Freedom

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.