intended to stay home with her children.

  So it was like Marcia to be taking in the party from a cautious distance, alone on a balcony overlooking the Quad lawn. Then this bean pole of a boy with thick, straight black hair, wearing plaid pants loud enough to stop a bus, stepped up from behind and grabbed her shoulders as if to push her off the balcony. He gave Marcia a playful push, just to startle her, and then pulled her back and grinned. Marcia didn’t know whether to giggle or get angry. She giggled.

  As she turned, she recognized him.

  “You look like the guy I saw passed out on the lawn earlier,” she said.

  “Yeah, that was me!” said Larry happily. “My name is Larry Lavin . . .” and just kept on talking. Marcia could hardly understand him, his Massachusetts accent was so thick and the music was so loud. But she stayed and listened and smiled. It felt good to be singled out, even by someone slightly goofy like this, on the first day. As a recent high school graduate on her first day away from home at a new school in a strange city, she was pleased by Larry’s eager attention. Marcia had a boyfriend she had met the year before working at the Shop-Rite in Dumont. He had gone off to Penn State out in State College, Pennsylvania, and the romance was still warm. So she wasn’t shopping for a boyfriend, but she had not been approached by boys often enough in her life to cease being flattered by it. Marcia told her roommate later, “This guy talked to me for almost two hours and I have no idea what the hell he said to me. I know his name is Larry. He must have been interested; he talked a lot.”