Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  I got fired from every job I ever had. For a while I was working for an artist living in Alexandria who did these circles of red, blue, and yellow on Plexiglas and had a little store that he had me running. Nobody came in there, and every once in a while I’d steal a dime and get a Coca-Cola. One day Jack came in and said he was joining the navy, but he wanted to do that for three seconds, because the next thing I know he’s up at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. So he’s up there and I’m down here.

  Bushnell knew it wasn’t the best thing for me to be in Alexandria, and he knew Jack was at the Academy, so he said, “Let’s make it really not fun for Dave around here.” Bushnell and his brother started shunning me, and I didn’t know why they were doing it, and it hurt. Then Bushnell wrote a letter to the Academy telling them how great I was, and I think that letter helped me get into the Academy. Bushnell started me out by making me realize I wanted to be a painter, then he gave me a studio; he was an inspiration to me, then he wrote that letter—he helped me in so many ways. He and his wife were the ones who told me about the American Film Institute. They heard I made two little films and told me the AFI was giving grants. He was a huge, huge, important person in my life.

  Bushnell helped a lot during those years, but, generally, being a teenager wasn’t that great for me. Being a teenager is so euphoric and thrilling, but it’s mixed with a kind of chain to jail, which is high school. It’s such a torment.

  Philadelphia was a broken city during the 1960s. In the years following World War II, a housing shortage, coupled with an influx of African Americans, triggered a wave of white flight, and from the 1950s through the 1980s the city’s population dwindled. Race relations there had always been fraught, and during the 1960s black Muslims, black nationalists, and a militant branch of the NAACP based in Philadelphia played key roles in the birth of the black power movement and ratcheted up tensions dramatically. The animosity that simmered between hippies, student activists, police officers, drug dealers, and members of the African American and Irish Catholic communities often reached a boiling point and spilled over into the streets.

  One of the first race riots of the civil rights era erupted in Philadelphia less than a year and a half before Lynch arrived there, and it left 225 stores damaged or destroyed; many never reopened, and once-bustling commercial avenues were transformed into empty corridors of shuttered storefronts and broken windows. A vigorous drug trade contributed to the violence of the city, and poverty demoralized the residents. Dangerous and dirty, it provided rich mulch for Lynch’s imagination. “Philadelphia was a terrifying place,” said Jack Fisk, “and it introduced David to a world that was really seedy.”

  Situated in the center of the city like a demilitarized zone was the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “There was a lot of conflict and paranoia in the city, and the school was like an oasis,” recalled Lynch’s classmate Bruce Samuelson.1 Housed in an ornate Victorian building, the Academy, the oldest art school in the country, was regarded as a conservative school during the years Lynch was there, but it was exactly the launching pad he needed.

  “David moved in with me in the little room I’d rented,” said Fisk. “He came in November of 1965 and we lived there until he started classes in January. The room had two couches, which we slept on, and I’d collected a bunch of dead plants that were scattered around—David likes dead plants. Then, on New Year’s Day, we rented a house for forty-five dollars a month that was across the street from the morgue in a scary industrial part of Philadelphia. People were afraid to visit us, and when David walked around he carried a stick with nails sticking out of it in case he got attacked. One day a policeman stopped him, and when he saw the stick he said, ‘That’s good, you should keep that.’ We worked all night and slept all day and didn’t interact with the instructors much—all we did was paint.”

  Lynch and Fisk didn’t bother going to school too often but quickly fell into a community of like-minded students. “David and Jack showed up kind of like the dynamic duo and became part of our group,” recalled artist Eo Omwake. “We were the fringy, experimental people, and there were about a dozen in our group. It was an intimate circle of people and we encouraged each other and all lived a frugal, bohemian lifestyle.”2

  Among the circle was painter Virginia Maitland, who remembered Lynch as “a corny, clean-cut guy who drank a lot of coffee and smoked cigarettes. He was eccentric in how straight he was. He was usually with Jack, who was tall like Abraham Lincoln and was kind of a hippie, and Jack’s dog, Five, was usually with them. They made an interesting pair.”3

  “David always wore khakis with Oxford shoes and big fat socks,” said classmate James Havard. “When we met we became friends right off because I liked his excitement about working—if David was doing something he loved, he’d really get into it. Philadelphia was very rough then, though, and we were all just scraping by. We didn’t run around much at night, because it was too dangerous, but we were wild in our own way and David was, too. We’d all be at my place listening to the Beatles, and he’d be beating on a five-pound can of potato chips like it was a drum. He’d just bang on it.”4

  Samuelson recalled being struck by “the gentlemanly way David spoke and the fact that he wore a tie—at the time nobody but the faculty wore ties. I remember walking away the first time we met and sensing something was wrong, and when I turned and looked back I saw that he had two ties on. He wasn’t trying to draw attention to himself—the two ties were just part of who he was.”

