Читать книгу Room to Dream - Kristine McKenna - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Art Life
Alexandria, Virginia, was a very different world. A relatively sophisticated city seven miles south of downtown Washington, D.C., it’s essentially a suburb of D.C. and is home to thousands of government workers. Alexandria had a population five times the size of Boise’s during the early sixties, but Lynch was apparently unfazed by the bigger world he stepped into. “From everything I’ve heard, David was a star in high school and had that sense of being the golden boy,” said Peggy Reavey. “From the start he had that.”
Lynch’s course in life clarified itself significantly when he befriended Toby Keeler shortly after beginning his freshman year. “I met David on the front lawn of his girlfriend’s house, and my first impression was of her, not David,” said Keeler, who proceeded to woo the girlfriend, Linda Styles, away from Lynch. “David lived in another part of town, but the driving age in Alexandria was fifteen, and he’d driven his family’s Chevy Impala, with big wings on it, to her house. I liked David immediately. He’s always been one of the most likable people on the planet, and we’ve joked for years about the fact that I stole his girlfriend. We were both in a fraternity at Hammond High School whose secret phrase was ‘Trust from beginning to end,’ but the David I knew wasn’t a partying frat boy.”1
Lynch and Keeler became close friends, but it was Toby’s father, artist Bushnell Keeler, who really changed Lynch’s life. “Bush had a big effect on David, because he had the courage to break away from the life he’d been living and get a studio and just start making art,” said Toby. “David said a bomb went off in his head when he heard what Bushnell did. ‘A fine-art painter? You can do that?’”
Bushnell Keeler’s younger sibling, David, remembered his brother as “a very up-and-down guy. Bush got a degree from Dartmouth College in business administration and married someone from a wealthy Cleveland family. He was a junior executive and was doing well but he hated it, so he and his family moved to Alexandria so he could study to become a minister, but after two years he realized he didn’t want to do that, either. He was a pretty angry young man, always challenging things, and he was taking a lot of upper and downer drugs, which didn’t help. Finally he realized that what he really wanted to do was be an artist, and that’s what he did. The marriage didn’t survive that decision.
“Bush understood something nobody else did at the time, which was that David really and truly wanted to be an artist,” David Keeler continued about his brother, who died in 2012. “Bush thought he was at a good point in life to get a boost with that, and I guess David wasn’t getting it from his parents, so Bush was absolutely fully behind him. David often stayed at his house, and Bush made space in his studio for David to work.”2
Lynch’s commitment to art deepened further when he met Jack Fisk during his freshman year, and they laid the foundations for an enduring friendship that continues to this day. Now a widely respected production designer and director, Fisk—who went by the name Jhon Luton at the time—was a rangy, good-looking kid born in Canton, Illinois, the middle in a family of three children; his sister Susan was four years older, and his sister Mary was a year younger. Following the death of Fisk’s father in a plane crash, his mother married Charles Luton, whose job overseeing the building of foundries required the family to make frequent moves. (Later in life Fisk reverted to his birth name, as did his sister Mary.) Fisk attended a Catholic military school as a boy, and at various points the family lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Lahore, Pakistan. Finally, they settled in Alexandria when Fisk was fourteen years old.
“David and I had heard about each other because we were both interested in painting,” said Fisk. “I remember him standing in a doorway at school introducing himself—he told me he was a sophomore, but I knew he was just a freshman. We sometimes laugh about the fact that he lied to me that day. I was working as a soda jerk at Herter’s Drug Store, and he came there and got a job driving their jeep around, delivering prescriptions.”3
Lynch’s job took him all over town, and he didn’t go unnoticed. “I had a newspaper route, and for maybe two years before I met David I’d see this guy with these little bags, knocking on doors,” said artist Clark Fox, who attended high school with Lynch. “He didn’t quite fit in. If you had your hair long back then it was kind of rough, but he had his hair as long as it could be without getting in trouble, and he was really pale. He always had a tie and jacket on when he was working for the drugstore. He was very distinctive.”4
Fisk’s childhood had been tumultuous while Lynch’s was bucolic and secure, and their temperaments were different, but the two of them shared the goal of committing their lives to art, and they fell into step. “Because I’d moved around so much I was kind of a loner, but David was easy to make friends with. Everybody liked him,” Fisk said. “When David talks you want to listen, and he was always that way. David was eccentric from the start, too. We were in a straight school that had fraternities—everybody was in one, although I wasn’t—and all the guys wore madras shirts and khaki pants. David ran for school treasurer—his campaign slogan was ‘Save with Dave’—and we had an assembly where the candidates spoke and he got up to speak wearing a seersucker suit with tennis shoes. That doesn’t seem crazy today, but at the time no one would think of wearing tennis shoes with a suit.”
Lynch won that election for high school treasurer, but at approximately the same time his interest in painting began to eclipse pretty much everything else in his life. “He didn’t want to do stuff like be high school treasurer anymore,” Fisk recalled. “I don’t know if he was removed or he resigned, but it didn’t last long.”
Rebellion is a standard part of most people’s teenage years, but Lynch’s recalcitrance was different in that he didn’t rebel just for the hell of it; he rebelled because he’d found something outside of school that was vitally important to him. “It was unusual in that time and place for somebody like David to get so interested in oil painting,” said John Lynch, “and our parents were upset with how he was going astray. His rebellion began in the ninth grade, and although he never got into trouble with the law, there was partying and drinking, and the first year in Alexandria he snuck out at night a few times and got caught. Then there was dinner. My mom would make normal dinners, but David thought they were too normal—he’d say, ‘Your food is too clean!’ When David was in Boise he was serious about Boy Scouts, but when we moved to Virginia he rebelled against that, too. My dad encouraged him to keep going and get his Eagle Scout rank, and David did it, but I think he partially did it for our dad.”
