Cops walked their beats. Lids walked his. I also knew Lids by his real name, Larry Lester. He was two years younger than me, but had been a year ahead of me at school. He had been Lincoln High School’s fair-haired boy, destined for a vastly different trajectory than the arc he was now traveling. Larry was supposed to be at MIT or Princeton or Cornell, doing book-length equations on the relationships between quarks and quasars and how they proved or disproved the existence of God. Larry Lester — Ocean Parkway’s answer to Descartes and Einstein — had lasted exactly one and a half terms at MIT before he went flip city. He never got around to smashing atoms. Instead, they smashed him. At least he cracked and wound up in a rubber room before they found him hanging in his closet by his belt. And now here he was, selling joints and getting by in the shadows of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues. “Feed your head,” was his whispered refrain to familiar passersby. “Yo, Larry, got a minute?”
