Looking past the nutty old shitbird at the wheel, I could see the abandoned strip mines out the driver’s side window. It was like looking at pictures from a distance, each mine framed by rectangles of roads. Nature was already taking over those abandoned coal mines, and trees and bushes grew out of the ugly scars on the earth. We were almost halfway up the mountain, and it was a hundred-foot drop to the bottom. The higher we got, the prettier the strip mines became. And to make it even more terrifying, we were riding a twenty-year-old Oldsmobile van with bad struts. It wasn’t bouncing much because there was a seven hundred pound Xerox machine lashed down in the back. And the driver had two pacemakers and could keel over dead at any moment.
It was late in June, and the year was 1990. Poppa-Doc Bush was still in office. Bethlehem Steel was closing down, and I couldn’t get my old payroll clerk job back if I wanted it. There were no accounting jobs to be had. I tried to get out of sales, and I figured this job might get me the experience to get into real estate. And it did. But I worked for two fifty per hour with nothing taken out for social security or income tax to earn the experience. This was the beginning of the gig economy.
Today, you can apply to Lyft or Uber as an independent contractor. Back then, you needed to know someone. The guy I knew ran a mineral store as a front but made his real money dealing PCP and guns. My acquaintance also got cash awards for employees sent to people who wanted to avoid paying taxes. That’s how I met the madman driving us up the mountain.
So I went to see Larry the one evening in his home on Wolf Avenue in Easton, Pennsylvania. It used to be a wealthier part of the city. Most of the Victorian mansions had been converted to apartments. At one time, Larry owned every house on the street. His was the shabbiest on the road. The lawn hadn’t seen a mower in years, and shrubbery blocked off the front door. It looks much better today than when I worked there. A big guy with a black beard and biker denim intercepted me on the way to the door to demand my business. He brought me to the back door. The Pagan MC was Larry’s next-door tenant and security as part of the rent.
The house looked even worse inside. Larry waited for me in the kitchen, which had the sink pulled out and a jumble of pipes and wires coming out of the wall. The stove was all dried grease and rust, and I didn’t want to know what was in that refrigerator. Larry sat at the stained wooden table, and I thought I was in the presence of a two-day-old corpse. Until he looked up at me with those furiously angry blue eyes. My new boss looked like the “The Portrait of Dorian Gray,” stepped out of the frame and went into real estate.
According to Larry, He had over twenty million dollars tied up in various properties. I inventoried them and came up with twenty-five million and change. Larry also claimed that his son and ex-girlfriend stole about fifteen million dollars worth of properties from him. And it all happened when he was in the hospital recovering from having a second pacemaker put in. Larry was especially furious that his son served him with papers while Larry was fresh out of the operating room. Then he came home to discover deeds had been stolen and replaced by falsified sales records. Plus, Larry’s girlfriend left him and took a few of his properties with her. And I thought he handled that betrayal the hardest. It was the first of two times I saw him hold back tears.
Unfortunately for me, I already had much of the experience Larry needed. I learned to do title searches from my father. Plus, I was an accountant. So I took the job out of desperation and survived the most brutal paralegal course this side of bedlam. The first thing I learned about Larry was he loved to hate. I swear, his pacemakers worked off pure hatred. Only the power of hate kept those pacemakers from frying when he stuck a frozen dinner into the microwave, pushed the button, and ran like hell. My own heart stopped in fear of having to give him mouth-to-mouth. Larry was utterly mad.
On the first day of the job, we absolutely had to go to Quakertown for a new copier. We could have bought one in Allentown or Bethlehem, except Larry was a wanted man in those cities. He had outstanding warrants for the board of health violations on several properties. He couldn’t afford the fines due to his legal fees. We were already in the car when he got around to telling me I was also his bodyguard. My duty was to get between Larry and the process servers.
Road trips were the best part of working for Larry. He was almost human when he drove, and I got a glimpse of the genius the man used to be. Larry had fifty years of business experience and shared them freely. I got a solid grounding in real estate, finance, and the legal system just from riding with him. Otherwise, I would have left after the first day.
