Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  A painting Lynch made in 1988, titled Boise, Idaho, speaks to these sorts of memories. Positioned in the lower right quadrant of a black field is an outline of the shape of the state, surrounded by tiny collaged letters that spell out the title of the painting. Four jagged vertical lines disrupt the black field, and a menacing tornado shape in the left of the image plane seems to be advancing on the state. It’s a disturbing image.

  Apparently the more turbulent currents of Lynch’s mind weren’t evident to his Boise playmates. Smith said, “When that black car is winding up the hill in Mulholland Drive you just know something creepy is going to happen, and that’s not the person David was as a kid. The darkness in his work surprises me and I don’t know where it came from.”

  In 1960, when Lynch was fourteen years old, his father was transferred to Alexandria, Virginia, and the family moved again. Smith recalled that “when David’s family moved it was like somebody unscrewed the bulb in the streetlight. David’s family had a 1950 Pontiac and the Pontiac symbol was the head of an Indian, so there was an ornament of an Indian head on the hood of the car. The nose on their Indian was broken, so we called the car Chief Broken Nose, and they sold the car to my mom and dad before they moved.” Gordon Templeton remembers the day the Lynches moved, too. “They left on the train and a bunch of us rode our bikes to the station to see them off. It was a sad day.”

  Though Lynch flourished as a high school student in Alexandria, the years he spent in Boise have always held a special place in his heart. “When I picture Boise in my mind, I see euphoric 1950s chrome optimism,” he’s said. When the Lynch family left Boise, a few other neighbors moved, too, and John Lynch recalled David saying, “That’s when the music stopped.”

  Lynch had begun edging out of childhood prior to leaving Boise. He’s recalled the dismay he felt as a young boy when he learned he’d missed Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, and he’d become seriously interested in girls by the time the family moved. “David started going steady with a really cute girl,” said Smith. “They were so in love.” Lynch’s sister recalled that “David always had a girlfriend, starting when he was pretty young. When he was in junior high I remember him telling me he kissed every single girl on a hayride his seventh-grade class went on.”

  Lynch returned to Boise the summer after he completed ninth grade in Virginia and spent several weeks staying with different friends. “When he came back he was different,” Smith remembered. “He’d matured and was dressing differently—he came back with a unique style and had black pants and a black shirt, which was unusual in our group. He was really self-confident, and when he told stories about experiences in Washington, D.C., we were impressed. He had a sophistication that made me think, My friend has gone somewhere beyond me.

  “After high school David stopped coming back to Boise and we lost touch,” Smith continued. “My youngest daughter is a photographer who lives in L.A., and one day in 2010 she was assisting a photographer who told her, ‘We’re shooting David Lynch today.’ When they took a break during the shoot she approached him and said, ‘Mr. Lynch, I think you might know my dad, Mark Smith, from Boise.’ David said, ‘You’re shitting me,’ and the next time I visited my daughter I got together with David at his house. I hadn’t seen him since high school and he gave me a big hug, and when he introduced me to people at his office, he said, ‘I want you to meet Mark, my brother.’ David’s very loyal, and he stays in touch with my daughter—as her dad, I’m glad David’s there. I wish he still lived next door to me.”

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  The 1950s have never really gone away for Lynch. Moms in cotton shirtwaist dresses smiling as they pull freshly baked pies out of ovens; broad-chested dads in sport shirts cooking meat on a barbecue or heading off to work in suits; the ubiquitous cigarettes—everybody smoked in the 1950s; classic rock ’n’ roll; diner waitresses wearing cute little caps; girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sweaters and pleated plaid skirts—these are all elements of Lynch’s aesthetic vocabulary. The most significant aspect of the decade that stayed with him, however, is the mood of the time: The gleaming veneer of innocence and goodness, the dark forces pulsing beneath it, and the covert sexiness that pervaded those years are a kind of cornerstone of his art.

