by Mark Bowden
There was one more run-in with campus authorities that year. Larry got a supply of “Sunshine” acid from a Haverhill friend, and sold some of it in the Quad. He wasn’t trying to make money; it was viewed as a public service.
One evening a freshman who had gotten acid from Larry freaked out. He went solo-streaking across campus pulling fire alarms, and ran campus security guards on a chase that led up to the peaked rooftop of the Quad. There the fleeing tripster took some frightening leaps before his roommate was able to coax him through a window back into his room. There, he doused a Russian textbook with lighter fluid and set it on fire before guards wrestled him, screaming, into custody. When the effects of the drug wore off, the student told campus officials that Larry had sold him the acid.
But Larry had made friends with young staff workers in the dean’s office. One of them paid Larry a visit, and warned him that the dean had a list of ten campus dealers whose rooms were going to be searched. So Larry and Max cleared out their inventory, filling two laundry bags with pot and acid and drug paraphernalia. The searches came several days later. There were drugs in most of the targeted rooms, but the penalties were not harsh. The worst was meted out to a girl who lived in the Quad who had stashed a pound of Colombian marijuana in her closet. Even then, her six-month suspension from the university was prompted less by the dope than by the fact that she was discovered to be living with a nonstudent friend, a teenager who had recently run away from home.
Years later, Larry Lavin would see his first year at Penn as his introduction to a subculture dominated by drug use. He lived on a roller coaster of stimulants, depressants, and alcohol. He nevertheless earned high grades. He found that many of the freshman classes at Penn were far behind the course work he had completed at Exeter. So he scored well on tests in classes in which he put forth only minimal effort. His success, under these circumstances, fed Larry’s natural cockiness. It reinforced a growing perception of himself as someone especially gifted, as someone who could break the rules and get away with it. He knew students who did as well or better than he did in class, and he had classmates who partied just as hard or harder than he did, but he knew of no one who excelled at both. His natural cynicism kicked in. If a college diploma, even from an Ivy League university like Penn, was this easy, then academic accomplishment itself was a farce—it depended more on going to the right school than on brains and hard work. Larry still planned on taking premed courses and going to dental school, so he suspected that his science courses would eventually be more demanding and competitive, but as a freshman and sophomore the emphasis was on partying. And in 1973-74, partying on a college campus meant drugs.
As freshman year progressed, Larry found himself more and more in the company of Penn’s fraternities. After his years of living in dormitories full of boys, Larry felt more at home with the idea of joining a fraternity than with finding his own off-campus housing for sophomore year. So, toward the end of his first year, he began to cultivate the friendships he would need to join one. The fraternity that most appealed to him was Phi Delta Theta, which occupied a dilapidated mansion on the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and Locust Walk, on the western edge of campus.
Most of the Phi Delta Theta brothers were from western Pennsylvania and shared a small-town perspective that Larry could appreciate. They tended to see academics as a necessary evil, hurdles on the path to a financially successful career. They exhibited a rugged, macho, independent style that resisted the vestiges of liberal idealism still present on campus, scorning political activism and, more important, the growing impact of women’s liberation. Young women at Penn tended to be feminists, looking more toward careers than husbands and families. Many treated sex casually, feeling that they were as entitled to “score” as the young men on campus. And their approach to serious relationships tended to be confrontational—few female Penn students wanted anything to do with conventional sexual roles. Midway through freshman year, apart from his deepening friendship with Marcia, Larry had casual sexual relationships with several young women. The new sexual freedom suited Larry and his friends perfectly; they postponed serious relationships and competed with each other in hedonistic pursuits.
