Doctor Dealer (3 page)

“Kill him,” said the big man. “Shove the whole ounce down his throat.”

Just then, Sidoli’s voice interrupted, quavering, shouting a plea he would be embarrassed about for the next twenty years. “No, don’t! Don’t kill him here! Please, kill him somewhere else!”

Then Lavin and Giancola and the other fellow were on the floor, laughing. Sidoli suddenly recognized the big man as a football player who lived two floors down. It was a joke! It was all a joke! Larry, laughing so hard he could barely speak, showed Sidoli the baggie, and sputtered, “Confectioners’ sugar!”

Larry laughed and laughed, and, after a while, Sidoli laughed, too.

Larry Lavin had entered Phillips Exeter Academy in January of 1971 as an awkward “townie,” a tall, skinny fifteen-year-old with a ludicrous retainer on his teeth. He had an especially hard time pronouncing the letter
L,
which was unfortunate, because every time he introduced himself it came out, “Hi, I’m ’arry ’avin,” with the
Ls
coming out as slippery Ws. But Larry didn’t seem to mind. He talked and talked and talked. Even without the retainer his Haverhill accent was so bad that his classmates found him hard to understand. Still, people liked Lavin. He had charm. He was black Irish and full of the devil. His pale green eyes would fix you with a gaze like a dare. His black hair was thick and long, framing his head like a helmet and falling down across his forehead to the eyebrows—which was a thing that preppies didn’t do. He affected gaudy plaid pants and pastel polo shirts and had a closet full of three-piece suits. Larry’s mom had worried about her son fitting in with his upper-class schoolmates, so she had spent months shopping in secondhand stores to find bargains on conservative suits and altering them to fit her youngest son’s gangly, uneven frame. Like his father, everything about Larry was long—a long thin face and nose, long torso, long arms and legs. His left leg was longer than his right, which set his left shoulder slightly higher, which made him always seem off-balance, thrown together loosely, an impression enhanced by the way his thick mop of black hair made his head seem to teeter atop such a pole of a neck.

His mother’s efforts to help her son fit in with his wealthy classmates had precisely the opposite effect. At Exeter the despised coat-and-tie rule was mocked. Students wore the rattiest sport coats and most ridiculous ties they could find to top their rumpled, faded jeans. Tennis shoes were not permitted, so students wore battered penny loafers held together with electrical tape. These were the Vietnam years, when the normal conflict between administration and students bordered on war. On most college campuses students had plenty of avenues to vent their outrage against the war and act out their fashionable disdain for social convention, but Exeter was just a high school, with curfews, a dress code, and other strict regulations against nonconformity. The same generation gap that troubled so many American homes during the sixties and early seventies was magnified a hundred times on a campus like Exeter’s. There were dozens of expulsions every year. Hardly a weekend went by that someone was not caught in violation of one or more of the school’s cardinal rules. This tension had left many in the student body with open contempt for the prep school’s proud 190-year-old traditions.

Enter Larry, a full year and a half behind the rest of the students in his class of ’73, wearing his tacky suburban wardrobe, talking nonstop through his braces in a Massachusetts accent few could readily understand. His politics, such as they were, were just a reflection of those of his father, who felt America had lost its last best hope when it rejected Barry Goldwater. It isn’t enough to simply say that this gangly local boy didn’t fit in with the tight teenage dormitory society of Langdell Hall—he stood flamboyantly apart.

But he seemed oblivious to this. If anything, the young eccentric seemed more sure of himself than any of his classmates. He reveled in being different, but not with the underlying anger of many singular adolescents. He liked people and wanted to be liked back. Moreover, Larry seemed to like himself. He enjoyed nothing more than telling people all about himself.

His mother, Pauline, and his father, Justin, had grown up in Haverhill, a nearby Massachusetts town that was one of the oldest in America and which billed itself as “The Shoe Capital of the World.” Both were from Irish Catholic families who had settled in Haverhill to work in the town’s famous four-story brick shoe factories, and who had gone on to better themselves. Pauline, a short bosomy woman with artistic leanings, had been raised as an only child, a rare upbringing among the big-familied Irish. Although her parents sent her to college, Pauline’s chief ambition was to build the family she had missed as a child. She had a daughter and three sons, of whom Larry was the youngest.

