Work began at nine sharp. Larry wanted me there at seven; hell, he never wanted me to leave. I also wanted to go home at six. And Larry had to concede because I was all he had; god help me! If he had his way, I’d sleep at my desk, eat microwaved weight watcher meals and piss in bottles.
For those who haven’t read my first post, this was during the late summer of 1990. I worked for Pennsylvania Real Estate Magnate Larry Marra Sr. Once, he was the biggest real estate guy in the state. You went into his office, and you’d be greeted by a giant map of Pennsylvania, captioned, “Welcome to L. Marra Country!” I think everybody hated that poster. I remember Dave Boyer, the columnist from the Easton Express, writing about how that poster offended him.
This was late in the summer of 1990, and Larry was living the last two years of his life. And the amazing thing is he lasted that long. I described him as “The Picture of Dorian Grey that stepped out of the frame and went into real estate.” And I can’t think of a better description. He was an evil-looking character who had once been tall but shrunk in on himself. I assumed he was in his 80s and learned he was only entering his late 60s. Looking into his blue eyes was like staring into an abyss of rage and madness. Larry survived two or three heart attacks and lived thanks to a double pacemaker.
I already recounted the business reversals and personal betrayals that drove Larry into that house on Wolf St. in Easton, PA. His son stole oil properties and pocketed the profits. Larry’s girlfriend dumped him for domestic abuse, left a few of her deeds behind, and picked up a few of his on the way out. Plus, she took the entire maintenance crew with her. Larry couldn’t afford to hire new staff. Every property he had left was mortgaged to the max. A reasonable man would have known he was in a no-win situation. But Larry didn’t believe in unwinnable situations. He was the James Tiberius Kirk of Real Estate. He had gone to the mattresses in the Wolf St. House and fought a war he couldn’t win.
Larry was literally besieged by people trying to serve him legal papers. He hid in his house, never answering the door, and only aired it out on Sundays when it was against state law to serve court documents. Before starting work, I had to do a security sweep of the entire block. It was the one thing on my to-do list that never changed. I never caught anybody hiding in the bushes and figured Larry was getting paranoid. Until one day, a process server jumped out of the bushes two blocks away and tossed a subpoena through the broken van window. “You’ve been served, Larry, have a nice day!” he laughed as he did a victory jog away from the van. Larry was livid, and I started my security sweeps when I crossed into Easton.
From the outside, Larry’s house looked abandoned. The shrubbery grew to block the front door, and I had to take a side path to get in by the back door. From the inside, the house looked haunted. Larry kept his food on the half-finished back porch. He had a microwave, and it scared the hell out of me every time he used it. He’d set it and run into the kitchen, which looked like it belonged in a Rob Zombie movie. This is why Larry kept his food on the porch. The “Welcome to M. Marra Country” poster hung on the basement door next to the rusting hulk of a refrigerator. I have no memory of ever being in that basement or seeing any unimaginable horrors lurking down there. The one I worked for was bad enough.
Larry resisted any of my efforts to clean the place. Which should have been my first clue that his brain was shutting down. His personal office was filthy with papers, and files were tossed all over the floor. The entire house hadn’t been dusted or vacuumed in years. The hallway near my copying machine had the drywall torn off a wall. The big office in the front room looked like somebody had died in it. But it contained the best legal library in Northhampton County. My workplace was the file room where thousands of deeds were kept in cardboard boxes on rough 2X4 shelves. There was no ventilation in that room. I passed out from lack of oxygen a couple of times.
If I was lucky, he wouldn’t be home when I arrived. That happened a few times a week. Sometimes he would be gone for the entire day, which was idyllic. I’d go through the mail and write “return to sender” on legal-looking envelopes and toss them in the mailbox. Then I’d come back with a cup of coffee and go through my most important duty, checking the newspapers for any articles that mentioned his name. I had to cut them all out and make multiple copies.
Every article was uncomplimentary. Larry was the most hated man in four or five counties. All his properties were crumbling blights, and he didn’t have the staff to maintain them. His every waking hour was dedicated to his legal cases, and he couldn’t afford to pay his lawyers. Newspapers in Northhampton, Lehigh, Carbon, and Bucks counties all had it out for him. A more reasonable person would be a little more conciliatory. But not Larry. He was determined to sue every reporter and newspaper who criticized him.