  “The neighborhood where Blue Velvet was shot looks very much like our neighborhood in Boise, and half a block from our house was a creepy apartment building like the one in the movie,” said John Lynch. Blue Velvet’s opening sequence of idyllic American vignettes was drawn from Good Times on Our Street, a children’s book that permanently lodged itself in David’s mind. “The joyride in Blue Velvet came from an experience in Boise, too. David and a few of his buddies once wound up in a car with an older kid who claimed he was going a hundred miles an hour down Capitol Boulevard. I think it was frightening, this crazy older kid with a hot car driving dangerously, and that memory stuck with David. He draws on his childhood a lot in his work.”

  Lynch does reference his childhood in his work, but his creative drive and the things he’s produced can’t be explained with a simple equation. You can dissect someone’s childhood searching for clues that explain the person the child grew up to be, but more often than not there is no inciting incident, no Rosebud. We simply come in with some of who we are. Lynch came in with an unusually intense capacity for joy and a desire to be enchanted, and he was confident and creative from the start. He wasn’t one of the boys buying a T-shirt with an irreverent drawing on it. He was the boy who was making them. “David was a born leader,” said his brother, John.

  IT’S NICE OF my brother to say I was a born leader, but I was just a regular kid. I had good friends, and I didn’t think about whether or not I was popular and never felt like I was different.

  You could say that my grandfather on my mother’s side, Grandfather Sundholm, was a working-class guy. He had fantastic tools down in his basement woodshop and he had these exquisitely made wooden chests, all inset locking systems and stuff like that. Apparently the relatives on that side of the family were expert cabinetmakers and they built a lot of cabinets in stores on Fifth Avenue. I went to visit those grandparents on the train with my mom when I was a little baby. I remember it was winter and my grandfather would stroller me around, and apparently I talked a lot. I’d talk to the guy who ran the newsstand in Prospect Park, and I think I could whistle, too. I was a happy baby.

  We moved to Sandpoint, Idaho, right after I was born, and the only thing I remember about Sandpoint is sitting in this mud puddle with little Dicky Smith. It was like a hole under a tree they filled with water from the hose, and I remember squeezing mud in that puddle and it was heaven. The most important part of my childhood took place in Boise, but I also loved Spokane, Washington, which is where we lived after Sandpoint. Spokane had the most incredible blue skies. There must’ve been an air force base nearby, because these giant planes would fly across the open sky, and they went real slow because they were propeller planes. I always loved making things, and the first things I made were wooden guns that I made in Spokane. I’d carve them and cut them with saws and they were pretty crude. I loved to draw, too.

  I had a friend named Bobby in Spokane who lived in a house at the end of the block, and there was an apartment building down there, too. So, it’s winter, and I go down there in my little snowsuit, and let’s say I was in nursery school. I’m in a little snowsuit and my friend Bobby is in a snowsuit and we’re going around and it’s freezing cold. This apartment building is set back from the street and we see that it has a corridor that goes down to these doors, and the door to one of the apartments is open. So we go in there and we’re in an apartment and no one’s home. Somehow we get this idea and we start making snowballs and putting them in the drawers of this desk. We put snowballs in all the bureau drawers—any drawers we could find, we’d make a hard snowball and put one in there. We made some big snowballs, about two feet across, and set them on the
bed, and put some more snowballs in other rooms. Then we got the towels out of the bathroom and laid them in the street, like flags. Cars would come and they’d slow down, then the driver would say, “Screw it,” and they’d drive right over these towels. We saw a couple of cars go over the towels, and we’re in our snowsuits rolling more snowballs. We finish up and go home. I’m in the dining room when the phone rings, but I don’t think anything of it. In those days the phone hardly ever rang, but still, I’m not panicked when the phone rings. My mother might’ve answered, but then my father took it, and the way he’s talking, I’m starting to get a feeling. I think my dear dad had to pay quite a lot of money for damages. Why did we do it? Go figure…

  After Spokane we moved to North Carolina for a year so my dad could finish school, and when I hear the song “Three Coins in the Fountain” I’m a certain height and I’m looking up at this building at Duke University and there was a fountain there. It was sunny 1954 light, and it was incredible with that song going in the background.

