Remembering My Brilliant Friend

-from Susan Harville

I have loved David since the day that I met him in 1966 when we were both nineteen and students at the University of Maryland. I, shy and reserved, was sitting alone under a big tree behind the English Literature building, reading a book while waiting for my next class (Victorian Essays) to start. David sat down right next to me, asked about my book and then we talked about every other book, writer or poet beloved by either of us: E. M. Forster, J. D. Salinger, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Henry Miller, Matsuo Basho, William Blake! – almost shouting the names as we thought of them. We also talked about Vietnam, the frequent protests on campus, the whiff of teargas that day near the library, our favorite spots inside the library, and a wonderful art history course we’d both taken. We speculated on the personal lives of a few prominent septuagenarian professors and what horrible food might be on offer in the cafeteria. We revealed to each other where we hoped to travel someday, what eras in history might have suited us. David at that time had been thinking intensely about what life was like in the Middle Ages. (About a year later he wrote an impressive poem on that subject.) That day David told me stories about his father, his admirable, fierce sister, his friend’s parents’ overstuffed refrigerator. (A few months later he took me to visit his friend’s parents. No one was home but undeterred, David broke into the house to show me the refrigerator. I was anticipating the arrival of the police but David sampled some tasty morsels and left a thank you note.)

We sat there under the tree talking and laughing for several hours. David was very funny, taking on characters, speaking with accents. He seemed to specialize in old disgruntled Yiddish shopkeepers. He told me his family’s name pre-Ellis Island was Gershanowitz and he asked if I knew my family’s ancestral name. I told him my family had come from England and originally our name was Harvillowitz. I was quite proud that David thought I was funny also. I’d never had a conversation like this in my life–instantly intimate, challenging, joyful, excited about everything. He was incandescent, so beautiful.

I blew off the class I’d been waiting for because I was talking to the most intelligent, interesting, witty, compassionate, enthusiastic person I’d ever met. I was enchanted. I’d also missed the bus I took to get home to my new apartment, so as it got dark I walked miles through unfamiliar neighborhoods, hoping I was going in the right direction but euphoric, amazed at my luck. I had just made a connection with a brilliant new friend which was to change the course of my life. I barely passed the Victorian essay class because more often than not I would choose to spend that class time with David who seemed far more inspiring to me than Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin.

I had lived two years in College Park, rarely venturing far from campus and with no sense of the larger area. David had grown up in that area and knew his way around all the neighborhoods near NW Washington. He had an apartment in Langley Park and a car. It was fun for both of us to get in his car after our classes so he could show me the best bakery in Langley Park or the best ice cream parlor in Silver Spring or the best bookstore in Bethesda. He loved the Loma Linda grocery owned by vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists in Takoma Park although he always searched out the weirdest fake meat in a can he could find and then, with wide expectant eyes, mirthfully presented it to me as a gift. Knowing David expanded my horizons. He also introduced me to some of his many friends and at least a couple of them were to become very important people in my life.

The summer of 1969 David was going to be away in California and I think that is when he first went to Mexico also. We arranged that I would sublet his apartment instead of going back to my parents’ house for the summer as I had done before. The night before he left I came to move in and he introduced me to Ann Gordon who was also there to move in. This was a surprise to both of us and not something either of us found desirable but we both trusted David’s judgment (usually) so we didn’t express our outrage with much vehemence. He sweetened the deal by letting us use his car (an old Valiant he called Prince) for the summer. Ann soon revealed herself to be really smart, really funny and more politically astute than anyone I knew. Ann and I both had terrible summer jobs but after work we drove David’s car all over—into Baltimore to have dinner with Ann’s parents, out to the north shore of the Magothy River where my parents lived to mess around in my tiny sailboat, into Georgetown in DC to watch the Apollo moon landing on a friend’s TV. Ann had a friend we called Bicycle Jeff because he commuted daily in the school year from Baltimore to College Park on his bike. He rode even further afield in the summer and every time he had a breakdown, which seemed often, we’d go pick up Jeff and his bicycle. In August we thought about driving to Woodstock for the music festival but David’s car was faltering. A day or two before David returned, the car died and we abandoned it in a Toys R Us parking lot.

David returned tanned and glowing, exultant and inspired, excitedly spilling out stories about the people he’d met and their adventures and about how different life was on the West Coast. When he paused, Ann and I gave him the car keys and told him where his dead car might be found. He wasn’t upset, didn’t blame us, dismissed our concerns and apologies. This little problem was so unimportant in the big scheme of things and he was still on Mexico time. Ann and I were hugely relieved. 

