Authors: Mark Bowden
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.
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.”
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.