Lynch bid a kind of farewell to the Scouts on his fifteenth birthday, when he was among a handful of Eagle Scouts selected to seat VIPs for the inauguration parade at John Kennedy’s swearing-in. He remembers seeing Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon cruising by in limousines just a few feet from where he stood.
Impressive, no doubt, but Lynch’s mind was on other things. Martha Levacy said, “Not long after we moved to Alexandria, all David wanted to do was paint, and I was the mediator. I’d talk to David about things that were bothering my parents, then I’d talk to my parents about his point of view, and I tried to keep the peace. Our parents were real patient people and David was always respectful of them so there weren’t big fights, but there were disagreements.”
His cousin Elena Zegarelli described Lynch’s parents as “very straight, conservative, religious people. Sunny was a pretty woman with a soft, sweet voice, but she was strict. I remember being in a restaurant in Brooklyn with the whole family at a birthday celebration for our great-grandmother Hermina. David was sixteen at the time and everybody was drinking wine and celebrating, but David’s mother didn’t want him to have a glass of wine. When you see David’s work it’s hard to believe he’s from the same family. My sense was that because his family was so straitlaced, that made him go the other way.”
Regardless of the constraints he encountered at home, Lynch was on his way. “David had already rented a room from Bushnell Keeler when we met,” Fisk recalled, “and he said, ‘Do you want to share my studio?’ It was really tiny, but I shared the studio with him—it was around twenty-five dollars a month—and Bushnell would come in and give us critiques. Bushnell told him about Robert Henri’s book, The Art Spirit, and David turned me on to it, and he sat around reading it and talking to me about it. It was great finding somebody who wrote about being a painter—suddenly you didn’t feel alone anymore. Because of the Henri book we knew about artists like van Gogh and Modigliani, and anybody in France in the 1920s interested us.”
A leading figure in the Ashcan School of American art, which advocated a tough, gritty realism, Robert Henri was a revered teacher, whose students included Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Stuart Davis. Published in 1923, The Art Spirit is a usefully technical distillation of several decades of his teaching, and it had a big impact on Lynch. The language and syntax of the book seem dated today, but the sentiment it expresses is timeless. It’s a quietly remarkable and encouraging book with a simple message: Give yourself permission to express yourself as freely and completely as possible, have faith that this is a worthy endeavor, and believe that you can do it.
Early in 1962, when he was sixteen years old, Lynch decided it was time for him to move out of Bushnell Keeler’s studio and get one of his own, and his parents agreed to contribute to the rent. “It was a big step for them to take,” said Levacy. John Lynch recalled that “Bushnell talked to our parents about David getting his own studio and said, ‘David’s not goofing off. He’s using the studio as a place to paint.’ David got a job and helped pay for it, and it was real cheap. In the 1960s there was a section called Old Town that was kind of the skid row of Alexandria. [Today, this area is an upscale district full of boutiques and expensive coffee emporiums.] The streets were lined with brick houses that were built two hundred years ago and were just junk, and one of them that was even less than junk was the one David and Jack rented. They had the second floor, and the building had narrow old stairs that creaked when you walked on them. There was a little partying going on but they really did use it as a studio, and David went there every night and stayed pretty late. He had a curfew, and there was an electric clock he was supposed to unplug when he got home so our parents would know what time he got in. Still, it was always hard for him to wake up in the morning, and Dad would take a wet washcloth to his face sometimes. David hated that.”
During high school both Fisk and Lynch attended classes at the Corcoran School of Art, in D.C., and their focus shifted increasingly to their lives off campus. “I got a failure notice in art in school, and I think David was doing pretty poorly in his art class, but we were painting all the time and had many different studios together,” said Fisk. “I remember one on Cameron Street where we managed to rent a whole building, and we painted one room black and that was where you could go to think. When I first met David he was doing Paris street scenes, and he had a way of doing them with cardboard and tempera paint that was kind of nice. One day he came in with an oil painting of a boat by a dock. He was putting the paint on really thick at that point and a moth had flown into the painting, and as it struggled to get out of the paint it made this beautiful swirl in the sky. I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.
“If David was going in a certain direction with his art, I found another way to go,” Fisk continued. “We were always pushing each other to get better, and it worked well in helping our work evolve. My work grew increasingly abstract, and David got into painting darker things—docks at night, animals dying—real moody stuff. David’s always had a cheerful disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to dark things. That’s one of the mysteries of David.”
Meanwhile, back at home, Lynch’s parents were bewildered. “David could draw the Capitol Building perfectly, and he did drawings of the homes of both of our sets of grandparents that were perfect,” said Levacy. “I remember my mom saying, ‘Why don’t you draw something that looks good like you used to?’ ” Lynch was finding the courage to defy what was deemed normal behavior, and these shifts in his personality took him into rocky waters at home. Some things about him didn’t change, however. Lynch is essentially a kind person, and this was evident in something as simple as how he treated his younger brother. “David and I shared a room in high school and we’d have our fights, but David would do things for me,” said John Lynch. “He was very popular in school, and instead of being ashamed of his little brother, he would kind of bring me in and I would meet his friends, and my friends would sort of become part of that same crowd. Some of my friends were on the nerdier side, too.”
