Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  It was pretty packed and then the cops show up and say, “There’s been a complaint; everybody’s got to go home.” Fine, most everybody left, and there were maybe fifteen people still hanging around. One guy was quietly playing acoustic guitar, it was real mellow, and the cops come back and say, “We thought we told you all to leave.” Just then this girl named Olivia, who was probably drunk, walks up to one of the cops and gives him the finger and says, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” “Okay, everybody in the paddy wagon,” and there was one parked out front and everybody got in—me, Jack, Olivia, and these other people—and they drive us to the police station. In interrogation they find out that Jack and I are the ones who live at the house, so we’re arrested as proprietors of a disorderly house and put in jail. Olivia was the one who mouthed off, so she goes to the women’s jail. Jack and I get put in a cell and there are two transvestites—one named Cookie in our cell, and another one down the way—and they talked to each other all night. There was a murderer—he had the cot—and at least six other people in the cell. The next morning we go before the judge and a bunch of art students came and bailed us out.

  We got to Philadelphia just before hippies and pigs and stuff like this, and cops weren’t against us at first, even though we looked strange. But it got bad during the time we were there because of the way things were going in the country. Richard had a truck, and one night I went with him to a movie. When we were driving home Richard looked in the rearview mirror and there was a cop behind us. We were approaching an intersection and when the light turned yellow Richard stopped, which I guess tipped off the cops that we were nervous. So the light turns green and we go through the intersection and the sirens and the lights go on. “Pull over!” Richard pulls over to this wide sidewalk next to a high rock wall. This cop walks around to the front of our car and he’s standing in the headlights and he puts his hand on his gun and says, “Get out of the truck!” We get out of the truck. He says, “Hands against the wall!” We put our hands against the wall. They start frisking Richard, and I thought, They’re frisking Richard, not me, so I lowered my arms and immediately this hand slammed me into the wall. “Hands against the wall!” Now there’s a paddy wagon and like twenty cops, and they put us in the paddy wagon and we’re riding along in this metal cage. We hear somebody talking over the cop radio describing two guys and what they’re wearing, and Richard and I look at each other and realize we look exactly like the guys being described. We get down to the station and in comes this old man holding a bloody bandage to his head, and they bring him over to us and he looks at us, then says, “No, these aren’t the guys,” and they let us go. That made me really nervous.

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  I’m quoted saying that I like the look of figures in a garden at night, but I don’t really like gardens except for a certain kind. I once did a drawing of a garden with electrical motors in it that would pump oil, and that’s what I like—I like man and nature together. That’s why I love old factories. Gears and oil, all that mechanical engineering, great big giant clanging furnaces pouring molten metal, fire and coal and smokestacks, castings and grinding, all the textures and the sounds—it’s a thing that’s just gone, and everything’s quiet and clean now. A whole kind of life disappeared, and that was one of the parts of Philadelphia that I loved. I liked the way the rooms were in Philadelphia, too, the dark wood, and rooms with a certain kind of proportions, and this certain color of green. It was kind of a puke green with a little white in it, and this color was used a lot in poor areas. It’s a color that feels old.

  I don’t know if I even had an idea when I started Six Men Getting Sick—I just started working. I called around and found this place called Photorama, where 16mm cameras were way cheaper than other places. It was kind of sleazy, but I went and rented this Bell and Howell windup camera that had three lenses on it, and it was a beautiful little camera. I shot the film in this old hotel the Academy owned, and the rooms there were empty and gutted, but the hallways were filled with rolled-up Oriental carpets and brass lamps and beautiful couches and chairs. I built this thing with a board, like a canvas, propped on top of a radiator, then I put the camera across the room on top of a dresser that I found in the hallway and moved into the room. I nailed the dresser to the floor to make sure the camera didn’t move at all.

