Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  Reavey had begun working in the bookstore at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1967, and she continued at her job until she went into labor. Jennifer Chambers Lynch arrived on April 7th, 1968, and Reavey recalled, “David got a kick out of Jen but had a hard time with the crying at night. He had no tolerance for that. Sleep was important to David, and waking him up was not fun—he had issues with his stomach and always had an upset stomach in the morning. But Jen was a great, really easy kid and was the center of my life for a long time—the three of us did everything together and we were an idyllic family.”

  When Reavey and Lynch married, Reavey’s father gave them two thousand dollars, and Lynch’s parents contributed additional funds that allowed them to purchase a house. “It was at 2416 Poplar, at the corner of Poplar and Ringgold,” Reavey said. “Bay windows in the bedroom—into which our bed was tucked—looked onto the Ukrainian Catholic church, and there were lots of trees. That house made a lot of things possible, but aspects of it were pretty rough. We ripped up all the linoleum and never finished sanding the wooden floors, and parts of it were really bitten up—if I spilled something in the kitchen, it just soaked into the wood. David’s mother visited us right before we moved to California and said, ‘Peggy, you’re going to miss this floor.’ Sunny had a wonderful, very dry sense of humor. She once looked at me and said, ‘Peggy, we’ve worried about you for years. David’s wife…’ She could be funny, and Don had a great sense of humor, too. I always had fun with David’s parents.”

  Life as Lynch’s wife was interesting and rich for Reavey; however, the violence of Philadelphia was no small thing. She’d grown up there and felt it wasn’t any rougher than any other large Northeastern city during the 1960s, but she conceded that “I didn’t like it when somebody got shot outside our house. Still, I went out every day and pushed the baby coach all over town to get film or whatever we needed, and I wasn’t afraid. It could be creepy, though.

  “One night when David was out I saw a face at a window on the second floor, then after David got home we heard someone jump down. The next day a friend loaned David a shotgun, and we spent the night sitting on our blue velvet couch—which David still pines for—with him gripping this rifle. Another time we were in bed and heard people trying to bash in the front door downstairs, which they succeeded in doing. We had a ceremonial sword under the bed that my father had given us, and David pulled his boxer shorts on backward, grabbed the sword, ran to the top of the stairs, and yelled ‘Get the hell out of here!’ It was a volatile neighborhood, and a lot happened at that house.”

  Lynch didn’t have a job when his daughter was born, nor was he looking for one when Rodger LaPelle and Christine McGinnis—graduates of the Academy and early supporters of Lynch’s art—offered him a job making prints in a shop where they produced a successful line of fine-art etchings. McGinnis’s mother, Dorothy, worked at the printshop, too, and LaPelle recalled, “We all had lunch together every day, and the only thing we talked about was art.”6

  The strongest paintings Lynch made during his time in Philadelphia were produced during the final two years that he lived there. Lynch had seen and been impressed by an exhibition of work by Francis Bacon, which ran from November through December of 1968 at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York. He wasn’t alone in his admiration, and Maitland said that “most of us were influenced by Bacon then, and I could see Bacon’s influence on David at the time.” Bacon is inarguably there in the paintings Lynch completed during this period, but his influence is largely subsumed by Lynch’s vision.

  As is the case with Bacon’s work, most of Lynch’s early pictures are portraits, and they employ simple vertical and horizontal lines that transform the canvases into proscenium stages, which serve as the setting for curious occurrences. The occurrences in Lynch’s pictures are the figures themselves. Startling creatures that seem to have emerged from loamy soil, they’re impossible conglomerations of human limbs, animal forms, and organic growths that dissolve the boundaries customarily distinguishing one species from the next; they depict all living things as parts of a single energy field. Isolated in black environments, the figures often appear to be traveling through murky terrain that’s freighted with danger. Flying Bird with Cigarette Butts (1968) depicts a figure hovering in a black sky with a kind of offspring tethered to its belly by a pair of cords. In Gardenback (1968–1970), an eagle seems to have been grafted onto human legs. Growths sprout from the rounded back of this figure, which walks in profile and has a breastlike mound erupting from the base of the spine.