Larry predicted that Donald Trump would run for president during that first road trip in 1990. Larry made his money the same way Trump’s father made his fortune; through income tax refunds. Between 1946 and 1987, all you had to do was buy a few apartment buildings, and the government would give you large tax subsidies for renting them. If you purchased enough residential housing, you could get millions in tax rebates. The US Treasury became a perpetual money machine, and if you added local rent control ordinances, Section 8 housing, and state programs. Even an idiot like Fred Trump could become a millionaire.
Then in 1987, Congress changed the tax code, and millions of dollars in tax rebates ended overnight. It wasn’t possible to maintain high profits on just rent. Rent subsidies like Section 8 were being cut yearly. By the time I met Larry, he had lived on loans secured against his properties. That was how most private landlords survived after the tax code changed. Trump was no different Trump needed to create a reputation of success to expand. He certainly made himself attractive to Russian banks. So there’s no doubt in my mind that Putin owns Donald Trump’s body and soul.
We came home with a late model Xerox copier about the size of a living room sofa, and he ordered me to bring it into the house by myself. That s when I realized how nuts the man was. He yelled and shouted at me until I told him I quit. That stopped him dead. He looked a little sheepish and asked if I would still show up the next day. I said yes as long as I didn’t have to break my back on that copier. We ended up driving around with that damned thing for a week.
That’s how we ended up driving up a mountain with a 700-pound copier in the back. Sane people would have taken the highway to Jim Thorpe, but Larry had warrants out on him. Not to mention we were riding in a van with his name emblazoned on the side. He insisted on driving the back road to avoid the police. That’s how we ended up driving up a mountain with a copier lashed in the back of the van. The van was climbing at a forty-degree angle, and the rope was fraying along with my nerves. My sphincter tightened every time we took a curve.
We were close to the top, and the twists and turns were getting pretty intense. Larry had been expounding on the finer points of judge shopping but fell silent as the road got more challenging. We were so high up the strip mines looked like postage stamps, and there was a solid wall of granite out my window. We took a hairpin right, and the cheap rope snapped. The copier started clog dancing, and Larry had to fight the steering wheel to stay on the road.
The van tipped on two wheels. I heard the mountain scraping paint off the roof. Thank god we tipped towards the mountain instead of the long drop. I could only see sky and clouds out the driver-side window. Larry’s face had turned pale green. I held back a scream, and it hurt my chest. The road straightened. Two wheels slammed back on the road. A second rope snapped, and nothing stopped that copier from rolling all over the back of the van. I don’t know how Larry managed to keep us on the road. The copier came down hard, and I heard a strut go boing. The left wheel bounced up while the rest of the van slammed down hard enough to make my teeth snap. Larry pulled over, and I had to check to see if I peed myself. We looked at each other and cracked up, just like in the movies.
My wife told me I should have gotten out and hitchhiked home. I might have if I weren’t halfway up a mountain heading to a place I had only been to once before. At least I managed to get the copier lashed down without Larry getting in my way. His face had turned cadaver green while the second pacemaker kicked in. Larry recovered when I finished, and we headed into the city of Jim Thorpe.
Larry was there for a tax sale. I was there to follow him around with his briefcase, so he could feel important. We got to the auction just as the house the nut wanted was on the block. I got to watch while he stood and raised his finger for each bid until he won at $6000. This was the genius that was Larry. His corporation let go of that property for taxes. Nobody else wanted it, so Larry waited until it hit the distressed property auction and saved himself tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes for recovering it. And he had still another useless house he could finance for a couple of million dollars.
I decided to ride home with him since he promised we’d be going back via the highway. It was early evening, and the police would be changing shifts. I was following him back to the van when I spotted a narc. He was a short fat guy staring at us with beady little eyes. He practically had “petty authority” tattooed on his forehead.
Larry saw him too and made a low bestial sound in his throat before pushing past me and striding towards the fat guy in the three-piece suit, who was marching towards Larry. I thought they would start beating on each other, but they stopped inches away, and Larry started screaming in the guy’s face. His face blotched red and green while the little fat guy just turned beet red. Larry was tossing out all his favorite insults like faggot and homosexual, while the shorter guy was calling Larry a cheap crook and fucking slumlord.