Then for years after, at odd moments, he would use the sad fate of his car as a special secret zinger to aim at me. We might be having a petty difference of opinion while cooking together. David would say “If you add a little more salt that will bring out the taste of the cumin”. If I were to disagree and say “I think it’s too salty already”, David would say with loud mock reproach “How could you abandon such a noble beast in a parking lot?” or even “You killed Prince!”. This was especially effective and amusing to us if there was someone nearby to overhear this alarming accusation. The last time I can remember David creating this drama was at an elaborate Thanksgiving feast he’d prepared all by himself at his house in Ithaca, maybe in 1975 or 1976. The guests, several of whom I’d just met, were seated around a big table enjoying the food. David asked how I liked the turkey. I answered, “You know I’m a vegetarian and I’m not going to eat it. The Brussels sprouts are delicious”. He pointed his finger at me across the table and with evident anger said “ Have you forgotten what you did at Toys R Us?!” Seeing the stunned, mystified faces around the table set off our laughter.

Ann and I had enjoyed living together in David’s apartment enough that in September we rented a big house at 62 Walnut Street in Takoma Park together. That house filled up with a changing roster of housemates and often served as a gathering place and crash pad. For six months or so, we harbored a fugitive soldier, an army deserter whose real name we never knew. When we had dinner parties we’d beg David to help us, he being the only one we knew who cooked well. He would usually bring along a recently discovered new friend or two. David was forever enthusiastically extolling the merits of one friend to another. He was thrilled when his new friend from California, David Ross, was coming for a visit and after great fanfare I met David Ross for the first time. I could see the appeal. David Ross was another original, a creative thinker, and a unique personality. Both David Ross and Ann Gordon were to become Very Important People in my life. David Gershan already had that distinction. 

Our friendship deepened and grew for the next few years. I remember a day I drove David to his physical for the draft. The war was raging, the news every night was filled with senseless horror. Most young men like David whose lottery numbers were low enough to conclude their probable conscription felt looming dread. David had a letter from an anti-war psychiatrist with a reputation for helping people get exemptions but he had no way to know if this would work for him. We were both frightened, shaky, grim and silent on the way there. I parked the car and blurted out “Canada. We could just go to Canada right now”.On his way into the army building David turned and waved, trying to look brave.

Hours went by and I imagined maybe David had been taken out a back door and put on a bus to his new army barracks. Maybe they were already shaving his head and issuing him a uniform. Maybe he’d been on that bus I had seen heading out an hour before. When he finally came out exhausted but with a deferment, we both got teary with relief for his escape. But almost immediately David was feeling and trying to express the anxiety and anguish, almost guilt he felt for all the young men still inside, some of whom had seemed only dimly aware of what was about to happen to them, and for the millions of people already living in the middle of the war. I think David and I were living then in a time filled with contradictions, a time when many people our age truly believed a peaceful revolution was soon to happen. A dawning of a new age seemed imminent and we expected to be part of it. We were mostly hopeful, confident and eager but this long, emotionally fraught day caused us to question this optimistic fable. We were feeling powerless and mournful that day, less certain about the path to a brave new world.

A few months later I dropped out of graduate school to drive across the country with David to San Francisco, where we hoped to become hippies. Our first stop was at a new commune in the countryside outside Ithaca, New York. David Ross lived there with others from LA and from New College in Florida. Some of them had started a band called The Cosmic Daddy Dancers. Tom Walls oversaw a candle factory in the basement. We spent a couple months there and made new friends. I loved the rural landscape and the cultural scene in Ithaca. David liked it too but he was getting antsy to keep moving west.

In California we stayed a couple months in Berkeley with David’s long-time friend Cheryl and her husband Mark. I remember we spent several days planning, preparing and laughing about a first birthday celebration for Cheryl’s dog and all his litter mates. I could be wrong but I think I remember that the dog, a greyhound, was named Woofer Kitty. We made about ten individual doggy birthday cakes, involving enormous amounts of whipped cream, which we whipped by hand. David perfected a new funny character for himself, the very proper but beleaguered servant to an unappreciative, entitled dog. Sometimes he would speak in this voice to Cheryl and me as if we were fellow servants of the dog and sometimes he spoke directly to the dog obsequiously explaining why he hadn’t performed his duties up to the dog’s high standards. Woofer Kitty was embarrassed, suspecting he was part of a joke and he would pretend he couldn’t hear David. It was a good act. 

