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.
Smiling Bags of Death
Philadelphia was a broken city during the 1960s. In the years following World War II, a housing shortage, coupled with an influx of African Americans, triggered a wave of white flight, and from the 1950s through the 1980s the city’s population dwindled. Race relations there had always been fraught, and during the 1960s black Muslims, black nationalists, and a militant branch of the NAACP based in Philadelphia played key roles in the birth of the black power movement and ratcheted up tensions dramatically. The animosity that simmered between hippies, student activists, police officers, drug dealers, and members of the African American and Irish Catholic communities often reached a boiling point and spilled over into the streets.
One of the first race riots of the civil rights era erupted in Philadelphia less than a year and a half before Lynch arrived there, and it left 225 stores damaged or destroyed; many never reopened, and once-bustling commercial avenues were transformed into empty corridors of shuttered storefronts and broken windows. A vigorous drug trade contributed to the violence of the city, and poverty demoralized the residents. Dangerous and dirty, it provided rich mulch for Lynch’s imagination. “Philadelphia was a terrifying place,” said Jack Fisk, “and it introduced David to a world that was really seedy.”
Situated in the center of the city like a demilitarized zone was the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “There was a lot of conflict and paranoia in the city, and the school was like an oasis,” recalled Lynch’s classmate Bruce Samuelson.1 Housed in an ornate Victorian building, the Academy, the oldest art school in the country, was regarded as a conservative school during the years Lynch was