The short guy just turned on his heel and walked away, letting Larry crow in victory. He was grinning like a ghoul when he got back to the van. “That was the Carbon County Health Commissioner,” he explained, “The little faggot wants my real estate license.”
That was life with Larry. He lived for hate, and he hated everybody. But the person he hated most in this world was his son. One day I took a call from Larry’s ex-wife and handed her over to the boss. The old lady did one of those deals where she handed her son the phone, hoping for reconciliation if she could get them talking. Larry totally lost his shit and started screaming over the phone. Larry must have shouted non-stop for ten minutes without losing his breath. He called his son the foulest names you can imagine, as well as accusing him of homosexuality. He slammed the phone down and smiled in bliss. There was nothing that put him in a better mood than dumping on his kid.
One moment he could be the soul of patience. He spent hours teaching me the finer points of writing a legal brief, and the next second he was a raving madman. There was no way to predict his temper, and it got worse over the three months I worked for him.
Once that copier was up and running, Larry’s entire life became an open book to me, and Stephen King couldn’t write such a terrifying story. Not only did I get to watch his charming phone manners, but I was privy to his private legal files. I was shocked when I found out he divorced his wife for incest. She was his stepmother, and she was still suing him for ownership of the house she lived in. I lost count of the board of health complaints. Then there was the criminal complaint the EPA leveled at him for trying to illegally dispose of a warehouse full of expired paint. But, most shocking of all was the wrongful death suit. Larry actually killed a Northampton County Deputy who tried to serve him with a subpoena. The poor guy’s wife was suing on behalf of his infant son.
I told myself the situation with his stepwife wasn’t my business. Still, I had to confront Larry about the dead deputy. To my surprise, he showed genuine remorse over the incident. According to Larry, he was pulling out of a restaurant parking lot, and the deputy got in the way, and Larry hadn’t seen him. The coroner ruled it an accident, so Larry didn’t go to jail. He refused to contest the wrongful death suit and let his insurance cover it. That was the second time I saw him fight back the tears. It was touching to know there was some humanity left under the madness.
Then there were times he seemed to act crazy for the sake of acting crazy. Like the time I had to serve my first eviction notice. It took me thirty years to figure this one out. The house was in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Bethlehem. And the house was just too well kept to be one of his properties. He gave me some papers and told me to keep knocking on the door and make sure I hand the papers to whoever answered the door.
I leaned on the doorbell, but nobody answered. I did get the dogs excited. There were too large dogs barking up a storm. I tried to go back when it was apparent nobody was home, and Larry would have a fit and screamed at me to go back. Finally, he said, “I can see them hiding behind the curtains.” The dogs were utterly freaked, and I could see them through the picture window.
“Those are dogs!” I said with as much patience as I could muster. In another couple of weeks, I’d be screaming right back at him, but that was before I learned that manners were wasted on Larry. He shut up and walked to the window. Those dogs must have been as crazy as he was. They barked loudly enough to wake a statue.
He came back with a look of horror on his face, like a priest who found a turd floating in the holy water font. “That house has hardwood floors,” he said. “What the hell is she doing letting dogs in that house?”.
That’s when he got around to explaining that the house was one of the properties he was suing his ex-girlfriend over. He wanted to establish that he was the legitimate landlord to improve his legal claim. We came back that Saturday afternoon, but this time the plan evolved. Instead of having me serve the eviction papers, Larry went up to the door with me following behind with his briefcase. The lady of the house answered, and every nerve in my body screamed, “don’t fuck with her!” She was an attractive brunette in expensive sweats and perfectly done. She was every inch a professional and not the type of tenant Larry was used to dealing with.
Larry acted so damn nice it didn’t seem sincere, but that was just how he was. He couldn’t do nice if his life depended on it. Larry explained his side of the story, but it didn’t look like the tenant was overly impressed. She was less impressed when he magnanimously offered her a new lease instead of an eviction notice. The new lease included a hundred buck raise in the rent and an extra deposit of 500 dollars per dog. I was pretty sure he was opening himself up to a fraud conviction. I figured the tenant thought so by the look on her face. She pointedly ignored the pen that Larry hopefully waved at her.
