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