Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden Page B

give you each two hundred dollars,” said Larry.
    But the effects of drugs are sometimes tricky. So much depends on your state of mind. Evidently, Larry’s guinea pigs wanted the two hundred dollars so much that it warped their judgment, because despite their insistence that the capsules had given them a powerful rush, it was evident within days after the purchase and delivery that the Black Beauties were duds—little better than placebos. Inside the frat house it was a joke. Larry faced facts quickly and slashed the price of his capsules to five cents. He sold off his portion of the buy within a few days, recovering his investment and turning a smallprofit. L.A. and the other investors hung tough—and graduated more than a year later with boxes of black capsules in their closets.
    Matched against the traditional campus dope dealer, who sold only when a shipment came in and even then only to keep himself well stocked, Larry had little trouble cornering Penn’s market. He learned (and liked) the feel of neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills, the preferred unit of currency for underground transactions, crisp pale green Ben Franklins about a half-inch thick. There was something indescribably macho about a bundle of hundreds. Larry got in the habit—which Marcia deplored—of carrying a thick wad of cash around with him at all times.
    Larry was always willing to front dope to people, even those he hardly knew. It just was not in him to distrust others. Larry worked on a principle that most of his friends considered painfully naive: He figured if he treated people well, they would treat him well in return. For most people that was true, but as the months went by the list of tardy debtors grew. In the first months there were only a handful who owed Larry a few hundred dollars total. But the list of names steadily grew. By the end of sophomore year there were more than thirty people on the list, and the total owed was in the thousands. Larry just didn’t worry about it. It bothered L.A. and Ed Mott and other dealers, but not Larry. The amounts he was making far outstripped such losses.
    It all happened so fast that Larry never even had time for second thoughts. By spring of 1975 the business had made him one of the most popular students on campus. He was making what seemed like a lot of money, even though, after paying off interest and splitting the profits with L.A., he was earning only a few thousand dollars on a hundred-pound deal. Toward the end of sophomore year he moved into more spacious quarters in the fraternity, a two-room suite that was painted a shade of green close to the color of money. He bought himself a ’66 Chevy Nova for three hundred dollars and also a leather coat. But most profits were poured back into the next deal.
    Dope dealing swept Larry up as surely as addiction sweeps up its victims. It played just the right chords in his personality. It allowed him to capitalize at once on his cynicism, his playfulness, his hypersociability, his ambition. It challenged his mind and satisfied his appetite for risk.
    The business went, as Larry would put it later, “from nothing to
zoom!”

THREE
Less Risk, More Exposure
    Larry moved in with Marcia in the spring semester of his junior year, 1976. They had been sleeping together most nights for more than a year, and Larry had kept clothes in her closet and books in her place all that time. But Marcia knew they were really living together when Larry carried in his stereo. He set up the big Advent speakers he had bought back from Paul Mikuta in two corners of the bedroom.
    Marcia only recently had moved out of an apartment she had shared with two friends for more than a year. There had been trouble between her and her roommates for some time, mostly over Larry. Marcia had moved with them from the Quad into an apartment at 4002 Spruce Street during junior year. It was over a barbershop and two doors away from University Pinball, a favorite off-campus hangout. Her