I wasted a tremendous amount of time making endless copies of articles that said the same thing, “Mow Your Damn Lawns, Larry.” It got tedious after a few weeks. But now and then, some articles weren’t so dull. I came across an editorial that got a bit personal and mentioned that Larry’s ex-wife was also his stepmother. I didn’t copy that one because I was trying to be couth. I reckoned that Larry would want that brushed under the carpet and forgotten.
Did I ever regret that decision! He found out and chewed me out for ten minutes without breathing. I tried to ask him if he had read it. But it didn’t matter. The article was about him. He had tears in his eyes, “it was about me!” he cried, and I felt like shit. Larry loved the attention to the point where even negative attention made him happy. It made him feel as if he were still an important figure in the world. At that point, I realized I was copying just for his ego. And if that doesn’t remind you of our 45th president, reread it.
When left alone, I had tons more copying to do. Going through an entire toner cartridge in a day wasn’t unusual. On top of the morning vanity copying, I also got to xerox tons of records. They were to be used as evidence in the many varied lawsuits that made up Larry’s life. I got to handle the most intimate pieces of Marra history. I found his divorce papers. The ones where he divorced for incest. I also found a few interesting tidbits about his ex-girlfriend. She was a pretty slick operator in Eastern Pennsylvania real estate. I think she did better once she was on her own.
Larry wasn’t making wise decisions. Digging through his records made me wonder why he didn’t deep-six most of it. They didn’t exactly make him look like a saint. I found a couple of handwritten letters between Larry and an oil executive. According to the letters, the executive agreed not to tell Larry Jr. about some oil deals. This is why I decided Larry had been the main crook in that situation. And I believed that for over thirty years until the courts proved otherwise.
Another duty was answering the telephone. That was easy enough when Larry wasn’t around. More times than not, it was an attorney from a county board of health or zoning board demanding that Larry make a repair on his properties. He could have sent me to do some of the work, but I was too busy clipping newspaper articles about him not making those repairs. It was a kind of vicious circle.
A lot of people called looking for someplace to rent or buy. In those cases, I took down addresses and mailed them the lists. I must have mailed out five to twenty lists a day. But to my knowledge, nobody ever called us back on them. Except for one, and that was a dilly.
This crazy truck driver from Pittsburgh saw a house while driving down the interstate and found Larry’s telephone number on the door. And if he were to be believed, Jesus told him that it would be the perfect home to get his family away from the crime and sin of Pittsburgh. As far as I was concerned, Jesus must have hated the guy’s guts to tell him to rent from Larry. But I humored him along. I got his name and address and mailed him the lists. I told him to find the address and call me back.
I forgot all about him for a while and went about my business. But he called me back a week later and told me he couldn’t find the address on the list. So I dragged out my copy and tried to help him find it. And all the time I looked, he was droning on about Jesus having sent him to that house. It was perfect for his family. I checked the list twice and couldn’t find it.
This was not my lucky day. Larry came home from court, and the judge must have chewed him a new one. He looked like he wanted to explode, and I gave him an excuse. I told him there was a potential tenant on the phone, but I couldn’t find the property on the list. Larry berated me for my incompetence and denied that the property wasn’t on the list. He called me “stupid” a couple of times, but on that occasion, he refrained from accusing me of homosexuality. That was another clue I was dealing with a person with dementia. I presented him with a problem that didn’t have a routine answer, and he vented his spleen rather than admitting he didn’t know.
I returned to the phone with tremendous sympathy for Larry’s ex-girlfriend. I never blamed her for dumping him. And with a temper like Larry’s, she showed rare good sense in waiting for him to be in the hospital before she rabbited. At that moment, I was ready to follow in her footsteps. Only the threat of not getting paid kept me from doing it. I returned to the phone to see what I could do with the truck driver. It was my sense of professionalism. I could never leave a customer hanging. If Larry wasn’t going to help me, I was determined to wing it. I hoped the tenant had hung up, but no such luck.