American movies were in the doldrums during the first half of the 1960s when Lynch was a teenager. The social revolution that breathed new life into American cinema had yet to begin, and U.S. studios were cranking out chaste romantic comedies starring Doris Day, beach-party pictures, Elvis Presley musicals, and bloated historical epics. It was the golden era of foreign film, though, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Polanski, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman were producing masterpieces during those years. Stanley Kubrick was one of the few U.S. filmmakers breaking new ground, and Lynch has expressed great admiration for Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s erotic comedy Lolita. He has fond memories of seeing A Summer Place, with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue, too. Although his brother recalls Lynch seeing films by Bergman and Fellini during those years, David has no memory of them.
Lynch’s most significant girlfriend during his teenage years was Judy Westerman: They were voted the cutest couple at school, and there’s a picture in their high school yearbook of the two of them on a bicycle built for two. “David had a really straight girlfriend, but he also used to date some of the ‘fast’ women at school,” said Clark Fox. “He used to talk about what he referred to as these ‘wow women,’ and although he didn’t get into a lot of detail about them, I know they were kind of wild. He was intrigued by the wild side of life.”
Fisk recalled that “David and Judy were pretty tight, but it wasn’t one of those relationships that developed into anything physical. He wasn’t really a ladies’ man, but he would have fascinations with women.” When Lynch met Fisk’s younger sister, Mary, there was no instant fascination, but they both remember that first meeting. “I was fourteen or fifteen when I met David,” recalled Mary Fisk, who became Lynch’s second wife, in 1977. “I was sitting in the living room at home and Jack walked through the room with David and said, ‘This is my sister Mary.’ There was a brass vase holding cigarettes in the living room, and I guess that shocked him because his family didn’t smoke. I don’t know why, but for some reason he’s always associated me with cigarettes—he’s often said that.
“David was going steady with Judy Westerman then, but he was really in love with Nancy Briggs,” Mary Fisk continued. “I had a crush on David the summer before my senior year and I was smitten—he has an extraordinary ability to connect with people. We went on a few dates but it wasn’t serious, because we were both dating other people, too. That was the summer after David and Jack graduated from high school, so we all went our separate ways that fall.”5
Lynch graduated from high school in June of 1964, and three months later his father’s work took the family to Walnut Creek, California, just as Lynch started classes at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, Jack Fisk began studies at Cooper Union, a private university in Manhattan. It was and is an excellent school—at the time the faculty included Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers—but Fisk dropped out after a year and headed to Boston to reconnect with Lynch. “I was shocked when I entered his apartment, because it was full of paintings and they were different kinds of paintings,” Fisk said. “They were orange and black, which was kind of bright for David, and I was impressed by how much he’d done. I remember thinking, My God, this guy has been working. One reason he was able to produce so much was because he stayed home and painted instead of going to school. School was a distraction for him.”
It’s interesting to note the disparity between Fisk and Lynch’s involvement in art and what was happening in Manhattan, which was the international center of the art world at the time. The heyday of abstract expressionism had passed, and late modernism was conceding the playing field to pop art, which had catapulted to the front lines in terms of advancing the narrative of art history. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were developing new strategies for bridging the gap between art and life, and conceptualism and minimalism were on the march. Boston was a short train trip to Manhattan, where Fisk was living, but what was happening outside of their studios seems to have been of marginal interest to Lynch and Fisk, who were following the lead of Robert Henri rather than Artforum. For them, art was a noble calling that demanded discipline, solitude, and a fierce single-mindedness; the cool sarcasm of pop and cocktail-party networking of the New York art world had no place in their art-making practices. They were romantics in the classic sense of the word and were on another trajectory entirely.
By the end of Lynch’s second semester in Boston his grades were circling the drain, and after failing classes in sculpture and design he quit school. Getting out of Boston was not without complications, though. “He made a mess of his apartment in Boston with his oil paint, and the landlord wanted him to pay for the damages, so my dad hired an attorney to negotiate a deal,” said John Lynch. “Dad wouldn’t yell at you but you knew when he was angry, and I think he was disappointed in David.”
Where to next? Bushnell Keeler’s brother had a travel agency in Boston and wrangled free flights to Europe as tour conductors for Fisk and Lynch; their duties began and ended with meeting a group of girls at the airport and escorting them onto a plane. The two of them headed to Europe in late spring of 1965, planning to study at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, an institution located in a castle called Hohensalzburg Fortress. Also called the “School of Vision,” it was founded in 1953 by Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka in the city where the squeaky-clean movie musical of 1965, The Sound of Music, is set. Lynch has recalled, “I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to make my work there.” Arriving two months before classes were scheduled to start in a city that turned them off, Fisk and Lynch were at a loss as to what to do with themselves. “Between us we had maybe two hundred and fifty dollars, and David loved Coca-Cola, which cost a dollar, and Marlboro cigarettes, which cost a dollar a pack, and I watched the money dwindle,” Fisk said. They lasted fifteen days.
“When I got back home my stepfather gave me a thousand dollars, which was a lot of money then, and I applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, because they were drafting people for Vietnam and you could get a student deferment,” Fisk continued. “I went to Philadelphia but I didn’t get into school because I’d applied too late, so I got a job at The Philadelphia Inquirer checking ads for their TV guide. A week or two later President Johnson escalated the war and they started drafting more people, and the school called and said, ‘We’re gonna let you in,’ so that’s how I got in. I rented a tiny room for thirty dollars a month at Twenty-first and Cherry Street.”