  I have no idea what gave me the idea to do the sculpture screen. I don’t think the plastic resin burst into flame when I mixed it, but it did get so hot it steamed like crazy. You mixed this stuff in these paper containers, and I loved mixing it hot. The paper would turn brown and scorch and it would heat so much that you’d hear it crackling and you’d see these gases just steaming out of this thing. When the film was done I built this kind of erector-set structure to take the film up to the ceiling and back down through the projector, and I had a tape recorder with a siren on a loop that I set on the stage. It was in a painting and sculpture show, and the students let me turn the lights off for fifteen minutes out of every hour, and that’s pretty damn good.

  Bart Wasserman was a former Academy student whose parents died and left him a lot of money, and when he saw Six Men Getting Sick he told me he wanted to give me a thousand dollars to make a film installation for his house. I spent two months working on this film for Bart, but when it was developed it was nothing but a blur. Everybody said I was really upset when that film didn’t come out, so I probably was, but almost immediately I started getting ideas for animation and live action. I thought, This is an opportunity and there’s some reason this is happening, and maybe Bart will let me make that kind of film. I called Bart and he said, “David, I’m happy for you to do that; just give me a print.” I later met Bart’s wife in Burgundy, France—she moved over there—and she told me Bart never did an altruistic thing in his life except for the thing he did for me. That film not coming out ended up being a great doorway to the next thing. It couldn’t have been better. I never would’ve gotten a grant from AFI if that hadn’t happened.

  The film I made with the rest of Bart’s money, The Alphabet, is partly about this business of school and learning, which is done in such a way that it’s kind of a hell. When I first thought of making a film, I heard a wind and then I saw something move, and the sound of the wind was just as important as the moving image—it had to be sound and picture moving together in time. I needed to record a bunch of sounds for The Alphabet, so I went to this lab, Calvin de Frenes, and rented this Uher tape recorder. It’s a German tape recorder, a real good recorder. I recorded a bunch of stuff then realized that it was broken and was distorting these sounds—and I was loving it! It was incredible. I took it back and told them it was broken, so I got it for free, and I got all these great sounds, too. Then I took everything into Bob Column at Calvin de Frenes, and he had a little four-track mixing console and I mixed it there with Bob. This mixing and getting stuff in sync was magical.

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  Before I got together with Peggy, I’d have brief relationships with people then move on. I dated a girl named Lorraine for a while, and she was an art student who lived with her mother in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Lorraine looked Italian and she was a fun girl. We’d be at her mom’s house and all three of us would go down to the basement and open up the freezer and pick out a TV dinner. This freezer was packed with all different kinds of TV dinners, and her mom would heat ’em up for us. You just put them in the oven and pretty soon you’ve got a dinner! And they were good! Lorraine and her mom were fun. Lorraine ended up marrying Doug Randall, who took some still photos for me on The Grandmother. There was also this girl Margo for a while, and a girl named Sheila, and I really liked Olivia, the girl who got arrested, but she wasn’t really my girlfriend. There’s a film called Jules and Jim, and Olivia and Jack and I were kind of like that—we’d go places together.

  Peggy was the first person I fell in love with. I loved Judy Westerman and Nancy Briggs, but they
didn’t have a clue about what I did at the studio and were destined to live a different kind of life. Peggy knew everything and appreciated everything and she was my number-one fan. I didn’t know how to type and Peggy typed my scripts, and she was incredible to me, so incredible. We started out being friends and we’d sit and talk at the drugstore next to the Academy and it was great.

  One day Peggy told me she was pregnant, and one thing led to another and we got married. The only thing I remember about our wedding is that Jack wore a taxicab-driver shirt to it. I loved Peggy but I don’t know that we would’ve gotten married if she hadn’t been pregnant, because marriage doesn’t fit into the art life. You’d never know I think that, though, because I’ve been married four times. Anyhow, a few months later Jennifer was born. When Jen was born fathers were never in the delivery room, and when I asked if I could go in, the guy looked at me funny. He said, “I’ll watch you and see how you do,” so he took blood from Peggy and I didn’t pass out, and she puked up a bunch of stuff and that didn’t bother me, so he said, “You’re good to come in.” So I scrubbed up and in I went. It was good. I wanted to see it just to see. Having a child didn’t make me think, Okay, now I’ve got to settle down and be serious. It was like…not like having a dog, but it was like having another kind of texture in the house. And babies need things and there were things I could contribute. We heard that babies like to see moving objects, so I took a matchbook and bent all the matches in different directions and hung it from a thread, and I’d dangle this thing in front of Jen’s face and spin it, like a poor man’s mobile. I think it boosted her IQ, because Jen’s so smart!

