David Lynch: The Art Life Page #4

A moving painting.

One night...

I met the man

who was the night man at the morgue

at Pop's Diner,

and I said, "I sure would like

to come over there and...

and, uh, see...

And he said, "Let me know."

Uh, you know, "Let me know."

And so I went across over there,

midnight, rang the bell.

This guy lets me in.

In the front was a kind of like, uh...

had, like, those square tiles,

green and kinda white,

and it had a cigarette machine,

a Coke machine,

some couches and a desk.

So it was kind of like

a lobby room in the front.

Then there was this big door

with a glass pane in it and wire in the glass,

and a doorknob, a brass doorknob or something.

You open up that, go down this corridor,

and now you're in, you know,

the back room where they do everything.

But nobody was working

'cause it's night.

And I went into the cold room

and, you know

He closed the door behind me.

And, um, so I'm in there sitting,

uh, kind of on the floor

and there's these, like, bunk beds.

All these people dead

you know, bodies all around me,

and, um, I just sort of sat there

and, uh, felt it.

It was...

It was strange.

And then I went home.

The thing that gets you is that

you wonder the story of each one.

You wonder the story.

Who they were, what they did,

how they got there.

Just makes you think.

And...

it makes you think of stories.

This was 1967...

and I was living

at 2429 Aspen Street.

Peggy had, at that time,

sort of started moving in to 2429.

And I get a call

that my father had to make a trip

from California

out to, say, DC or something,

and he would like to come up

and visit, uh, in Philadelphia.

So I said, "Oh, my God."

I had to make arrangements.

Peggy had to move out.

Uh, not move out, but not be there.

And...

I picked up my dad and brought him

back to 2429 Aspen Street

and we had a visit.

And just near the end of the visit I said,

"Oh, I gotta show you some stuff."

And, uh, I took him down to the basement,

which was, like,

earthen floor, really old.

Cobwebs and stuff

all around the ceiling level.

And dirty basement windows.

But I'd set up these little tables,

little, like, platforms

out of wood and stuff,

and I had all these experiments going.

Like, I wanted to see what fruit

would do after a long period

different stages of fruit

and how it would decay.

And I had some dead birds

and I had my mouse in plastic

and I had, you know,

a bunch of stuff I'd collected.

So I wanted to share this with my father.

So I took him down to the basement.

And it's pretty dim light.

And looking at these things

I'm sharing with him, right?

And he's looking at them.

So then we went back up,

and we were on the stairway,

and I was ahead of him,

and I was smiling, uh, to myself.

It was great that he got to see this.

And I kind of turned with a smile.

As we were going up the stairs

I turned back toward him,

and I see this pained expression

on my father's face,

which he was hiding from me.

Then I got back in the truck

and we were driving back

to the, uh, railroad station,

and it was in that truck

driving back, uh, to the station

that he said to me, "Dave?"

I said, "Yeah?"

"I don't think you should

ever have children."

He was worried about me.

But inside me

I felt there was nothing to worry about.

But I still understood why he said it.

He misunderstood, um, my experiments

for, um...

some kind of, uh...

like, diabolical, you know,

man who needs serious help,

mentally and probably emotionally.

The ironic part of this is,

unbeknownst to me and my father,

Peggy, at that very moment, was pregnant.

So, uh, that...

that's... uh, interesting.

I started doing a...

kind of a split-screen...

thing,

and it was gonna be Mary Fisk

dancing on one-third of the screen

and...

on the other two-thirds an animated thing.

So I animated that thing for two months.

And I had a hundred feet of film

in the camera.

And I didn't know technically

what I was doing really,

but I took the hundred-foot roll

out of the camera,

took it to the lab,

and a couple of days later I got it back.

And I was standing in the doorway

'cause I opened the door

so I could get sunlight and just

I just wanted to check the first part,

make sure everything was okay.

So I unspool, there's a lot of liter on it.

You know, and I unspool some more.

And I can't find anything.

I unspool some more.

And it dawns on me

that this entire roll of negative is a blur.

And Peggy...

Her recollection is that I was really upset.

But... in a strange way...

I wasn't that upset because...

I must have been getting an idea

for something more.

And I wanted to do

live action and animation both.

That's when I made The Alphabet.

So, accidents or destroying something

can lead to something good.

It can lead to something good.

Very controlled things,

not being open to...

You know, just like being...

like these boundaries,

they just screw you.

And you have to sometimes make a huge mess

and make big mistakes

to find that thing

that you're looking for.

Right after The Alphabet was finished,

right after it was finished,

we must have moved up

to 2416 Poplar Street.

It must have been right around then...

that we needed money.

And...

I was sawing wood in the dining room.

And it was like...

You know, the sweetness of freedom

was just going.

But I loved sawing that wood.

It was my last free night.

And then I started this job.

And I'd go there, you know,

five days a week.

When I was printing for Rodger LaPelle,

Jennifer was, like,

two or three or four months old.

I had applied for a grant

to the American Film Institute,

an independent filmmakers grant.

The winners of the first group

were announced.

And when I read the names of the winners,

I knew I wouldn't win,

'cause they were all really

well-established underground filmmakers.

So, and they had their bios

and all the stuff with them,

so I just gave up.

I mean, I didn't really give up.

I just said, "There's no f***ing way."

So I would go to work printing,

and Philadelphia, you know,

was, like, already...

just suck your happiness away

and, um, fill you with

a sadness and a fear.

So, you know, I didn't have

any time, really, to paint.

But Rodger would give me $25

to come out on Saturday and paint,

and then paid me for printing.

And that's what kept us afloat.

One day, a few months later,

I said to Peggy,

"call me if anything exciting happens.

I'll call you

if anything exciting happens."

And I headed out to print.

That day...

First I think Peggy received a phone call.

Because the phone rang and Rodger

came downstairs from upstairs

sort of smiling

and said, "The phone is for you."

And it was George Stevens Jr.

and Tony Vellani on the line,

and they said, "David, we're..."

Something like,

"we're very happy to tell you

that you have won a grant

from the American Film Institute."

And, you know...

It just...

Total life-changing phone call.

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