it was fate that I wound up at that school. Jack and I didn’t go to classes—the only reason we were in school was to find like-minded souls, and we found some, and we inspired each other. All the students I hung out with were serious painters, and they were a great bunch. Boston was a bad bunch. They just weren’t serious.
My parents supported me as long as I was in school, and my dear dad never disowned me, but there’s some truth to Peggy and Eo Omwake saying I was a little depressed when I first got to Philadelphia. It wasn’t exactly depression—it was more like a melancholy, and it didn’t have anything to do with the city. It was like being lost. I hadn’t found my way yet and maybe I was worried about it.
I went there at the end of 1965 and stayed with Jack in his little room. When I got there Jack had a puppy named Five, so there was newspaper all over the floors because he was housebreaking him. When you walked around the place there was the sound of rustling newspaper. Five was a great dog and Jack had him for many years. Next door to us was the Famous Diner, which was run by Pete and Mom. Pete was a big guy and Mom was a big gal who had weird yellow hair. She looked like the picture of the woman on the bags of flour—you know, the blue-apron waitress thing. The Famous Diner was a train-car diner, and it had a long counter and booths along the wall and it was so fantastic. They’d deliver the jelly donuts at five-thirty in the morning.
Jack’s place was small so we needed to move, and we found a place at 13th and Wood. We moved on New Year’s Eve and I remember moving like it was yesterday. It was around one in the morning and we moved with a shopping cart. We had Jack’s mattress and all his stuff in there, and I just had one bag of stuff, and we were pushing the cart along and we passed this happy couple, drunk probably, and they said, “You’re moving on New Year’s Eve? Do you need any money?” I yelled back, “No, we’re rich!” I don’t know why I said that, but I felt rich.
Our place was like a storefront, and in the back was a toilet and washbasin. There was no shower or hot water, but Jack rigged up this stainless-steel coffee maker that would heat up water and he had the whole first floor, I had a studio on the second floor next to this guy Richard Childers, who had a back room on the second floor, and I had a bedroom in the attic. The window in my bedroom was blown out so I had a piece of plywood sitting in there, and I had a cooking pot I’d pee in then empty out into the backyard. There were lots of cracks in my bedroom walls, so I went to a phone booth and ripped out all the white pages—I didn’t want the yellow pages, I wanted the white pages. I mixed up wheat paste and papered the entire room with the white pages, and it looked really beautiful. I had an electric heater in there, and one morning James Havard came to wake me up and give me a ride to school and the plywood had blown out of the window, so there was a mound of fresh snow on the floor in my room. My pillow was almost on fire because I had the heater close to my bed, so he maybe saved my life.
James was the real deal. He was older and he was a great artist and he worked constantly. You know the word “painterly”? This guy was painterly. Everything he touched had this fantastic, organic painterly thing, and James had a lot of success. Six or seven of us went to New York once because James was in a big show way uptown. By the end of the opening we were all drunk and we had to go way downtown, and I don’t know if I was driving, but I remember this as if I was driving. It was one or two in the morning and we hit every single green light from way uptown all the way to the bottom of the city. It was incredible.
Virginia Maitland turned out to be a serious painter, but I sort of remember her as a party girl. She was out in the street one day and there was a young man whistling bird calls on the corner. She took him home and he did bird calls in her living room and she liked that so she kept him, and that was Bob Chadwick. Bob was a machinist and his boss loved him—Bob could do no wrong. He worked at this place that had a thirty-five-foot lathe with ten thousand different gears to do complicated cuttings, and Bob was the only one who could run it. He just intuitively knew how to do things. He wasn’t an artist, but he was an artist with machines.
Our neighborhood was pretty weird. We lived next door to Pop’s Diner, which was run by Pop and his son Andy, and I met a guy at Pop’s who worked in the morgue, and he said, “Anytime you want to visit, just let me know and ring the doorbell at midnight.” So one night I went over there and rang the bell and he opened the door, and the front was like a little lobby. It had a cigarette machine, a candy machine, old forties tile on the floor, a little reception area, a couch, and this corridor that led to a door into the back. He opened that door and said, “Go on in there and make yourself at home,” and there was nobody working back there, so I was alone. They had different rooms with different things in them, and I went into the cold room. It was cold because they needed to preserve the bodies, and they were in there stacked up on these bunk-bed-type shelves. They’d all been in some kind of accident or experienced some violence, and they had injuries and cuts—not bleeding cuts, but they were open wounds. I spent a long time in there, and I thought about each one of them and what they must’ve experienced. I wasn’t disturbed. I was just interested. There was a parts room where there were pieces of people and babies, but there wasn’t anything that frightened me.
One day on the way to the White Tower to get lunch, I saw the smiling bags of death at the morgue. When you walked down this alley you’d see the back of the morgue opened up, and there were these rubber body bags hanging on pegs. They’d hose them out and water and body fluids would drip out, and they sagged in the middle so they were like big smiles. Smiling bags of death.
I must’ve changed and gotten kind of dirty during that period. Judy Westerman was at the University of Pennsylvania then and I think she was in a sorority, and one time Jack and I got a job driving some paintings up there. I thought, Great, I can see Judy. So we go up there and deliver this stuff, then I go to her dormitory and walk in and this place was so clean, and I was in art school being a bum, and all the girls are giving me weird looks. They sent word to Judy that I was there, and I think I embarrassed her. I think they were saying “Who the hell is that bum over there?” But she came down and we had a really nice talk. She was used to that part of me, but they weren’t. That was the last time I ever saw Judy.
We once had a big party at 13th and Wood. The party’s going on and there’s a few hundred people in the house, and somebody comes up to me and says, “David, so-and-so’s got a gun. We gotta get it from him and hide it.” This guy was pissed off at somebody, so we got his gun and hid it in the toilet—I grew up with guns, so I’m comfortable around them. There were lots of art students at this party, but everybody wasn’t an art student, and there was one girl who seemed a little bit simple, but she was totally sexy. A beautiful combo. It must’ve been winter, because everybody’s coats were on my bed in the attic, so when somebody was leaving I’d go up and get their coat. One time I go to my room and there on my bed, against a kind of mink coat, is this girl with her pants pulled down, and she’d obviously been taken advantage of by someone. She was totally drunk and I helped her up and got her dressed, so that was going on at this party, too.
It was pretty packed and then the cops show up and say, “There’s been a complaint; everybody’s got to go home.” Fine, most everybody left, and there were maybe fifteen people still hanging around. One guy was quietly playing acoustic guitar, it was real mellow, and the cops come back and say, “We thought we told you all to leave.” Just then this girl named Olivia, who was probably drunk, walks up to one of the cops and gives him the finger and says, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” “Okay, everybody in the paddy wagon,” and there was one parked out front and everybody got in—me, Jack, Olivia, and these other people—and they drive us to the police station. In interrogation they find out that Jack and I are the ones who live at the house, so we’re arrested as proprietors of a disorderly house and put in jail. Olivia was the one who mouthed off, so she goes to the women’s jail. Jack and I get put in a cell and there are two transvestites—one named Cookie in our cell, and another one down the way—and they talked to each other all night. There was a murderer—he had the cot—and at least six other people in the cell. The next morning we go before the judge and a bunch of art students
