Doctor Dealer (6 page)

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.”

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.”

Larry was interested. In fact, he had gone out that morning with the express purpose of finding a girlfriend. His roommate, who unpacked two ounces of pot before Larry had even introduced himself, passed along a warning with his first joint.

“By the end of this week all the freshman girls will have upperclassman
boyfriends. So if you plan on getting any this year, make friends fast.”

Marcia saw Larry again the next evening. He was passed out on the lawn.

“Are you all right?” she asked, stooping over him and shaking him by the shoulder.

“It’s this heat,” said Larry. Along with many of his new classmates, most of them away from home for the first time, Larry was testing the limits of his tolerance for beer and marijuana.

That same week he recruited Marcia to accompany him on a search for a parachute. One of the freshmen had decorated his room in the Quad by draping a silk parachute from the ceiling. Larry thought it looked cool; it gave the room a soft, cavelike quality. With that and a black light, some posters, a stereo, and some candles, it would make a perfect doper’s lair. He found the address of an army-surplus store in the phone book and set off with Marcia to find it. It was their first date.

In North Philly they exited a subway stop that smelled of piss. Up and down the street were boarded-up storefronts covered with extravagant graffiti. Sidewalks were littered with broken glass, abandoned appliances, fast-food wrappers, empty plastic milk crates, and brown paper bags with bottles protruding from the open end, the detritus of civilization in full retreat. Parked along curbs were hulking wrecks of automobiles, some resting on cinder blocks like pagan offerings with hoods up over gaping holes and with windshield glass shattered over interiors reduced to corroded metal shells. The corners in this neighborhood were occupied by idle, confident black men who made no effort to hide their amazement on seeing this short, wideeyed, chubby coed in bell-bottom jeans and white blouse, and her tall, skinny, dark-haired companion, who was sporting red-and-white checked bell-bottom pants and a white cowboy shirt complete with a lacy trim. Larry approached with his best brazen “Hey, bro!” grin, inquiring in this flat-out
Bahston
accent, “Is there an army-surplus store around here somewhere? I’m looking for a place to buy a parachute.”

The men on the corner didn’t seem to know, so Larry and Marcia set off looking. Around a corner a tall man with a bottle in one hand, wearing a long overcoat (in sweltering heat), stepped in their way and pushed Larry against a wall. The man’s black face was covered with gray stubble and dried spit, and his eyes from pupils to lower rims were bloodred. He mumbled something that Larry didn’t understand, except in a general way, and Larry reached in his pocket for a quarter.
As he handed it over, another man shoved the first one aside and they began to shout and push one another. Larry and Marcia eased away and retreated back down the sidewalk at a fast walk.

A cop on the next block took one look at Larry and Marcia, marched across the street, and asked sternly, “What are you kids doing in this neighborhood?”

“We’re leaving,” Larry said.

The cop pointed them toward the nearest Broad Street subway stop. There were more derelicts down the stairs, lounging on benches and against the cool, damp concrete walls.

A bored woman behind a thick plate of milky glass scowled at Larry’s dollar bill.

“I don’t make change,” she said.

Larry was stumped. Then one of the drunks piped up, “Here, give me the dollar; I’ll go get change for you!” and the walls echoed with hilarity.

The woman in the milky glass booth softened.

“I’m not supposed to make change, but you really look lost, honey.” She slipped two tokens and change through the slot to Marcia.

Back on campus Marcia’s roommate, Patty, who knew better, said, “He took you to North Philly? To North Philly!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Marcia. “He didn’t know it was like that. He was just looking for a parachute.”

Heat records were challenged that first week of September 1973. Into the Quad, fraternity houses, the two high-rise dorms, and throughout the surrounding neighborhood moved trunks and suitcases, rugs and stereos, boxes of books and albums, lamps and chairs, all of them hoisted by students soaked with sweat. Larry and Marcia had both moved into the Freshman Quad, a four-walled Gothic structure enclosing several city blocks that looks more like a medieval cathedral than a college dorm. Its gray stone walls have long, narrow leaded glass windows; its roof is topped by ornate spires. More than a hundred different bat-faced gray gargoyles peer down from under its ivied eaves.

