really upset with me. Another time this kid stole a bunch of .22 bullets from his father and he gave me some of them. They have such great weight, .22 bullets; they’re sort of like little jewels. I kept them for a while, then I started thinking I’d get in trouble for having them, so I wadded them up in newspaper, put them in a bag, and threw them in the trash. In the winter my mother would burn trash in the fireplace, so she put all this paper in the fire-place and lit it and pretty soon bullets started flying all around the living room. I got in trouble for that.
One day we were having a badminton tournament in the back of the Smiths’ house and we heard this giant explosion and ran to the street, and we saw smoke rising at the end of the block. We walked down and there was this guy named Jody Masters who was older than us. Jody Masters was building a rocket out of a pipe and it accidentally ignited and cut his foot off. His mother, who was pregnant, came out, and she saw her oldest son and he couldn’t get up. He tried, but his foot was hanging by tendons in a pool of blood and billions of burned-out match heads. They sewed his foot back on and it was fine. There was a lot of bomb building and gasoline-powered things in Boise.
We left Boise and moved to Alexandria, Virginia, after I finished eighth grade, and I was upset when we moved from Boise. I can’t express how upset I was, and it was the end of an era—my brother is right when he says that’s when the music stopped. Then, the summer after ninth grade, my mother and sister and brother and I went back to Boise on the train.
My grandfather Lynch died that summer, and I was the last person to see him alive. He’d had his leg amputated and it never really healed because he had such bad hardening of the arteries, so he was staying in a regular neighborhood house with five or six other people, being taken care of by nurses. My mother and grandmother visited him every day, but one day they couldn’t go, and they said, “David, would you go visit your grandfather today because we can’t go?” and I said yes. Some of the day went by and it got late, then I remembered about visiting him, so I borrowed a bike from this kid in front of the South Junior High swimming pool and I rode out Shoshone Street. There he was in a wheelchair out in the front yard, getting some air. So I sat with him and we had a really great talk. I can’t remember what we talked about—maybe I asked him some questions about the old days, and there were some stretches where nobody talked—but I always loved just sitting with him. Then he said, “Well, Dave, I better go back in now,” and I said, “Okay, Granddad.” I got on my bike, and as I was riding away I look back and I see nurses coming out to get him. I’m riding down the street and I get to a green wooden garage that blocks my view, so the last thing I see is some nurses coming toward him.
From there I went to Carol Robinson’s house because her cousin, Jim Barratt, had built a bomb as big as a basketball and he was going to set it off. He set the bomb in the freshly mowed backyard and it smelled so beautiful. I haven’t smelled that in a really long time and don’t know of any mowed lawns around here in L.A. Anyhow, there was a porcelain washbowl about a foot and a half in diameter, and he set it on top of the bomb and lit the fuse and this thing went off like you cannot fuckin’ believe. It blew this dish two hundred feet in the air, it blew dirt everywhere, and smoke was coming out of the lawn in a really beautiful way ten or fifteen feet out. It was an amazing thing that I saw.
Then some moments pass and I hear sirens and think maybe the police are on their way, so I hightail it to the pool and give the kid’s bike back to him. As I’m walking home to my grandparents’ apartment, I see my mother out in the front. She was headed to the car, but when she saw me she started waving wildly, so I go faster and I get to her and say, “What is it?” She says, “It’s your grandfather.” I drove her fast to a hospital in downtown Boise where my grandfather was, and I double-parked and my mother went in. She came out fifteen minutes later and I could immediately tell something was wrong, and when she got in the car she said, “Your grandfather died.”
I’d been with him just fifteen minutes before it happened. When he said, “Dave, I better go back in now,” I’m pretty sure, playing it back, that something was going wrong in him—I think he had internal bleeding—and he didn’t want to say it in front of me. That night I sat with my grandmother and she wanted to hear all about my visit with him. Later I put two and two together and I realized those sirens weren’t for the bomb; they were going to get my grandfather. I was very close to my grandparents, all four of them, and he was the first one I lost, and I loved him so much. It was a huge thing for me when my grandfather Lynch died.
I went back to Boise another time, in 1992, to find out what happened to a girl I knew there who committed suicide in the seventies. This story started a long time before that, though. When I left Boise for Alexandria after the eighth grade, my girlfriend was Jane Johnson, and during that first year in Alexandria—my worst year, ninth grade—I wrote to Jane and kind of kept that relationship going. When we went back to Boise the following summer of 1961, Jane and I broke up within the first two weeks, but while we were there I started hanging out with this other girl, and after we went back to Alexandria she became the girl I was writing to. We wrote to each other for years, and in those days you wrote long letters.
The summer after I graduated from high school I went to visit my grandmother on a Greyhound bus. This bus had a big engine that made a lot of noise, and the driver was going seventy or eighty miles an hour on these two-lane highways, and the whole trip is basically sagebrush. I remember there was this guy on the bus who looked like a real cowboy. He had on a cowboy hat all stained with sweat, and his face was totally lined, like leather skin, and he had steel-blue eyes, and he just stared out the window the whole trip. An old-style cowboy. So we get to Boise and I go to my grandmother’s place, where she’s living with Mrs. Foudray, and they’re old ladies but they doted on me. They thought I was so handsome. It was really great.
My grandmother let me use her car and I went to this hotel, up to the mezzanine level, which was kind of strange and dark, and there was a soda fountain there where this girl I’d been writing to worked. I asked her if she wanted to go to the drive-in that night, and after I had dinner with my grandmother and Mrs. Foudray, this girl and I went to the drive-in. In those days there were drive-ins everywhere. It was fantastic. So we start making out at the drive-in and she’s telling me things about herself and I realize this is a really wild girl. She had strange boyfriends after that, probably because so-called regular guys like me were sort of afraid of her. I remember her saying to me, “Most people don’t know what they want to do in life and you are so lucky that you know what you want to do.” I think her life was already headed in a dark direction.
We continued writing to each other—in fact, I was still writing to her, and two other girls, when I married Peggy. I’d been writing to these three girls for years, and finally one day Peggy said, “David, you’re married now; you gotta stop writing to these girls.” Peggy wasn’t the jealous type at all, but she said, “Look, you write a nice little letter and they’ll understand,” like I was a little kid. And I stopped writing to them.
Many years later, in 1991, I’m up shooting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and during lunch I go into my trailer and meditate. One day after I finish meditating, I open up the trailer door and there’s somebody on the film saying, “There’s a man named Dick Hamm here, and he says he knows you.” I said, “Dick Hamm? Are you kidding?” I’d gone to elementary school with Dick Hamm and hadn’t seen him in decades. I go over and there he is with his wife from New York City, and it was great to see him. I asked him if he’d run into this girl I’d gone to the drive-in with and he said, “No, she’s dead. She jumped into the big canal and killed herself.” I started wondering, What is the story here? What happened to her? So I went back to Boise after the film wrapped and looked into this thing. I went to the library and read articles about this girl, and I saw police reports about the day she died.
This girl had married an older guy who her brother and father hated, and she was also having an affair with this guy who was a prominent citizen in Boise. One Friday night this guy broke it off with her and she was devastated. She couldn’t hide her sadness, so maybe her husband suspected something. The following Sunday morning a neighbor down the street was having a brunch, and she and her husband went there separately. The story goes that her husband left the brunch and went home, and a little while later she comes home and goes into the bedroom and gets