  It was during the late 1960s that Lynch made these visionary paintings, and although the latest Beatles album was usually on permanent rotation on the turntable at home, the deeper waters of the counterculture were of little interest to him. “David never did drugs—he didn’t need them,” Reavey recalled. “A friend once gave us a lump of hash and told us we should smoke it and then have sex. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we smoked all of it, sitting there on the blue velvet couch, and we could barely crawl upstairs by the time we were done. Drinking was never a huge thing in our lives, either. My dad used to make this thing he called ‘the Lynch Special’ out of vodka and bitter lemon that David liked, but that was about the extent of his drinking.”

  “I never saw David intoxicated other than at my wedding, where everybody was falling-down drunk,” said Maitland. “Later, I remember my mother saying, ‘Your friend David was jumping up and down on my nice yellow couch!’ It’s probably the only time David’s been that drunk.”

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  With encouragement from Bushnell Keeler, Lynch applied for a $7,500 grant from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and submitted The Alphabet, along with a new script he’d written called The Grandmother, as part of his application. He received $5,000 to make The Grandmother, the story of a lonely boy who’s repeatedly punished by his cruel parents for wetting the bed. A thirty-four-minute chronicle of the boy’s successful attempt to plant and grow a loving grandmother, the film starred Lynch’s co-worker Dorothy McGinnis as the grandmother. Richard White, a child from Lynch’s neighborhood, played the boy, and Robert Chadwick and Virginia Maitland played the parents.

  Lynch and Reavey transformed the third floor of their house into a film set, and Reavey recalled “trying to figure out how to paint the room black and still define the shape of a room; we ended up using chalk at the joints where the ceiling meets the wall.” The creation of the set also called for the elimination of several walls, and “That left a big mess,” she said. “I spent lots of time filling little plastic bags with plaster and putting them in the street to be picked up. Big bags would’ve been too heavy, so we used little bags that had ties on them like bunny ears. One day we were looking out the window when the trash guys came, and David was falling down laughing because we’d filled the street with these little bags and it looked like a huge flock of rabbits.”

  Maitland said that her participation in The Grandmother began with an overture from Reavey. “Peggy said, ‘Do you want to do this? He’ll pay you three hundred dollars.’ I have strong memories of being in their house and how bleak it was the way he had it set up. David had us put rubber bands around our faces to make us look strange and made all of our faces up with white. There’s a scene where Bob and I are in the ground buried up to the neck, and he needed a place where he could dig deep holes, so we shot that scene at Eo Omwake’s parents’ house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. David dug the holes, which we got into, then he covered us up with dirt, and I remember being in the ground for what seemed like way too long. But that’s the thing about David that makes him so great—he was an incredible director, even then. He could get you to do anything, and he’d do it in the nicest way.”

  A crucial element of The Grandmother fell into place when Lynch met Alan Splet, a kind of freelance genius of sound. “David and Al getting together was a cool thing—they just really clicked,” s
aid Reavey. “Al was an eccentric, sweet guy who’d been an accountant for Schmidt’s Brewery, and he was just naturally gifted with sound. He had the red beard, red hair, and intense eyes of Vincent van Gogh and was skinny as a pencil and blind as a bat, so he couldn’t drive and had to walk everywhere, which was fine with him. He was a totally uncool dresser who always wore these cheap short-sleeved shirts and was a wonderful cellist. When he was living with us in L.A., we’d sometimes come home and he’d be blasting classical music on the record player and sitting there conducting.”

  Lynch discovered that existing libraries of sound effects were inadequate for the needs of The Grandmother, so he and Splet produced their own effects and created an unconventional soundtrack that’s vital to the film. The Grandmother was almost completed in 1969 when the director of the American Film Institute, Toni Vellani, took a train from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia for a screening; he was excited by the film and vowed to see to it that Lynch was invited to be a fellow at the AFI’s Center for Advanced Film Studies for the fall semester of 1970. “I remember David had a brochure from the AFI and he used to just sit and stare at it,” Reavey recalled.