“My husband won’t be coming back until tomorrow night,” she said coldly. “You know we have to sign it together.” Pennsylvania’s a joint property state, and Larry seemed shocked that she knew it. He had no idea how to handle a tenant who wouldn’t be bullied.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to evict you if you don’t sign it,” he weakly threatened and seemed to shrink when the tenant said, “I’ll show this to my husband, and we’ll get back to you.”
We got a letter from the tenant’s attorney a few days later. The tenants were paying their rent into a court-supervised escrow until legal ownership was established. And Larry went nuts in a way I never saw before. I expected him to start yelling, screaming, and chewing the furniture. But he went dead pale and silent. For a moment, I was afraid that both pacemakers stopped, and he was about to keel over. But he told me to get the van ready in a dangerous voice.
I followed him into the Bethlehem Police Station near Moravian College a half-hour later. Usually, Larry avoided police stations like Dracula avoided hallowed ground. But he fearlessly approached the desk sergeant despite the warrants. He declared he had squatters on his property, and he wanted them out. I never heard him speak with such conviction.
The desk sergeant was a heavy-set African American going bald and sported a cop mustache. He was the kind of desk sergeant who smiled no matter how crazy the person at his desk was. And he smiled in an avuncular way as he called down a superior to deal with Larry. Two plainclothes cops came in to see us. The lieutenant was a big sandy-haired guy who looked like an athlete doomed by too many donuts. The other cop was younger and in better shape. I assumed he was there in case of an arrest. So there I was with my long hair tied into a ponytail and my George Harrison mustache and Grateful Dead shirt standing at the police officer’s desk. At the same time, two cops brought my batshit crazy boss into a glass conference room. I was frozen in terror like a deer in the headlights.
“You know I only work for him,” I said to the desk sergeant, trying to sound calm.
“The MacDonald’s in South Bethlehem’s hiring,” he replied. “Mention my name.”
Larry sat at the oval conference table with the other two cops. He turned back to watch the show. My boss took a copy of the Bethlehem legal code from his briefcase. He repositioned it so the detectives could better see the paragraph was pointing at. I couldn’t hear through the soundproof glass, but both plainclothes cops stood and looked at the book.
“I’m not really a part of this,” I reminded the desk sergeant. Things seemed to be going well, which made me even more nervous.
“It’s okay,” the sergeant replied and laughed harder. The senior cop with the lighter hair had back down and calmly explained something to Larry, unaware that god almighty himself didn’t explain things to Larry. And Larry’s face was getting the tell-tale red and green splotches that warned of an oncoming temper tantrum. I knew what would happen and looked away for a moment and shuddered. When I looked back, Larry was screaming at the cops. The cops shouted back. And the desk sergeant leaned back in his chair, laughing. I wondered if I would look guilty if I just left at that moment and stopped caring. My legs refused my order to run like hell, and I stood there waiting to go to jail.
“It’s a civil matter.” The lieutenant yelled as his partner opened the door. And Larry was saying in his high-pitched shriek, “it’s right there in the property laws! You have to arrest them.”
They passed me on the way to the door. The younger cop rushed past me to open the door, and I took a step closer to the desk. The lieutenant shoved Larry out the door and yelled, “come back, and I’ll arrest you!”
Then the lieutenant turned on me, and his younger partner came up behind me as if to block my escape. “That’s the way it goes,” I remember thinking. “He gets kicked out, and I get arrested.”
“Your grandfather needs to be in a home,” the lieutenant growled at me as he left me a direct route out the door. This time my legs carried me out before I even had a chance to give the order. “He’s not my grandfather. I’m just his trained monkey,” I called over my shoulder as I left. The spot between my shoulder blades itched as if I were about to be shot.
“Mention my name at MacDonald’s,” the sergeant yelled to my retreating back. Of course, I went to the MacDonald’s first chance I got, but the position had already been filled, and I was stuck with that madman.
I spent the next thirty years wondering about that incident. I put it down to Larry cheering himself up by making a new enemy. And while it was consistent with Larry, there were too many other unaccounted factors. That answer didn’t even make Larryish logic. It never occurred to me that Larry was the actual owner.
