Doctor Dealer Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a big challenge for Larry. He had to work hard to catch up to classmates who had more than a year of the school’s demanding curriculum behind them already. In French class—Larry had always earned A’s in French at Cardinal Cushing—he found himself competing with students who had spent summers, even years, living in Europe. He took a heavy load of math and science courses, which were considered the hardest. Larry learned quickly that, unlike at the schools he had attended before, doing well at Exeter meant spending hours preparing for classes, and days preparing for tests. Many classes had fewer than ten students, who sat around a big table in a room heated by a crackling fire. It was impossible to escape notice and censure if you came unprepared. Likewise, the intimacy of life at boarding school made all failures and successes public. He felt a steady strong pressure to succeed.
    Larry found an outlet for his interest in writing by contributing accounts of sporting events to the
Plain Dealer,
a campus newspaperthat had been founded by an embattled minority of Nixonites to counter the fuzzy-headed liberalism that then prevailed on the
Exonian,
Exeter’s official, better-funded, and more polished student newspaper. Larry himself soon abandoned his conservative political convictions, but he did enjoy the
Plain Dealer’s
freewheeling rebel posture. He was named sports editor in his second year, but lost interest in the paper; his name dropped on and off the masthead from week to week. His colleagues remember that even after losing interest Larry had a talent for recruiting others to turn in stories. His scholarship job in the school library gave him a chance to get acquainted with just about everyone at the school. When Exeter’s dramatic new Louis Kahn Library opened across the street from the main campus, Larry helped to organize the student chain that moved more than sixty thousand volumes from the old building to the new. He played water polo and joined one of the school’s club lacrosse teams, and was considered fairly good with a stick. His grades soon recovered from the initial shock of dealing with Exeter’s demanding course load. All this would have been enough for a normal student, but as those who came to know him soon realized, it was all just the surface Larry Lavin.
    This exceptional scholarship student was usually as engrossed in some illicit caper as he was in his schoolwork. On the surface Larry displayed such innocent charm that the faculty at Exeter counseled him to avoid the more rebellious of his classmates, fearing they would lead him into trouble. The truth was, Larry was into things even these students wouldn’t dare. He snuck a TV into his room, against dorm regulations, and then crawled with a wire out on the ledge and up onto the sharply angled roof, a good fifty feet up, and attached it to the housemaster’s big antenna. Somehow Larry had obtained a master key to the dining hall, so he could lead his friends on midnight raids to the commissary storehouse in the basement. Even more impressively, he was the only one who dared sneak a girl into his room and have sex with her, a chubby, unattractive girl from Haverhill named Sherry whom Larry had a crush on in his senior year. It was funny how Larry seemed to get as excited about the logistics of sneaking Sherry into his room as he was about the sex. To Larry, risk was like foreplay.
    As it was in high schools all over the country, marijuana smoking was common at Exeter in the early seventies, despite the prep school’s rigidly enforced expulsion policy. Easily half of the students at Exeter smoked dope. It wasn’t just infatuation with the drug; it was a form of cultural expression, a clear litmus test of cool—an intoxicant with fewer harmful side effects than alcohol, a magical substance that only adults and the uncool condemned. Larry couldn’t afford to buy dope, something that was no problem for his wealthy classmates, so he