The nearby UC Berkeley campus was in political turmoil every day with mass demonstrations and police in riot gear. Just walking down Shattuck Avenue towards the entrance to campus was stimulating. It felt like the epicenter of big changes in the world. We spent a lot of time on campus, especially after we discovered a small student-run movie theater filled with lots of big soft chairs and some grungy mattresses on the floor. You could watch a continuous string of movies any time of day or night. You could eat and smoke or sleep a few hours there. Our money was running low and we both made some half-hearted attempts to find work but with no success.

The closest we came to achieving hippiedom was by accident. On a sudden whim we decided to take a ferry from the pier in San Francisco out to Angel Island. We were the last passengers taken aboard just a minute before the boat left the dock. We took a seat inside and looked around. Everyone there, except us, was wildly, colorfully dressed, some more extravagantly than others, some in tatters, but all of them together looked like a fever dream of hippie paradise. There were old people with long flowing white hair tied with colorful ribbons. There was a man who must have been seven feet tall, dressed like Jesus. There was a gorgeous young woman wearing almost nothing except fresh flowers. She must have drenched herself in some kind of nectar because she was surrounded by a fluttering cloud of live butterflies. It was the first time I’d seen people with designs painted all over their faces and bodies. We saw a group of nuns in starched habits with winged headwear. All the nuns had their arms entwined and all had bright red lipsticked smiles. Everyone seemed happy and friendly. It was a spontaneous party with hugging and kissing, singing and dancing, and passing around bottles of wine. The next day I had bruises on my arm where David had been squeezing me so tight. We were agog, mesmerized.

On Angel Island the party moved onto a grassy pasture overlooking the water. Under some trees, tables were spread with wonderful foods. David suggested that if we took off all our staid, embarrassingly ordinary clothes we would better blend into this special throng of people. I demurred and out of kindness or perhaps pity for my timidity, David stayed dressed too. I’m pretty sure though that had I not been there, David might have danced naked in the sunshine with butterflies that glorious day. We wandered through the crowd, listened to musicians, enjoyed food and wine, and danced a little. Only as we were walking down to catch the last ferry back did we discover that we had been at an exclusive international Fellini festival. This explained the fabulous costuming but it remained a mystery why we’d been ushered onto the special ferry. Most of the revelers stayed all night on the island but for us the unexpected, astonishing day was enough–a great adventure.

 As it turned out, the hippies we saw on the streets of San Francisco were beginning to look a bit careworn. Perhaps we’d come too late for that party. But the fantastical land of Fellini–it would never be too late for that. I started to think about going to Italy someday or maybe back to the lovely hills of Ithaca. David got an urgent message from his friend Bruce Marquardt to come immediately to his place on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula in Mexico. Bruce said “Don’t bring anything. You won’t even need to wear clothes on the beach”. A few days later, David went to Mexico.

I slowly made my way back across the country to the commune outside Ithaca. Nine or ten people were living in the house which had once been a stage coach inn in the 1850s. All the bedrooms were claimed, but I found that the mattress-sized nook at the end of the upstairs hallway was just right for me because it had a window that looked out on my favorite view of the hilly pastures. Not many of us had ever before experienced such a long, cold, snow-covered winter. I read all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books trying to learn about life in poorly insulated houses. Laura’s family didn’t even have electricity or flush toilets so we weren’t so badly off. Janie Gershan came and stayed for a while also. I tried to make a cozy and comfortable place for her in a windowless room that had been the kitchen pantry. It was nice to have her wry company for a time and her little room turned out to be the warmest spot in the house. We sat in her room and read letters from David in Mexico and from my high school friend, Dominica, who was in art school in Italy. The Cosmic Daddy Dancers made just enough money to buy food and gas. I got a job in a restaurant in Ithaca. Eventually the commune fell apart and people drifted away.

I rented a small farm just down the road because I wanted to stay. David Ross decided to stay also. He and I embarked on a life together that was to last about ten years. We began to fill our barns with farm animals–goats, sheep, cows, horses, dogs, cats, birds of all kinds. The goats were so smart they could figure out how to get through any door latching system we devised so they could leave the barn and come into our kitchen to see if we had any breakfast cereal or maybe fruit on the table. The cows were so gentle and sweet that it was pleasant sometimes to spend the night in the barn sleeping in the straw next to the warm cows. We learned how to grow vegetables, outbid the Armour Star guy at the livestock auction, make hay, put in miles of fence, and assist at the birth of baby animals. We got to know the other farmers nearby. Getting to know animals was a fascinating and profound experience.