Last year, I was working on an earlier version of this memoir, and I googled Larry’s name. I found a newspaper article about Larry’s estate finally being settled after thirty years. And the hell of it was is that both Larry’s son and ex-girlfriend had stolen from him. In the case of his ex, I like to think it was an honest mistake. She took the opportunity to grab her deeds and run from the abusive sonuvabitch. Some of Larry’s deeds ended up with her, and she left a few of hers with Larry. The properties were swapped back. In the case of Junior, it was much more sinister.
Poor Larry was experiencing Homer Simpson’s dilemma. He didn’t care if he was called on an actual lie. Hell, I did that three times daily, and he always took it in good grace. (At least for him.). But Larry was in the situation of telling the truth, and nobody believed him. His mind was also as distressed as his properties, and he was no longer competent to represent himself. It must have been so frustrating!
There was also the fact that Larry was always the sort of goniff who gave other crooks a bad name. I was the guy who spent at least 24 hours a week arranging his files for court. And I wasn’t a fan of what I was learning about Larry and his business practices. Then came the day I came upon a copy of a note about oil right negotiations. Larry requested the negotiations be kept secret from his son. That did it for me. I was convinced that Younger Larry was the injured party from that moment on. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Younger Larry actually stole the most valuable properties his father owned.
It was pretty evident that the police lieutenant was right. Larry needed to be in a home. He lived in filth and refused to let me do any cleaning. His memory was so bad that I got calls at home because Larry couldn’t find things. Sometimes he would be such a pest I had to come into the office after midnight to find them where they belonged. Of course, he never showed any appreciation. Plus, the rage was getting worse and even less predictable. He would give me carefully detailed instructions and have a temper tantrum after I did precisely what he told me to do.
One time he told me to serve a summons to a lawyer. He repeated that I was only supposed to give the papers to the attorney. I thought he was wrong at the time. Usually, I handed the summons to the receptionist and went about my business. But I was near the end of my third month and knew better than contradicting him. The attorney disappeared into his private sanctum as soon as I stepped into the waiting room, and I stood there for a good fifteen minutes before I gave up and served the secretary. Of course, Larry had a temper tantrum and denied telling me not to leave until I served the lawyer in person.
His mind was slipping. But at the time, I was more pissed than concerned. I was ready to quit before I found a new job. After the lawyer incident, I decided that Friday was my last day. I was going to get my pay and walk out. That way, the old coot wouldn’t stiff me.
I admit I made that decision twice a day. Still, the bleak employment situation kept me coming back for another week. But as that day progressed, the decision was engraved in stone. We had a tax appeal to prepare for, but he took me to Allentown instead. It was on a street of wooden townhouses the city was famous for. And there was no doubt which house Larry owned. His front lawn was overgrown with crabgrass and dandelions escaping to the yards on either side. Also, the porch was sagging and full of debris. Somebody was living there because I could hear a TV behind the door.
Larry pulled out his giant s keyring and made a big show of finding the right key, opened the door, and we stepped into the outdoors. The whole house was fire gutted. The back wall had burned down entirely. Both side walls had been fire-damaged, and the entire roof had collapsed. Still, all I could focus on was the missing back wall, and the sound of “The Price is right coming out from under a stairway to nowhere. It would have been funny on TV, but it made me dizzy in real life.
A door tiny under the stairway opened, and this hairy creature crawled out. I stifled a scream and jumped backward. I didn’t recognize it as human until it got up on its hind legs, and my brain reconfigured the monster as a naked old man with a bandage wrapped around his loins. It took me another second to recognize him as one of the more colorful street people who wandered around Easton and Phillipsburg. For a dollar, he would tell your fortune with his pendulum, which was a massive nut from an old truck engine suspended from a piece of greasy rope. You asked yes or no questions, the pendulum would swing, and every answer was wrong.
“Everything’s okay with the rent, Larry?” he asked. I was suddenly so angry my stomach turned to a burning rock. That old bastard was charging the old man rent for sleeping in a burned-out building? I don’t think I ever hated anybody as much as I hated Larry right then.
“You’re paid up until December,” Larry assured him. “You go rest now. I brought this guy to help me.”
