Room to Dream Read online

  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…

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  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 stu
dio 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.

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  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.”