Larry’s father, Justin, was a lanky, dark-haired, contentious man who enjoyed commanding center stage. His father, William S. Lavin, was a successful real estate speculator who had laid the foundations for great wealth by borrowing to buy up acres of land in Bradford, a growing residential community across the Merrimack River south of Haverhill proper, and around Chadwick Pond and Kenoza Lake, where the expanding town’s most successful citizens were beginning to build summer cottages. The twenties were a boom time for the shoe and leather industries along the river. Justin was raised as one of Haverhill’s elite. He excelled at high school sports, winning a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame to play football. When his athletic career was stalled by a broken leg in freshman year, he transferred to M.I.T., where he was graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1939.

But during the Depression, while Justin was away at school, his father was forced to sell most of his real estate holdings at a loss. The Lavin family retained a measure of social prominence in Bradford, but lost most of its wealth. When World War II started, Justin enlisted as a naval aviation cadet. For more than three years he flew dangerous combat missions in Wildcat and Hellcat fighter-bombers in the Pacific. Twice he was shot down and survived, once after drifting for four hours in the ocean aboard a rubber raft. He returned from the war a local hero, decorated with two Navy Cross medals, the Air Medal, a Presidential unit citation, and the Purple Heart, but a man whose life had been permanently changed by the war. Larry remembers that many years later his father could be startled out of his chair by a fork
accidently falling to the kitchen floor. His experience as an officer in a navy ruled by a tight coterie of predominantly WASP Naval Academy graduates left him with bitter feelings toward the U.S. government. Despite his acknowledged heroism and skill, Justin felt shut out of paths toward more power and responsibility. Long after the war had begun to fade in people’s memories, Justin could invest his harrowing war stories, stories of life and death, danger and triumph, with enough detail and enthusiasm to make them seem as though they had happened only yesterday. He seemed to pine for those days of daring and adventure.

Back in Haverhill, Justin found a different life from the one he had known as a child. During the fifties he became president and treasurer of the Keeler-Cochran Heel Co., Inc., one of the town’s oldest and most durable manufacturers. His executive position for a time afforded Justin the income and social status he was raised to expect. He and Pauline joined the Bradford Country Club, and Justin sat on the board of trustees for Bradford Junior College. In 1960 they bought a handsome two-story house on Highland Street with gray shingles and a brick front walk and a detached two-car garage in back. Justin added black shutters cut with the silhouette of a sailboat on the top, and would build on a redbrick patio with a small pool decorated with porcelain dolphins at either end that spouted water from their blowholes. Then came decline. Competition from foreign shoemakers, whose postwar economies had been subsidized by the United States, crushed Haverhill’s three-hundred-year-old shoe industry. Justin’s heel factory closed. He found work at an employment office in Boston, an hour’s commute south, and spent the next decade trying to find work for other displaced executives, earning commissions only when he was successful. Pauline found work as a medical secretary, and the Lavins often lived for months on her salary alone.

Larry, who had been born March 14, 1955, had no memory of the heel factory. He grew up in a family determined to live beyond its means, maintaining an active social schedule, planning ski trips all the while fending off creditors. He remembers being told to stand beside his desk at Sacred Heart School with the other children whose parents had fallen behind in tuition payments, or being turned away at the Bradford Swim Club because dues were unpaid, or taking an excited trip with his father to the department store to buy a color TV, only to be disappointed when Justin’s credit card was rejected. Justin would explode with anger. His children would feel ashamed for him, and somehow betrayed. Larry was a teenager when the family moved from its Bradford home into a small townhouse in a new development called Colonial Village across the river in Methuen. His
mother supplemented family earnings by selling floral arrangements to local restaurants and eventually by teaching this skill to other women.

An outspoken conservative Republican, Justin Lavin blamed U.S. policy under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for these hardships. He could go on and on, working himself into a fine Irish froth, about “The jerks went to work for the government. Have you ever dealt with some of the government boys in Washington? Some of the stupidest sons of bitches I have ever met in my life. . . .” Justin became the kind of man with whom people avoided serious conversation. A friendly chat would often explode into argument or serve as an excuse to launch a red-faced diatribe against the ineptitude and corruption of authority. Larry grew up absorbing his father’s bitterness for the system that had rewarded his wartime heroism with financial failure.