There were other things that set Larry and the Phi Delta Theta brothers apart from the mainstream at Penn. Most of the students came from large cities, many from Philadelphia and New York, and had grown up attending multiracial and ethnically diverse schools. Larry, like many of the western Pennsylvanian brothers of Phi Delta Theta, had been raised in smugly racist, subtly anti-Semitic communities. Their fraternity was an ark of “normalcy” in the swirling currents of Penn’s complex community. Like all of Penn’s frats, it was by definition all-male, and by long-standing tradition virtually all-white and all-Christian (or, rather, non-Jewish). Few of these attitudes and practices were overt, but they formed a homogeneous underpinning to fraternity life that made the “Greek system” in the seventies a haven for more conventionally minded young men.
Larry’s first friend at Phi Delta Theta was Dan Dill, a tall, gregarious, long-haired life of the party who rolled joints the size of cigars and who brought an old-fashioned beer-drinker’s approach to drug use—he prided himself on being able to ingest more of everything than anyone else. Larry admired that. There was a party in the spring of 1974 when fraternity brothers had to count off Dill’s pulse as he lay unconscious on their front lawn to be sure that he was still alive. Dill was responsible for keeping the house supplied with marijuana, but by the standards of the times, he was strictly a social drug dealer. He would purchase only a pound or two at a time, split it into ounces, and sell it in the house. This trade made Dill the fraternity’s informal social director. A bong was usually burning in his room, and there was often a crowd around it. It was precisely the way Larry wanted to live.
So he pledged with the fraternity that spring, and set about to fulfill its initiatory tasks with a gusto that took the house by surprise. There was a point system for scavenging; more points were awarded for more daring and unique prizes. High on the list were parking tickets, so Larry and his friends set about collecting from windshields not only tickets issued by the campus police, which was the tradition, but also by the city of Philadelphia. Taking swings through Center City at midday, Larry and other pledges collected over several weeks a total of two hundred parking tickets. No one had ever collected that many before. Once Larry’s points were credited, he packed the tickets in a shoe box and mailed them to City Hall.
But by far the most prized items in the scavenger hunt were trophies from other fraternities. In this, of course, Larry had experience. He set his sights first on one of the most unique and dramatic targets on campus: a moose head that hung in the hallway at rival ZBT, the predominately Jewish fraternity on campus. Larry recruited his friend Paul Mikuta to help—Paul was not pledging with a fraternity but enjoyed pranking as much as the next guy. In the middle of the night, Paul watched while Larry climbed up a rear wall of ZBT’s house, using window ledges and gutters for hand- and footholds. Easing out along a utility pipe three stories up, Larry worked himself over to a window. With a penknife, he chipped away at the putty around a small pane that had recently been replaced, and removed it. He reached inside and unlocked the window, and stepped inside.
Larry found himself standing in darkness in an empty bathtub. When’ his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he crept over to a pile of clothes draped over the back of a chair and rooted through the pockets. He found a bundle of keys. Then he climbed out the window and back down to Paul.
One of the keys opened the front door. They went directly to the moose head and lifted it off the wall. After carrying it across campus, thrilling in their daring and good fortune, they deposited it in Phi Delta Theta’s foyer. It had all gone so smoothly, Larry and Paul didn’t want to stop. They went back for more. This time they wrestled a heavy, prized poker table out the front door, delivering it to Phi Delta Theta shortly before dawn. More items were collected over the next few we
eks, much to the surprise and delight of Larry’s prospective fraternity brothers. Eventually ZBT was summoned to recover its belongings amidst catcalls and jeers. Larry stole another fraternity’s official flag, and when a group from that house tracked him down and came to retrieve it, Larry displayed a machete that he had bought at an army-surplus store in Boston—its blade was heavy and had a sinister bend. The group backed off. When a complaint was filed with the frat council about his machete, Larry was contrite. He agreed to return the flag. So he and Paul Mikuta climbed up in the Quad rafters and captured two pigeons. They wrapped them in the flag, put it in a box, and left it on ZBT’s front porch. The fraternity recovered a soiled flag and had a hell of a time catching the frightened pigeons.
Larry ran up more scavenging points than any pledge before or since. In the process he became one of the house’s most popular characters before he was officially even a brother.
