Black & White Photos of New York

IN THE DREAM, I was about 25 years old. That’s three decades ago. My father and I were in an expansive room in a small country house, and I had my darkroom equipment around me. Trays, and a 4×5 enlarger that I never actually owned but had seen in catalogs.

I was trying to convince my father that I could move all the equipment down to the basement, and live in the house rent free. That way I could become a photographer. We were really going at it.

It never happened like that in real life. I never would have asked to live rent free in his country house. I knew he wouldn’t go for it. The basement was always damp, and anything that stayed down there would have rotted away.

We never yelled at each other. We discussed things in a civilized way, and I always walked away feeling, he just doesn’t understand me.

Dad was a child of the great depression, and all he knew was that you had to have a way to make a living. Art could come afterwards. During those days, he was the hard one – maybe what they call tough love today. I lived for a long time in utter poverty. My sister, my mother would bring me food packages. My younger sister was especially supportive.

Back to the dream: so, it was sort of a horrible dream, and we were yelling at each other until finally I woke up, to look around my little studio, and say, oh - this isn’t real. I’m already doing pretty well. Why, it’s three decades later and I’m still kicking.

But there it was: the old black feelings, after all these decades haunting me. Maybe some people can put them away - but not completely.

Decades in the wilderness. What brings it up now? Might be the thought going into these little books that are as I mentioned memoirs. I don’t like dredging this stuff up.

I tried to explain the dream to dad a few days later, and he began to go down his path again - saying that he understood, completely. That even if I had a good Christmas, business-wise, I would always be just a bad year away from destitution.

No - I broke in. That’s not what I meant to say at all. What I meant to say was even if all the Christmas’ for the rest of my life were better than the ones before, I’d still be walking around with the baggage of a lifetime of trying to figure out where I belonged. You just can’t push that all aside because things go well.

Ah, he understood. He said, why - that’s just like me. I feel the same way. No matter how far I’ve come, I’m still stuck with that depression kid looking for a way to survive.

Yes. That’s it. It’s not like we make some rational decision to live in the past; but it comes back to visit us, whether we like it or not. Whether we’ve “made it,” or not. For most of us, there’s more of that floating around us than we like to think.

And I’m not saying that dad was wrong either. People write to me asking for advice all the time about how to “make it” as a photographer, and I have no answers. What can I say when it took me nearly thirty years to figure out something? What advice can I give other than it seems that if you are meant to do it - you’ll find a way. Somehow, you’ll find a way.

And when you do get there, look back sometime. There are always footprints in the sand.

Lester is my oldest friend. I met him when we were both 18, or maybe 19. He knows me better than I know myself. When we met, we were both counselors at a summer camp. As I remember those days, I was very uptight, quiet, and shy. He was outgoing and wild. I really don’t know how we became friends, but I taught him how to play the guitar, and he taught me how to be funny. I’m not kidding about that. I think that he gave me my sense of humor.

We’ve stayed in touch all these years. Worked on all sorts of creative projects that I usually roped him into. But so far - none of those projects ever came to fruition. In other words, we wrote a screenplay together, that was eventually sold - but never produced. We wrote tons of songs together, and even auditioned way back when at a bar in the west village, but performing was terrifying to me and I didn’t pursue it. He acted in some of the student films I made when I was at NYU Grad Film school. Those were probably our best collaborations. The best of those was a Keystone Cops sort of short about a patient and a doctor fighting for a parking spot. When it was shown to the Film School, the audience laughed non-stop. Afterwards, the Film School Dean (Laslo Benedek, who had directed Brando in The Wild One) said that he could not comment on the film because he was still laughing too hard.

We bought a car when we were 19 and set off to do the obligatory On The Road (not that I had read it) cross country trip. I had never even driven on a highway before we set off. So that’s going to be a chapter on it’s own.

Oh - and in case you wonder why is Dave writing all this personal stuff now - it’s because it’s coming out of the picture book memoir which I’m working on now which is just filling me with memories.

Circa 1959, Me and Joannie, University Avenue, Bronx

Probably my first day in 2nd grade. What a great satchel bag. My school years always followed the same pattern: at the beginning I had my new sharpened pencils. I always set off to do good. After a few days I’d be staring out one of the big windows most of the class. After a week, the pencils were gone. I’d be finishing my homework in the morning before going to class. I have old report cards from those days. It seemed that my teachers always wrote that I wasn’t paying attention.

They took me in for IQ tests, or something along those lines, and were always shocked to find out that I my scores were frighteningly high. It drove my poor parents nuts. Education was everything to them. I’m certain that if I were going to school today I would have been put on to some sort of attention deficit drugs…

Anyway - more later -