It wasn’t so easy for Lynch. “His parents were furious that he wasn’t going to school and they told David, ‘You’re on your own,’ ” recalled Peggy Reavey. “He spent the rest of 1965 living in Alexandria, working at a series of bad jobs, and I know he had some really rough times. I think it was during that time that he was drafted—he got out of that, probably from a nervous stomach. He had a lot of trouble with his stomach when he was young.” (Lynch had a bad back that kept him out of the service.)
When Lynch returned from Europe and headed back to Alexandria, the Keelers took him in. He did various odd jobs around the house, including painting the upstairs bathroom, which Toby Keeler said “took him forever. He used a teeny little brush and spent three days painting the bathroom, and probably a day alone painting the radiator. He got into every nook and cranny and painted that thing better than when it was new. My mother still laughs when she thinks of David in that bathroom.”6 One night when the Keelers were entertaining dinner guests, Bushnell announced, “David has decided he’s going to be moving out and finding his own place.” Lynch was hearing this news for the first time, but Keeler felt Lynch should get on with his life and begin living among his peers.
“David was gobbling up all the art he could,” said David Keeler, “and he always seemed cheerful—he’d use naïve expressions like ‘nifty.’ His favorite was ‘swingin’ enough.’ Bush would suggest that he try this or that, and David would say, ‘Okay, swingin’ enough, Bushnell!’ Still, I think he was adrift at that point. He was kind of desperate and needed money because he’d gotten his own place, so I got him a job as a blueprint boy at an engineering firm where I worked as a draftsman. David worked by himself in the blueprint room and loved experimenting with the materials. He’d come over to my desk and say, ‘Hey, Dave! What do you think of this? Look at this!’ He spent a lot of time not doing company business. I can’t remember which of us got fired first.
“David was very hard to get up in the morning, too,” Keeler continued. “I walked by his place on the way to work, and I’d holler up to his window, ‘Lynch! Get up! You’re gonna be late!’ He was living in a building owned by a guy named Michelangelo Aloca, and there was a frame shop just below David’s room that Aloca owned. He was a paraplegic, great big guy, very strong and intimidating-looking.”
After losing his job at the engineering firm, Lynch was hired by Aloca to work in his frame shop. He lost that job, too, when he scratched a frame, and Aloca then gave him a job as a janitor. He was making the best of things but it was a difficult period, and Lynch was relieved when he again crossed paths with Fisk. “At some point I went home to Alexandria and found David working in an art store, sweeping—David’s a great sweeper,” said Fisk. “He still likes to sweep, and takes great pride in it, but he was being paid next to nothing. He was living in this apartment that was beautifully decorated with inexpensive stuff—I remember it had orange drapes—but I think his life was kind of stagnant. I said, ‘You should come up to Philly,’ so he came to look at the school, then he enrolled.”
Lynch headed for Philadelphia at the end of that year and he left Alexandria for good, but not without leaving a mark. Fisk’s mother was the property manager of the rented house where the Lynches had lived, and he’d painted a mural on the ceiling of his bedroom. “After they moved out they had such a problem getting that mural off,” said Fisk. “David painted it in Prussian blue, which was one of his favorite colors, and it kept bleeding through.”
NINTH GRADE WAS the worst year of my life. I missed my friends in Boise and the feel of the place, the light and the smell, and Virginia seemed very dark. I hated the nature in Alexandria—the forests were completely different from Boise—and I got in with some bad guys and sort of became a juvenile delinquent. One of these guys, kind of the ringleader, was way older than his years and was like an adult. A smoothie. He looked like a smaller Rock Hudson, and he’d steal his neighbor’s car and pick up different people, and we’d go into D.C. at two or three in the morning, a hundred and twenty miles an hour down Shirley Highway, and go to novelty shops or drinking or whatever. The thing that drew me to this guy was that I didn’t like my life, and I liked the idea of doing strange things, sort of. I liked it and I didn’t like it. This guy came up to the house once and he had a cigarette behind his ear and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve, and my parents met him. They weren’t real happy. They thought, Poor Dave, he’s into something. . . .
This guy had lots of girlfriends and I think he quit school. I visited Boise during the summer after ninth grade, and when I got back to Alexandria he was gone. Then one day at lunch I was out in the parking lot, probably going over to the smoking section, and he drives up in this convertible with this girl and it was just perfect. All happy; Mr. Cool. I don’t know what became of him.
My bedroom opened onto a patio on the second floor and I could climb down and sneak out; then the next day I’d have to go to school. One time I got home and the minute my head hit the pillow I heard the alarm go off. It was crazy, and my parents knew I snuck out, but they didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t that wild, but I did get really drunk a few times, and one time it was on gin. I was drinking gin and telling these girls it was water and I ended up in Russell Kefauver’s front yard. I woke up and saw this wooden post with a number on it, and I kept looking at this number, then I realized I was in a yard on my back and that I was at Russell’s house. I don’t know how I got home.
My parents worried about me when I was in the ninth grade. Magazines then had these contests that said, “Draw me,” and just to see if I could do it, I drew this thing and sent it in. Then one night this man came to the house and told my parents that my drawing was so good that I’d won some kind of fake scholarship. I was upstairs, and my parents were downstairs meeting with this man in the living room and it was so sweet. They were trying to help me find a better direction to go in.