Still, despite his setbacks, Justin remained a talented and hardworking man. He took up cabinetmaking as a hobby, and over the years developed such skill that he furnished their home with handsome, inexpensive reproductions of delicate antiques. Larry remembers his parents’ tireless ingenuity in keeping up with bills and maintaining their ambitious living standard. When the back patio was under construction, there were late-night drives to demolition sites where Larry and his brothers would help his father scavenge valuable red bricks. If his father drove past a pile of mulch dumped for road crews gardening along the interstate, he would pull off the road, open the trunk, and hurriedly fill several plastic bags.
If they’re stupid enough to leave this lying by the side of the road . . .
that was how his father saw it. Larry loved and admired his parents, but at the same time, as he grew older, he felt sorry for them. If there was one lesson in their experience, it was that in the pursuit of wealth, talent and hard work weren’t enough.

Larry’s oldest brother, Justin, Jr. (the family called him Paul), and his sister, Mary (who was known as Jill), were quiet, hardworking, accomplished students. His other brother, Rusty, with his pink face and red hair and fearless personality, had a wild streak. Rusty ended more than a decade of feuding with teachers and school officials by dropping out of high school, the first member of his family who did not attend college. In a family fiercely intent on bettering itself, Rusty seemed defiantly downwardly mobile. He found work off and on as a trucker and moved into an apartment in Haverhill, spending most of what he earned on the ski slopes, where he became expert. Paul and Jill, for all their success in school, were sensitive, withdrawn, and sometimes troubled children. Jill fought with her father so much over politics and style—she was against the Vietnam War, he favored it; he wanted her to wear a dress, Jill preferred blue jeans—that she moved into an apartment with a girlfriend when she was only sixteen.
Paul, who was more diplomatic than Jill, nevertheless found himself frequently at odds with his father. He would come home from college with liberal ideas that gave his father apoplexy. In the midst of all these battles with teenage children, young Larry, who looked so much like his father, was a blessing. He seemed to have acquired the best traits of all his older siblings with none of the worst. He was a straight-A student whose grades seemed to come even easier than Paul’s or Jill’s. If it was true that Larry possessed a touch of Rusty’s rambunctious style, he was blessed with a unique counterbalancing charm.

Once, after a teacher took exception when Larry threw a pencil out a classroom window in the middle of a lesson, he assigned the boy a punishment essay. Larry invented a story entitled “My Life as a Pencil,” envisioning the plunge through the open classroom window through the pencil’s eyes. As it fell earthward its life passed before its eyes, giving Larry a chance to invent a satire of the teacher and classroom as seen through the eyes of a pencil at rest on the sill under the chalkboard. As a final indignity, the pencil crashed to its death on the roof of the teacher’s car. The teacher, who had a sense of humor, thought the work so clever that he read it out loud to his advanced composition classes.

This and other incidents like it imbued Larry with a cocky individuality beyond his years. He was someone whom other children admired and imitated. When he violated the dress code at Sacred Heart School one spring morning by showing up for classes wearing bright yellow pants, which were a fad with Haverhill children that spring, he was taken to the principal’s office and sent home. The next day the school hallway blossomed from the waist down in bright colors.

Justin and Pauline learned early to accept warm compliments about their youngest son. Larry shoveled driveways and sidewalks for people in the neighborhood, raked leaves, cut lawns, delivered newspapers. When Justin drove the paper route one week while Larry was away at a summer camp, customers lavished praise on his youngest son. Along the way he discovered cards and notes left out by customers for “Dear Larry,” asking him to please deliver a loaf of bread or gallon of milk the next day, or reminding him to take out the garbage cans. Larry earned Boy Scout merit badges, served as an altar boy at funerals and weddings in Sacred Heart Church, and was twice elected president of his class at Cardinal Cushing Academy. When he was only fourteen, Larry talked himself into a job at a local restaurant. When the employment board found out and he lost that position, Larry hitchhiked out to a newly opened Friendly’s restaurant on Main Street and got hired there. Larry filled in extra hours helping his friend Glen Fuller’s father roast and package peanuts for sale to
local bars, and often contributed his earnings to help pay late electric or gas bills at home. Larry’s parents were used to leaving their youngest son alone. He seemed gifted with some prodigious sense of inner direction. Unlike Paul and Jill and Rusty, Larry was not a child to cause them concern. To the contrary, Larry’s parents were continually amazed by their youngest son’s accomplishments.