Doctor Dealer Read Online Free PDF Page B

always been an unlikely pair: Ricky short and chubby, nervous and shy; Larry tall and skinny, bold and outgoing. Larry’s grandmother had a house by Sunset Lake close to the Baratts’ summer home, and during the summer Ricky and Larry had learned to water-ski and ride horses. Some of those summers Larry had seemed to belong more to the Baratt family than his own. He openly admired the Baratts, with their big suburban home, their lakefront second home, and their boat. “This is the kind of life I want to have someday,” he told Ricky.
    For his part, Ricky knew his parents would like him to exhibit some of Larry Lavin’s levelheaded, hardworking gumption.
    But Ricky knew things about Larry that his parents didn’t. He knew that despite appearances, Larry was as much of a drinker and doper as he was, only these things didn’t seem to have the same debilitating effect on Larry that they had on Ricky. He had introduced Larry to pot, hiding in the Lavins’ garage with Jill and Rusty and Larry passing around a joint awkwardly, enjoying the nervous titillation of
doing something illegal!
After that, Larry and Ricky smoked just about every chance they got. Yet, while Ricky floundered, Larry continued to breeze through school. With Ricky, the drugs and alcohol seemed to crowd everything else out of his life. His first blackout came when he was in the eighth grade. One day in the same year, he dropped acid before going to school. His father had to come and bring him home. It was a terrifying experience. A week later Ricky tried mescaline and barely made it through the day. His grades were terrible. His parents, who were heroically understanding, grew increasinglyfrustrated. When Ricky nearly overdosed on pills at home one afternoon, his father saved his life, forcing him to vomit and pulling him into a cold shower to keep him awake. Despite such catastrophes, despite declining performance in school, despite all his parents’ loving patience and pleadings, nothing seemed to help. Ricky would feel so overwhelmed that the only thing to make him feel better was to get high. So he would call Larry. During summers and vacation breaks he partied night after night with Larry, and marveled at him.
    On one of those lazy, stoned days, in the spring of 1972, Larry had an idea. He showed Ricky a key.
    “Not just any old key,” he explained. “I borrowed a master key to my dorm at Exeter from a senior proctor, and copied it. You should see some of the stuff these guys have in their rooms.”
    Ricky and Larry drove together the twenty miles to the redbrick Colonial campus. Larry opened the front door of the dorm adjacent to Langdell Hall with his key, and then took his friend from home on a tour. He led him down the hall, using the key to open doors to his classmates’ rooms. Ricky felt queasy about it, so at first he resisted taking anything for himself, but he helped Larry carry two big, expensive Advent speakers from one kid’s room. They hauled the speakers out the front door in broad daylight, with Larry grinning, and loaded them gently into the trunk. On one of the last trips Ricky picked up a typewriter. Larry gathered additional stereo components, a shag rug, and helped himself to a tapestry he had admired on another classmate’s wall. He paused to flip through record collections, and picked out albums by groups that he liked: Yes, Pink Floyd, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens. Larry felt no qualms about doing this. These were things that the privileged people at school had that he did not. To Larry, there was something wrong about
that.
    In the car on the way back he told Ricky, “These people are all so rich it’s like nothing to them.”
    Some people blamed Larry’s bad streak on Glen Fuller. Larry was at Cardinal Cushing Academy when he started running with Glen, a thickset rebel with light brown hair and wild pale blue eyes. As a student in elementary school Glen had been the butt of his classmates’ humor; there was