Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden Read Free Book Online Page B

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 upperclassmanboyfriends. 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