who knows why you fall in love with somebody. Nothing ever happened with her, but I just couldn’t get her out of my system. After I finished shooting Blue Velvet I was in Wilmington, and for some reason I decided, I’m going to call Nancy Briggs. Somehow I got her number and I called her up, and the second I heard her voice the pining was completely lifted. It went from a dream to reality, and the dream was the powerful thing. It’s amazing what we do in our brains. Why did I pine for all those years? Go figure . . .
Things were changing in the country at the end of the fifties, so the change I felt when we moved to Virginia was also happening in Boise. Then when Kennedy was assassinated it got really bad. I remember that day. I was setting up an art display by myself in these big glass cases in the entrance hall to the school, right next to the administration office, and I heard something about the president on the radio in there. They hadn’t said he’d died, but he was in the hospital and the buzz started. When I finished what I was doing, this woman said, “You have to go back to your class,” so I went back to class and they made the announcement and closed the school. I walked Judy home and she was sobbing so much she couldn’t talk. Kennedy was Catholic like her and she loved him so much. She lived in an apartment building on the second floor, so we walked up and went inside and her mom was in the living room. Judy walked away from me, passed her mom, turned a corner, went into her room, and didn’t come out for four days.
At the time I didn’t question who killed Kennedy, but you start looking into things. They say, Look who’s got the motive. LBJ lived in Texas and got him down there, and LBJ wanted to be president since he was three feet tall. LBJ was the most powerful senator they say there ever was, and he gave that up to be vice president? He was one twenty-five-cent bullet away from the presidency, and I think he hated Kennedy and he organized it so he could be president. That’s my theory.
In the eighth grade I liked science for some reason, so when I started ninth grade I signed up for all science classes. Now I can hardly believe it. The whole four years is booked in science! Then in ninth grade I meet Toby Keeler and he tells me his father is a painter—no, not a house painter, a fine-art painter—and, literally, boom! A bomb goes off in my head. All these things must’ve just flown together like a hydrogen bomb and that was it, that’s all I wanted to do. But I had to go to school, and high school was the worst. To go to that building for so many hours every day just seemed ridiculous. I have about three high school classroom memories, and none of them are good. I remember saying to Sam Johnson, “Tell me, tell me, tell me!” We were about to have a test, and he would tell me things and I’d try to remember them long enough to take the test. I never studied and couldn’t get out of these science classes, and I got thrown off the student council because I flunked physics and refused to go to class. Instead of going, I’d go down to the front office and beg, “Let me out of this; I don’t want to be a physicist,” and they said, “David, there are some things in life you have to do whether you like it or not.” My little brother was into electronics from an early age and that’s what he wound up going into, and I think you know what you’re going to do when you’re a kid. They should take us out of school and just let us concentrate on whatever that thing is. Holy smokes! I could’ve been painting all that time I spent in school! And I remember zip. Zip! I can’t remember a fuckin’ thing I learned in school.
The weekend after I met Toby Keeler he took me to his father’s studio, and at that point Bushnell had a studio in Georgetown that was so fucking great. He was living the art life and painting all the time. I only saw his Georgetown studio once, and the next thing I know he’s moved from Georgetown to Alexandria, where he had a whole building. I wanted a studio and Bushnell offered to rent me a room in his new place, so I talked to my father and he said, “I’ll pay half if you get a job and pay the other half.” So I got a job at Herter’s Drug Store delivering prescriptions in the store’s red-and-white jeep. It was an open jeep with a stick shift. I can’t believe I did that. I’d have to find people’s addresses and take drugs to them, and that’s a lot of responsibility. On weekends I’d sometimes work the cigar counter at Herter’s. During that period Bushnell would get models and I’d get to sit in on these things and draw, and he always had coffee going. A guy named Bill Lay went in on the room with me but he never showed up there.
Jack had started working in my room at Bushnell’s, though, and it wasn’t big enough for both of us so we moved into a studio above a shoe store. Our landlady was named Mrs. Marciette, and she didn’t have any teeth. She complained to us a lot—“I’m not burning the light all night for two alley cats; clean up; I’m sick; I don’t know why I rent to you”—and she was always around. When I turned the lights on in my room, just for a millisecond I’d see ten million cockroaches, which would instantly disappear. The place was riddled with cockroaches, but Jack and I each had a room, and there was a kitchen, and it was a great place to paint.
Living in the attic above Jack and me was this guy named Radio, and we got to know him. He was a hunchback, and he would go up these real narrow back stairs that led to this wooden door with a padlock on it. That was his room. Radio didn’t have too many teeth, either, and in his room he had maybe fifty porno magazines lying around, a hot plate where he made steaks—just steaks—and cheap hard liquor. He was a phone man for the circus, and he’d travel to cities ahead of the circus and phone prominent businessmen and get them to donate money to send needy children to the circus. The circus would rent a room somewhere and have twelve phones put in and there would be all these guys phoning people, and it was a racket. They would send maybe one busload of needy children to the circus and pocket the rest of the dough. Radio says, “They call me Radio because they can’t turn me off.” Jack and I had a phone, and one night he came down and asked if he could use our phone. We said, “Sure, Radio,” so he comes in and there’s this little table with a rotary dial phone on it. He goes to the phone and his hand goes down and begins dialing, and the number was instantly dialed. I’ve never seen anybody dial a phone like this. It’s as if he put all the fingers on his hand into this rotary dial at the same time, and in a fraction of a second he’s got somebody on the phone and he starts talking. If you closed your eyes you’d swear you were listening to a highly intelligent saint telling you about these needy children. Radio was incredible.
Right next door to Mrs. Marciette’s was Frankie Welch, this woman who looked like a brunette Doris Day. This area was right by city hall but it was pretty bad, and Frankie Welch was the first person down there. She had a vision and she had this super high-end place where she sold clothes. She also designed clothes and she ended up being really close to Betty Ford and did clothes for her. When she found out we were artists, she had me making signs with oil paint that were really cool-looking. But then Mrs. Marciette asked us to leave. We were in there a lot late at night and we’d leave the lights on and she was paying for electricity and there was paint all over the place. I didn’t used to leave properties better than they were when I got there. It wasn’t like we purposely trashed the place like rock stars, but when you’re painting, paint gets around. After we moved out, I saw Radio one more time. He was downtown, this hunchback with a battered little suitcase, waiting for the bus that would take him to the next town.
I went to a doctor when I was in high school because I was having spasms of the intestines, which were caused by nerves and all the things I was doing wrong. When I was in high school I had a studio life, a fraternity life, and a home life, and I didn’t want any of them to mix. I never brought friends home and I didn’t want my parents to know about anything. I knew how to behave at home, and it was different from how I behaved at the fraternity, and that was different from how I was at the studio. I had a lot of tension and nervousness about living all of these separate lives.
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I didn’t care about the New York art world, and going to college there didn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know why I picked the Boston Museum School—I just got a thing in my mind. I wanted to go to Boston. It sounded so cool, the Boston Museum School, but I didn’t like it at all and I almost couldn’t go to school because I was afraid to leave the apartment. I had agoraphobia and still have it a little bit. I don’t like going out. My dad told me I had to get a roommate because my apartment was too expensive, so I put a thing on the wall at school, and this guy Peter Blankfield—who later changed his name to Peter Wolf and became the singer