I guess I believed in God in my own way when I was growing up. I didn’t really think about it, but I knew there was something kind of running the thing. Then one Sunday morning when I was fourteen I thought to myself, I’m not getting anything out of going to church. I knew I wasn’t getting the real thing, and looking back, I can see I was headed for Maharishi. When I was working on Eraserhead, I’d see photographs of Indian masters and think, This face knows something that I don’t know. Could it be that there’s such a thing as enlightenment? Is that real or is it just some Indian thing? Now I know it’s real. Anyhow, I stopped going to church.
Like in every school, the jocks at Hammond High were the most popular. Then there were fraternities, and they weren’t exactly the bad boys, but they didn’t give a shit about sports and were into other things. I was in a fraternity and Lester Grossman was our president and Lester was a supreme character. After school Lester worked in a shoe store and every night he stole a metal shoehorn, and when he got home he’d throw it on the floor in his bedroom, and there was a big pile of shoehorns in there. A relative of Lester’s got us a bunch of light bulbs for super cheap and we sold them door-to-door. We were selling them like hotcakes and we made a truckload of money, then we threw a giant party. It wasn’t just for our high school. It was for Washington, D.C.–area high schools, and it was huge. We hired this band called the Hot Nuts, and there was an admission fee and we made a lot of money. We had so much money that we all spent a week in Virginia Beach, and the fraternity paid for little bungalows and dinner every night and maybe even some spending money. I went my junior and senior year and was in a fraternity the whole way through high school. People had slow-dance parties in basements, too, and I’d also go to those. Movies didn’t mean anything to me when I was a teenager. The only time I went to movies was when I’d go to the drive-in, and I’d go there for making out. I went to movie theaters a few times, but why go to the theater? It’s cold and dark and the day is going by outside. You could be doing so many things.
I dress the same way now that I dressed then, and I wasn’t aware in high school that I had my own style. I got my clothes at Penney’s. I loved khaki pants and I liked wearing a coat and tie—it was just something I felt comfortable with. I wore three ties for a long time, two bow ties and a regular tie, but I wouldn’t tie the bow ties—they’d just be knotted at the top. I’ve always buttoned the top button of my shirt because I don’t like air on my collarbone and I don’t like anyone touching my collarbone. It makes me crazy and I don’t know why. It might’ve been one of the reasons for the ties, to protect my neck.
I met Jack Fisk at school and we became friends because we were both interested in art, but the thing I really liked about Jack is that he’s a dedicated worker. When you see the seriousness of him working and building stuff, it’s a beautiful thing. I have tremendous respect for Jack, and because I met him when we were young, those are friends that you keep longer. I probably haven’t talked to him in months, but Jack is my best friend. I remember meeting his sister Mary very well, too. She was a fox and I was always attracted to her. We dated a little bit and I made out with her and I think Jack got really upset.
Linda Styles was my girlfriend during my freshman year. Linda was petite and real dramatic and we used to make out in her basement. Her parents were nice—her father was in the navy and her mom was real sweet, and they let me smoke there. Most people didn’t mind smoking in those days. Later on Linda ended up going with this ringleader guy, and I think he was screwing her. See, I didn’t get there until I was eighteen, the summer after high school. Maybe I was slow, but I think I was pretty normal for those days. It was a different time. After Linda Styles I saw some other girls. If I had a type, I guess you could say I liked brunettes the best, and I kind of liked librarian types, you know, their outer appearance hiding smoldering heat inside. . . .
Judy Westerman was my main high school girlfriend, and I loved her so much. She sort of looked like Paula Prentiss. Was I faithful to her? No. I mean, I was and I wasn’t. I was seeing some different girls and getting further with them because Judy was a Catholic. We probably did more on the early dates than later, because she kept going to catechism and finding out more things she wasn’t allowed to do. Only one girl broke my heart and her name was Nancy Briggs. She was the girlfriend of my friend Charlie Smith, and I don’t know if he knew I loved his girlfriend. She didn’t love me, though. I was nuts for her all during the first half of my year at college in Boston, and I was just brokenhearted.
During Christmas break when I was going to college in Boston, I went down to Virginia and I was pining away, and David Keeler said, “Why don’t you just take her to lunch and see what’s going on?” So I called Nancy and we went to McDonald’s. We took our food to the car and I asked her if she loved me, and she said no, and that was it. I just sort of carried it for a long time and I’d have dreams about her. What was it about Nancy Briggs? I just loved her, and who knows why you fall in love with somebody. Nothing ever happened with her, but I just couldn’t get her out of my system. After I finished shooting Blue Velvet I was in Wilmington, and for some reason I decided, I’m going to call Nancy Briggs. Somehow I got her number and I called her up, and the second I heard her voice the pining was completely lifted. It went from a dream to reality, and the dream was the powerful thing. It’s amazing what we do in our brains. Why did I pine for all those years? Go figure . . .
Things were changing in the country at the end of the fifties, so the change I felt when we moved to Virginia was also happening in Boise. Then when Kennedy was assassinated it got really bad. I remember that day. I was setting up an art display by myself in these big glass cases in the entrance hall to the school, right next to the administration office, and I heard something about the president on the radio in there. They hadn’t said he’d died, but he was in the hospital and the buzz started. When I finished what I was doing, this woman said, “You have to go back to your class,” so I went back to class and they made the announcement and closed the school. I walked Judy home and she was sobbing so much she couldn’t talk. Kennedy was Catholic like her and she loved him so much. She lived in an apartment building on the second floor, so we walked up and went inside and her mom was in the living room. Judy walked away from me, passed her mom, turned a corner, went into her room, and didn’t come out for four days.
