LITMIR.BIZ

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but there wasn’t anything that frightened me.

      One day on the way to the White Tower to get lunch, I saw the smiling bags of death at the morgue. When you walked down this alley you’d see the back of the morgue opened up, and there were these rubber body bags hanging on pegs. They’d hose them out and water and body fluids would drip out, and they sagged in the middle so they were like big smiles. Smiling bags of death.

      I must’ve changed and gotten kind of dirty during that period. Judy Westerman was at the University of Pennsylvania then and I think she was in a sorority, and one time Jack and I got a job driving some paintings up there. I thought, Great, I can see Judy. So we go up there and deliver this stuff, then I go to her dormitory and walk in and this place was so clean, and I was in art school being a bum, and all the girls are giving me weird looks. They sent word to Judy that I was there, and I think I embarrassed her. I think they were saying “Who the hell is that bum over there?” But she came down and we had a really nice talk. She was used to that part of me, but they weren’t. That was the last time I ever saw Judy.

      We once had a big party at 13th and Wood. The party’s going on and there’s a few hundred people in the house, and somebody comes up to me and says, “David, so-and-so’s got a gun. We gotta get it from him and hide it.” This guy was pissed off at somebody, so we got his gun and hid it in the toilet—I grew up with guns, so I’m comfortable around them. There were lots of art students at this party, but everybody wasn’t an art student, and there was one girl who seemed a little bit simple, but she was totally sexy. A beautiful combo. It must’ve been winter, because everybody’s coats were on my bed in the attic, so when somebody was leaving I’d go up and get their coat. One time I go to my room and there on my bed, against a kind of mink coat, is this girl with her pants pulled down, and she’d obviously been taken advantage of by someone. She was totally drunk and I helped her up and got her dressed, so that was going on at this party, too.

      It was pretty packed and then the cops show up and say, “There’s been a complaint; everybody’s got to go home.” Fine, most everybody left, and there were maybe fifteen people still hanging around. One guy was quietly playing acoustic guitar, it was real mellow, and the cops come back and say, “We thought we told you all to leave.” Just then this girl named Olivia, who was probably drunk, walks up to one of the cops and gives him the finger and says, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” “Okay, everybody in the paddy wagon,” and there was one parked out front and everybody got in—me, Jack, Olivia, and these other people—and they drive us to the police station. In interrogation they find out that Jack and I are the ones who live at the house, so we’re arrested as proprietors of a disorderly house and put in jail. Olivia was the one who mouthed off, so she goes to the women’s jail. Jack and I get put in a cell and there are two transvestites—one named Cookie in our cell, and another one down the way—and they talked to each other all night. There was a murderer—he had the cot—and at least six other people in the cell. The next morning we go before the judge and a bunch of art students came and bailed us out.

      We got to Philadelphia just before hippies and pigs and stuff like this, and cops weren’t against us at first, even though we looked strange. But it got bad during the time we were there because of the way things were going in the country. Richard had a truck, and one night I went with him to a movie. When we were driving home Richard looked in the rearview mirror and there was a cop behind us. We were approaching an intersection and when the light turned yellow Richard stopped, which I guess tipped off the cops that we were nervous. So the light turns green and we go through the intersection and the sirens and the lights go on. “Pull over!” Richard pulls over to this wide sidewalk next to a high rock wall. This cop walks around to the front of our car and he’s standing in the headlights and he puts his hand on his gun and says, “Get out of the truck!” We get out of the truck. He says, “Hands against the wall!” We put our hands against the wall. They start frisking Richard, and I thought, They’re frisking Richard, not me, so I lowered my arms and immediately this hand slammed me into the wall. “Hands against the wall!” Now there’s a paddy wagon and like twenty cops, and they put us in the paddy wagon and we’re riding along in this metal cage. We hear somebody talking over the cop radio describing two guys and what they’re wearing, and Richard and I look at each other and realize we look exactly like the guys being described. We get down to the station and in comes this old man holding a bloody bandage to his head, and they bring him over to us and he looks at us, then says, “No, these aren’t the guys,” and they let us go. That made me really nervous.

      I’m quoted saying that I like the look of figures in a garden at night, but I don’t really like gardens except for a certain kind. I once did a drawing of a garden with electrical motors in it that would pump oil, and that’s what I like—I like man and nature together. That’s why I love old factories. Gears and oil, all that mechanical engineering, great big giant clanging furnaces pouring molten metal, fire and coal and smokestacks, castings and grinding, all the textures and the sounds—it’s a thing that’s just gone, and everything’s quiet and clean now. A whole kind of life disappeared, and that was one of the parts of Philadelphia that I loved. I liked the way the rooms were in Philadelphia, too, the dark wood, and rooms with a certain kind of proportions, and this certain color of green. It was kind of a puke green with a little white in it, and this color was used a lot in poor areas. It’s a color that feels old.

      I don’t know if I even had an idea when I started Six Men Getting Sick—I just started working. I called around and found this place called Photorama, where 16mm cameras were way cheaper than other places. It was kind of sleazy, but I went and rented this Bell and Howell windup camera that had three lenses on it, and it was a beautiful little camera. I shot the film in this old hotel the Academy owned, and the rooms there were empty and gutted, but the hallways were filled with rolled-up Oriental carpets and brass lamps and beautiful couches and chairs. I built this thing with a board, like a canvas, propped on top of a radiator, then I put the camera across the room on top of a dresser that I found in the hallway and moved into the room. I nailed the dresser to the floor to make sure the camera didn’t move at all.

      I have no idea what gave me the idea to do the sculpture screen. I don’t think the plastic resin burst into flame when I mixed it, but it did get so hot it steamed like crazy. You mixed this stuff in these paper containers, and I loved mixing it hot. The paper would turn brown and scorch and it would heat so much that you’d hear it crackling and you’d see these gases just steaming out of this thing. When the film was done I built this kind of erector-set structure to take the film up to the ceiling and back down through the projector, and I had a tape recorder with a siren on a loop that I set on the stage. It was in a painting and sculpture show, and the students let me turn the lights off for fifteen minutes out of every hour, and that’s pretty damn good.

      Bart Wasserman was a former Academy student whose parents died and left him a lot of money, and when he saw Six Men Getting Sick he told me he wanted to give me a thousand dollars to make a film installation for his house. I spent two months working on this film for Bart, but when it was developed it was nothing but a blur. Everybody said I was really upset when that film didn’t come out, so I probably was, but almost immediately I started getting ideas for animation and live action. I thought, This is an opportunity and there’s some reason this is happening, and maybe Bart will let me make that kind of film. I called Bart and he said, “David, I’m happy for you to do that; just give me a print.” I later met Bart’s wife in Burgundy, France—she moved over there—and she told me Bart never did an altruistic thing in his life except for the thing he did for me. That film not coming out ended up being a great doorway to the next thing. It couldn’t have been better. I never would’ve gotten a grant from AFI if that hadn’t happened.

      The film I made with the rest of Bart’s money, The Alphabet, is partly about this business of school and learning, which is done in such a way that it’s kind of a hell. When I first thought of making a film, I heard a wind and then I saw something move, and the sound of the wind was just as important as the moving image—it had to be sound and picture moving together in time. I needed to record a bunch of sounds for The Alphabet, so I went to this lab, Calvin de Frenes, and rented this Uher tape recorder. It’s a German tape recorder, a real good recorder. I recorded a bunch of stuff

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