“I’m sorry to keep you on hold,” I said.
“That’s okay because I have a question,” he responded, and my stomach sunk. If I didn’t have an answer, I wouldn’t ask Larry. “Do they turn the oil well off at night?” he inquired.
“The what?” I asked, wondering how that day was going to get worse.
“There’s a big oil well about three feet away from the front porch,” said the Pittsburgh truck driver, who wasn’t the brightest disciple in the congregation. “That thing makes a big racket, and I’m worried it might keep the kids awake at night.”
It speaks very well of my professionalism that I didn’t break down and scream, “we can’t rent you a house with an oil well in the front yard, you motherfucking idiot!” I swallowed air and counted to ten. “Well, that explains why it isn’t on the list,” I said, pretending not to have lost my composure. I sounded calm while silently acting out my frustration by gesturing and making faces at the phone. “We can’t rent you a house with an oil well on it. You should have told me about the oil well.”
“Well, I figured you’d know about the oil well,” he answered. I think that guy must have found Jesus during an acid trip.
“Larry Marra owns thousands of properties,” I replied. “I can’t be aware of everything going on with all of them.”
“But Jesus sent me to that house,” he argued.
“Maybe Jesus didn’t want you to have the house. He just wanted you to call L. Marra Real Estate. Do you still have the lists? Check out the homes we’re actively renting, and we also do rents to own. Find something you like and call us back.”
“Jesus didn’t let me down,” he said. “Thanks, Bill.”
The trucker actually called back a few times, but nobody was around to answer. And I made sure to erase his messages so the boss wouldn’t call him back. If there is a Jesus, he either sent that poor son of a bitch to Larry as a sick joke or knew I wouldn’t let Larry take advantage of him. Whatever that poor guy’s problems, renting from Larry was a sure way to make them worse.
The resident loon came into my workspace as soon as I hung up the phone. “How did it go with that tenant?” he asked.
“There was an oil well three feet away from the front porch,” I told him.
“Well, that’s why it’s not on the list,” he replied, forgetting the verbal abuse he just gave me. He was always in a better mood after venting his spleen. “It must be one of the properties my son stole.” He stopped suddenly and lit into a smile. “But if I rent him the house, that will help establish my claim through the courts,” he said, planning to himself. Then he turned back to me, “can you call him back?”
Larry demonstrated a lack of ethics that can’t be explained away by dementia. He was always that crooked. His mental decline only worsened an already black reputation. That’s why I was shocked to learn his son actually did steal those properties. Everything he did screamed crook.
The next thing I knew, he dumped a massive file on my desk. He told me to write a legal brief and not leave until it was done. He needed it by the following day. I stayed there for an extra two hours, which made Larry happy. He never liked me leaving at six; making me work late was a victory.
Sometimes I would come to work, and Larry would be at a Burger King across the river. He could relax because Pennsylvania process servers couldn’t follow him out of state. Larry spent hours there working on his many legal cases. He constantly refilled his decaf in a soda cup and never paid. I’m surprised the managers never kicked him out of there. Maybe they just felt sorry for the poor old bastard.
It wasn’t unusual for him to call me sometime after three and order me to meet him at a courthouse. Usually, it was in Easton, where he had bench warrants against him. By four thirty, I had to be standing in plain sight outside the courthouse parking lot. Larry would drive by and toss me an envelope without stopping. I took the papers to the clerk’s office while he took off like a bat out of hell.
I usually made it to the court clerk’s office fifteen minutes before closing. I think the clerks felt a little sorry for me. They were always very friendly despite me bringing them more to do at the last minute. “I’m here to file this for ‘Last Minute Larry,” I’d say, and the clerks would crack up. Soon, all the clerks called him “Last Minute Larry,” and it spread to other courthouses. Larry found out about it but never traced it back to me.
There was some method to his last-minute madness. He was overwhelmed by court cases and needed more time to do everything. And he was doing everything with only me for help, and I was learning as I went. So he delayed as much as possible. Filing appeals and other papers at the very last minute gave him days more to prepare.