At the time I didn’t question who killed Kennedy, but you start looking into things. They say, Look who’s got the motive. LBJ lived in Texas and got him down there, and LBJ wanted to be president since he was three feet tall. LBJ was the most powerful senator they say there ever was, and he gave that up to be vice president? He was one twenty-five-cent bullet away from the presidency, and I think he hated Kennedy and he organized it so he could be president. That’s my theory.
In the eighth grade I liked science for some reason, so when I started ninth grade I signed up for all science classes. Now I can hardly believe it. The whole four years is booked in science! Then in ninth grade I meet Toby Keeler and he tells me his father is a painter—no, not a house painter, a fine-art painter—and, literally, boom! A bomb goes off in my head. All these things must’ve just flown together like a hydrogen bomb and that was it, that’s all I wanted to do. But I had to go to school, and high school was the worst. To go to that building for so many hours every day just seemed ridiculous. I have about three high school classroom memories, and none of them are good. I remember saying to Sam Johnson, “Tell me, tell me, tell me!” We were about to have a test, and he would tell me things and I’d try to remember them long enough to take the test. I never studied and couldn’t get out of these science classes, and I got thrown off the student council because I flunked physics and refused to go to class. Instead of going, I’d go down to the front office and beg, “Let me out of this; I don’t want to be a physicist,” and they said, “David, there are some things in life you have to do whether you like it or not.” My little brother was into electronics from an early age and that’s what he wound up going into, and I think you know what you’re going to do when you’re a kid. They should take us out of school and just let us concentrate on whatever that thing is. Holy smokes! I could’ve been painting all that time I spent in school! And I remember zip. Zip! I can’t remember a fuckin’ thing I learned in school.
The weekend after I met Toby Keeler he took me to his father’s studio, and at that point Bushnell had a studio in Georgetown that was so fucking great. He was living the art life and painting all the time. I only saw his Georgetown studio once, and the next thing I know he’s moved from Georgetown to Alexandria, where he had a whole building. I wanted a studio and Bushnell offered to rent me a room in his new place, so I talked to my father and he said, “I’ll pay half if you get a job and pay the other half.” So I got a job at Herter’s Drug Store delivering prescriptions in the store’s red-and-white jeep. It was an open jeep with a stick shift. I can’t believe I did that. I’d have to find people’s addresses and take drugs to them, and that’s a lot of responsibility. On weekends I’d sometimes work the cigar counter at Herter’s. During that period Bushnell would get models and I’d get to sit in on these things and draw, and he always had coffee going. A guy named Bill Lay went in on the room with me but he never showed up there.
Jack had started working in my room at Bushnell’s, though, and it wasn’t big enough for both of us so we moved into a studio above a shoe store. Our landlady was named Mrs. Marciette, and she didn’t have any teeth. She complained to us a lot—“I’m not burning the light all night for two alley cats; clean up; I’m sick; I don’t know why I rent to you”—and she was always around. When I turned the lights on in my room, just for a millisecond I’d see ten million cockroaches, which would instantly disappear. The place was riddled with cockroaches, but Jack and I each had a room, and there was a kitchen, and it was a great place to paint.
Living in the attic above Jack and me was this guy named Radio, and we got to know him. He was a hunchback, and he would go up these real narrow back stairs that led to this wooden door with a padlock on it. That was his room. Radio didn’t have too many teeth, either, and in his room he had maybe fifty porno magazines lying around, a hot plate where he made steaks—just steaks—and cheap hard liquor. He was a phone man for the circus, and he’d travel to cities ahead of the circus and phone prominent businessmen and get them to donate money to send needy children to the circus. The circus would rent a room somewhere and have twelve phones put in and there would be all these guys phoning people, and it was a racket. They would send maybe one busload of needy children to the circus and pocket the rest of the dough. Radio says, “They call me Radio because they can’t turn me off.” Jack and I had a phone, and one night he came down and asked if he could use our phone. We said, “Sure, Radio,” so he comes in and there’s this little table with a rotary dial phone on it. He goes to the phone and his hand goes down and begins dialing, and the number was instantly dialed. I’ve never seen anybody dial a phone like this. It’s as if he put all the fingers on his hand into this rotary dial at the same time, and in a fraction of a second he’s got somebody on the phone and he starts talking. If you closed your eyes you’d swear you were listening to a highly intelligent saint telling you about these needy children. Radio was incredible.
Right next door to Mrs. Marciette’s was Frankie Welch, this woman who looked like a brunette Doris Day. This area was right by city hall but it was pretty bad, and Frankie Welch was the first person down there. She had a vision and she had this super high-end place where she sold clothes. She also designed clothes and she ended up being really close to Betty Ford and did clothes for her. When she found out we were artists, she had me making signs with oil paint that were really cool-looking. But then Mrs. Marciette asked us to leave. We were in there a lot late at night and we’d leave the lights on and she was paying for electricity and there was paint all over the place. I didn’t used to leave properties better than they were when I got there. It wasn’t like we purposely trashed the place like rock stars, but when you’re painting, paint gets around. After we moved out, I saw Radio one more time. He was downtown, this hunchback with a battered little suitcase, waiting for the bus that would take him to the next town.
