Intellectually, Walter was definitely the big brother and Richard his follower. And yet, for Richard, being smart, like being good, was just a sideshow to the main competitive effort. This was what Walter had in mind when he said he didn’t trust his friend. He could never shake the feeling that Richard was hiding stuff from him; that there was a dark side of him always going off in the night to pursue motives he wouldn’t admit to; that he was happy to be friends with Walter as long as it was understood that he was the top dog. Richard was especially unreliable whenever a girl entered the picture, and Walter resented these girls for being even momentarily more compelling than he was. Richard himself never saw it this way, because he tired of girls so quickly and always ended up kicking them to the curb; he always came back to Walter, whom he didn’t get tired of. But to Walter it seemed disloyal of his friend to put so much energy into pursuing people he didn’t even like. It made Walter feel weak and small to be forever available for Richard to come back to. He was tormented by the suspicion that he loved Richard more than Richard loved him, and was doing more than Richard to make the friendship work.
The first big crisis came during their senior year, two years before Patty met them, when Walter was smitten with the evil sophomore personage named Nomi. To hear Richard tell it (as Patty once did), the situation was straightforward: his sexually naïve friend was being exploited by a worthless female who wasn’t into him, and Richard finally took it upon himself to demonstrate her worthlessness. According to Richard, the girl wasn’t worth competing over, she was just a mosquito to be slapped. But Walter saw things very differently. He got so angry with Richard that he refused to speak to him for weeks. They were sharing a two-room double of the sort reserved for seniors, and every night when Richard came in through Walter’s room, on his way to his own more private room, he stopped to engage in one-sided conversations that a disinterested observer would probably have found amusing.
Richard: “Still not speaking to me. This is remarkable. How long is this going to last?”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “If you don’t want me to sit down and watch you read, just say the word.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “Interesting book? You don’t seem to be turning the pages.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “You know what you’re being? You’re being like a girl. This is what girls do. This is bullshit, Walter. This is kind of pissing me off.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, it’s not going to happen. I’ll tell you that right now. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but my conscience is clear.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “You do understand, don’t you, that you’re the only reason I’m even still here. If you’d asked me four years ago, what are the odds of me graduating from college, I would have said small to nonexistent.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “Seriously, I’m a little disappointed.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “OK. Fuck it. Be a girl. I don’t care.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “Look. If I had a drug problem and you threw away my drugs, I’d be pissed off at you, but I’d also understand that you were trying to do me a favor.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “Admittedly not a perfect analogy, in that I actually, so to speak, used the drugs, instead of just throwing them away. But if you were prone to crippling addiction, whereas I was just doing something recreational, on the theory that it’s a shame to waste good drugs…”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “All right, so it’s a dumb analogy.”
Walter: silence.
Richard: “That was funny. You should be laughing at that.”
Walter: silence.
So, at any rate, the autobiographer imagines it, based on the later testimony of both parties. Walter maintained his silence until Easter vacation, when he went home alone and Dorothy managed to extract the reason he hadn’t brought Richard along with him. “You have to take people the way they are,” Dorothy told him. “Richard’s a good friend, and you should be loyal to him.” (Dorothy was big on loyalty-it lent meaning to her not so pleasant life-and Patty often heard Walter quoting her admonition; he seemed to attach almost scriptural significance to it.) He pointed out that Richard himself had been extremely disloyal in stealing a girl Walter cared about, but Dorothy, who herself perhaps had fallen under the Katzian spell, said she didn’t believe that Richard had done it deliberately to hurt him. “It’s good to have friends in life,” she said. “If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.”
An additional vexing wrinkle to the girl issue was the fact that the ones Richard attracted were almost invariably big music fans, [2] and that Walter, being Richard’s oldest and biggest fan, was in bitter competition with them. Girls who otherwise might have been friendly to a lover’s best friend, or at least tolerant of him, found it necessary to be frosty to Walter, because serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness. Girls understandably considered it impossible to be any more connected to Richard than locked in coitus with him, mingling actual fluids. Walter seemed to them merely a pestering small insect of irrelevance, even though it was Walter who had turned Richard on to Anton von Webern and Benjamin Britten, it was Walter who had given Richard a political framework for his angriest early songs, it was Walter whom Richard actually loved in a meaningful way. And it was bad enough to be treated with such consistent frostiness by sexy girls, but even worse was Walter’s suspicion-confessed to Patty in the years when they’d kept no secrets from each other-that he was at root no different than any of those girls: that he, too, was a kind of parasite on Richard, trying to feel cooler and better about himself by means of his unique connection to him. And, worst of all, his suspicion that Richard knew it, and was made all the lonelier by it, and all the more guarded.
The situation was especially toxic in the case of Eliza, who wasn’t content to ignore Walter but went out of her way to make him feel bad. How, Walter wondered, could Richard keep sleeping with a person so deliberately nasty to his best friend? Walter was grownup enough by then not to do the silence thing, but he did stop making meals for Richard, and the main reason he kept going to Richard’s gigs was to show his displeasure with Eliza, and, later, to try to shame Richard into not using the coke she was keeping him supplied with. Of course there was no shaming Richard into anything. Not then, not ever.
The particulars of their conversations about Patty are, sadly, unknown, but the autobiographer is pleased to think they were nothing like their conversations about Nomi or Eliza. It’s possible that Richard urged Walter to be more assertive with her, and that Walter replied with some guff about her having been raped or being on crutches, but there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself. What Richard was privately feeling about Patty did eventually become clearer to her-the autobiographer is getting to that, albeit rather slowly. For now, it’s enough to note that he migrated to New York and stayed there, and that for a number of years Walter was so busy building his own life with Patty that he hardly even seemed to miss him.
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.