Free Doctor Dealer by Mark Bowden Page B

Quaaludes—in demand on campus.
    Dill was not as eager as Larry to expand the operation. But shortly after the semester began, he left on a week-long hunting trip to western Pennsylvania. In his absence, Larry paid a routine visit to Chance and Mott to replenish the house dope supply, handing over the standard two hundred dollars. Only this time Larry said he wanted to buy more. He asked them to front him ten pounds—or eleven hundred dollars’ worth of pot.
    “Give me one week,” he said.
    Chance and Mott agreed. Back in his black fraternity room, Larry used his machete and Dill’s scale to cut the dope into pieces. He sold it for ten dollars per ounce. Before the week was up he drove out to pay Chance and Mott their eleven hundred dollars—a whole brown bag full of bills, mostly tens and twenties. The sequence went Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson. It felt good to go to the branch bank and exchange the smaller bills for hundreds, crisp pale green Ben Franklins. After all, Franklin had founded Penn! When Dill returned from his trip that weekend, Larry handed him five bills. It was hard to believe something so slight as these five slips of green paper could be worth so much—five hundred dollars!
    “That’s what I made off your connections this week,” Larry said.
    After that, Dill conceded the pot business to his little brother.
    L.A. was stuck. While he was away over an October weekend, Ed Mott had dropped off forty pounds of pot. Forty pounds! Whowas he trying to kid? The most L.A. had ever ordered at one time was ten pounds. And he had just moved that much over the last two weeks. All of his customers were well stocked. But there it was, filling a large blue American Tourister suitcase on the floor of his living room.
    “Are you kidding me?” he asked Mott, who laughed on the other end of the phone.
    “Don’t worry about it,” said Mott. “Take it on credit. Pay me when you move it. No hurry.”
    “But you’re nuts,” said L.A. “I’m not going to be able to sell it.”
    “Really?”
    “Ed, it’s going to grow mold where it is.”
    “Well, just hang on to it for a while, sell any of it you can.”
    L.A. was annoyed. He knew Mott’s methods. By dropping off that amount he was urging L.A., daring him, to expand his business. There was nearly two thousand dollars in profits there if he could sell it. But he didn’t know where to begin. L.A. was a hulking junior with a broad face and big glasses perched on a wide, crooked nose. His thin, untended brown hair sprayed out like an aura. He was a bit of a loner, an awkward, extremely intelligent young man who liked to stay high—a habit he had started and perfected in high school in California. L.A. had connections in Florida dating back to high school days who were willing to sell him as much or more as Mott could deliver, but he had kept his dealing strictly to a small circle of friends, selling little more than it took to keep him in spending money and to maintain his own steady, free supply. The supply end was L.A.’s strength. How was he going to retail 640 ounces? Yet he knew that if he didn’t sell it, then Mott was just using him to store it, parceling out the risk to his minions. It troubled L.A., but not enough to do anything. His laid-back nickname had stuck for more than one reason. With the exception of a few minor sales, the suitcase was still nearly full when Mott checked back toward the end of November. L.A. told him it was hopeless, and he wasn’t thrilled with having the stuff lying around his apartment.
    “Okay. I’m going to send over this guy named Larry.”
    And within an hour this cheerful, skinny guy with black hair was at the door. L.A. smoked a joint with him. He thought Larry looked awfully clean-cut and wholesome to be dealing with Mott—most of the pot dealers he knew, including himself, were holdovers from the sixties, long-haired goofs who cultivated their own spacedout brand of cool. Larry wore his hair