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
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.