I went to a doctor when I was in high school because I was having spasms of the intestines, which were caused by nerves and all the things I was doing wrong. When I was in high school I had a studio life, a fraternity life, and a home life, and I didn’t want any of them to mix. I never brought friends home and I didn’t want my parents to know about anything. I knew how to behave at home, and it was different from how I behaved at the fraternity, and that was different from how I was at the studio. I had a lot of tension and nervousness about living all of these separate lives.
• • •
I didn’t care about the New York art world, and going to college there didn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know why I picked the Boston Museum School—I just got a thing in my mind. I wanted to go to Boston. It sounded so cool, the Boston Museum School, but I didn’t like it at all and I almost couldn’t go to school because I was afraid to leave the apartment. I had agoraphobia and still have it a little bit. I don’t like going out. My dad told me I had to get a roommate because my apartment was too expensive, so I put a thing on the wall at school, and this guy Peter Blankfield—who later changed his name to Peter Wolf and became the singer in the J. Geils Band—came up to me and said, “I’d like to be your roommate.” I said, “Fine,” and he came over that night.
Another guy, Peter Laffin, had a pickup truck, so the three of us get in this truck and go from Boston down to Brooklyn or the Bronx or someplace to get Peter’s stuff. They were smoking dope in the car and I’d never smoked dope, so I’m getting high just from being in the car, and they gave me some tokes. They knew how marijuana works and knew I didn’t know, so they say, “Hey, David, wouldn’t a donut be good right now?” I said, “I gotta have a donut!” So we got twenty-four day-old powdered-sugar donuts and I was so eager to eat one that I inhaled a mountain of powdered sugar into my lungs. You’ve got to be careful.
So it’s my turn to drive, and we’re driving down the freeway and it’s real quiet, then I hear somebody say, “David.” Then it was quiet again, and then somebody said, “David! You’ve stopped on the freeway!” I was watching these lines on the road and they were going slower and slower, and I was loving them, and I was going slower and slower until the lines finally stopped moving. This was an eight-lane freeway at night and cars are just flying by us and I’d stopped the car! It was so dangerous!
For some reason we then stopped by some guy’s apartment, which was lit by just a few Christmas bulbs, mostly red. He’s got his giant motorcycle in the living room all taken apart, and a few chairs, and it seemed like we’d entered hell. Then we go to Peter’s house and go down in the basement, and while we’re down there I cup my hands, they fill up with dark water, and there, floating on the surface of the water, was Nancy Briggs’s face. I was just looking at her. That was the first time I smoked marijuana. The next morning we loaded Peter’s stuff and went to see Jack, who told me that some of the students at his school were taking heroin. I went to a party in Jack’s building and there was this kid in a silk shirt kind of huddled up, and he was on heroin. You started seeing hippies around during that period, too, and I didn’t look down on them, but it seemed like a fad, and a lot of them were raisin and nut eaters. Some of them dressed like they were from India and they’d say they were meditators, but I didn’t want anything to do with meditation then.
I threw my roommate Peter out after just a few months. What happened was I went to a Bob Dylan concert and ended up sitting next to this girl I’d just broken up with. I couldn’t believe I was sitting next to her. Obviously I’d made the date while we were going together, but then we broke up, so I went to the concert alone and I was stoned and there she was! I remember thinking what a weird coincidence it was that I was sitting next to her. We had really bad seats and we were way in the back of a giant auditorium, far, far, away. This was 1964 and Dylan didn’t have a band with him—it was just him up there alone and he looked incredibly small. Using my thumb and my forefinger I started sighting and measuring his jeans and I said to this girl, “His jeans are only a sixteenth of an inch big!” Then I measured his guitar and I said “His guitar is just a sixteenth of an inch, too!” It seemed like the strangest magic act and I got super paranoid. Finally there was an intermission and I went running outside and it was cold and fresh and I thought, Thank God, I’m out, and I walked home. So I’m at home and Peter comes in with a bunch of friends and he says “What? Nobody walks out on Dylan!” And I said, “I fuckin’ walk out on Dylan. Get the hell out of here.” And I threw them all out. I remember the first time I heard Dylan on the car radio I was riding with my brother and we started laughing like crazy. It was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it was so cool the way he sang, but it was cool funny.
I only went to the Boston Museum School for two semesters, and I didn’t even go to classes the second half. The only class I liked was sculpture, which was held in the attic of the museum. The room was around twenty-five feet wide, but it was a hundred feet long and had incredibly high ceilings with a skylight running through the whole thing. There were big bins of materials like plaster and clay, and that’s where I learned casting. The teacher was named Jonfried Georg Birkschneider, and when he got his paycheck he’d sign it over in a Boston bar with a polished dark wooden bar a hundred feet long, and he’d just drink. His girlfriend’s name was Natalie. After my first semester I went home to Alexandria at Christmas and I let him stay at my place with Natalie. When I came back to Boston I let them keep staying with me in my apartment, and they stayed for a few months. I was painting in one room, and he and Natalie took over another room, and he just sat there, but it didn’t bother me. He turned me on to Moxie, which is this kind of cola they drink in Boston. I hated it until I discovered that if you put the bottles in the freezer the lid will pop off and there would be soft ice that tasted so good. It was like a Moxie slush. I don’t know what became of Jonfried Georg Birkschneider.
