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Room to Dream. Kristine McKenna
Читать онлайн.Название Room to Dream
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782118404
Автор произведения Kristine McKenna
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
As far as the police looking into this, I think they got word from the guy she was having the affair with: This is a suicide; don’t go anywhere near it, because it’s going to come back to me; don’t fuck around, guys. Put it under the rug. I went to the police department and tried to trick them by saying, “I’m looking for a story for a film; do you have any girls who committed suicide during this period?” It didn’t work, because they were never going to bring up that story. I got permission to get a photograph of the crime/suicide scene, and I filled out these forms and turned them in, and they said, “We’re sorry, but that year’s stuff was thrown away.” I knew this girl from the beginning, when she was young, and I can’t explain why her life went the way it did.
But I do know that a lot of who we are is already set when we get here. They call it the wheel of birth and death, and I believe we’ve been around many, many times. There’s a law of nature that says what you sow is what you reap and you come into life with the certainty that some of your past is going to visit you in this life. Picture a baseball: You hit it and it goes out and it doesn’t come back until it hits something and starts traveling back. There’s so much empty space that it could be gone for a long time, but then it starts coming back and it’s coming back to you, the person who set the baseball in motion.
I think fate plays a huge role in our lives, too, because there’s no explaining why certain things happen. How come I won an independent-filmmaker grant and got to go to the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute? How come you meet certain people and fall in love with them and you don’t meet all those other people? You come in with so much of who you are, and although parents and friends can influence you a little, you’re basically who you are from the start. My children are all really different and they’re their own people and they came into the world with their little personalities. You get to know them really well and you love them, but you don’t have that much to do with the path they’re going to travel in life. Some things are set. Childhood experiences can shape you, though, and my childhood years in Boise were hugely important to me.
It was an August night in 1960. It was our last night in Boise. There’s a triangle of grass separating our driveway from the Smiths’ driveway next door, and my dad, my brother, my sister, and I were out in that triangle saying goodbye to the Smith boys, Mark, Denny, Randy, and Greg. Suddenly Mr. Smith appears and I see him talking to my dad, then shaking his hand. I stared at this and started feeling the seriousness of the situation, the huge importance of this last night. In all the years living next to the Smiths I had never spoken one-on-one with Mr. Smith and now here he was walking toward me. He held out his hand and I took it. He might’ve said something like, “We’re going to miss you, David,” but I didn’t really hear what he said—I just burst into tears. I realized how important the Smith family was to me, then how important all my Boise friends were, and I felt it building on a deeper and deeper level. It was beyond sad. And then I saw the darkness of the unknown I’d be heading into the next day. I looked up through tears at Mr. Smith as we finished shaking hands. I couldn’t speak. It was definitely the end of a most beautiful golden era.
The Art Life
Alexandria, Virginia, was a very different world. A relatively sophisticated city seven miles south of downtown Washington, D.C., it’s essentially a suburb of D.C. and is home to thousands of government workers. Alexandria had a population five times the size of Boise’s during the early sixties, but Lynch was apparently unfazed by the bigger world he stepped into. “From everything I’ve heard, David was a star in high school and had that sense of being the golden boy,” said Peggy Reavey. “From the start he had that.”
Lynch’s course in life clarified itself significantly when he befriended Toby Keeler shortly after beginning his freshman year. “I met David on the front lawn of his girlfriend’s house, and my first impression was of her, not David,” said Keeler, who proceeded to woo the girlfriend, Linda Styles, away from Lynch. “David lived in another part of town, but the driving age in Alexandria was fifteen, and he’d driven his family’s Chevy Impala, with big wings on it, to her house. I liked David immediately. He’s always been one of the most likable people on the planet, and we’ve joked for years about the fact that I stole his girlfriend. We were both in a fraternity at Hammond High School whose secret phrase was ‘Trust from beginning to end,’ but the David I knew wasn’t a partying frat boy.”1
Lynch and Keeler became close friends, but it was Toby’s father, artist Bushnell Keeler, who really changed Lynch’s life. “Bush had a big effect on David, because he had the courage to break away from the life he’d been living and get a studio and just start making art,” said Toby. “David said a bomb went off in his head when he heard what Bushnell did. ‘A fine-art painter? You can do that?’”
Bushnell Keeler’s younger sibling, David, remembered his brother as “a very up-and-down guy. Bush got a degree from Dartmouth College in business administration and married someone from a wealthy Cleveland family. He was a junior executive and was doing well but he hated it, so he and his family moved to Alexandria so he could study to become a minister, but after two years he realized he didn’t want to do that, either. He was a pretty angry young man, always challenging things, and he was taking a lot of upper and downer drugs, which didn’t help. Finally he realized that what he really wanted to do was be an artist, and that’s what he did. The marriage didn’t survive that decision.
“Bush understood something nobody else did at the time, which was that David really and truly wanted to be an artist,” David Keeler continued about his brother, who died in 2012. “Bush thought he was at a good point in life to get a boost with that, and I guess David wasn’t getting it from his parents, so Bush was absolutely fully behind him. David often stayed at his house, and Bush made space in his studio for David to work.”2
Lynch’s commitment to art deepened further when he met Jack Fisk during his freshman year, and they laid the foundations for an enduring friendship that continues to this day. Now a widely respected production designer and director, Fisk—who went by the name Jhon Luton at the time—was a rangy, good-looking kid born in Canton, Illinois, the middle in a family of three children; his sister Susan was four years older, and his sister Mary was a year younger. Following the death of Fisk’s father in a plane crash, his mother married Charles Luton, whose job overseeing the building of foundries required the family to make frequent moves. (Later in life Fisk reverted to his birth name, as did his sister Mary.) Fisk attended a Catholic military school as a boy, and at various points the family lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Lahore, Pakistan. Finally, they settled in Alexandria when Fisk was fourteen years old.
“David and I had heard about each other because we were both interested in painting,” said Fisk. “I remember him standing in a doorway at school introducing himself—he told me he was a sophomore, but I knew he was just a freshman. We sometimes laugh about the fact that he lied to me that day. I was working as a soda jerk at Herter’s Drug Store, and he came there and got a job driving their jeep around, delivering prescriptions.”3
Lynch’s job took him all over town, and he didn’t go unnoticed. “I had a newspaper route, and for maybe two years before I met David I’d see this guy with these little bags, knocking on doors,” said artist Clark Fox, who attended high school with Lynch. “He didn’t quite fit in. If you had your hair long back then it was kind of rough, but he had his hair as long as it could be without getting in trouble, and he was really pale. He always had a tie and jacket on when he was working for the drugstore. He was very distinctive.”4
Fisk’s childhood had been tumultuous while Lynch’s was bucolic and secure, and their temperaments were different, but the two of them shared the goal of committing their lives to art, and they fell into step. “Because I’d moved around so much I was kind of a loner, but David was easy