Room to Dream Read online

  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.