The old man’s name was Harry, and I was fond of him and enjoyed the show he put on with his homemade pendulum. Larry informed me he had just had a hernia operation. The state wasn’t going to pay for him to recover in a decent room, so Harry’s cousin paid Larry to give him a place to stay. I knew Larry was looking at a total financial disaster because he didn’t have the money to cover all his loans. But I couldn’t believe he was so desperate to charge somebody to live in that dump.
We came to finish restoring a tiny room that could have been an office in better days. And Larry even had a tenant lined up for that. But at least that part of the roof hadn’t fallen in. There was a power saw, a toolbox, and paint. I painted the soot-covered ceiling while Larry finished putting up new paneling. It could have been a bonding experience if I hadn’t been so freaked out about Harry. All I could think of was how to budget my last paycheck to last until I got paid.
Salvation came at the hands of my wife. She had discovered that I was eligible for unemployment. She wanted me to quit right then, but I insisted on staying the week to make sure I got paid. Not only that, but I was going to pull some overtime. That way, I’d have a better bridge.
Larry didn’t show up until three o’clock the next day. It had gotten to the point where I cherished infrequent times when he would hole up at the Burger King in Phillipsburg. The old skinflint would shamelessly refill his soda cup with decaf and work on his legal papers. Sometimes he would call and tell me to meet him at a courthouse so I could run into the clerk’s office and file something five minutes before closing time.
This time was different. I no sooner got to Larry’s house when a deputy came to the door and knocked for five minutes before he went around to the back and shouted for Larry. Following instructions, I hid upstairs until he left. These were the days before everybody had phones in their pockets, so I had no way to get in touch with the boss. This was very unusual because the deputies usually dropped their paperwork on the front porch. I was afraid that Larry died owing me for three days of work.
I was almost glad to see him when he showed up late that afternoon. He informed me that the deputy at the door had a bench warrant. Since Larry wasn’t home, the Easton PD picked him up when he stopped to get a paper. They booked him and stuck him in a cell for an hour or so. Then they brought him up before a county magistrate. He was served with a half-ton of papers from four counties that included nearly a hundred grand in fines. The magistrate also gave him two weeks to mow the lawns on his problem properties or face months of jail time. He pretended the whole thing was funny, but he knew he had reached the end. Larry didn’t have the resources to keep fighting his son and ex-girlfriend, plus all this other stuff. He declared that we would have to prepare for bankruptcy. But first. the tax appeal.
The logical thing to do was for me to do the lawn work. But I think Larry was very scared and making even worse decisions than usual. He insisted on going out to mow the grass by himself, leaving me home to prepare for the tax appeal. At the time, I didn’t even know you could appeal property taxes, but I could operate a lawnmower with the best of them. The old l lunatic went off on me when I suggested reverse jobs. So Larry went out into the early September heat to mow the lawns while I tried to teach myself property tax law. Of course, I accomplished nothing, and Larry took all his frustration out on me when he came back. But I stuck it out until Friday.
Friday came, and of course, my last day was filled with drama. Larry was asleep on his air mattress when I got in, and he started screaming as soon as he opened his eyes. Around noon, he got dressed and went to mow a few more lawns. At that point, I looked forward to a long leisurely lunch and to amuse myself until he came home with my pay. Then it was going to be “see ya’, Larry.” I spent my last morning following his pointless and contradictory orders.
I didn’t even get lunch. Larry had a trailer hitched to the van with the broken strut, and he tore through his narrow driveway like a bat out of hell. The van ran its bad wheel over the curb and bounced like a super ball. The trailer jumped to the side, and a back tire blew. And Larry kept on going with his back right wheel setting sparks from the rim. I watched the whole debacle from the bathroom window. A I wanted was to get my pay and go home. But under twenty minutes later, he called and told me to bring a jack.
The only jack he had was in his van. But I took a long leisurely look around anyway because I didn’t want to deal with Larry’s crap. I walked the two blocks to where he was parked in a residential neighborhood. H was lying on the pavement, trying to lift the trailer by himself. The only jack he owned was bent and useless on the ground next to him.
“Did you bring a jack?” he asked.
