Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden Read Free Book Online

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