There is something peculiar and distinctly untimely about David's and my friendship. I actually met him in Los Angeles in August, 1971 when he was researching his biography of Frank Zappa, "No Commercial Potential." I say "met," but that overstates the case a bit. Basically, Frank pointed to him and said "This is David Walley, my biographer," and at me and said "This is Nigey Lennon" (with no further explanation). I mumbled, "Hullo," David said "Pleased to meet you," and that was it. The incident then disappeared into my subconscious file cabinet, where it remained for the next 25 years. So when David and I began to correspond, and we discovered that we had a great deal in common, but neither of us could figure out why, for awhile it was like a "Twilight Zone" or "Sliders" experience, until we finally realized we'd already been introduced to each other, even if that had happened light years ago, in another galaxy.
David now lives on the southern Maine coast, in a rambling, Craftsmanesque wooden house with a four-sided screened-in porch overlooking acres of wetlands. Sitting on the porch at night, you can see the lights of Portsmouth, New Hampshire just to the south. David likes to take a break from work and sit on the porch, smoking his mahogany pipe or a hand-rolled American Spirit cigarette. The rest of the time he’s hunched over his desk, writing. He shares the place (which is full of antique rugs, Tiffany-style lamps, comfortable chairs, and a lifetime of memorabilia in frames on the walls) with three very large, very furry white Persian cats, who have the run of the house and whose favorite haunts are, in descending order, the dining table, David's work area, and the upstairs bedrooms. One of them somehow got trapped in Eric's and my room the first night we were there. We didn't know it was in the room, because it hid out and was quiet, but it had evidently been there all night. When Eric got up in the early hours to go to the john, the stowaway saw its chance, came bounding out of its hiding place, leaped up onto the bed, and tore out of the open door, leaving a small explosion of fur behind. We didn't know which of the three it was, of course, since all the cats were huge, hairy, and gray in the dark.
If Frank Zappa were still alive today and was Jewish, he'd probably look sort of like David. With a thick mass of still-dark hair, a bristling moustache, and very keen eyes, a brusque manner that hides a certain sensitivity, and a residual accent like Uncle Jake from Jersey (which makes sense, since David grew up there), he stomps around in his old jeans and cowboy boots and doesn't suffer fools gladly. His speech is a combination of Paul Krassner and John Dewey...or maybe Lenny Bruce and Betrand Russell. Juggling subjects, he throws a bunch of ideas out at you and looks closely to see if any of them stuck. He listens carefully to what you say in reply. For him, conversation is serious business. Puffing manically on his pipe, or rolling cigarettes, he paces back and forth in his dark-paneled study, expostulating on the sorry state of American education, the horrors of the present political situation, sex and politics, politics and sex, music, literature, the lack of true subversives nowadays...I listen to him and suddenly find myself realizing, with some shock, that it's been a few years since I've been involved in a dialogue like this one. That sort of passion about ideas died sometime in the '70s, to be replaced by ever-more-academic expostulations, pretentious tomes, post-modernist archness...whatever happened to the sheer fun and the spark of an honest debate? Who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of academics and bogus pundits? The Walley knows, nyee-hah-hah (he does have a wonderfully evil-sounding laugh; I sampled it and used it on a song, “Messin’ in the Kitchen,” because it seemed to be the quintessential “last laugh”, the philosopher-king watching the world burning and cackling maniacally.)
These days David is putting in very long days working on a new book, about Herbert Feis, an American political figure whose life and writing spanned most of the 20th century and provide a good framework for a comprehensive survey of 20th-century American politics. David's work has been growing steadily more serious in the three decades following his first published title, "No Commercial Potential," the FZ biography. Between then and now, he's done some fairly weighty scribbling, including his recent, trenchant essays about American popular culture, "Teenage Nervous Breakdown." But that was all just a warmup: as he says, "They'll know I've finally written a grown-up book" when the Feis project is published.
It’s an understatement to say that David reveres the written word...as a concept, perhaps, more than in the flesh. His passion is contagious. Before we leave, he’s almost convinced Eric, as a teacher with years of experience under his belt, to write “the definitive book on what’s wrong with American education.” If Eric ever does write it, he will definitely have to dedicate his work to our friend the philosopher-king, Uncle Jake.
