Freedom [70]
What was happening was that Richard was becoming more Richard and Walter more Walter. Richard settled in Jersey City, decided it was finally safe to experiment with social drinking, and then, after a period he later described as “fairly dissolute,” decided, no, not so safe after all. As long as he’d lived with Walter, he’d avoided the alcohol that had ruined his dad, used coke only when other people were paying, and moved forward steadily with his music. On his own, he was a mess for quite a while. It took him and Herrera three years to get the Traumatics reconstituted, with the pretty, damaged blonde Molly Tremain sharing the vocals, and to put out their first LP, Greetings from the Bottom of the Mine Shaft, with the tiniest of labels. Walter went to see the band play at the Entry when they came through Minneapolis, but he was home again with Patty and the infant Jessica, carrying six copies of the LP, by ten-thirty in the evening. Richard had developed a day-job niche in building urban rooftop decks for the sort of Lower Manhattan gentry who got a contact cool from hanging out with artists and musicians, i.e., didn’t mind if their deck-builder’s workday began at 2 p.m. and ended a few hours later, and if it therefore took him three weeks to do a five-day job. The band’s second record, In Case You Hadn’t Noticed, attracted no more notice than the first, but its third, Reactionary Splendor, was released by a less-tiny label and got mentioned on several year-end Best Ten lists. This time, when Richard came through Minnesota, he phoned in advance and was able to spend an afternoon at Patty and Walter’s house with the polite but bored and mostly silent Molly, who either was or wasn’t his girlfriend.
That afternoon—to the surprisingly small extent that the autobiographer remembers it—was especially nice for Walter. Patty had her hands full with the kids and with her attempts to induce Molly to utter polysyllables, but Walter was able to show off all the work he was doing on the house, and the beautiful and energetic offspring he’d conceived with Patty, and to watch Richard and Molly eat the best meal of their entire tour, and, no less important, to acquire rich data from Richard about the alternative-music scene, data that Walter would put to good use in the months that followed, buying the records of every artist Richard had mentioned, playing them while he renovated, impressing male neighbors and colleagues who fancied themselves musically hip, and feeling that he had the best of both worlds. The state of their rivalry was very satisfactory to him that day. Richard was poor and subdued and too thin, and his woman was peculiar and unhappy. Walter, now unquestionably the big brother, could relax and enjoy Richard’s success as a piquant and hipness-enhancing accessory to his own.
At that point, the only thing that could have thrown Walter back into the bad ways he’d felt in college, when he’d been tormented by his sense of losing to the person he loved too much not to care about beating, would have been some bizarre pathological sequence of events. Things at home would have had to sour very badly. Walter would have had to have terrible conflicts with Joey, and fail to understand him and earn his respect, and generally find himself replicating his relationship with his own dad, and Richard’s career would have had to take an unexpected latter-day turn for the better, and Patty would have had to fall violently in love with Richard. What were the chances of all that happening?