by Mark Bowden
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 lik
e 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.
Larry lived in Monk’s Row, the one corridor of the Quad that was all-male. It was considered a bad break. His three years at Phillips Exeter had given him a number of distinct advantages in his new freshman society at Penn. His authentic “preppie” credentials gave him precisely the aura of wealth and class that he had lacked at Exeter. His three years in Langdell Hall had prepared him better than most of his classmates for dorm life. And the academic rigors of Exeter made the freshman course load at Penn seem laughably easy. His roommate, Max, a native of the Main Line, Philadelphia’s most exclusive suburban region, had enrolled at Penn less out of any academic ambition than with plans to perform as coxswain on the Schuylkill for the school’s crew, for which he had been awarded a scholarship. But in the summer before starting, Max had gone through such a growth spurt that he was no longer suited for the job. Both roommates had a lot of free time, and Max, as Larry learned, had access to a steady supply of Mexican pot and LSD.
So Larry spent month after month ingesting drugs, staying high on pot virtually all the time, sometimes overindulging in beer, often experimenting with acid. Heavy users like Larry were like Quad jesters, a source of amusement to the less intrepid. One night Larry got so lost in an acid experience that he was unable to speak. Max led him around campus like a stoned puppy, a disheveled, long-haired goof in faded flannel shirt and unwashed bell-bottom blue jeans, stopping to show him off, just for the fun of it:
“This is Larry. He’s tripping. You’ve just got to forgive him; he can’t talk.”
And people thought it was hilarious. Scenes like these made Larry one of the most popular members of his class. He was called “insane,” “totally whacked-out,” “weird,” and other terms of warm tribute.
Larry had a scholarship at Penn that required him to work in Penn’s Government Studies Library, a little-used repository where he spent most of his time playing chess and Ping-Pong with the elderly staff. More and more often Larry hung out in his friend Marcia’s room, which was the largest in the Quad. Marcia’s roommate, Patty Simon, was one of the prettiest, most popular girls in the new class. And Marcia, attractive in a quieter way, soon became the center of her own social circle. She played the guitar and gave sweet performances of Simon and Garfunkel songs. Both young women had considerably more domestic skills than most of their classmates; their room, which was called MOPS, after the girls’ initials, was an oasis of vaguely maternal calm in the tumultuous Quad. And though Marcia still had her boyfriend at Penn State, she was always glad to see Larry. He was always cheerful and fun to have around. He had a childlike wholesomeness that seemed to belong to some earlier era—Larry was the only person Marcia knew who exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh!” or who actually used the expression “Okeydokey.” She invited him to swim with her after classes and often sat with him in the dining room. Larry had no success at first in trying to move their relationship beyond friendship. Marcia was a one-man woman. But she enjoyed having male friends. Besides Larry, she had been befriended by a bear of a freshman named Paul Mikuta, another Main Line native, who kept much of the Quad supplied with marijuana from his local sources. If Larry was Marcia’s hapless suitor, she had adopted Paul as a kind of big brother.
Larry’s first stoned, carefree months at Penn came to an abrupt end in late October.
Max got hold of a BB gun from his older brother, and one afternoon he and Larry invented a game. Max would sprint across the lawn while Larry took aim from the dorm window and tried to shoot him in the back. It was chilly fall weather by now, and with a shirt and jacket on it didn’t hurt too much to get hit, but you felt it. After perfecting their aim on each other, Larry and Max began taking aim at unsuspecting students. Hapless students crossing the Quad would jump and turn their heads angrily and reach for the pinch in their back. Stoned Larry and Max would giggle and giggle off in their room, out of sight.
For a week, word spread and the mystery grew. Who was the Quad’s mysterious mad BB gunner? Everyone thought it was funny except the students who had been hit. Then, one afternoon, Larry got careless. He shot at a girl as she crossed the Quad facing the window. The BB stung her right breast, and as she looked up quickly she caught a glimpse of the gun barrel in the window. She screamed.
“I’ve been shot! The mad BB gunner!” she screamed.
Larry threw the gun in the closet and fled. He and Max drove off campus to Max’s brother’s apartment, where they settled in to smoke opiated hash wrapped in a layer of Virginia tobacco. They were lost in the lush effects of this mix, listening to Yes’s Fragile album, when the phone rang.
Max answered the phone. When he hung up, he was in tears. It had been the dorm counselor. The girl had reported being shot and she had led campus security guards to their room. They had found the gun in the closet. The counselor was angry. Everyone was looking for Larry and Max.
In the same week, as Larry and Max sweated out a scheduled disciplinary hearing, Larry got even more distressing news. His girlfriend from Haverhill, Sherry of the 1,001 positions, was pregnant! She had waited three months before telling anyone. Her parents didn’t know, and she desperately needed three hundred dollars for an abortion. Larry said he would get the money, one way or the other.
But he had no idea where he was going to find three hundred dollars. He figured there was a chance that after the disciplinary hearing next week he would be out of school. What was he going to tell his father? He kept hearing that angry warning, “Three strikes, Larry, and you’re out.” Sitting alone in a friend’s room, ten floors up in one of the high-rise dorms, Larry had glanced at an open window and considered jumping. But the thought, which seemed disembodied somehow, just made him laugh at himself. He figured if all else failed he could always just hitch a ride out to California and be a beach bum.
Larry turned to Marcia for help. She listened patiently as he explained his plight. The BBs really didn’t hurt anybody, he said; it was just a prank. She told him she thought that was pretty stupid, and, in retrospect, he agreed, but, you had to admit, picturing the look of surprise on the face of a student just stung from nowhere in the ass . . . it could make you laugh. This and the pregnant girlfriend, all in the same week! This kind of thing seemed to happen to no one but Larry. Trouble seemed to be staged for him on a grander scale than for other people. Yet his good cheer was infectious and seemed indestructible. He was goofy but he was sincere; he was wild but he could also be vulnerable and tender.
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nbsp; Marcia got her friend Paul Mikuta to buy Larry’s prized Advent speakers (the ones he had stolen from a classmate at Exeter) for three hundred dollars. That paid for Sherry’s abortion. Marcia asked her dorm counselor, a law student, to help defend Larry at the disciplinary hearing. Her counselor knew Larry.
“The guy is a jackass,” he told Marcia, “but if you want me to help him, I will.”
There was not much of a defense he could offer before the twelveman disciplinary panel of upperclassmen. Larry said that the BB had ricocheted off the wall and out the window to hit the girl. The panel saw through the obvious lie. Larry and Max were asked to leave the room while the panel decided their punishment.
While waiting, an administrative dean, who had observed the hearing, waved Larry into his office for a chat.
“We’re very liberal here at Penn,” he said, peering across a cluttered desk at Larry. “We tolerate most things: the marijuana, the acid and other drugs, most horseplay, except for fires, but we really can’t have people shooting other people!”
As it turned out, Larry’s and Max’s fears of being expelled were overblown. The board called them back in and gave them a choice: They could either move off campus or work for the rest of the school year picking up dog shit from the Quad lawn. After some initial indecision, Larry and Max swallowed their pride and became temporary “Pet Inspectors.”