Free Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden

penknife, he chipped away at the putty around a small pane that had recently been replaced, and removed it. He reached inside and unlocked the window, and stepped inside.
    Larry found himself standing in darkness in an empty bathtub. When’ his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he crept over to a pile of clothes draped over the back of a chair and rooted through the pockets. He found a bundle of keys. Then he climbed out the window and back down to Paul.
    One of the keys opened the front door. They went directly to the moose head and lifted it off the wall. After carrying it across campus, thrilling in their daring and good fortune, they deposited it in Phi Delta Theta’s foyer. It had all gone so smoothly, Larry and Paul didn’t want to stop. They went back for more. This time they wrestled a heavy, prized poker table out the front door, delivering it to Phi Delta Theta shortly before dawn. More items were collected over the next few weeks, much to the surprise and delight of Larry’s prospective fraternity brothers. Eventually ZBT was summoned to recover its belongings amidst catcalls and jeers. Larry stole anotherfraternity’s official flag, and when a group from that house tracked him down and came to retrieve it, Larry displayed a machete that he had bought at an army-surplus store in Boston—its blade was heavy and had a sinister bend. The group backed off. When a complaint was filed with the frat council about his machete, Larry was contrite. He agreed to return the flag. So he and Paul Mikuta climbed up in the Quad rafters and captured two pigeons. They wrapped them in the flag, put it in a box, and left it on ZBT’s front porch. The fraternity recovered a soiled flag and had a hell of a time catching the frightened pigeons.
    Larry ran up more scavenging points than any pledge before or since. In the process he became one of the house’s most popular characters before he was officially even a brother.
    By the end of freshman year, Larry’s relationship with Marcia Osborn had moved beyond friendship. Though Marcia was still writing to her high school boyfriend at Penn State, Larry’s persistence and charm had gradually worn away her resolve. They were in bed together often in her room at the Quad during spring semester, where Larry would often return with ridiculous stories about things he had taken, things he had done. Larry brought out maternal tendencies in Marcia; he was someone who needed to be loved in spite of himself. Larry was wild, but his drug use was really no more extreme than that of many freshmen in the Quad, and his grades were considerably better than most. Their personalities complemented each other, Larry affording Marcia a bit more joy and excitement than she had known, and Marcia offering Larry a reliable base of affection. Larry was reckless, loud, and impulsive, while Marcia was cautious, quiet, and analytical. Larry trusted and liked people instantly, while Marcia could spend months and years with a person before developing trust and affection. She committed her heart more cautiously than Larry did, but once committed, Marcia was like a rock. She figured that time would wear out Larry’s wildness, and that her own good sense would ultimately prevail.
    Larry didn’t tell Marcia about the other girls. His relationship with her was to be the most important, but not the only one.
    At the beginning of sophomore year Larry moved into Phi Delta Theta. He chose a room on the second floor of the thirty-room mansion, overlooking the front door, and began an ambitious paint job. Larry wanted to paint a fluorescent spectrum across his walls against a black backdrop in imitation of the cover of
Dark Side of the Moon,
an album by Pink Floyd, as though the colors were spilling on the wall from a giant prism. He got as far as painting his room pitch black and the ceiling white. Then things got busy.
    Over the summer after freshman year, Larry had worked in the giant Converse factory in Haverhill. When