By the end of freshman year, Larry’s relationship with Marcia Osborn had moved beyond friendship. Though Marcia was still writing to her high school boyfriend at Penn State, Larry’s persistence and charm had gradually worn away her resolve. They were in bed together often in her room at the Quad during spring semester, where Larry would often return with ridiculous stories about things he had taken, things he had done. Larry brought out maternal tendencies in Marcia; he was someone who needed to be loved in spite of himself. Larry was wild, but his drug use was really no more extreme than that of many freshmen in the Quad, and his grades were considerably better than most. Their personalities complemented each other, Larry affording Marcia a bit more joy and excitement than she had known, and Marcia offering Larry a reliable base of affection. Larry was reckless, loud, and impulsive, while Marcia was cautious, quiet, and analytical. Larry trusted and liked people instantly, while Marcia could spend months and years with a person before developing trust and affection. She committed her heart more cautiously than Larry did, but once committed, Marcia was like a rock. She figured that time would wear out Larry’s wildness, and that her own good sense would ultimately prevail.
Larry didn’t tell Marcia about the other girls. His relationship with her was to be the most important, but not the only one.
At the beginning of sophomore year Larry moved into Phi Delta Theta. He chose a room on the second floor of the thirty-room mansion, overlooking the front door, and began an ambitious paint job. Larry wanted to paint a fluorescent spectrum across his walls against a black backdrop in imitation of the cover of Dark Side of the Moon, an album by Pink Floyd, as though the colors were spilling on the wall from a giant prism. He got as far as painting his room pitch black and the ceiling white. Then things got busy.
Over the summer after freshman year, Larry had worked in the giant Converse factory in Haverhill. When he was not working at the factory, Larry had a second job as a lifeguard at the swimming pool of his parents’ townhouse complex. He had scholarships and a government loan to help pay his tuition and board at Penn, but he needed every dollar he could scrape up to pay the rest. He especially liked the Converse job. At the factory, workers had fashioned a cave out of the pallets in the warehouse. It couldn’t be seen from the floor, and was entered by climbing up and across the top layer of boxes and then climbing down inside. Out of sight, he and his coworkers, including his friend Ricky Baratt, spent many idle hours smoking dope.
But unlike many of his co-workers, Larry actually enjoyed his work at Converse and found himself growing more and more reluctant to spend so much time getting high. His job in the warehouse was to make up orders for shipments to shoe stores around the country. He would fill pallets with different-sized boxes and cartons of tennis shoes, a time-consuming but important procedure. Converse took pains to package each order exactly to the specifications of each customer, each of which had ordered different combinations of sneakers. Some of the orders were just for a few boxes, some for whole pallets. It fascinated Larry. He had dated the daughter of the man who supervised him, so his boss took a special interest in Larry, who, as a college kid attending an Ivy League school, was regarded as only temporarily suited for such labor. So Larry found himself infected with a new, managerial perspective. He watched his friends and co-workers sneaking off to get high—and continued to join them now and then—but it bugged him that they were working at only 50 percent of their potential. He could hear old echoes of his father’s lament: Unions have spoiled American workers; it’s no wonder the fuckin’ Japs are kicking our ass!
Larry was surprised to feel such conservative instincts in himself. He had never thought of himself as ambitious, but those stirrings were there, too. Looking back over the way he had spent his first year at Penn, he realized that he couldn’t expect to continue pulling high grades if he lived that way. He resolved to work harder during sophomore year, and to find a way to make more money during the school year so he wouldn’t have to work fifty hours a week again next summer.
It was during this summer that Larry had the first seeds of a notion. He knew that Dan Dill, who was his big brother at Phi Delta Theta, had contacts who sold him two or three pounds of pot at a time, enough to supply the house with ounces and maintain a free supply for Dill’s bong. Dill didn’t see it as a business. But Larry did. It was a business! It worked on the same principle as the Converse factory: The key to higher profits was higher volume, and the key to higher volume was having a steady supply of product on hand, neatly packaged to suit the customer. If Dill multiplied the number of buyers—nearly everyone Larry knew smoked dope—and maintained a larger supply, profits would quickly grow beyond what it took just to keep himself high.