“Sorry, I told you that was the only jack you have. If you like, I can call my father and ask if we could borrow his,” I offered.
“Then lift up the trailer so I can put on the spare wheel,” he commanded.
“Larry, that’s impossible,” I said as gently as I could.
He was usually reasonable in these situations, and the verbal abuse was saved until after I saved his ass. But this time, he just snapped. I think I witnessed the madness winning over the genius. The old bastard went nuts and started screaming at me. He blamed me for busting the tire and for breaking the jack. I was accused of sodomy, homosexuality, and sundry acts of faggotry. His fists came up in a boxing stance. His heart stopped in the middle of it and caused him to stagger forward while the backup pacemaker kicked in. People came out of their houses to see what all the shouting was about. They recognized Larry, and suddenly, I had a cheering section wanting me to knock his block off.
I was close to doing it. I was so mad I was in tears. I decided to walk away; instead, salary be damned. I was stopped by one of Larry’s biker tenants. He pulled up in an old panel truck, got out, and gentled Larry like a horse. As the biker had everything in hand, I stuck around because I wanted my pay. He was a tall thin guy with a gray streak in his long black beard. We took the tractor off the trailer used his jack to take off the bad wheel, which he managed to fix with the tools he had in the back of his truck. It was a mobile service station. He even had a tire for the wheel. All all the while, he tried to gentle me like a horse and assure me that Larry didn’t mean it.
After five, the helpful biker got back in his truck and drove off. I let my spine stiffen as I prepared to demand my pay. He acted like I was holding a gun on him on payday at his best. He was worse this time, demanding that I go back to work and he’d pay me when he finished mowing the lawns. I reminded him that I missed lunch, and he could either pay me now to get a burger, or I could go home for dinner and come back in the morning.
He didn’t like it, but he pried a hundred and fifty dollars out of his wallet. It doesn’t sound like much today, but that’s what you could expect from a minimum wage job after taxes. Prices were low enough to contribute to necessities until that first unemployment check. M hand was in my pocket, pulling out his keys, just he said, “I’m cutting your pay. You’re not worth two-fifty an hour. If you want the same pay, you’re going to have to work twice the hours.”
He looked pretty damned surprised when I dropped his keys on the dashboard and turned away without a word. ” ll, suit yourself,” he said as if I were about to negotiate.
“Fuck you, Larry,” I replied, and those were the last words I ever said to him. It would be the perfect line to end this story. But alas, Larry was a curse that wasn’t finished with me.
He came back to haunt me during my unemployment interview. Larry sent unemployment a handwritten letter denying I’d ever worked for him because I was “unqualified for the position.” Needless to say, I was outraged and demanded an immediate appeal. T guy at the desk promised me he would approve my claim if I could prove that Larry was lying. I told him I’d be back in under an hour.
Thanks to Larry, I knew exactly what to do. It took me forty-five minutes to walk up to the county courthouse and back. In between, I went to the court clerk’s office and copied a few legal papers with my name as Larry’s agent and/or employee. I had become such a familiar face in the county clerk’s office that I was greeted by name and chatted with the secretaries.
I returned to the unemployment office and dropped the forms on the interviewer’s desk. Of course, my claim was approved. . He gave a few weak arguments, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.
A few months went by. It was heading to Christmas, and my family had just moved into a new apartment. I was sitting on my porch with a cigarette, minding my own business, and what should I see but Larry’s van bouncing down South Main Street. He slowed and parked right in front of my new place. I panicked, ditched my smoke, and ran inside. I didn’t understand how he could know I was living there. I peeked through the curtains as he got out of the van and walked to the front of his truck.
It would have been horrifying enough if he had come to see me, but what happened next was worse. He stopped in front of his vehicle, pulled down his zipper, took out his Johnson, and drained the lizard right on my sidewalk. I broad daylight with foot traffic. I squawked in horror, and my wife and kids came running to see what was going on. I spreadeagled myself against the door to keep the kids from being traumatized for life.