  I always felt that the work was the main thing, but there are fathers now who love spending time with their children and go to school functions and all that. That wasn’t my generation. My father and mother never went to our baseball games. Are you kidding me? That was our thing! What are they going to go for? They’re supposed to be working and doing their thing. This is our thing. Now all the parents are there, cheering their kids on. It’s just ridiculous.

  Not long before Jen was born, Peggy said, “You gotta go and see Phyllis and Clayton’s house. They’ve got a setup that’s unbelievable.” So I rode my bike over to see this artist couple we knew and they were living in this huge house. Both of them were painters and each of them had their own floor to work in, and they showed me around and I said, “You guys are so lucky—this is great.” Phyllis said, “The house next door is for sale,” so I went and looked at this place and it was a corner house that was even bigger than their house. There was a sign with the name of the real estate company, so I rode over to Osakow Realty and introduced myself to this nice plump lady in a little office and she said, “How can I help you?” I said, “How much is that house at 2416 Poplar?” and she said, “Well, David, let’s take a look.” She opened up the book and said, “That house is twelve rooms, three stories, two sets of bay windows, fireplaces, earthen basement, oil heat, backyard, and tree. That house is three thousand, five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars down.” I said, “I’m buying that house,” and we did. It was right on the borderline between this Ukrainian neighborhood and a black neighborhood, and there was big, big violence in the air, but it was the perfect place to make The Grandmother and I was so lucky to get it. Peggy and I loved that house. Before we bought the place it had been a communist meeting house, and I found all kinds of communist newspapers under the linoleum flooring. The house had kind of a softwood floor, and they’d put newspaper down then put linoleum on top of the newspaper. This linoleum was really old, so I was breaking it up and throwing it away and one day I was working at the front of the house and I hear this noise like the sound of many waters. It was weird, something really unusual. I opened the blinds and looked out and there were ten thousand marchers coming down the street, and it freaked me out. That was the day Martin Luther King was killed.

  We didn’t go to the movies a lot. Sometimes I would go to the Band Box, which was the art house where I saw French new wave and all that for the first time, but I didn’t go there much. And even if I was in the middle of making a film, I wasn’t ever thinking I’m in that world. Not in a million years! My friend Charlie Williams was a poet, and when he saw The Alphabet, I said to Charlie, “Is this an art film?” He said, “Yes, David.” I didn’t know anything. I did love Bonnie and Clyde, although that’s not why I started wearing an open-road Stetson panama-style hat. I started wearing one just because I found one at the Goodwill. When you take those hats off you sort of pinch the front of the brim, so they start coming apart. The Stetsons I was buying were already old, so the straw would break and pretty soon there would be a hole there. There are lots of pictures of me in hats with holes in them. I had two or three of them and I loved them.

  The Goodwill in Philadelphia was incredible. Okay, I need some shirts, right? I go down Girard Avenue to Broad Street and there’s the Goodwill and they’ve got racks of shirts. Clean. Pressed. Some even starched! Mint. Like brand-new! I’d pick out three shirts, take them up to the counter: How much is this? Three dimes. I was into medical lamps, and this Goodwill had lamps that had all kinds of adjustments and different things, and I had fifteen medical lamps in our living room. I left them in Philadelphia because Jack was supposed to help pack the truck I drove out to Los Angeles, but he worked in a porno place that was busted and he was in jail the day we were loading the truck. It was just my brother and Peggy and me loading, and some good stuff got left behind.