Despite this and other flourishes of antiquity, the university founded by Benjamin Franklin is the least formal of the Ivy League Schools. Across busy Fortieth Street to the west, Penn upperclassmen live in West Philly tenement housing, where the shabby gentility of undergraduate rental units rapidly gives way a few blocks west to ghetto. To the east the campus is bounded by a muddy, slick bend in the Schuylkill River. Beyond the river is the low, aging skyline of Philadelphia’s Center City.

Nineteen seventy-three was not a boom year for Philadelphia; the city seemed crippled by economic forces outside its control: rising oil prices that drove its manufacturing base to the Sunbelt, rising unemployment, a permanent black/Hispanic underclass. Ham-handed Frank Rizzo, the colorful former police chief who spouted cheap racist slogans and who once offered to invade Cuba with his black-leather-jacketed force, was a newly elected mayor, guaranteeing years of dangerous racial polarization and reactionary municipal government. Set near the urban core of this troubled city, Penn was a liberal academic island, a world removed from the harder reality of its surrounding city streets. Penn students, few of whom were native Philadelphians, tended to be more interested in national politics anyway. The Vietnam War had turned the campus into a recruiting center for radical student groups. There wasn’t a street corner or campus walk that was not lined with folding tables proffering militant socialist literature, manned by earnest upperclassmen or a breed of drifting veteran activists still intent on student revolution. But by 1973 these hippie revolutionaries were already losing their grip on campuses like Penn. The Vietnam War was hastening to its ignoble end, and Richard Nixon was embattled by near-daily revelations concerning Watergate. On campus there were “Impeachment Rallies” featuring crowds of long-haired, flannel-shirted, blue-jeaned students celebrating what seemed a lot like victory.

It was a heady time for students. There was a widespread feeling that youth had triumphed over calcified establishment wisdom. All tradition was suspect. On college campuses authority was viewed not just skeptically, but with open contempt. With no impassioned political battles to fight, this contempt found quieter, less profound ways of expression—1973 would be the year of “streaking”; sex was casual and commonplace; and pot rivaled alcohol as the intoxicant of choice at most campus events.

Very few Americans under thirty bought the establishment line that recreational drugs, including acid, mescaline, and speed, were harmful. A favorite campus film was
Reefer Madness,
the ridiculous antimarijuana propaganda film that depicts dope smokers being turned into murderous lunatics. Even the most thoughtful, cautious students scorned the illogic of harsh penalties for pot possession. Surely toking weed was no worse than guzzling six-packs until your higher brain functions signed off—which was still considered good all-American fun.

Through the seventies, as conventional wisdom has it, campus political anger gave way to personal ambition. The new college student was caricatured as an accounting major more interested in his résumé than social reform. But this was a different kind of ambition from the
Horatio Alger variety. It was as if you had crossed Calvin Coolidge with Abbie Hoffman, coupling vigorously rationalized greed with utter scorn for social norms. Drugs were a big part of this attitude; they remained—marijuana, LSD, mescaline, peyote, speed, cocaine—a symbol of the unalloyed coolness of youth. Teen dopers of the seventies had a fantasy about their future. Their lives would be like their parents’, only better. They would cut their hair, clean up their acts, and not so much join the establishment as
infiltrate
it, play along just enough to master the system without getting co-opted. Pulling it off meant you could have it all, you could dabble at a profession, hobnob with the rich and powerful, marry and have kids, drive a fancy foreign car; you could be respected by your elders, admired by your peers, honored by your children; you could have all these things without taking a goddamn one of them seriously, without dropping a decibel of adolescent anger,
without growing up!

In Larry Lavin’s case, he had decided to become a dentist. Dentists made good money like doctors, but they had regular office hours. That was how Larry saw it.

From inside, the Quad was just a set of hallways that never stopped. They wrapped around and around, one on each of three floors, with rooms off to both sides filled with freshmen taking their first plunge into the total freedom of adulthood. Many were swiftly in over their heads. Anytime, any day, there were parties going on in the Quad, quiet downer parties with Jethro Tull piping on the turntable, intimate wine parties that evolved into sex, acid tests for the serious druggies, boisterous beer and whiskey and uppers parties that could lead to anything—party mingling with party, mind with mind, body with body—the Quad was a place where all the rules that had bound their teenage lives at home were gone . . . Valium or Quaaludes to help you cool out, and, to pick you right back up, speed or even—
now for something rare and expensive!
—cocaine. For many of the students freshman year meant total immersion in forbidden pleasures.