For some reason, I am cleaning the swimming pool at one of the houses David Lynch owns in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve seen pictures of the houses but I have no idea if any of them actually have a swimming pool. Possibly it is the swimming pool from Mulholland Dr. Which I suppose might make me Gene (played by Billy Ray Cyrus) owner and proprietor of Gene Clean, who will not only service your pool but your wife as well. But really I think I’m just me, dreaming of cleaning pools instead of painting houses.
David is reclining in a lounge chair, dressed in khaki pants and a white Oxford shirt, buttoned all the way to the top button. The style he is known for. He is wearing the largest pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses I’ve ever seen. They make them in different sizes, but these are comically large. His hair seems an archetypal mess, but like an abstract expressionist sculpture sitting on top of his head, meant to convey some subtext other than “I do not comb my hair.”
“Everything is an art,” David calls out to me. “Even pool cleaning.”
“You want to do some art and clean the pool?” I ask him.
He laughs. “That’s your job, cupcake.”
Later I am walking in Griffith Park park when I see a large cow, just standing there beside the path. As I get closer, I see the cow is a statue. David Lynch is sitting behind the cow, in a director’s chair, smoking a cigarette.
“Is this your cow?” he asks me.
“No,” I answer.
“Somebody left this here,” David tells me. “I’m keeping an eye on it for them.”
“Who left it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I thought you did.”
I walk over to the cow and touch it. “What’s it made of?”
“Plastic!” David raps the side of the cow with his knuckles. “High-impact polystyrene.”
“You don’t know who left it? Or why it’s here?”
“It’s here because somebody left it here,” David tells me. He frowns and sits back down.
“Maybe there’s a plastic Hindu somewhere looking for his cow,” I joke.
David laughs. “CUT!” he shouts.
“Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.”