So I left college and Jack and I went to Europe. We went because it’s part of the art dream, but it was completely half-baked. I was the only one who had money—although Jack probably could have gotten some if he’d written home—but we really did have a good time, sort of. The only place we didn’t like was Salzburg, and once that went belly-up we were just free-floating. We had no plan. We went from Salzburg to Paris, where we spent a day or two, then we took the real Orient Express, all electric trains, to Venice, and then coal-burning trains down to Athens. We got there at night, and when I woke up the next morning there were lizards on the ceiling and the walls of my room. I wanted to go to Athens because Nancy Briggs’s father had been transferred and was going to be there two months later, and Nancy would’ve been there, but we only stayed in Athens for one day. I thought, I’m seven thousand miles from where I really want to be and I just want to get out of here. I think Jack did, too.
But we were truly out of money by then. We went back to Paris, and on the train we met four schoolteachers and somehow we got an address where they were staying in Paris. We get to Paris and Mary has sent Jack a ticket home, but I don’t have a ticket, and Jack’s going to the airport. Before he left we went to the address these girls had given us, but they weren’t home, so we went to a sidewalk café and I ordered a Coca-Cola and gave Jack the last bit of money for a cab to the airport. I’m sitting there alone; I finish my Coke and go and knock on their door, and they’re still not there. I go back to the café and sit, then I go back and knock on their door and they’re home. They let me take a shower and gave me twenty dollars. I couldn’t reach my parents, because they were on vacation, so I called my grandfather and woke him up at four in the morning, and he got the money for a ticket to me fast; then I flew back and went to Brooklyn. I had all these European coins when I got home, and I gave them to my granddad. When he passed away they found this little purse with a slip of paper he’d safety-pinned to it that said, “These are coins that David brought me from Europe.” I still have it somewhere.
That was a strange period after I got back from Europe. My parents were upset when they found out I wouldn’t be going to school in Salzburg, and when I got back to Alexandria I stayed at the Keeler house. Bushnell and his wife were away and just Toby was there, and he was shocked to see me. I was going to be gone for three years, and fifteen days later I’m knocking on the door. After Toby’s I got my own place, and I always like to fix up a place. It’s almost like painting. I want the place where I live to be a certain way that feels good and where I can work. It’s something about the mind; it wants to have a certain thing, a setup.
Michelangelo Aloca was a fifties action painter who had a frame shop, and he gave me a job. He was a strange guy. His head was as big as a five-gallon can, and he had a huge beard and giant torso and the legs of a three-year-old. He was in a wheelchair, but he was very strong on top. One time we were driving and we passed these giant iron H-beams and he crawled out of the car, went over and grabbed this H-beam, and lifted it up and slammed it down. He was a nut. His wife was beautiful and he had a beautiful child. Knockout wife! He fired me from the job in his frame store and then hired me as a janitor to sweep out. One day he said, “You want to make five dollars extra?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “The girls just vacated their place in the building. Go clean their toilet.” This toilet . . . if a little wind came, it would slop over. It was right to the top of the toilet, brown, white, and red water, right to the brim. I cleaned it until you could eat off it. It was clean as a whistle.
One time I went into Mike Aloca’s place and he was in there talking with this black guy. After the guy left Mike says, “You want a free TV?” I said, “Sure,” and he said, “Take this money and this gun and go to this place and this guy’s gonna take you to these TVs.” I got Charlie Smith and somebody else to go with me and we went to D.C. and found the guy, and he tells us where to drive, then he says, “Stop here—I’ll go in and get the TVs.” He goes in, then he comes back and says, “They won’t give me the TVs; they want the money first.” We say no, so he goes in and comes out again without the TVs, telling us he needs the money first. We say no, then he makes another trip, and this time he brings out a TV box and we decide to take a chance. We give him the money, he goes in and never comes out again, and there we were with a loaded pistol under the front seat. Luckily, Mike just laughed when we told him what happened. Mike could be scary. He once said I was spending all the money he paid me on paint and he said, “I want you to show me food you buy; you gotta eat.” I must’ve looked sickly or something. So I show him my milk and peanut butter and loaf of bread and he said, “Good for you.”
I got fired from every job I ever had. For a while I was working for an artist living in Alexandria who did these circles of red, blue, and yellow on Plexiglas and had a little store that he had me running. Nobody came in there, and every once in a while I’d steal a dime and get a Coca-Cola. One day Jack came in and said he was joining the navy, but he wanted to do that for three seconds, because the next thing I know he’s up at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. So he’s up there and I’m down here.
Bushnell knew it wasn’t the best thing for me to be in Alexandria, and he knew Jack was at the Academy, so he said, “Let’s make it really not fun for Dave around here.” Bushnell and his brother started shunning me, and I didn’t know why they were doing it, and it hurt. Then Bushnell wrote a letter to the Academy telling them how great I was, and I think that letter helped me get into the Academy. Bushnell started me out by making me realize I wanted to be a painter, then he gave me a studio; he was an inspiration to me, then he wrote that letter—he helped me in so many ways. He and his wife were the ones who told me about the American Film Institute. They heard I made two little films and told me the AFI was giving grants. He was a huge, huge, important person in my life.
Bushnell helped a lot during those years, but, generally, being a teenager wasn’t that great for me. Being a teenager is so euphoric and thrilling, but it’s mixed with a kind of chain to jail, which is high school. It’s such a torment.