When David came back to Ithaca, farm life wasn’t for him. He opened a small store on the second floor of a building on State Street in downtown Ithaca. The Everyman Book and Record Exchange became quite popular, mostly because people loved to hang out there and talk with David. He would question people about their lives and then recommend a book that was perfect for them. It was like therapy. He rented a tiny house in a traditionally black neighborhood in southside Ithaca and got to know his neighbors. When you sat on the front porch of David’s house with him, almost every passerby on the sidewalk would greet him. Every Halloween he bought out the supply of Reese’s peanut butter cups in the supermarket because he expected a hundred neighborhood kids to stop by for treats. He’d already polled them to find out the favored candy. 

Later, he moved to an elegant old house in a student neighborhood on Ithaca’s East Hill just below the Cornell campus. David Ross and I would take off our manure covered barn boots and go into town to see David as often as we could. We would go to the only Chinese restaurant there was in Ithaca at that time or to a movie or lecture at Cornell or just for a walk through the gorges to a waterfall. Often, David would insist we walk through the beautiful old cemetery across the street from his house so he could point out a particularly interesting or poignant gravestone he had noticed. When Cornell planned to raze a nearby cherry orchard to put in a parking lot, David got to know the students who protested there every day holding up construction for months. He would make cookies and bring them water and a few times take a shift tied to a tree.

David would often become enamored of a new friend or experience, build up his hopes for something transformational that might happen and be a bit crestfallen when his intensity wasn’t matched. His dynamism was exhilarating to be around but sometimes hard to keep up with. I was consumed with caring for about a hundred animals then and probably disappointed him regularly when I couldn’t summon the energy, the time, the freedom or the zeal he was seeking.

When he left Ithaca, many and various people felt the loss. But David was good at maintaining friendships. I only spoke to him a few times while he was in medical school in the Caribbean. The workload was difficult, he was lonely but he was almost exultant, finally knowing for certain that he was going to excel at this calling. When he traveled, he would send postcards or even letters. Often, when I’d seen a movie, read a book or heard an aria or, even better, a cello piece new to me, David was the one I wanted to share it with but I didn’t always follow up on the impulse. I did usually keep a running list on my desk of things I wanted to talk with David about so I wouldn’t forget.

For the last several decades David and I lived 3000 miles apart and saw each other rarely. Sometimes even half a year might go by between phone calls but I could always trust that the connection was there. Late at night I would answer my phone and a Viennese psychotherapist with David’s voice would scold me, saying “Harvillowitz, have you been reading Austerlitz like I told you?”

The last couple phone calls we had were in November and December of 2021. By chance we were both reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, so we discussed the book, which we both loved, as we read it. During one of these calls David told me, with pride, what a great painter Janie had become. Around this time he texted me a description of a new cookie he was trying to perfect and the photo above of himself posing like King Tut on the sidewalk in front of a bakery in Portland. He labeled the photo “Portland’s Temple”. I imagine Janie was the photographer. He also sent a photo of the inside of his refrigerator, all clean and neat and nearly empty except for a bowl of plums. He labeled this one “Memorial to William Carlos Williams”. So I sent him a photo of the inside of my extraordinarily messy, crammed full, transgressive refrigerator and labeled it “Tribute to Charles Bukowski”. He texted back “Hah”.

I never experienced nor observed David as a doctor, so I’ve been glad to read all the touching testaments here about how dedicated and good at that job he was. He did tell me a bit about his practice, most often about treating homeless people in the park. He once said that sometimes the most healing thing he had to offer was giving someone his focused attention.

My purpose here has been to tell some of what I know about David in his twenties, as I think it may be of interest to some of you. As mature, sophisticated and quick-witted as David was, he also seemed innocent, especially in his youth, because he was honest and earnest and wide open to new experiences. It came naturally to him to be kind for all of his life. As I’ve been writing about that period of our lives, my desire to talk to David is stronger than ever. I so regret that I didn’t check in more often. I hope David knew how precious his friendship was to me. The moral of this story, I guess, is that life is short, no matter how long it lasts, so only connect!