Last year, my dear friend Dave Levine died swiftly, from pneumonia after a slow, long struggle with Parkinson’s. Dave was one of those people who was “born” wise, and from the time I met him when I was 16 at Cornell until I was 75 I always sought his counsel, and he was always there for me. Dave was brilliant and very persuasive.
If you go to the Ithaca campus of Cornell University you won’t find any plaque commemorating Dave’s achievements. But for a small circle of people who knew him well at the fraternity, he was an academic legend. I can say with confidence that there has never been a student in the 160 years of Cornell history, who attended as few classes as Dave, and passed every one, graduated on time, and went straight from Cornell to medical school.
Dave liked to stay up all night and sleep during the day. In fact, there was one whole semester when no one ever saw Dave out of his pajamas, except for big fraternity weekends when his fiancée Sheila came up from Brooklyn. When we had our 50th reunion, Kenny Feldman told the story of signing up with Dave to take a class together. Kenny went to every class and never saw Dave there. With a couple of weeks left before finals, Dave went in and introduced himself to the professor for the first time. He asked him what do I need to do to pass the class. The professor told him there was nothing he could do to pass. Dave said “What if I got an A on the final”? The professor replied, “That’s impossible, you never heard one of my lectures.” “What if I got an A?”, Dave asked. The professor relented, “OK, if you get an A on the final I will pass you.” So Dave borrowed Kenny’s class notes, read the books and got an A on the final.
Dave and I connected immediately after I joined the fraternity because we both loved to stay up late and talk about philosophy, people and the meaning of life. Probably no surprise that he became a psychiatrist and I became a clinical psychologist. On one of those evenings, in early May 1962, we were sitting around the fraternity house talking about Kerouac’s On the Road. I remarked how amazing it was that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity could be sitting around an apartment in New Jersey and just decide to get in their car and drive to Mexico or California. Dave said, “We could do that”. So I pointed out that we didn’t have a car and he said, “Let’s walk out the back door and hitchhike to Canada, right now.” It was about 10pm and that is what we did. We grabbed some clothes and $200 of my scholarship money and we walked out of the fraternity onto Westbourne Lane without telling anyone. We walked until midnight before we hit a main road with trucks going by, and managed to get rides heading north all night. At about 8am, our last ride dropped us off about a mile from the Canadian border, at the 1000 Lakes crossing. The driver warned us that we would not be able to walk into Canada, that we needed someone to drive us in. So we waited, and amazingly two Australian women on vacation let us get in the back seat of their car and we made it through the border.
From there we got rides to Montreal, and spent two wonderful days in the honky-tonk section of St. Catherine and St Laurent avenues, hanging out in bars and clubs. We decided to hitch back at night again, but this time we got stopped by the Quebec highway patrol, who informed us it was against the law to hitch-hike in Quebec. We were standing on the side of the road, the spotlight of the squad car shining on us, while the Quebec cop checked our ID’s with police headquarters. Dave and I were scared that we would go to jail and miss finals, when we then heard the cop speak some French words, which we understood, into his walkie- talkie. He described us as, “Les Duex Voyageur”. Dave and I instantly looked at each other and we both started smiling. We didn’t say anything but we both knew that this was going to be our nickname forever. Fortunately, the cop was merciful and let us go. So we continued during the night and got back to the fraternity the next morning, gone for 3 days.
Dave graduated Cornell in May 1963, married Sheila a few weeks later, and made a dramatic shift in his life. He became responsible, disciplined, and focused to the point that he graduated Downstate Medical school first in his class. I think it’s fair to say that anyone who first met Dave after June 1963 would have a hard time believing the stories I’m recounting here. I’ve only met one other person who dropped their “wild” side as quickly as Dave did. That was Monte Stambler, and maybe it’s a coincidence, but Monte also became a psychiatrist.
Dave went on to have a wonderful life, with an excellent career in community mental health and psychiatry. He raised two wonderful sons in Marin County during a 56-year marriage to Sheila. The sons, their wives, and Dave’s grandchildren had dinner with him and Sheila every Sunday night.
When I moved back to Northern California in 2005, I reconnected with Dave. At first we would have lunches with his friend Lee, a Zen Master from the Green Gulch Zen center. Lee was a wonderful, fascinating person who created a Zen sangha at San Quentin that grew quite large and helped many inmates. Eventually Lee became disabled and couldn’t attend our lunches, so Dave and I met, and sometimes our brothers Kenny Feldman and Morris Shriftman joined us.
We would take Dave out to his favorite restaurant in Mill Valley. The last time I ever saw him, we were walking slowly back to the car after lunch, and one of us said something that sparked some memories. Dave looked at me and said, “Yes, I remember Les Duex Voyageur.” His eyes were bright and he had a big smile and for a moment I could see 19 year old Dave Levine standing on the side of the road in Quebec, hearing the words for the first time. I could also see how much he loved me and that he knew how much I loved him.
Marty Seldman 