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