  My grandparents Sundholm lived in a beautiful brownstone on 14th Street, and they had a building that my grandfather oversaw on Seventh Avenue. There might’ve been some storefronts in the building and it was a residential building, too. People lived there, but they weren’t allowed to cook. I once went there with my grandfather and the door to one of the apartments was open and I saw a guy cooking an egg on a flat iron. People find ways of doing stuff. It’s true that going to New York would upset me when I was growing up. Everything about New York made me fearful. The subways were just unreal. Going down into this place, and the smell, and this wind would come with the trains, and the sound—I’d see different things in New York that made me very fearful.

  My father’s parents, Austin and Maude Lynch, lived on a wheat ranch in Highwood, Montana. My father’s dad was like a cowboy and I loved to watch him smoke. I came in wanting to smoke, but he reinforced that desire. My dad smoked a pipe when I was real little, but then he got pneumonia and quit. All his pipes were still around, though, and I loved to pretend to be smoking them. They put Scotch tape around the mouthpieces because they figured they were dirty, so I had all these scotch-taped pipes, some curved, some straight, and I loved them. I started smoking when I was really young.

  My grandparents had a ranch, and the closest big town was Fort Benton. At a certain point in the fifties they moved from the ranch to a small farm in Hamilton, Montana, where they had a farmhouse and quite a bit of land. It was real rural. They had a horse called Pinkeye I would ride, and I remember Pinkeye taking a drink out of a creek and it took everything I had not to slide right down that horse’s neck and head into the creek. You could go out and shoot a gun in the backyard and not hit anything. I grew up loving trees, and I had a strong connection with nature when I was a kid. It was all I knew. When the family drove anywhere across the country, we’d pull over and my dad would set up a tent and we’d camp—we never stayed in motels. In those days there were campsites all along the roads, but those are gone now. On the ranch you had to fix stuff yourself, so there were tons of tools for everything, and my dad always had a woodshop. He was a craftsman and he rebuilt people’s musical instruments and made ten or eleven violins.

  Projects! The word “project” was so thrilling to everyone in my family. You get an idea for a project, and you get your tools together, and tools are some of the greatest things in the world! That people invent things to make things more precise—it’s incredible. Like Peggy said, my parents took it seriously when I got ideas for things I wanted to make.

  My parents were so loving and good. They’d had good parents, too, and everybody loved my parents. They were just fair. It’s something you don’t really think about, but when you hear other people’s stories you realize how lucky you were. And my dad was a character. I always said if you cut his leash he’d go right into the woods. One time my dad and I went deer hunting. Hunting was part of the world my dad grew up in and everybody had guns and hunted some, so he was a hunter, but not an avid hunter. And if he killed a deer we’d eat it. You’d rent a freezer and every once in a while you’d go down to the freezer in the basement and get a piece of meat, and for dinner we’d have venison, which I hated. I never shot a deer, and I’m glad I didn’t.

  Anyway, I was around ten at the time and we were going deer hunting, so we drive out of Boise and we’re on a two-lane highway. The only light is from the headlights of the car and it’s pitch-black. It’s hard for people today to imagine this, because there are no roads that are pitch-black, hardly ever. So this is pitch-black; we’re going on these winding roads up into the mountains, and a porcupine races across the road. My dad hates porcupines because they eat the tops of trees and the trees die, so he tries to run over the thing but it makes it across the road. So he screeches to the side of the road and slams on the brakes, pops open the glove compartment, takes out this .32 pistol, and says, “Come on, Dave!” We run across the highway and we’re following the porcupine up this rocky mountain, and we’re sliding down while we’re trying to go up this hill, and at the top of this little mountain are three trees. The porcupine goes up one of them, so we start throwing rocks to see which tree it’s in. We figure out which one it’s in, my dad starts climbing the tree, and he says, “Dave! Throw a rock and see if it moves. I don’t see it!” So I throw a rock, and he yells, “No! Not at me!” So I throw some more rocks, and he hears it running, and—Bam! Bam! Bam!—it rolls down out of the tree. We get back in the car and go deer hunting and on the way back we stopped and found that porcupine and it had flies all over it. I got a couple of quills from it.

