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Lynch seeing films by Bergman and Fellini during those years, David has no memory of them.

      Lynch’s most significant girlfriend during his teenage years was Judy Westerman: They were voted the cutest couple at school, and there’s a picture in their high school yearbook of the two of them on a bicycle built for two. “David had a really straight girlfriend, but he also used to date some of the ‘fast’ women at school,” said Clark Fox. “He used to talk about what he referred to as these ‘wow women,’ and although he didn’t get into a lot of detail about them, I know they were kind of wild. He was intrigued by the wild side of life.”

      Fisk recalled that “David and Judy were pretty tight, but it wasn’t one of those relationships that developed into anything physical. He wasn’t really a ladies’ man, but he would have fascinations with women.” When Lynch met Fisk’s younger sister, Mary, there was no instant fascination, but they both remember that first meeting. “I was fourteen or fifteen when I met David,” recalled Mary Fisk, who became Lynch’s second wife, in 1977. “I was sitting in the living room at home and Jack walked through the room with David and said, ‘This is my sister Mary.’ There was a brass vase holding cigarettes in the living room, and I guess that shocked him because his family didn’t smoke. I don’t know why, but for some reason he’s always associated me with cigarettes—he’s often said that.

      “David was going steady with Judy Westerman then, but he was really in love with Nancy Briggs,” Mary Fisk continued. “I had a crush on David the summer before my senior year and I was smitten—he has an extraordinary ability to connect with people. We went on a few dates but it wasn’t serious, because we were both dating other people, too. That was the summer after David and Jack graduated from high school, so we all went our separate ways that fall.”⁵

      Lynch graduated from high school in June of 1964, and three months later his father’s work took the family to Walnut Creek, California, just as Lynch started classes at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, Jack Fisk began studies at Cooper Union, a private university in Manhattan. It was and is an excellent school—at the time the faculty included Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers—but Fisk dropped out after a year and headed to Boston to reconnect with Lynch. “I was shocked when I entered his apartment, because it was full of paintings and they were different kinds of paintings,” Fisk said. “They were orange and black, which was kind of bright for David, and I was impressed by how much he’d done. I remember thinking, My God, this guy has been working. One reason he was able to produce so much was because he stayed home and painted instead of going to school. School was a distraction for him.”

      It’s interesting to note the disparity between Fisk and Lynch’s involvement in art and what was happening in Manhattan, which was the international center of the art world at the time. The heyday of abstract expressionism had passed, and late modernism was conceding the playing field to pop art, which had catapulted to the front lines in terms of advancing the narrative of art history. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were developing new strategies for bridging the gap between art and life, and conceptualism and minimalism were on the march. Boston was a short train trip to Manhattan, where Fisk was living, but what was happening outside of their studios seems to have been of marginal interest to Lynch and Fisk, who were following the lead of Robert Henri rather than Artforum. For them, art was a noble calling that demanded discipline, solitude, and a fierce single-mindedness; the cool sarcasm of pop and cocktail-party networking of the New York art world had no place in their art-making practices. They were romantics in the classic sense of the word and were on another trajectory entirely.

      By the end of Lynch’s second semester in Boston his grades were circling the drain, and after failing classes in sculpture and design he quit school. Getting out of Boston was not without complications, though. “He made a mess of his apartment in Boston with his oil paint, and the landlord wanted him to pay for the damages, so my dad hired an attorney to negotiate a deal,” said John Lynch. “Dad wouldn’t yell at you but you knew when he was angry, and I think he was disappointed in David.”

      Where to next? Bushnell Keeler’s brother had a travel agency in Boston and wrangled free flights to Europe as tour conductors for Fisk and Lynch; their duties began and ended with meeting a group of girls at the airport and escorting them onto a plane. The two of them headed to Europe in late spring of 1965, planning to study at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, an institution located in a castle called Hohensalzburg Fortress. Also called the “School of Vision,” it was founded in 1953 by Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka in the city where the squeaky-clean movie musical of 1965, The Sound of Music, is set. Lynch has recalled, “I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to make my work there.” Arriving two months before classes were scheduled to start in a city that turned them off, Fisk and Lynch were at a loss as to what to do with themselves. “Between us we had maybe two hundred and fifty dollars, and David loved Coca-Cola, which cost a dollar, and Marlboro cigarettes, which cost a dollar a pack, and I watched the money dwindle,” Fisk said. They lasted fifteen days.

      “When I got back home my stepfather gave me a thousand dollars, which was a lot of money then, and I applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, because they were drafting people for Vietnam and you could get a student deferment,” Fisk continued. “I went to Philadelphia but I didn’t get into school because I’d applied too late, so I got a job at The Philadelphia Inquirer checking ads for their TV guide. A week or two later President Johnson escalated the war and they started drafting more people, and the school called and said, ‘We’re gonna let you in,’ so that’s how I got in. I rented a tiny room for thirty dollars a month at Twenty-first and Cherry Street.”

      It wasn’t so easy for Lynch. “His parents were furious that he wasn’t going to school and they told David, ‘You’re on your own,’ ” recalled Peggy Reavey. “He spent the rest of 1965 living in Alexandria, working at a series of bad jobs, and I know he had some really rough times. I think it was during that time that he was drafted—he got out of that, probably from a nervous stomach. He had a lot of trouble with his stomach when he was young.” (Lynch had a bad back that kept him out of the service.)

      When Lynch returned from Europe and headed back to Alexandria, the Keelers took him in. He did various odd jobs around the house, including painting the upstairs bathroom, which Toby Keeler said “took him forever. He used a teeny little brush and spent three days painting the bathroom, and probably a day alone painting the radiator. He got into every nook and cranny and painted that thing better than when it was new. My mother still laughs when she thinks of David in that bathroom.”⁶ One night when the Keelers were entertaining dinner guests, Bushnell announced, “David has decided he’s going to be moving out and finding his own place.” Lynch was hearing this news for the first time, but Keeler felt Lynch should get on with his life and begin living among his peers.

      “David was gobbling up all the art he could,” said David Keeler, “and he always seemed cheerful—he’d use naïve expressions like ‘nifty.’ His favorite was ‘swingin’ enough.’ Bush would suggest that he try this or that, and David would say, ‘Okay, swingin’ enough, Bushnell!’ Still, I think he was adrift at that point. He was kind of desperate and needed money because he’d gotten his own place, so I got him a job as a blueprint boy at an engineering firm where I worked as a draftsman. David worked by himself in the blueprint room and loved experimenting with the materials. He’d come over to my desk and say, ‘Hey, Dave! What do you think of this? Look at this!’ He spent a lot of time not doing company business. I can’t remember which of us got fired first.

      “David was very hard to get up in the morning, too,” Keeler continued. “I walked by his place on the way to work, and I’d holler up to his window, ‘Lynch! Get up! You’re gonna be late!’ He was living in a building owned by a guy named Michelangelo Aloca, and there was a frame shop just below David’s room that Aloca owned. He was a paraplegic, great big guy, very strong and intimidating-looking.”

      After losing his job at the engineering firm, Lynch was hired by Aloca to work in his frame shop. He lost that job, too, when he scratched a frame, and Aloca then gave him a job as a janitor. He was making the best of things but it was a difficult

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