Immediately on his return to Penn in the fall of 1974, Larry apprenticed himself to his big brother. Dill introduced Larry to the two main sources of marijuana at Penn, Bob Chance and Ed Mott, two upperclassmen who lived in off-campus apartments and drove cars and lived a life that, while not lavish, was far beyond the financial reach of most underclassmen. Chance was a studious personality who kept careful track of business dealings. Mott was a freewheeler who spent his money as fast as he made it. Larry noted that every time he stopped by Mott’s apartment there was a different girl with him—each of them a knockout. Chance and Mott had started dealing together as freshmen and after four years had connections that could deliver hundred-pound bales of pot, thirty-pound lumps of hashish, and large quantities of the other drugs—notably speed and Quaaludes—in demand on campus.
Dill was not as eager as Larry to expand the operation. But shortly after the semester began, he left on a week-long hunting trip to western Pennsylvania. In his absence, Larry paid a routine visit to Chance and Mott to replenish the house dope supply, handing over the standard two hundred dollars. Only this time Larry said he wanted to buy more. He asked them to front him ten pounds—or eleven hundred dollars’ worth of pot.
“Give me one week,” he said.
Chance and Mott agreed. Back in his black fraternity room, Larry used his machete and Dill’s scale to cut the dope into pieces. He sold it for ten dollars per ounce. Before the week was up he drove out to pay Chance and Mott their eleven hundred dollars—a whole brown bag full of bills, mostly tens and twenties. The sequence went Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson. It felt good to go to the branch bank and exchange the smaller bills for hundreds, crisp pale green Ben Franklins. After all, Franklin had founded Penn! When Dill returned from his trip that weekend, Larry handed him five bills. It was hard to believe something so slight as these five slips of green paper could be worth so much—five hundred dollars!
“That’s what I made off your connections this week,” Larry said.
After that, Dill conceded the pot business to his little brother.
L.A. was stuck. While he was away over an October weekend, Ed Mott had dropped off forty pounds of pot. Forty pounds! Who was he trying to kid? The most L.A. had ever ordered at one time was ten pounds. And he had just moved that much over the last two weeks. All of his customers were well stocked. But there it was, filli
ng a large blue American Tourister suitcase on the floor of his living room.
“Are you kidding me?” he asked Mott, who laughed on the other end of the phone.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Mott. “Take it on credit. Pay me when you move it. No hurry.”
“But you’re nuts,” said L.A. “I’m not going to be able to sell it.”
“Really?”
“Ed, it’s going to grow mold where it is.”
“Well, just hang on to it for a while, sell any of it you can.”
L.A. was annoyed. He knew Mott’s methods. By dropping off that amount he was urging L.A., daring him, to expand his business. There was nearly two thousand dollars in profits there if he could sell it. But he didn’t know where to begin. L.A. was a hulking junior with a broad face and big glasses perched on a wide, crooked nose. His thin, untended brown hair sprayed out like an aura. He was a bit of a loner, an awkward, extremely intelligent young man who liked to stay high—a habit he had started and perfected in high school in California. L.A. had connections in Florida dating back to high school days who were willing to sell him as much or more as Mott could deliver, but he had kept his dealing strictly to a small circle of friends, selling little more than it took to keep him in spending money and to maintain his own steady, free supply. The supply end was L.A.’s strength. How was he going to retail 640 ounces? Yet he knew that if he didn’t sell it, then Mott was just using him to store it, parceling out the risk to his minions. It troubled L.A., but not enough to do anything. His laid-back nickname had stuck for more than one reason. With the exception of a few minor sales, the suitcase was still nearly full when Mott checked back toward the end of November. L.A. told him it was hopeless, and he wasn’t thrilled with having the stuff lying around his apartment.