this hotel, up to the mezzanine level, which was kind of strange and dark, and there was a soda fountain there where this girl I’d been writing to worked. I asked her if she wanted to go to the drive-in that night, and after I had dinner with my grandmother and Mrs. Foudray, this girl and I went to the drive-in. In those days there were drive-ins everywhere. It was fantastic. So we start making out at the drive-in and she’s telling me things about herself and I realize this is a really wild girl. She had strange boyfriends after that, probably because so-called regular guys like me were sort of afraid of her. I remember her saying to me, “Most people don’t know what they want to do in life and you are so lucky that you know what you want to do.” I think her life was already headed in a dark direction.
We continued writing to each other—in fact, I was still writing to her, and two other girls, when I married Peggy. I’d been writing to these three girls for years, and finally one day Peggy said, “David, you’re married now; you gotta stop writing to these girls.” Peggy wasn’t the jealous type at all, but she said, “Look, you write a nice little letter and they’ll understand,” like I was a little kid. And I stopped writing to them.
Many years later, in 1991, I’m up shooting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and during lunch I go into my trailer and meditate. One day after I finish meditating, I open up the trailer door and there’s somebody on the film saying, “There’s a man named Dick Hamm here, and he says he knows you.” I said, “Dick Hamm? Are you kidding?” I’d gone to elementary school with Dick Hamm and hadn’t seen him in decades. I go over and there he is with his wife from New York City, and it was great to see him. I asked him if he’d run into this girl I’d gone to the drive-in with and he said, “No, she’s dead. She jumped into the big canal and killed herself.” I started wondering, What is the story here? What happened to her? So I went back to Boise after the film wrapped and looked into this thing. I went to the library and read articles about this girl, and I saw police reports about the day she died.
This girl had married an older guy who her brother and father hated, and she was also having an affair with this guy who was a prominent citizen in Boise. One Friday night this guy broke it off with her and she was devastated. She couldn’t hide her sadness, so maybe her husband suspected something. The following Sunday morning a neighbor down the street was having a brunch, and she and her husband went there separately. The story goes that her husband left the brunch and went home, and a little while later she comes home and goes into the bedroom and gets this Western-style .22 pistol, then goes into the laundry room, points it into her chest, pulls the trigger, then staggers out of the house and dies on the front lawn. I wondered, If you were committing suicide, why would you stagger out on the lawn?
As far as the police looking into this, I think they got word from the guy she was having the affair with: This is a suicide; don’t go anywhere near it, because it’s going to come back to me; don’t fuck around, guys. Put it under the rug. I went to the police department and tried to trick them by saying, “I’m looking for a story for a film; do you have any girls who committed suicide during this period?” It didn’t work, because they were never going to bring up that story. I got permission to get a photograph of the crime/suicide scene, and I filled out these forms and turned them in, and they said, “We’re sorry, but that year’s stuff was thrown away.” I knew this girl from the beginning, when she was young, and I can’t explain why her life went the way it did.
But I do know that a lot of who we are is already set when we get here. They call it the wheel of birth and death, and I believe we’ve been around many, many times. There’s a law of nature that says what you sow is what you reap and you come into life with the certainty that some of your past is going to visit you in this life. Picture a baseball: You hit it and it goes out and it doesn’t come back until it hits something and starts traveling back. There’s so much empty space that it could be gone for a long time, but then it starts coming back and it’s coming back to you, the person who set the baseball in motion.
I think fate plays a huge role in our lives, too, because there’s no explaining why certain things happen. How come I won an independent-filmmaker grant and got to go to the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute? How come you meet certain people and fall in love with them and you don’t meet all those other people? You come in with so much of who you are, and although parents and friends can influence you a little, you’re basically who you are from the start. My children are all really different and they’re their own people and they came into the world with their little personalities. You get to know them really well and you love them, but you don’t have that much to do with the path they’re going to travel in life. Some things are set. Childhood experiences can shape you, though, and my childhood years in Boise were hugely important to me.
It was an August night in 1960. It was our last night in Boise. There’s a triangle of grass separating our driveway from the Smiths’ driveway next door, and my dad, my brother, my sister, and I were out in that triangle saying goodbye to the Smith boys, Mark, Denny, Randy, and Greg. Suddenly Mr. Smith appears and I see him talking to my dad, then shaking his hand. I stared at this and started feeling the seriousness of the situation, the huge importance of this last night. In all the years living next to the Smiths I had never spoken one-on-one with Mr. Smith and now here he was walking toward me. He held out his hand and I took it. He might’ve said something like, “We’re going to miss you, David,” but I didn’t really hear what he said—I just burst into tears. I realized how important the Smith family was to me, then how important all my Boise friends were, and I felt it building on a deeper and deeper level. It was beyond sad. And then I saw the darkness of the unknown I’d be heading into the next day. I looked up through tears at Mr. Smith as we finished shaking hands. I couldn’t speak. It was definitely the end of a most beautiful golden era.
The Art Life
Alexandria, Virginia, was a very different world. A relatively sophisticated city seven miles south of downtown Washington, D.C., it’s essentially a suburb of D.C. and is home to thousands of government workers. Alexandria had a population five times the size of Boise’s during the early sixties, but Lynch was apparently unfazed by the bigger world he stepped into. “From everything I’ve heard, David was a star in high school and had that sense of being the golden boy,” said Peggy Reavey. “From the start he had that.”
Lynch’s course in life clarified itself significantly when he befriended Toby Keeler shortly after beginning his freshman year. “I met David on the front lawn of his girlfriend’s house, and my first impression was of her, not David,” said Keeler, who proceeded to woo the girlfriend, Linda Styles, away from Lynch. “David lived in another part of town, but the driving age in Alexandria was fifteen, and he’d driven his family’s Chevy Impala, with big wings on it, to her house. I liked David immediately. He’s always been one of the most likable people on the planet, and we’ve joked for years about the fact that I stole his girlfriend. We were both in a fraternity at Hammond High School whose secret phrase was ‘Trust from beginning to end,’ but the David I knew wasn’t a partying frat boy.”1
Lynch and Keeler became close friends, but it was Toby’s father, artist Bushnell Keeler, who really changed Lynch’s life. “Bush had a big effect on David, because he had the courage to break away from the life he’d been living and get a studio and just start making art,” said Toby. “David said a bomb went off in his head when he heard what Bushnell did. ‘A fine-art painter? You can do that?’”
Bushnell Keeler’s younger sibling, David, remembered his brother as “a very up-and-down guy. Bush got a degree from Dartmouth College in business administration and married someone from a wealthy Cleveland family. He was a junior executive and was doing well but
