When my father had checked in on me earlier that evening, he almost bought my charade, when he noticed the person in the bed wasn't breathing. He broke past the chain and went in. He found the dummy!  Poor Dad, he had troubles enough I'm sure.

Later that year after a continuing change in my personality brought on by my new passion, drinking, I was sent away to attend Burwick Academy, in South Berwick Maine for the summer. I had to attend the summer session to make up for my three failed subjects that year. I had been at Berwick's summer school for about month when I got a chance to go home for my Sister Connie's wedding around the end of July. I had taken the demo's Glen and I made earlier that year with me to Burwick. I was proud of them. Music was going to be my life, not boarding school. I had heard from Larry Hoff that Glen now thought I was stealing them to cut him out of our partnership. Neither of us thought to make two copies of each demo. They were eight dollars each. One copy was all we could afford.


And so it happened on my return home for the wedding, I heard there was to be a drinking party at Glen Larko's house, unsupervised by any parents of course. I had also heard that Glen wanted to kill me. Now in Merrick at that time the expression "kill" sort of meant just punching someone out. Remembering the closeness of our conversation at his house the night of 'cologne man', I went to the drinking party anyway. I was there not fifteen minutes when someone informed me Glen wanted blood. I remember thinking it far worse waiting to be killed, so I walked up to Glen and asked him to take a walk outside with me alone. He was dead serious about his feelings. There were some guys there that would have liked to see blood probably. First of all Glen could whip me around a telephone pole with just his glare! It wasn't a macho thing. I knew he could take me in a fight and so did he. We went outside and surprisingly, no one followed. I walked with him down his street, both of us drinking beer. I spoke about my feelings around the strange new school I was sent off to. I kept the focus on me. I told him I took the demos with me because they meant more to me than anything else in my world. They were both ours not just mine. If he wanted them he could keep them. When we got back to the drinking party at his house we were friends. I never thought much about it again.

["...Glen could whip me
  around a telephone
  pole with just his glare!" ]

["I knew that gun. It hung in his room."]

I went back to Burwick Academy in Maine after the wedding. Maybe three weeks passed and I got word one day, my father had been calling me. Three calls in one afternoon was strange. When I called him back and he answered the phone, I noticed his voice was strained. After he found out it was me he said that Glen was dead. My first thought was that Glen must have gotten hit by the four thirty diesel that use to pass through Merrick town. Many people had been killed by it before they raised the tracks. Glen had written lyrics about trains and streetcars that I had put into our songs. "Did he get hit by the train"? I asked in shock. My dad slowly answered, "no- he shot himself with a rifle". I remember asking how Larry was next.

Billy Servideo and Mark upstairs in his room at 51 Montauk Avenue in Merrick (Bed in background is exactly in the same place as it was the night of
cologne man 3 years earlier) Note: The 45's on the floor are the Glen Larko demo records.

I knew that gun. It hung in his room. He actually stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. In his room! I couldn't get over that image for weeks.  It just placed another notch in the chip already sitting on my shoulder.

Two years later I wrote a song called "Larry Stein". The mood of that song really captured the Glen Larko days. Even Larry Hoff's name somehow inspired the title. I was making up the bridge and came up with the lyric "I feel fine". The second time I sang the bridge, which ends the song, I just tagged on the name "Larry Stein" as a rhyme. But Larry Stein was really all of us. Glen, the dead guy who feels fine now that he's dead is Larry Stein - and the surviving close friends (the whole crowd who knew him) who must feel fine because you have to move on past things like this is Larry Stein.  "I feel fine" is what we all have to say because it's never easy to tell each other when it's not really fine.  Maybe some of us were catching on to Glen's world not being fine but not in time to stop what Glen thought he had to do. It changed us all. 

Wayne Ashdown, Andrea and Mark in front of Wayne's house in Merrick