Then there were the days when he was home. Sometimes I got to actually learn stuff like how to write a legal brief. Larry could be a patient teacher, and I picked things up quickly. There were even times when we would work harmoniously together, filing deeds, checking through files for evidence, or any number of things that needed to be done. But Larry was always as touchy as a hat full of fulminate of mercury. He was so mercurial that I called him “Electric Larry,” after a silly character in an 80s movie. One wrong word, and he would go totally nuts, and I’d be left at the edge of tears. And when I came home, my partner would ask, “how are things in Electric Larry Land?”
Amazingly enough, he occasionally showed a human side. He would break into tears when talking about his ex. He never understood why his ex left him. And I mentioned in an earlier post that he showed apparent remorse over the deputy he accidentally ran over and killed. Then there was the time my mother suffered a major heart attack. He was amazingly supportive and helped my father and me find a hospital to properly treat her condition. I came dangerously close to thinking of him as a friend, so he always shocked me with his frightening flairs of temper and vile language. He was Electric Larry, and nothing would change that.
He’d take me on road trips several times a week. And he was generally good company. “Just think,” he used to joke. “Someday, you can say you knew Larry Marra when he was only a struggling millionaire.” We usually ate at a fast food joint when he made that joke. But to give him credit, he always paid for my meals. But he was in no physical shape for the long distances we had to drive. He’d be Electric Larry again when we returned, cursing and swearing and not letting me go home to my dinner.
He sent me on some insane errands during these trips. He couldn’t attend many of his trials without risking arrest. So he’d wait in a parking lot a few blocks from the courthouse, and I would have to sit for the verdict and report back to him. Once I gave him some bad news, and his heart stopped. His usually green complexion turned paper-white, and he lurched forward. It was a good thing his lawyer came with me. He was the one who caught Larry on the way down. A second later, the old maniac was laughing about his second pacemaker kicking in. He was living entirely due to technology. From that day on, I came to work prepared to find him dead somewhere and carefully checked the house when he wasn’t home.
Sometimes I had to get information from the tax assessor’s office, or I would have to file eviction papers. (Not that I can remember any that had been successfully served. Not by me, at least.) But Strangest of all were the trips we took to tax auctions. You would think twenty-something million dollars worth of property would be enough for anybody. But not Larry. Every scrap of topsoil he owned was mortgaged, second mortgaged, or otherwise in hock. Larry had to pay taxes, fees, insurance, and mortgages on all of it. The proceeds would go to the bank if he sold any property. The only thing he could do was buy more properties and mortgage them.
He usually went to the tax auctions in Carbon and Bucks counties because he didn’t have outstanding warrants. But tax foreclosures weren’t as common in those affluent areas. Besides, Larry preferred the special auctions where they discounted properties nobody wanted for the entire tax bill. One day Larry gave me two thousand dollars cash and the lot number of a property he wanted me to bid on. I had been to enough auctions to know what I was doing. So I went out and did it.
Larry might have been the best general since Sun Sui. Dementia may have clouded his ability to see the big picture, but his attention to detail was exceptional. The tax auction began at one in the afternoon, but he told me to get there between two and two thirty. I don’t know how he did it, but I got there around two ten, and they were nearly ready to auction off the one I was supposed to buy.
They were in the process of auctioning a large house with a detached cottage. From the description, the place was falling apart. A big biker offered the full-back taxes in the first bid. He got it, of course. Then the tax clerk asked for his name and address, and the biker gave the property he had just won as his address.
“Excuse me, but you live on the property?” the clerk asked.
“I live in the cottage,” he replied as he took out a biker wallet and pulled out an unholy wad of cash. “Buying it was easier than moving all my stuff.”
That got a big laugh out of everybody, and a few attendees applauded. I was too nervous to laugh. This was the very first time I had ever bid in an auction. I was so excited; I was on the verge of peeing myself. I trembled like a chihuahua at a cat show and desperately wanted it to start and be over simultaneously.
“Next on the block is property AI33333 (or whatever number it was. You expect me to remember it after 32 years?). The bidding begins at two hundred dollars.” The auctioneer called out.
