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
