Ron Levin

Ron Levin, a mildly infamous but, in the narrator’s description, harmless gay con man in his early forties, appears in a recollection of the spring of 1981 as an adult presence at the edge of Buckley students’ adolescence. He drove a convertible Rolls-Royce, hosted the teenagers at his Beverly Hills apartment, and would be murdered several years later by members of the Billionaire Boys Club. The episode gives Levin’s brief role a double significance: it records the students’ early access to adult freedom and excess, while the narrator carefully distinguishes it from the later events surrounding Robert Mallory and the Trawler.

Introduction and Social Context

Levin entered the group’s orbit through Jeff Taylor, who introduced him to several Buckley students. On a school night in the middle of junior year, Levin drove Jeff, Thom Wright, Kyle Colson, and the narrator from Beverly Hills toward West Hollywood in his Rolls-Royce. They were seventeen, had used cocaine earlier at Levin’s condo, and were moving through an adult social world with little sense of its implications. The narrator presents Levin as notorious but not dangerous at the time, a contrast made sharper by what happened to him later.

The narrator also places Levin within the loosely connected world of elite Los Angeles private schools. Jeff, described as a handsome surfer, supplied Levin with sexual favors for money despite being straight; the money went toward a surfboard, stereo equipment, and a supplier in Zuma. The account does not treat this arrangement as an isolated biographical detail so much as evidence of the casually transactional adult milieu into which the teenagers were beginning to step.

The 1981 Encounter

As the car headed up La Cienega, Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights” played on the stereo. Levin drove, Jeff sat beside him, and the other three boys were in the back. The narrator saw Levin place a hand on Jeff’s thigh; Jeff gently moved it away without looking at him. After the narrator nudged Thom, Thom glanced over and shrugged. The gesture remains ambiguous in memory, but the boys’ response is clear: they were high, young, and more absorbed in the warm spring night and the feeling of entering adulthood than in judging the encounter.

At Flipper’s, the former roller-disco rink, the narrator remembers sitting in a booth drinking champagne while the Xanadu soundtrack played, though not roller-skating. Later, the group returned to Levin’s Beverly Hills apartment. Levin went into a bedroom with Jeff, saying he wanted to show him a new Rolex. Kyle drove home to Brentwood; the narrator and Thom stayed behind to play records, including music by Duran Duran, Billy Idol, and Squeeze. After Levin passed out, Jeff and Thom left for Jeff’s father’s place in Malibu, where they stayed up, finished the cocaine Levin had given Jeff, and went surfing at dawn before driving to school.

The narrator had already driven back to his parents’ house on Mulholland, taken a Valium from a Gucci pillbox, and fallen asleep. In hindsight, the night feels like one of the last innocent evenings of his life, despite the underage drinking and drug use and the imbalance between the teenagers and their much older host. Levin’s later murder intensifies that retrospective unease without changing the narrator’s account of what the night meant to them then.

Later Murder and Retrospective Meaning

Levin was murdered a few years later by two members of the Billionaire Boys Club, a group described as an investment and social collective that included men the narrator vaguely knew from Los Angeles private-school circles. The narrator later met the club’s founder, Joe Hunt, at a casual dinner at La Scala Boutique during winter break from Bennington, before Levin’s murder. Hunt’s appearance and manner did not suggest to the narrator that he would later be imprisoned for serious crimes. This recollection links Levin to a larger criminal history while emphasizing how little the teenagers could read from outward appearances.

The narrator explicitly separates Levin’s fate from the events of fall 1981, when Robert Mallory arrived at Buckley and the Trawler’s story began to emerge. In the retrospective structure, the Levin episode is a detour into the adult world surrounding the students, not a cause of the later attacks. Yet the narrator sees the permissive, hedonistic culture they were entering as an opening through which danger could approach unnoticed. Levin therefore occupies a brief but consequential place in the book’s memory: he marks an early threshold between adolescent autonomy and adult worlds whose risks the students did not yet understand.