generation. My father and mother never went to our baseball games. Are you kidding me? That was our thing! What are they going to go for? They’re supposed to be working and doing their thing. This is our thing. Now all the parents are there, cheering their kids on. It’s just ridiculous.
Not long before Jen was born, Peggy said, “You gotta go and see Phyllis and Clayton’s house. They’ve got a setup that’s unbelievable.” So I rode my bike over to see this artist couple we knew and they were living in this huge house. Both of them were painters and each of them had their own floor to work in, and they showed me around and I said, “You guys are so lucky—this is great.” Phyllis said, “The house next door is for sale,” so I went and looked at this place and it was a corner house that was even bigger than their house. There was a sign with the name of the real estate company, so I rode over to Osakow Realty and introduced myself to this nice plump lady in a little office and she said, “How can I help you?” I said, “How much is that house at 2416 Poplar?” and she said, “Well, David, let’s take a look.” She opened up the book and said, “That house is twelve rooms, three stories, two sets of bay windows, fireplaces, earthen basement, oil heat, backyard, and tree. That house is three thousand, five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars down.” I said, “I’m buying that house,” and we did. It was right on the borderline between this Ukrainian neighborhood and a black neighborhood, and there was big, big violence in the air, but it was the perfect place to make The Grandmother and I was so lucky to get it. Peggy and I loved that house. Before we bought the place it had been a communist meeting house, and I found all kinds of communist newspapers under the linoleum flooring. The house had kind of a softwood floor, and they’d put newspaper down then put linoleum on top of the newspaper. This linoleum was really old, so I was breaking it up and throwing it away and one day I was working at the front of the house and I hear this noise like the sound of many waters. It was weird, something really unusual. I opened the blinds and looked out and there were ten thousand marchers coming down the street, and it freaked me out. That was the day Martin Luther King was killed.
We didn’t go to the movies a lot. Sometimes I would go to the Band Box, which was the art house where I saw French new wave and all that for the first time, but I didn’t go there much. And even if I was in the middle of making a film, I wasn’t ever thinking I’m in that world. Not in a million years! My friend Charlie Williams was a poet, and when he saw The Alphabet, I said to Charlie, “Is this an art film?” He said, “Yes, David.” I didn’t know anything. I did love Bonnie and Clyde, although that’s not why I started wearing an open-road Stetson panama-style hat. I started wearing one just because I found one at the Goodwill. When you take those hats off you sort of pinch the front of the brim, so they start coming apart. The Stetsons I was buying were already old, so the straw would break and pretty soon there would be a hole there. There are lots of pictures of me in hats with holes in them. I had two or three of them and I loved them.
The Goodwill in Philadelphia was incredible. Okay, I need some shirts, right? I go down Girard Avenue to Broad Street and there’s the Goodwill and they’ve got racks of shirts. Clean. Pressed. Some even starched! Mint. Like brand-new! I’d pick out three shirts, take them up to the counter: How much is this? Three dimes. I was into medical lamps, and this Goodwill had lamps that had all kinds of adjustments and different things, and I had fifteen medical lamps in our living room. I left them in Philadelphia because Jack was supposed to help pack the truck I drove out to Los Angeles, but he worked in a porno place that was busted and he was in jail the day we were loading the truck. It was just my brother and Peggy and me loading, and some good stuff got left behind.
When I got with Peggy, Jack moved into this place over an auto-body shop owned by a guy from Trinidad named Barker, and everybody loved Barker. He had legs like rubber and could crouch and then spring up, and he was built for auto-body work. One day he walked me past all these cars on racks to the very back of the place, where there was this old dusty tarp covering something. He pulls this tarp back and said, “I want you to have this car. This is a 1966 Volkswagen with hardly any miles on it. It was rear-ended and totaled, but I can fix this car and you can have it for six hundred dollars.” I said, “Barker, that is great!” So he fixed it up and it was like brand-new—it even smelled new! It rode so solid and smooth and it was a dream car in mint condition. I loved that car. When I brushed my teeth in the second-floor bathroom, I’d look out the window and see it down there parked in the street and it was so beautiful. So I’m brushing my teeth one morning and I look out and I think, Where did I park my car? It’s not there. That was my first car and it was stolen. So I moved on to my second car. There was a service station at the end of the street where Peggy’s family lived, and Peggy’s father took me down there and said to the guy who ran the place, “David needs a car. What used cars do you have?” I got this Ford Falcon station wagon and it was a dream, too. It was three-on-the-tree, the plainest Ford Falcon station wagon there could be—it had a heater and a radio and nothing else, but it had snow tires on the back and it could go anywhere. I sort of fell in love with that car.
I had to wait for the license plate for the Ford Falcon to come in the mail, so I decided to make one for the meantime. The license plate was a really fun project. I cut some cardboard, and it was a good piece of cardboard that was the same thickness as a license plate. I cut it in exactly the shape of a real license, then went to a car and measured the height of the letters and numbers, and looked at the colors, and made a Day-Glo registration sticker. The problem was that the license I copied had either all letters or all numbers, and my license had letters and numbers, and I later learned that letters and numbers aren’t the same height. So this rookie cop spots my license as a fake because everything was the same height, and this cop was a hero at the precinct for spotting this thing. So cops came to the door and Peggy was crying—it was serious! They came back later and wanted the license plate for the police museum. It was a fuckin’ beautiful job! That was the first time a museum acquired my work.
One night I came home from a movie and went up to the second floor and started to tell Peggy about it, and her eyes are like saucers because someone is outside the bay window. So I go downstairs where our phone is, and our next-door neighbor Phyllis calls right then. She’s a character and she’s talking away until I interrupt her and say, “Phyllis, I’ve gotta hang up and call the police. Somebody was trying to break in.” While I’m on the phone with her I see a pipe move, then I hear breaking glass, and I see someone outside the window and realize someone was in the basement, too—so there were two people. I don’t remember sitting on the couch the next night with a gun like Peggy said—I don’t think we ever had a gun at that place. But, yeah, these sorts of things happened there. Another time I’m sound asleep and I’m woken by Peggy’s face like two inches from mine. “David! There’s somebody in the house!” I get up and put my underpants on backward and reach under the bed and get this ceremonial sword Peggy’s father gave us, and I go to the head of the stairs and yell, “Get the hell out of here!” There were two black couples standing down there and they’re looking at me like I’m totally fucking crazy, right? They’d come in to make love or party or something because they thought it was an abandoned house. They said, “You don’t live here,” and I said, “The hell I don’t!”
By the time Jen was born I’d left school and I wrote that bullshit letter to the administration. Then I got a job. Christine McGinnis and Rodger LaPelle were both painters, but to make money Christine would knock out these animal engravings, and she had her mother, Dorothy, who was known as Flash, in there printing. It was the perfect job for me. Flash and I worked next to each other and there would be a little TV in front of us, and behind us were a hand press and some sinks. You’d start by inking the plate, then you’d take one of these used nylon socks Rodger would get and you’d fold it in a certain way, then you’d dance this nylon over the plate, hitting the mountains and leaving the valleys. Then you’d run a print on real good paper. While I was working in the shop, Rodger told me, “David, I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars to paint on the weekends and I’ll keep the paintings you make.” After I moved to L.A. he would send me paper and pencils to do drawings for him, still paying me. Rodger was and is a friend to artists.
One
