The Doc Lived Like He Died--With Style

The Doctor died the other day. He dropped dead during a basketball game on a high school court back in New York, where he grew up.

He was 35, way too young to go. But he’d hung with the wrong crowd and spent his last years homeless in Venice Beach, eking out an existence under the warm Southern California sun. The Doc always hated cold weather.

His real name was Larry. He was an intelligent, articulate man who one day woke up to find himself living outside society in a beat-up old van that held his worldly belongings.

His stepbrother, Eric, my former college roommate, called to tell me about Larry’s death.

Eric is a true cynic. When I said I wanted to write a story about the Doctor, he scoffed: “Yeah, right. What’s the story? That another Venice Beach homeless person bites the dust?”

No, that’s not it. The story is that all those seemingly aimless people we see wandering around Venice Beach or Santa Monica or along freeway exit ramps in Downtown Los Angeles have real pasts--even if they’ve given up temporarily on the present.

Just like the Doctor.

And like Larry, they have friends and family who still love them, who may have fallen out of touch with them, who might be desperately seeking to find them, reconcile mistakes and start again.

They’re people with high school yearbook photos, like Larry’s--right there among the junior class of Great Neck North Senior High back in 1975. They’ve had Glory Days that deserve recognition, even after their death.

Larry grew up on the streets of Queens. Then his divorced father, who is Haitian, married a woman who lived out on Long Island. So Larry and his sister joined their new family--three kids and a stepmom--in Great Neck.

The Brady Bunch it was not.

Larry shared a room with Eric, who was a year ahead in school. They were like night and day.

“He was from the city; I was from the suburbs,” Eric recalled. “I’m Jewish; he was Catholic. He was black; I was white. It went on from there.”

But eventually, they began to bond like brothers.

Years before, Larry had spent a few years in a Catholic boarding school. He bristled at authority, an attitude that soon rubbed off on Eric.

Together, they liked to shock people, play on their differences, especially in Great Neck--an upper-middle-class, largely Jewish, bedroom community of New York City. Every time the mixed-race family walked into some restaurant, eyebrows raised. That’s when Eric and the Doctor went to work.

“People would ask ‘How do you two know each other?’ ” Eric said. “And we’d say ‘We’re brothers. Hell, don’t we look like one another?’ ”

Eric always looked up to the Doctor. He had class. Kids imitated him. He had leadership stuff.

And “the Doctor” nickname suited him. At night, Larry was on the phone for hours, counseling high school friends, mostly women, about their love lives and futures. People started calling him the Doctor. To Eric, he was just “Doc.”

Eric and Larry called themselves the Soul Patrol. On Eric’s 18th birthday, the two got drunk at school and ended up getting suspended. It was, as Eric said, “one of our defining moments of hilarity.”

But Eric graduated. Larry didn’t.

Eric, never a high school achiever, went to college, got his MBA and a high-paying job in Chicago. Larry dropped out, later got his GED and an associate arts degree before taking a series of retailing jobs.

*

Here’s where the story gets blurry. Larry moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s in search of a new definition of cool. He hung out, bounced basketballs with the Venice Beach street players.

He also lost touch with Eric.

And so, it surprised me last November when Eric called with the news that the Doc was down and out. Soft-spoken, winner-with-the-women, way-cool Larry--from whom people always expected big things--was homeless.

Over the years, Larry had kept in touch with his mother and sisters, but not Eric. He always felt a bit ashamed, it seems, in light of his successful stepbrother. But Eric didn’t care about Larry’s lack of success: He just wanted to get back in touch with the Doctor.

And so Eric dispatched me to find Larry and give him a letter containing pictures of Eric’s new daughter. I found the Doc last Thanksgiving weekend along the Venice Beach boardwalk, keeping watch over parked cars for a few extra bucks.

He looked pleased when I handed him Eric’s letter, smiling like someone who has suddenly remembered something touching or funny about their past.

For a moment, we talked about how I first met him back in Great Neck during a college vacation. I was a hick from Upstate New York, impressed with the Doctor and that sense of style I knew I would never have.

I gave Larry my number at work, told him I could patch him through to Eric. He tried contacting me a few times, always leaving a short message on my machine. We never spoke again.

*

But the brothers made contact. When Eric got laid off at Christmas, the Doc called with some advice: Just hang in there, things would get better.

A few months ago, Larry moved back East to rejoin family and friends, and to try to set his life straight. Who knew what his plans were?

One day on a basketball court in Great Neck, he collapsed and died. Unkind fate made the Doctor’s decision for him.

Now Eric is left with the pieces of his stepbrother’s troubled life. Who knows what happened, where he went wrong?

The past days have been tough for Larry’s family, the people he left behind. Eric chooses to remember his stepbrother just like always:

A genuine man who loved his family, one who maybe had a bit of a self-destructive streak.

And crazy to be with. He was, after all, the Doctor.

At the funeral, Eric asked Larry’s friends about his game that day.

“They told me he was hot,” he said. “On the day he died, the Doc was smokin’.”