  Vellani kept his word, and in a letter to his parents dated November 20th, 1969, Lynch said, “We feel that a miracle has occurred for us. I will probably spend the next month trying to get used to the idea of being so lucky, and then after Christmas Peggy and I will ‘roll ’em’ as they say in the trade.”

  Philadelphia had worked its strange magic and exposed Lynch to things he hadn’t previously been familiar with. Random violence, racial prejudice, the bizarre behavior that often goes hand in hand with deprivation—he’d seen these things in the streets of the city and they’d altered his fundamental worldview. The chaos of Philadelphia was in direct opposition to the abundance and optimism of the world he’d grown up in, and reconciling these two extremes was to become one of the enduring themes of his art.

  The ground had been prepared for the agony and the ecstasy of Eraserhead, and Lynch headed for Los Angeles, where he’d find the conditions that would allow the film to take root and grow. “We sold the house for eight thousand dollars when we left,” said Reavey. “We get together now and talk about that house and that blue couch we bought at the Goodwill—David gets so excited talking about the stuff we got at the Goodwill. He’ll say, ‘That couch was twenty dollars!’ For some reason Jack was in jail the day before we left Philadelphia, so he couldn’t help us move it. David still says, ‘Damn it! We should’ve brought that couch with us!’ ”

  I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT politics or the conditions in Philadelphia before I went there. It’s not that I didn’t care—I just didn’t know, because I wasn’t into politics. I don’t think I even voted in those days. So I got accepted at the Academy and I got on a bus and went up there, and it was fate that I wound up at that school. Jack and I didn’t go to classes—the only reason we were in school was to find like-minded souls, and we found some, and we inspired each other. All the students I hung out with were serious painters, and they were a great bunch. Boston was a bad bunch. They just weren’t serious.

  My parents supported me as long as I was in school, and my dear dad never disowned me, but there’s some truth to Peggy and Eo Omwake saying I was a little depressed when I first got to Philadelphia. It wasn’t exactly depression—it was more like a melancholy, and it didn’t have anything to do with the city. It was like being lost. I hadn’t found my way yet and maybe I was worried about it.

  I went there at the end of 1965 and stayed with Jack in his little room. When I got there Jack had a puppy named Five, so there was newspaper all over the floors because he was housebreaking him. When you walked around the place there was the sound of rustling newspaper. Five was a great dog and Jack had him for many years. Next door to us was the Famous Diner, which was run by Pete and Mom. Pete was a big guy and Mom was a big gal who had weird yellow hair. She looked like the picture of the woman on the bags of flour—you know, the blue-apron waitress thing. The Famous Diner was a train-car diner, and it had a long counter and booths along the wall and it was so fantastic. They’d deliver the jelly donuts at five-thirty in the morning.

  Jack’s place was small so we needed to move, and we found a place at 13th and Wood. We moved on New Year’s Eve and I remember moving like it was yesterday. It was around one in the morning and we moved with a shopping cart. We had Jack’s mattress and all his stuff in there, and I just had one bag of stuff, and we were pushing the cart along and we passed this happy couple, drunk probably, and they said, “You’re moving on New Year’s Eve? Do you need any money?” I yelled back, “No, we’re rich!” I don’t know why I said that, but I felt rich.

  Our place was like a storefront, and in the back was a toilet and washbasin. There was no shower or hot water, but Jack rigged up this stainless-steel coffee maker that would heat up water and he had the whole first floor, I had a studio on the second floor next to this guy Richard Childers, who had a back room on the second floor, and I had a bedroom in the attic. The window in my bedroom was blown out so I had a piece of plywood sitting in there, and I had a cooking pot I’d pee in then empty out into the backyard. There were lots of cracks in my bedroom walls, so I went to a phone booth and ripped out all the white pages—I didn’t want the yellow pages, I wanted the white pages. I mixed up wheat paste and papered the entire room with the white pages, and it looked really beautiful. I had an electric heater in there, and one morning James Havard came to wake me up and give me a ride to school and the plywood had blown out of the window, so there was a mound of fresh snow on the floor in my room. My pillow was almost on fire because I had the heater close to my bed, so he maybe saved my life.