  When I got with Peggy, Jack moved into this place over an auto-body shop owned by a guy from Trinidad named Barker, and everybody loved Barker. He had legs like rubber and could crouch and then spring up, and he was built for auto-body work. One day he walked me past all these cars on racks to the very back of the place, where there was this old dusty tarp covering something. He pulls this tarp back and said, “I want you to have this car. This is a 1966 Volkswagen with hardly any miles on it. It was rear-ended and totaled, but I can fix this car and you can have it for six hundred dollars.” I said, “Barker, that is great!” So he fixed it up and it was like brand-new—it even smelled new! It rode so solid and smooth and it was a dream car in mint condition. I loved that car. When I brushed my teeth in the second-floor bathroom, I’d look out the window and see it down there parked in the street and it was so beautiful. So I’m brushing my teeth one morning and I look out and I think, Where did I park my car? It’s not there. That was my first car and it was stolen. So I moved on to my second car. There was a service station at the end of the street where Peggy’s family lived, and Peggy’s father took me down there and said to the guy who ran the place, “David needs a car. What used cars do you have?” I got this Ford Falcon station wagon and it was a dream, too. It was three-on-the-tree, the plainest Ford Falcon station wagon there could be—it had a heater and a radio and nothing else, but it had snow tires on the back and it could go anywhere. I sort of fell in love with that car.

  I had to wait for the license plate for the Ford Falcon to come in the mail, so I decided to make one for the meantime. The license plate was a really fun project. I cut some cardboard, and it was a good piece of cardboard that was the same thickness as a license plate. I cut it in exactly the shape of a real license, then went to a car and measured the height of the letters and numbers, and looked at the colors, and made a Day-Glo registration sticker. The problem was that the license I copied had either all letters or all numbers, and my license had letters and numbers, and I later learned that letters and numbers aren’t the same height. So this rookie cop spots my license as a fake because everything was the same height, and this cop was a hero at the precinct for spotting this thing. So cops came to the door and Peggy was crying—it was serious! They came back later and wanted the license plate for the police museum. It was a fuckin’ beautiful job! That was the first time a museum acquired my work.

  One night I came home from a movie and went up to the second floor and started to tell
Peggy about it, and her eyes are like saucers because someone is outside the bay window. So I go downstairs where our phone is, and our next-door neighbor Phyllis calls right then. She’s a character and she’s talking away until I interrupt her and say, “Phyllis, I’ve gotta hang up and call the police. Somebody was trying to break in.” While I’m on the phone with her I see a pipe move, then I hear breaking glass, and I see someone outside the window and realize someone was in the basement, too—so there were two people. I don’t remember sitting on the couch the next night with a gun like Peggy said—I don’t think we ever had a gun at that place. But, yeah, these sorts of things happened there. Another time I’m sound asleep and I’m woken by Peggy’s face like two inches from mine. “David! There’s somebody in the house!” I get up and put my underpants on backward and reach under the bed and get this ceremonial sword Peggy’s father gave us, and I go to the head of the stairs and yell, “Get the hell out of here!” There were two black couples standing down there and they’re looking at me like I’m totally fucking crazy, right? They’d come in to make love or party or something because they thought it was an abandoned house. They said, “You don’t live here,” and I said, “The hell I don’t!”

  By the time Jen was born I’d left school and I wrote that bullshit letter to the administration. Then I got a job. Christine McGinnis and Rodger LaPelle were both painters, but to make money Christine would knock out these animal engravings, and she had her mother, Dorothy, who was known as Flash, in there printing. It was the perfect job for me. Flash and I worked next to each other and there would be a little TV in front of us, and behind us were a hand press and some sinks. You’d start by inking the plate, then you’d take one of these used nylon socks Rodger would get and you’d fold it in a certain way, then you’d dance this nylon over the plate, hitting the mountains and leaving the valleys. Then you’d run a print on real good paper. While I was working in the shop, Rodger told me, “David, I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars to paint on the weekends and I’ll keep the paintings you make.” After I moved to L.A. he would send me paper and pencils to do drawings for him, still paying me. Rodger was and is a friend to artists.