David Lynch: The Art Life Page #3

See you, Mary.

I don't get out much.

Come on.

Come on.

My father, uh, told me, you know,

I could get this place,

but I had to take a roommate,

and my roommate later turned out

to be Peter Wolf

of the J. Geils Band.

He's a great musician.

And he knows the blues.

But he didn't ever lift a brush.

And the first night, there was, um,

another guy named Peter

who had a pickup truck.

And the three of us, uh,

got in his pickup truck

and drove back down

to, uh, New York City, in Brooklyn.

And it was on that trip

that I smoked, um, marijuana

for the first time.

And then it was my turn to drive.

So I was driving on a freeway

and pretty soon I hear, "David?"

And I said, "what?"

And they said, "David."

I said, "what?"

"David!"

"You stopped on the freeway, man."

And I had stopped right in the...

Not the right lane, but in the middle.

'Cause I was watching these white lines

and then it got slower and slower,

it was such a dream.

And the next time I smoked dope...

uh, Bob Dylan was playing, you know,

at this big place right down the street.

And so, lo and behold,

out of thousands of people

in this, you know,

auditorium kind of thing

which was real steep.

I was way in the back.

Out of all those seats, when I sat down,

there was this girl sitting next to me

that I'd just broken up with.

Then Bob Dylan came out on the stage

and I couldn't believe how little he was.

And I measured him

with my fingers on my knee,

and I said to her,

'his jeans are only this big."

And then I measured his guitar

and I says, "his guitar is only this big."

And I wasn't even digging the music,

it was so far away.

So I wanted to get out of there

really bad.

Then when the concert was over,

Peter came back with a bunch of his friends.

He said, "nobody walks out on Dylan."

I said, "I walk out on Dylan.

Get the f*** out of here."

And, um, so that was the end

of Peter as my roomie.

I just didn't wanna be,

you know, anywhere in this world.

It was, you know, now my world.

I hated Boston.

Boston Museum School was kind of like...

to me like going back to high school.

I didn't like anything inside that building

except the sculpture department.

They don't do anything

except make you do these exercises.

And it's just drudgery.

And they want the exercises

to be a certain way,

and if your way isn't that way,

you're just gonna, you know...

You're gonna flunk out of art school.

It's a joke.

And then no kids

were serious about painting.

So, it was just, uh,

a kind of a waste of a year,

and I quit going to school.

And then I heard from Jack.

He was fed up with Cooper Union.

I was more than fed up

with Boston Museum School.

And we decided we're gonna go to Europe.

So, we started making plans,

and we found out this guy,

Oskar Kokoschka,

had this class in Salzburg, Austria.

So we decided we were gonna go do that.

But it was, like, not even half-baked,

these ideas.

So we were gonna go for three years.

And...

But we came back in 15 days.

So Jack was, really, my best friend.

But when Jack and I came back from Europe,

we had a pretty big falling out.

Next thing I hear is he's up at

the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

which made me really happy for him.

But... Bushnell

and some of the painters in that area...

I would go to Bushnell's and have

coffee with him, you know, every day.

And so he got this idea that he said,

"Let's all snub David.

Let's make life miserable for him.

And then maybe

he'll wanna go back to school."

And that's what they did.

I'd go over there, they'd hardly talk to me.

And I just, I'd get this strange feeling,

and Jack telling me how good it was.

One day, I said, "Bush, I think

I'm gonna go to... back to school."

And he said, "well, bully for you."

He wrote a letter, secretly, to the school,

a really powerful

letter on my...

I did never know about it till way later.

When I went up there to school,

they not only accepted me,

but they put me in advanced classes.

And it wasn't anything to do with my work.

It was Bushnell doing it.

It was great.

First of all,

yeah, I wanted to go up there

'cause Jack said it was good.

But Philadelphia was one of the last places

in the world I ever wanted to go.

There's something about Philadelphia

that I didn't like,

and so when I got...

I forget the way the bus goes,

but you're not in Philadelphia,

and then you go across a bridge

and that bridge takes you.

So, on the bridge, I was saying,

"I'm not in Philadelphia, I'm not

in Philadelphia, I'm not in Philadelphia."

Then I got halfway over the bridge

and I said,

"I'm in Philadelphia, I'm in Philadelphia."

And I just couldn't believe it.

Philadelphia...

was kind of a poor man's New York City.

So it was a weird town.

It was a kind of a mean town.

One woman, who was my neighbor,

reeked of urine.

And she was a complete racist.

There was another woman

who was totally crazy.

She was a neighbor,

lived down the street with her parents.

And she would go around the backyard

on her hands and knees

and squawk like a chicken

and say, "I'm a chicken, I'm a chicken"

and squawk and squawk

and go around and around

in this tall white grass in her backyard.

She came up to me one day on the street...

and she said, "Oh, my nipples hurt!"

And she was squeezing her breast and

standing in front of me,

squeezing 'em and shaking 'em...

"my nipples hurt!"

Then there is, uh, that person

I walked by, you know,

going to the store

to get some smokes or something.

I'm walking down the street.

There's a very nice lady

with her little boy...

her little baby on her lap

out on the stoop.

I'm walking by.

I say, "how you doing?"

"how you doing? How you doing?"

She turned to her baby and said,

"You grow up like that

and I'll f***ing kill you."

There was a thick,

thick fear

in the air.

There was a feeling

of sickness, corruption...

of racial hatred.

But Philadelphia

was just perfect to spark things.

And the students were great,

and they were workers.

And we had a kind of camaraderie,

and it was like the art life,

uh, the art spirit was alive and well.

Philadelphia was what started...

started, uh...

It was so good for me.

Really, really good.

Even though I lived in fear,

I've kind of, um, uh...

It was...

thrilling...

to live the art life

in Philadelphia at that time.

I...

had some kind of a cubicle set up

in this painting studio at the academy.

And when I went into my little cubicle,

it was very private.

And there were other cubicles

like that around.

But people could work in privacy.

And I was painting a painting

about four-foot square.

And it was mostly black,

but it had some green plant and leaves

coming out of the black.

And I was sitting back,

probably taking a smoke and looking at it.

And from the painting

I heard a wind.

And the green started moving.

And I thought, "Oh!

A moving painting, but with sound."

And that idea stuck in my head.

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