  Five months before Lynch arrived at the Academy, Peggy Lentz Reavey started classes there. The daughter of a successful lawyer, Reavey graduated from high school, went straight to the Academy, and was living in a dorm on campus when she first crossed paths with Lynch. “He definitely caught my eye,” she recalled. “I saw him sitting there in the cafeteria and I thought, That is a beautiful boy. He was kind of at sea at that point and many of his shirts had holes in them, and he looked so sweet and vulnerable. He was exactly the kind of wide-eyed, angelic person a girl wants to take care of.”

  Both Reavey and Lynch were involved with other people when they met, so the two were just friends for several months. “We used to eat lunch together and enjoyed talking, but I remember thinking he was a little slow at first because he had no interest in the things I grew up loving and associated with being an artist. I thought artists weren’t supposed to be popular in high school, but here’s this dreamy guy who’d been in a high school fraternity and told wonderful stories about a world I knew nothing about. Class ski trips, shooting rabbits in the desert outside Boise, his grandfather’s wheat ranch—so foreign to me, and funny! Culturally, we came from completely different worlds. I had this cool record of Gregorian chant I played for him, and he was horrified. ‘Peg! I can’t believe you like this! It’s so depressing!’ Actually, David was depressed when we were getting to know each other.”

  Omwake concurred: “When David was living near the morgue, I think he went through a depressed period—he was sleeping, like, eighteen hours a day. One time I was at the place he shared with Jack, and Jack and I were talking when David woke up. He came out, drank four or five Cokes, talked a little bit, then went back to bed. He was sleeping a lot during that period.”

  When he was awake Lynch must have been highly productive, because he progressed quickly at school. Five months after starting classes he won an honorable mention in a school competition, with a mixed-media sculpture involving a ball bearing that triggered a chain reaction featuring a light bulb and a firecracker. “The Academy was one of the few art schools left that stressed a classical education, but David didn’t spend much time doing first-year classes like still-life drawing,” said Virginia Maitland. “He moved into advanced classes fairly quickly. There were big studios where they put everybody in the advanced category, and there were five or six of us in there together. I remember getting a real charge out of watching David work.”


  Lynch was already technically skilled when he arrived at the Academy but hadn’t yet developed the unique voice that informs his mature work, and during his first year he tried on several different styles. There are detailed graphite portraits rendered with a fine hand that are surreal and strange—a man with a bloody nose, another vomiting, another with a cracked skull; figures Lynch has described as “mechanical women,” which combine human anatomy with machine parts; and delicate, sexually charged drawings evocative of work by German artist Hans Bellmer. They’re all executed with great finesse, but Lynch’s potent sensibility isn’t really there yet. Then, in 1967, he produced The Bride, a six-by-six-foot portrait of a spectral figure in a wedding dress. “He was diving headlong into darkness and fear with it,” said Reavey of the painting, which she regards as a breakthrough and whose whereabouts are unknown. “It was beautifully painted, with the white lace of the girl’s dress scumbled against a dark ground, and she’s reaching a skeletal hand under her dress to abort herself. The fetus is barely suggested and it’s not bloody…just subtle. It was a great painting.”

  Lynch and Fisk continued to live across the street from the morgue until April of 1967, when they relocated to a house at 2429 Aspen Street, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. They moved into what’s known as a “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” row house, with three floors; Fisk was on the second, Lynch was on the third, and the bottom floor was the kitchen and living room. Reavey was living in an apartment a bus ride away, and by that point she and Lynch had become a couple. “He made a point of calling it ‘friendship with sex,’ but I was pretty hooked,” recalled Reavey, who became a regular presence on Aspen Street and wound up living there with Lynch and Fisk, until Fisk moved into a loft above a nearby auto-body shop a few months later.

  “David and Jack were hilarious together—you laughed around those two constantly,” said Reavey. “David used to ride his bike beside me when we walked home from school, and one day we found an injured bird on the sidewalk. He was very interested in this and took it home, and after it died he spent most of the night boiling it to get the flesh off the bird so he could make something with the skeleton. David and Jack had a black cat named Zero, and the next morning we were sitting drinking coffee, and we heard Zero in the other room crunching the bones to pieces. Jack laughed his head off over that.

  “David’s favorite place to eat was a drugstore coffee shop on Cherry Street, and everybody in the place knew us by name,” continued Reavey of her first few months with Lynch. “David would tease the waitresses and he loved Paul, the elderly gentleman at the cash register. Paul had white hair and glasses and wore a tie, and he always talked to David about his television. He talked about shopping for it and what a good one he’d gotten, and he’d always wind up this conversation about his TV by saying, with great solemnity, ‘And, Dave…I am blessed with good reception.’ David still talks about Paul and his good reception.”

  The core event of the David Lynch creation myth took place early in 1967. While working on a painting depicting a figure standing among foliage rendered in dark shades of green, he sensed what he’s described as “a little wind” and saw a flicker of movement in the painting. Like a gift bestowed on him from the ether, the idea of a moving painting clicked into focus in his mind.

