give me the TVs; they want the money first.” We say no, so he goes in and comes out again without the TVs, telling us he needs the money first. We say no, then he makes another trip, and this time he brings out a TV box and we decide to take a chance. We give him the money, he goes in and never comes out again, and there we were with a loaded pistol under the front seat. Luckily, Mike just laughed when we told him what happened. Mike could be scary. He once said I was spending all the money he paid me on paint and he said, “I want you to show me food you buy; you gotta eat.” I must’ve looked sickly or something. So I show him my milk and peanut butter and loaf of bread and he said, “Good for you.”
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.
Smiling Bags of Death
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