  James was the real deal. He was older and he was a great artist and he worked constantly. You know the word “painterly”? This guy was painterly. Everything he touched had this fantastic, organic painterly thing, and James had a lot of success. Six or seven of us went to New York once because James was in a big show way uptown. By the end of the opening we were all drunk and we had to go way downtown, and I don’t know if I was driving, but I remember this as if I was driving. It was one or two in the morning and we hit every single green light from way uptown all the way to the bottom of the city. It was incredible.

  Virginia Maitland turned out to be a serious painter, but I sort of remember her as a party girl. She was out in the street one day and there was a young man whistling bird calls on the corner. She took him home and he did bird calls in her living room and she liked that so she kept him, and that was Bob Chadwick. Bob was a machinist and his boss loved him—Bob could do no wrong. He worked at this place that had a thirty-five-foot lathe with ten thousand different gears to do complicated cuttings, and Bob was the only one who could run it. He just intuitively knew how to do things. He wasn’t an artist, but he was an artist with machines.

  Our neighborhood was pretty weird. We lived next door to Pop’s Diner, which was run by Pop and his son Andy, and I met a guy at Pop’s who worked in the morgue, and he said, “Anytime you want to visit, just let me know and ring the doorbell at midnight.” So one night I went over there and rang the bell and he opened the door, and the front was like a little lobby. It had a cigarette machine, a candy machine, old forties tile on the floor, a little reception area, a couch, and this corridor that led to a door into the back. He opened that door and said, “Go on in there and make yourself at home,” and there was nobody working back there, so I was alone. They had different rooms with different things in them, and I went into the cold room. It was cold because they needed to preserve the bodies, and they were in there stacked up on these bunk-bed-type shelves. They’d all been in some kind of accident or experienced some violence, and they had injuries and cuts—not bleeding cuts, but they were open wounds. I spent a long time in there, and I thought about each one of them and what they must’ve experienced. I wasn’t disturbed. I was just interested. There was a parts room where t
here were pieces of people and babies, but there wasn’t anything that frightened me.

  One day on the way to the White Tower to get lunch, I saw the smiling bags of death at the morgue. When you walked down this alley you’d see the back of the morgue opened up, and there were these rubber body bags hanging on pegs. They’d hose them out and water and body fluids would drip out, and they sagged in the middle so they were like big smiles. Smiling bags of death.

  I must’ve changed and gotten kind of dirty during that period. Judy Westerman was at the University of Pennsylvania then and I think she was in a sorority, and one time Jack and I got a job driving some paintings up there. I thought, Great, I can see Judy. So we go up there and deliver this stuff, then I go to her dormitory and walk in and this place was so clean, and I was in art school being a bum, and all the girls are giving me weird looks. They sent word to Judy that I was there, and I think I embarrassed her. I think they were saying “Who the hell is that bum over there?” But she came down and we had a really nice talk. She was used to that part of me, but they weren’t. That was the last time I ever saw Judy.

  We once had a big party at 13th and Wood. The party’s going on and there’s a few hundred people in the house, and somebody comes up to me and says, “David, so-and-so’s got a gun. We gotta get it from him and hide it.” This guy was pissed off at somebody, so we got his gun and hid it in the toilet—I grew up with guns, so I’m comfortable around them. There were lots of art students at this party, but everybody wasn’t an art student, and there was one girl who seemed a little bit simple, but she was totally sexy. A beautiful combo. It must’ve been winter, because everybody’s coats were on my bed in the attic, so when somebody was leaving I’d go up and get their coat. One time I go to my room and there on my bed, against a kind of mink coat, is this girl with her pants pulled down, and she’d obviously been taken advantage of by someone. She was totally drunk and I helped her up and got her dressed, so that was going on at this party, too.