  He discussed collaborating on a film with Bruce Samuelson, who was producing visceral, fleshy paintings of the human body at the time, but they wound up scrapping the idea they developed. Lynch was determined to explore the new direction that had presented itself to him, though, and he rented a camera from Photorama, in downtown Philadelphia, and made Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), a one-minute animation that repeats six times and is projected onto a unique six-by-ten-foot sculpted screen. Made on a budget of two hundred dollars and shot in an empty room in a hotel owned by the Academy, the film pairs three detailed faces cast in plaster, then fiberglass—Lynch cast Fisk’s face twice and Fisk cast Lynch’s face once—with three projected faces. Lynch was experimenting with different materials at the time, and Reavey said, “David had never used polyester resin before Six Men Getting Sick, and the first batch he mixed burst into flames.”

  The bodies of all six figures in the piece have minimal articulation and center on swollen red orbs representing stomachs. The animated stomachs fill with colored liquid that rises until the faces erupt with sprays of white paint that trickle down a purple field. The sound of a siren wails throughout the film, the word “sick” flashes across the screen, and hands wave in distress. The piece was awarded the school’s Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize, which Lynch shared with painter Noel Mahaffey. Fellow student H. Barton Wasserman was impressed enough to commission Lynch to create a similar film installation for his home.

  “David painted me with bright-red acrylic paint that burned like hell and rigged up this thing with a showerhead,” Reavey recalled of the Wasserman commission. “In the middle of the night he needed a showerhead and length of hose, so he goes out into the alleyway and comes back with them! That kind of thing happened to David a lot.” It took Lynch two months to shoot two minutes and twenty-five seconds of film for the piece, but when he sent it to be processed, he discovered the camera he’d been using was broken and the film was nothing but a long blur. “He put his head in his hands and wept for two minutes,” said Reavey, “then he said, ‘Fuck it,’ and sent the camera to be fixed. He’s very disciplined.” The project was decommissioned, but Wasserman allowed Lynch to keep the remainder of the funds he’d allotted for it.

  In August of 1967, Reavey learned she was pregnant, and when the fall semester began a month later, Lynch left the Academy. In a letter to the school administration, he explained, “I won’t be returning in the fall, but I’ll be around from time to time to have some Coca-Cola. I just don’t have enough money these days, and my doctor says I’m allergic to oil paint. I am developing an ulcer and pinworms on top of my spasms of the intestines. I don’t have the energy for continuing my conscientious work here at the Penn. Academy of the Fine Arts. Love—David. P.S.: I am seriously making films instead.”5

  At the end of the year Reavey left school, too. “David said, ‘Let’s get married, Peg. We were going to get married anyway. Let’s just get married,’ ” Reavey recalled. “I couldn’t believe I had to go and tell my parents I was pregnant, but we did, and it helped that they adored David.

  “We got married on January 7th of 1968 at my parents’ church, which had just gotten a new minister, who was great,” she continued. “He was on our side: Hey, you guys found love, fantastic. I was about six months pregnant at the time and wore a floor-length white dress, and we had a formal ceremony that David and I both found funny. My parents invited their friends and it was awkward for them, so I felt bad about that, but we just rolled with it. We went to my parents’ house afterward for hors d’oeuvres and champagne. All our artist friends came and there was plenty of champagne flowing and it was a wild party. We didn’t go on a honeymoon, but they booked us a room for one night at the Chestnut Hill Hotel, which is beautiful now but was a dump then. We stayed in a dismal room, but we were both happy and had a lot of fun.”

  Using the funds remaining from the Wasserman commission, along with financial aid from his father, Lynch embarked on his second movie, The Alphabet. A four-minute film starring Reavey, The Alphabet was inspired by Reavey’s story of her niece giving an anxious recitation of the alphabet in her sleep. Opening with a shot of Reavey in a white nightgown lying on a white-sheeted bed in a black void, the film goes on to intercut live action with animation. The drawings in the film are accompanied by an innovative soundtrack that begins with a group of children chanting “A-B-C,” then segues into a male baritone (Lynch’s friend Robert Chadwick) singing a nonsensical song in stentorian tones; a crying baby and cooing mother; and Reavey reciting the entire alphabet. Described by Lynch as “a nightmare about the fear connected with learning,” it’s a charming film with
a menacing undercurrent. It concludes with the woman vomiting blood as she writhes on the bed. “The first time The Alphabet screened in an actual movie theater was at this place called the Band Box,” Reavey recalled. “The film started but the sound was off.” Lynch stood up and shouted, “Stop the film,” then raced up to the projection booth with Reavey behind him. Reavey’s parents had come to see the movie, and Lynch remembers the evening as “a nightmare.”

  “David’s work was the center of our life, and as soon as he made a film it was all about him being able to make another one,” said Reavey. “I had no doubt that he loved me, but he said, ‘The work is the main thing and it has to come first.’ That’s just the way it was. I felt extremely involved in David’s work, too—we really did connect in terms of aesthetics. I remember seeing him do stuff that just wowed me. I’d say, ‘Jesus! You’re a genius!’ I said that a lot, and I think he is. He would do stuff that seemed so right and original.”