LITMIR.BIZ

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Laffin, had a pickup truck, so the three of us get in this truck and go from Boston down to Brooklyn or the Bronx or someplace to get Peter’s stuff. They were smoking dope in the car and I’d never smoked dope, so I’m getting high just from being in the car, and they gave me some tokes. They knew how marijuana works and knew I didn’t know, so they say, “Hey, David, wouldn’t a donut be good right now?” I said, “I gotta have a donut!” So we got twenty-four day-old powdered-sugar donuts and I was so eager to eat one that I inhaled a mountain of powdered sugar into my lungs. You’ve got to be careful.

      So it’s my turn to drive, and we’re driving down the freeway and it’s real quiet, then I hear somebody say, “David.” Then it was quiet again, and then somebody said, “David! You’ve stopped on the freeway!” I was watching these lines on the road and they were going slower and slower, and I was loving them, and I was going slower and slower until the lines finally stopped moving. This was an eight-lane freeway at night and cars are just flying by us and I’d stopped the car! It was so dangerous!

      For some reason we then stopped by some guy’s apartment, which was lit by just a few Christmas bulbs, mostly red. He’s got his giant motorcycle in the living room all taken apart, and a few chairs, and it seemed like we’d entered hell. Then we go to Peter’s house and go down in the basement, and while we’re down there I cup my hands, they fill up with dark water, and there, floating on the surface of the water, was Nancy Briggs’s face. I was just looking at her. That was the first time I smoked marijuana. The next morning we loaded Peter’s stuff and went to see Jack, who told me that some of the students at his school were taking heroin. I went to a party in Jack’s building and there was this kid in a silk shirt kind of huddled up, and he was on heroin. You started seeing hippies around during that period, too, and I didn’t look down on them, but it seemed like a fad, and a lot of them were raisin and nut eaters. Some of them dressed like they were from India and they’d say they were meditators, but I didn’t want anything to do with meditation then.

      I threw my roommate Peter out after just a few months. What happened was I went to a Bob Dylan concert and ended up sitting next to this girl I’d just broken up with. I couldn’t believe I was sitting next to her. Obviously I’d made the date while we were going together, but then we broke up, so I went to the concert alone and I was stoned and there she was! I remember thinking what a weird coincidence it was that I was sitting next to her. We had really bad seats and we were way in the back of a giant auditorium, far, far, away. This was 1964 and Dylan didn’t have a band with him—it was just him up there alone and he looked incredibly small. Using my thumb and my forefinger I started sighting and measuring his jeans and I said to this girl, “His jeans are only a sixteenth of an inch big!” Then I measured his guitar and I said “His guitar is just a sixteenth of an inch, too!” It seemed like the strangest magic act and I got super paranoid. Finally there was an intermission and I went running outside and it was cold and fresh and I thought, Thank God, I’m out, and I walked home. So I’m at home and Peter comes in with a bunch of friends and he says “What? Nobody walks out on Dylan!” And I said, “I fuckin’ walk out on Dylan. Get the hell out of here.” And I threw them all out. I remember the first time I heard Dylan on the car radio I was riding with my brother and we started laughing like crazy. It was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it was so cool the way he sang, but it was cool funny.

      I only went to the Boston Museum School for two semesters, and I didn’t even go to classes the second half. The only class I liked was sculpture, which was held in the attic of the museum. The room was around twenty-five feet wide, but it was a hundred feet long and had incredibly high ceilings with a skylight running through the whole thing. There were big bins of materials like plaster and clay, and that’s where I learned casting. The teacher was named Jonfried Georg Birkschneider, and when he got his paycheck he’d sign it over in a Boston bar with a polished dark wooden bar a hundred feet long, and he’d just drink. His girlfriend’s name was Natalie. After my first semester I went home to Alexandria at Christmas and I let him stay at my place with Natalie. When I came back to Boston I let them keep staying with me in my apartment, and they stayed for a few months. I was painting in one room, and he and Natalie took over another room, and he just sat there, but it didn’t bother me. He turned me on to Moxie, which is this kind of cola they drink in Boston. I hated it until I discovered that if you put the bottles in the freezer the lid will pop off and there would be soft ice that tasted so good. It was like a Moxie slush. I don’t know what became of Jonfried Georg Birkschneider.

      So I left college and Jack and I went to Europe. We went because it’s part of the art dream, but it was completely half-baked. I was the only one who had money—although Jack probably could have gotten some if he’d written home—but we really did have a good time, sort of. The only place we didn’t like was Salzburg, and once that went belly-up we were just free-floating. We had no plan. We went from Salzburg to Paris, where we spent a day or two, then we took the real Orient Express, all electric trains, to Venice, and then coal-burning trains down to Athens. We got there at night, and when I woke up the next morning there were lizards on the ceiling and the walls of my room. I wanted to go to Athens because Nancy Briggs’s father had been transferred and was going to be there two months later, and Nancy would’ve been there, but we only stayed in Athens for one day. I thought, I’m seven thousand miles from where I really want to be and I just want to get out of here. I think Jack did, too.

      But we were truly out of money by then. We went back to Paris, and on the train we met four schoolteachers and somehow we got an address where they were staying in Paris. We get to Paris and Mary has sent Jack a ticket home, but I don’t have a ticket, and Jack’s going to the airport. Before he left we went to the address these girls had given us, but they weren’t home, so we went to a sidewalk café and I ordered a Coca-Cola and gave Jack the last bit of money for a cab to the airport. I’m sitting there alone; I finish my Coke and go and knock on their door, and they’re still not there. I go back to the café and sit, then I go back and knock on their door and they’re home. They let me take a shower and gave me twenty dollars. I couldn’t reach my parents, because they were on vacation, so I called my grandfather and woke him up at four in the morning, and he got the money for a ticket to me fast; then I flew back and went to Brooklyn. I had all these European coins when I got home, and I gave them to my granddad. When he passed away they found this little purse with a slip of paper he’d safety-pinned to it that said, “These are coins that David brought me from Europe.” I still have it somewhere.

      That was a strange period after I got back from Europe. My parents were upset when they found out I wouldn’t be going to school in Salzburg, and when I got back to Alexandria I stayed at the Keeler house. Bushnell and his wife were away and just Toby was there, and he was shocked to see me. I was going to be gone for three years, and fifteen days later I’m knocking on the door. After Toby’s I got my own place, and I always like to fix up a place. It’s almost like painting. I want the place where I live to be a certain way that feels good and where I can work. It’s something about the mind; it wants to have a certain thing, a setup.

      Michelangelo Aloca was a fifties action painter who had a frame shop, and he gave me a job. He was a strange guy. His head was as big as a five-gallon can, and he had a huge beard and giant torso and the legs of a three-year-old. He was in a wheelchair, but he was very strong on top. One time we were driving and we passed these giant iron H-beams and he crawled out of the car, went over and grabbed this H-beam, and lifted it up and slammed it down. He was a nut. His wife was beautiful and he had a beautiful child. Knockout wife! He fired me from the job in his frame store and then hired me as a janitor to sweep out. One day he said, “You want to make five dollars extra?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “The girls just vacated their place in the building. Go clean their toilet.” This toilet . . . if a little wind came, it would slop over. It was right to the top of the toilet, brown, white, and red water, right to the brim. I cleaned it until you could eat off it. It was clean as a whistle.

      One time I went into Mike Aloca’s place and he was in there talking with this black guy. After the guy left Mike says, “You want a free TV?” I said, “Sure,” and he said, “Take this money and this gun and go to this place and this guy’s gonna take you to these TVs.” I got Charlie Smith and somebody else to go with me and we went

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