There was no doubt that Larry’s mind was completely gone. T poor son of a bitch had become a hate-fueled shell of his former self. H was wandering around following the call of nature anywhere he happened to be. T problem was convincing somebody to do something. T police wouldn’t even take a report. Larry was a millionaire, and no upstanding law officer would believe a millionaire would piss on a proletariat’s sidewalk. The same class protection that keeps outright crooks like Donald Trump from being prosecuted also protected Larry from the help he needed.
What other ethical choice did I have except to call Larry Junior and offer to help him put his father in a home? I had been considering doing it while working for Larry. The only thing holding me back was the niggling doubt that Larry Sr. might be innocent. If I sided with Junior, I might be causing an injustice. But I decided that letting Larry run lose and piss all over the world would be an even bigger injustice.
“Good morning,” I said over the phone. ” my name’s Bill Dunlap, and I used to work for your father. I’m afraid for his safety. I’ve seen him urinating in public, and he is not safe behind the wheel.” He hung up between “good morning” and “the wheel.” I was handing him his victory. The state would take over his affairs once Larry Sr. was declared incompetent. Larry wouldn’t be harassing Junior with endless court cases, and Younger Larry’s life would become much easier. It took me thirty years before I realized how close I was to sending Younger Larry to jail.
Larry Junior covered his own ass by letting his senile father go feral and peeing on everything. Not only had he swiped properties from his father, but he conspired with a notary to hide the theft. If the state authorities had gotten involved, Junior could have spent at least two and a half years in prison and lost his real estate license.
I was infuriated at Younger Larry’s lack of concern. At the time, I attributed it to him being so furiously angry at the old man. I spotted Larry pissing in a supermarket parking lot and wasn’t willing to let it go. As a last resort, I went to see Mr. Dave Boyer of the Easton Express. He had been such an influential voice against Larry and his scofflaw ways that the old loon was ready to initiate a libel suit against him. B er was a physically impressive fellow who was built like Bruce Wayne. H was sympathetic and agreed with me that Larry needed professional care. But there was nothing we could do. So I let him interview me about Larry’s living conditions hoping to shame Junior into doing something. Of course, nothing did but at least I tried.
Larry Marra Sr. died on March 11, 1992. An Easton press reporter called me a few minutes after it happened. “Di d you hear Larry Marra died?” she asked point-blank. She must have put it that way to shock me. Because I couldn’t possibly have known, the body was still lying on the Northampton Courthouse parking lot. She told me he had died in bankruptcy court while screaming at his son. I ould picture him having one of his hissy-fits while the judge banged the gavel demanding order. I ended up laughing, which was an entirely inappropriate response.
The truth wasn’t so funny. Larry died after the court was adjourned. H ran into his son in the parking lot during a cold rain and started screaming at him. The Allentown Morning Call reported it as a massive heart attack, but eyewitnesses told me it was a stroke. His brain exploded in his skull while both pacemakers tried to keep the body alive.
Of course, it wasn’t the end. Larry had an entire cabinet loaded with different copies of his will and only one person who knew which was the one he wanted to be executed. M A that point, I was done with Larry and his affairs. T Northampton Sheriff’s department tried to contact me to help them find the will. I also knew his affairs were such a mess I could end up involved for decades to come. Besides, there was no way I could testify that Larry was of sound mind. So I avoided Pennsylvania for a while and let events sort themselves out.
Which was a sound decision on my part because regardless of the will, Larry had a sister who was determined to prove her nephew was a thief. I had spoken with her on the phone a time or two. But I had no idea they were that close. I guess Larry wasn’t always the human toothache I knew. It couldn’t have been easy for her because Larry was not making good decisions and rampaging through the courts like a bull in a china shop. He might have made things harder. I felt like a total sleaze after finding out Larry was innocent. I totally rewrote this memoir because of it.
Larry Marra Sr. may have been a crooked landlord, but he was my mentor. Without him, my life would have been very different in a bad way. Frankly, I’m grateful to Larry’s sister for defending her brother. He was a human being who deserved better than the neglect he suffered in his final days. She also kept me from wronging a man who had been betrayed by his own son. Junior died the year before the courts decided in his father’s favor. At least his aunt never left him to enjoy the fruits of his crime. I hope Larry found the peace he never had in life from it.
The Traumatic 90s 