  I went to the second grade in Durham, North Carolina, and my teacher’s name was Mrs. Crabtree. My father had gone back to school in Durham to get his doctorate in forestry, so he studied every night at the kitchen table and I would study with him. I was the only kid in my class that got straight A’s. My second-grade girlfriend, Alice Bauer, got a couple of B’s, so she came in second. One night my dad and I are sitting there studying and I hear my mother and father talking about a mouse that’s in the kitchen. On Sunday my mother takes my brother and sister to church with the idea that my dad is going to stay home and get rid of this mouse. He had me kind of helping him move the stove, and this little mouse ran out of the kitchen and across the living room and leapt up inside a closet with clothes hanging. My dad took a baseball bat and beat these clothes until this little bloody mouse fell out.

  Idaho City used to be the biggest city in the state of Idaho, but when we moved to Boise there were probably a hundred people living in Idaho City in the summer and fifty in the winter. That’s where the research center was for the Boise Basin Experimental Forest, and my dad was in charge of the Experimental Forest. The word “experimental” is so beautiful. I just love it. They did tests on erosion, insects, and disease and tried to figure out how to get healthier trees. All the buildings were white with green trim, and in the yard there were posts with little wooden houses on top. They were kind of like birdhouses with doors, and when you opened them up you’d find all sorts of devices inside that were checking things like humidity and temperature. They were beautifully made and were painted white with green trim, just like all the buildings. Then you go into some office and there are billions of little drawers, and you open them up and there are insects in there on little pins. There were big greenhouses with seedlings going, and if you went into the forest a lot of the trees had little tags on them for some kind of experiment or something. They’d check them.

  That’s when I would shoot chipmunks. My dad would drive me into the woods in the Forest Service pickup, and I loved these pickups—they run so smooth, and they’re Forest Service green. I’d get out with my .22 and my lunch and he’d pick me up at the end of the day. I was allowed to shoot as many chipmunks as I could, because the forest was overrun with them, but I couldn’t shoot any birds. One time I was out there and a bird flew way up in the top of a tree and I raised m
y gun and pulled the trigger. I never thought I’d hit it but I must’ve hit it dead center, because the feathers just exploded and it came twirling down and plopped into a creek and swirled away.

  We lived on Parke Circle Drive in Boise, and next door were the Smiths. There was Mr. and Mrs. Smith; the four boys, Mark, Randy, Denny, and Greg; and the grandmother, who was called Nana. Nana was always out doing gardening, and you knew when she was out gardening because you’d hear this little tinkle of ice against a glass. She’d be out there with these gardening gloves on, with a mixed drink in one hand and a little spade in the other hand. She got the Pontiac that my family sold to the Smiths. She wasn’t completely deaf, but she was deaf enough that when she started the car she’d almost floorboard the thing so she could hear that it was on. There’d be this gigantic roar in the garage and you’d know Nana was going somewhere. On Sundays people in Boise went to church, and the Smiths went to an Episcopalian church. They had a Ford station wagon they’d drive to church, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith would sit up front with a carton of cigarettes. Not just a couple of packs. A carton.

  Kids then had a lot of freedom to run around. We went everywhere and we weren’t inside in the day, ever. We were out doing stuff and it was fantastic. It’s horrible that kids don’t get to grow up that way anymore. How did we let that happen? We didn’t have a TV until I was in the third grade, and I watched some TV as a child, but not very much. The only show I really watched was Perry Mason. Television did what the Internet is doing more of now: It homogenized everything.

  That’s something about the fifties that’s so important and is never going to come back: There used to be differences in places. In Boise the girls and the guys dressed a certain way, and if you go to Virginia they dressed in a completely different way. If you go up to New York City they dress in a completely different way there, too, and they listen to different music. You go to Queens and the girls looked like—you’d never seen anything like it in your life! And in Brooklyn they’re even different than in Queens! That Diane Arbus photograph of the couple with the baby, and the girl has a certain type of big beautiful hair? You would never see that in Boise or Virginia. And the music. If you catch the vibe of the music in a place, you just look at these girls and listen to what they’re listening to, and you’ve got a whole picture. The world they live in is completely strange and unique and you want to know about that world and what they’re into. Those kinds of differences are pretty much gone now. There are still minor differences, like there are the hipsters, but you’ll find hipsters in other cities that are just like the hipsters in your town.