My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it, and I trembled like a racehorse. I had been living for that moment for the last five minutes, but it felt like hours. My legs jumped without me wanting to. I was out of my seat and yelled, “Two hundred dollars,” at the top of my lungs. The entire room burst into laughter, and I wanted the earth to open and swallow me. The biker gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder on his way out. I guess this wasn’t unusual for somebody’s first tax auction, but that didn’t make things any less humiliating. I sat down and tried to act with a little bit of dignity.
“Two fifty,” the auctioneer said with a big chuckle in my direction.
I waited for the next bid, secure in my two grand budget, but nobody topped my bid. I started getting excited again but managed to keep it under control. Somebody was bound to counterbid. That’s how they did it in the movies.
“Two twenty-five,” the auctioneer said, and my legs wanted to jump again. I had to stop myself from topping my own bid.
“Two hundred one,” the auctioneer called, and there were crickets. “The bid stands at two hundred. Do I hear two hundred one?” he continued, and I braced myself for a second bid that never came. “We have two hundred dollars for this property.” That was my bid. I couldn’t get myself to believe it was so easy. “Two hundred going once.” I was sure somebody was going to top my bid. “Two hundred going twice.” Nobody was bidding against me, and my heart was breaking. Where was the drama I always saw on television? It wasn’t fair!
“AI33333 goes to the young man with the beard and ponytail,” the auctioneer finished, and I was devastated! Not only had I made an ass of myself in public, but I made an ass of myself for a property nobody else even wanted! I could have burst into tears.
“Your name and address, young man?” the tax clerk asked.
“I’m purchasing this for Lawrence Marra Sr,” I replied, and everybody stared at me. And I think their pity was worse than their laughter. I slunk down to the podium wishing the whole thing was over.
“You work for Larry?” asked the auctioneer.
“Times are tough all over,” I replied, trying not to sound bitter.
“You know, they’re hiring over at the Burger King in South Bethlehem,” the tax clerk said as he filled out the paperwork. I had to sigh after I gave him the cash.
“I tried there two days ago,” I replied. “The position is filled. But let me know if you hear about a bomb factory looking for a dud tester.”
That got a friendly laugh. “Don’t worry; something safer will come up,” the clerk said kindly.
“And everybody gets excited at their first auction,” the auctioneer assured me. “You did great for a first-timer.”
“At least you didn’t top your own bid,” the clerk laughed. How did he know I was on the verge of doing just that? “Give our love to Larry,”
Naturally, Electric Larry had to ruin any trace of a victory by being amazed I came back with his 1800 bucks and the deed. He counted the money and checked the receipt three times. That was the moment I stopped even wanting to like him. He could even manage to demean somebody for their integrity. And instead of thanking me for being such a loyal employee, he told me to file it. Then he found another reason to release his venom at me. That was the part when I emotionally ended my employment with him. Two weeks later, my partner discovered I was eligible for unemployment. The next payday, he came close to physically attacking me, but I was quitting that day anyhow.
Larry was living in a state of ever-increasing debt and buying junk properties to take out more loans and bury himself in more debt. Bankruptcy was as inevitable as the massive stroke that felled him at the Easton Courthouse in the early spring of 1992. At the time, I was convinced he was trying to manipulate the courts to steal property from his son. Today I know he was the injured party. I also learned the signs of dementia.
I can’t blame myself for not getting him help because no help was forthcoming. I tried to get intervention, but I simply didn’t have the legal standing to do so. The cops wouldn’t even help me when I reported Larry for urinating in public. I tried calling Larry Jr. to volunteer to testify against his father in a competency hearing, but Junior hung up on me. I must have scared the living crap out of him because if Larry Sr. went into court-appointed conservancy, Larry Jr’s ass would have been grass.
I got my State of California Real Estate License in 2006, and I passed the exam because of all Larry taught me in 1990. Due to what Larry had taught me, I represented myself in court numerous times. I would have been homeless back in 1995 if Larry hadn’t taught me every dirty landlord trick ever written. Larry Marra Sr. was the most influential person in my life, bar none. And the irony of it; I hated his guts. Time, education, and life experience tempered my hatred into a deep pity. As well as intense gratitude for all he taught me. Over time, his memory became a blessing.
The Traumatic 90s 