Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Where Eliza imagined a gay thing between Walter and Richard, the autobiographer now sees a sibling thing. Once Walter had outgrown being sat on and punched in the head by his older brother and sitting on his younger brother and punching his head, there was no satisfactory competition to be found in his own family. He’d needed an extra brother to love and hate and compete with. And the eternally tormenting question for Walter, as the autobiographer sees it, was whether Richard was the little brother or the big brother, the fuckup or the hero, the beloved damaged friend or the dangerous rival.

  As with Patty, Walter claimed to have loved Richard at first sight. It had happened on his first night at Macalester, after his dad had dropped him off and hurried to get back to Hibbing, where Canadian Club was calling to him from the lounge. Walter had sent Richard a nice letter in the summer, using an address provided by the housing office, but Richard hadn’t written back. On one of the beds in their dorm room was a guitar case, a cardboard carton, and a duffel bag. Walter didn’t see the owner of this minimal luggage until after dinner, at a dorm hall meeting. It was a moment he later described to Patty many times: how, standing in a corner, apart from everybody else, there was a kid he couldn’t take his eyes off, a very tall acned person with a Jewfro and an Iggy Pop T-shirt who looked nothing like the other freshmen and didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile politely, at the jokey orientative spiel their R.A. was giving them. Walter himself had great compassion for people attempting to be funny, and laughed loudly to reward them for their effort, and yet he instantly knew he wanted to be friends with the tall unsmiling person. He hoped this was his roommate, and it was.

  Remarkably enough, Richard liked him. It started with the accident of Walter’s having come from the town Bob Dylan grew up in. Back in their room, after the meeting, Richard plied him with questions about Hibbing, what the scene there was like, and whether Walter had personally known any Zimmermans. Walter explained about the motel being several miles outside town, but the motel itself impressed Richard, as did the fact that Walter was a full-scholarship student with an alcoholic dad. Richard said he hadn’t written back to Walter because his own dad had died of lung cancer five weeks earlier. He said that since Bob Dylan was an asshole, the beautifully pure kind of asshole who made a young musician want to be an asshole himself, he’d always imagined that Hibbing was an asshole-filled kind of place. Downy-cheeked Walter, sitting in that dorm room, eagerly listening to his new roommate and trying hard to impress him, was a vivid refutation of this theory.

  Already, that first night, Richard made comments about girls which Walter never forgot. He said he was unfavorably impressed with the high percentage of overweight chicks at Macalester. He said he’d spent the afternoon walking the surrounding streets, trying to figure out where the townie chicks hung out. He said he’d been astonished by how many people had smiled and said hello to him. Even the good-looking chicks had smiled and said hi. Was it like this in Hibbing, too? He said that, at his dad’s funeral, he’d gotten to know a very hot cousin of his who was unfortunately only thirteen and was now sending him letters about her adventures in masturbation. Although Walter never needed much of a push in the direction of solicitude toward women, the autobiographer can’t help thinking about the polarizing specialization of achievement that comes with sibling rivalry, and wondering if Richard’s obsession with scoring might have given Walter an additional incentive not to compete on that particular turf.

  Important fact: Richard had no relationship with his mom. She hadn’t even come to his dad’s funeral. By Richard’s own account to Patty (much later), the mom was an unstable person who eventually became a religious nut but not before making life hellish for the guy who’d got her pregnant at nineteen. Richard’s dad had been a saxophone player and bohemian in Greenwich Village. The mom was a tall, rebellious WASP girl of good family and bad self-control. After four raucous years of drinking and serial infidelity, she stuck Mr. Katz with the job of raising their son (first in the Village, later in Yonkers) while she went off to California and found Jesus and brought forth four more kids. Mr. Katz quit playing music but not, alas, drinking. He ended up working for the postal service and never remarrying, and it’s safe to say that his various young girlfriends, in the years before drink fully ruined him, did little to provide the stabilizing maternal presence that Richard needed. One of them robbed their apartment before disappearing; another relieved Richard of his virginity while babysitting him. Soon after that episode, Mr. Katz sent Richard to spend a summer with his stepfamily, but he lasted less than a week with them. On his first day in California, the entire family gathered around him and joined hands to give thanks to God for his safe arrival, and apparently things got only wackier from there.

  Walter’s parents, who were merely social churchgoers, opened their home to the tall orphan. Dorothy was especially fond of Richard—may, indeed, have had a demure little Dorothyish thing for him—and encouraged him to spend his vacations in Hibbing. Richard needed little encouragement, having nowhere else to go. He delighted Gene by showing interest in shooting guns and more generally by not being the sort of “hoity-toity” person Gene had been afraid that Walter would take up with, and he impressed Dorothy by pitching in with chores. As previously noted, Richard had a strong (if highly intermittent) wish to be a good person, and he was scrupulously polite to people, like Dorothy, whom he considered Good. His manner with her, as he questioned her about some ordinary casserole she’d made, asking where she’d found the recipe and where a person learned about balanced diets, struck Walter as fake and condescending, since the chances of Richard ever actually buying groceries and making a casserole himself were nil, and since Richard reverted to his ordinary hard self as soon as Dorothy was out of the room. But Walter was in competition with him, and though Walter may not have excelled at picking up townie chicks, the province of listening to women with sincere attentiveness most definitely was his turf, and he guarded it fiercely. The autobiographer thus considers herself more reliable than Walter regarding the authenticity of Richard’s respect for goodness.

  What was unquestionably admirable in Richard was his quest to better himself and fill the void created by his lack of parenting. He’d survived childhood by playing music and reading books of his own idiosyncratic choosing, and part of what attracted him to Walter was Walter’s intellect and work ethic. Richard was deeply read in certain areas (French existentialism, Latin American literature), but he had no method, no system, and was genuinely in awe of Walter’s intellectual focus. Though he paid Walter the respect of never treating him with the hyper-politeness he reserved for those he considered Good, he loved hearing Walter’s ideas and pressing him to explain his unusual political convictions.

  The autobiographer suspects there was also a perverse competitive advantage for Richard in befriending an uncool kid from the north country. It was a way of setting himself apart from the hipsters at Macalester who came from more privileged backgrounds. Richard disdained these hipsters (including the female ones, though this didn’t preclude fucking them when opportunities arose) with the same intensity as the hipsters themselves disdained people like Walter. The Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back was such a touchstone for both Richard and Walter that Patty eventually rented it and watched it with Walter, one night when the kids were little, so that she could see the famous scene in which Dylan outshone and humiliated the singer Donovan at a party for cool people in London, purely for the pleasure of being an asshole. Though Walter felt sorry for Donovan—and, what’s more, felt bad about himself for not wanting to be more like Dylan and less like Donovan—Patty found the scene thrilling. The breathtaking nakedness of Dylan’s competitiveness! Her feeling was: Let’s face it, victory is very sweet. The scene helped her understand why Richard had preferred to hang out with unmusical Walter, rather than the hipsters.

  Intellectually, Walter was definitely the big brother and Richard his follower. And yet, for Richard, being smart, like being good, was just a sidesh
ow 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,* 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.

  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.