hated Walter for this, and resented the marriage, and Joey moved out of the house and in with the Monaghans and made everybody pay in bitter tears for their mistakes.
Though this barely scratches the surface, it’s already more than the autobiographer intended to say about those years, and she will now bravely move on.
One small benefit of having the house to herself was that Patty could listen to whatever music she wanted, especially to the country music that Joey had cried out in pain and revulsion at the merest sound of, and that Walter, with his college-radio tastes, could tolerate only a narrow and mostly vintage playlist of: Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash. Patty loved all of those singers herself, but she loved Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks no less. As soon as Walter left for work in the morning, she cranked up the volume to a level incompatible with thinking, and steeped herself in heartbreaks enough like her own to be comforting and enough different to be sort of funny. Patty was strictly a lyrics-and-stories gal—Walter had long ago given up on interesting her in Ligeti and Yo La Tengo—and never tired of cheating men and strong women and the indomitable human spirit.
At the very same time, Richard was forming Walnut Surprise, his new alt-country band, with three kids whose combined age wasn’t much greater than his own. Richard might have persisted with the Traumatics, and launched further records into the void, were it not for a strange accident that could only have befallen Herrera, his old friend and bassist, whose dishevelment and disorganization made Richard look like the man in the gray flannel suit in comparison. Deciding that Jersey City was too bourgeois (!) and not depressing enough, Herrera had moved up to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and settled in a slum there. One day he went to a rally in Hartford for Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates and assembled a spectacle that he called the Dopplerpus, which consisted of a rented carnival octopus ride on whose tentacles he and seven friends sat and played dirges on portable amps while the ride flung them around and distorted their sound interestingly. Herrera’s girlfriend later told Richard that the Dopplerpus had been “amazing” and a “huge hit” with the “more than a hundred” people who’d attended the rally, but afterward, when Herrera was packing up, his van started rolling down a hill, and Herrera chased after it and reached in through the window and grabbed the steering wheel, which swung the van alongside a brick wall and pancaked him. He somehow finished packing up and drove back to Bridgeport, coughing blood, and there nearly expired of a ruptured spleen, five broken ribs, a broken clavicle, and a punctured lung before his girlfriend got him to a hospital. The accident, following the disappointments of Insanely Happy, seemed like a cosmic sign to Richard, and since he couldn’t live without making music, he’d teamed up with a young fan of his who played killer pedal steel guitar, and Walnut Surprise was born.
Richard’s personal life was in scarcely better shape than Walter and Patty’s. He had lost several thousand dollars on the last Traumatics tour and had “loaned” the uninsured Herrera further thousands for medical expenses, and his domestic situation, as he described it on the phone to Walter, was collapsing. What had made his whole existence workable, for nearly twenty years, was the big ground-floor Jersey City apartment for which he paid a rent so low as to be literally nominal. Richard could never be bothered to get rid of things, and his apartment was big enough that he didn’t have to. Walter had been to it on one of his trips to New York and reported that the hall outside Richard’s door was filled with junk stereo equipment, mattresses, and surplus parts for his pickup truck, and that the rear courtyard was filling up with supplies and leftovers from his deck-building business. Best of all, there was a room in the basement directly beneath his apartment where the Traumatics had been able to practice (and, later, record) without unduly disturbing the other tenants. Richard had always taken care to remain on good terms with them, but in the wake of his breakup with Molly he’d made the dreadful mistake of going a step further and getting involved with one of them.
At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a mistake to anyone but Walter, who considered himself uniquely