![]() Larry was stroking Isabella’s hair, soothing her. “He started to help me kind of process and make sense of a lot of things I just couldn’t make sense of.” Talia’s boyfriend at the time remembers seeing Larry and Isabella reclining on Talia’s bed. ![]() “I’m 19, I was having a lot of difficulty making sense of things, I wasn’t in a good place,” Isabella says. After her breakup, she seemed to take comfort in Larry’s company. Isabella had come to Sarah Lawrence on a full academic scholarship from an all-girls Catholic high school in San Antonio. He began counseling a few of the roommates, including Isabella, Talia’s best friend. He said he knew techniques to discipline the mind, training he’d received from the government. And in fact, Santos, according to his parents, had tried to kill himself in high school. Larry would sometimes tell the kids they had come together in part because of a shared obsession with taking their own lives. “We were talking about getting a big bag of sand and dumping it out on the kitchen floor to make a tiny beach - it’s not like we were trying to have a normal household.” “I don’t think anyone really questioned it because it was such a huge part of Talia’s life,” says Daniel of Larry’s presence. They were a receptive audience for their unusual ninth roommate. (The last names of many of the students have been withheld at their request.) Another roommate, Isabella, went through a bad breakup soon after Larry arrived. Claudia and Santos had both struggled with depression. There was Daniel Barban Levin, who had begun exploring his sexuality. (“We’re different, so are you,” goes one of the school’s slogans.) They were also sensitive and, in ways common to 19-year-olds, searching for guidance. The residents of Slonim 9 were in some ways typical Sarah Lawrence students: an artistic, bookish group of introverts with good grades. The school’s head of security once sent out safety alerts because a small fox had been seen on campus. It can feel whimsically sheltered, even more so than most liberal-arts colleges. Located just above the city limits of New York, Sarah Lawrence looks as if it had been plucked from a New England town and plopped 15 miles north of Times Square. At night, he’d retire to an air mattress in Talia’s room or the common-room couch. He screened Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in the common room, where the students watched from pillows on the floor, and followed it with an impromptu lecture on the nature of the universe. “He did all of our cleaning and definitely took on the dad role in the house in a big way,” says Juli Anna, one of the Slonim 9 roommates. He was a good listener and engaged the group on heady concepts like truth and justice. “Can you defend yourself? You look really weak.” “Do you work out?” Larry would ask Talia’s friends. His machismo was out of place on the liberal-arts campus. He had a clean-shaven head and favored polo shirts cut to make his 50-year-old frame look hulking. ![]() Larry was of average height and overweight, yet he could be intimidating. He loved to preach the values of the Marine Corps and dropped references to his relationships with high-ranking American military officers. While they ate, he told them stories in a nasal Brooklyn accent about his long and decorated history as a government agent, his former work as an international CIA operative, how he recovered Stinger missiles off the black market and engineered a cease-fire in Kosovo. He planted himself in the common area, cooking steak dinners and ordering expensive delivery for Talia and her seven housemates. Within days of his release, Larry Ray moved onto Sarah Lawrence’s campus. So in late September 2010, at the beginning of sophomore year, when Talia told her housemates that her father was getting out of prison and needed to crash with them for a while, they were mostly unfazed. Talia, who had grown up in New Jersey, was old for a freshman and had become the de facto leader of her group of friends, organizing their housing for the next year at Slonim Woods 9, a drab two-story brick dorm in the middle of campus. He’d been sent to prison for his heroic efforts to save her and her younger sister from their abusive mother, and his incarceration was the result of deep-seated government corruption. He was a truth teller, she’d explain, who’d been silenced by a group of powerful, vindictive men. Anyone who spent time with Talia Ray during her first year at Sarah Lawrence College heard her talk about her father.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |