The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  While my daughters and I were in St. Louis, Phil wrote me:

  Dear Anne, That strange old lady who cleans up your house evidently descended on it as soon as you were out of the driveway—when I got back there to turn off lights and lock doors I found the front door locked and that big outdoor light off and the various small messes indoors cleaned up. Right in the middle of the dining table, in its paper bag, terribly visible in the cleaned-up ascetic room, was my pair of blue pajamas. A sort of chanting reminder that they who sin will be found out by the Others. However, that old woman has her own defects, since I found water running in the bathroom bowl and a spoon on the floor.

  [On the way home from taking us to the airport he stopped by his mother’s house.]

  I went upstairs to my family’s place and bummed a meal from them and told them why I was in town (i.e., that I had driven you and the children to the airport or spaceport, whatever it was). Thereupon my mother and I had a long discussion about breaking up a bad marriage (mine, and the one she had with my father)…. I wiped off the windshield carefully and set off. Actually the trip was easy. The rain had almost stopped, and the … Christmas shoppers had gone home to eat. But about halfway along the route, about at the intersection with U.S. 101, I really started getting the shakes. I know damn well that it had nothing to do with the drive as such, it was simply that I was beginning to get back onto the part of the route that we five had taken coming in, and I was subconsciously contrasting the driving in with this driving back…. Marin County seemed shut down. Deserted. As if nobody lived there, like those half-ruined wartime housing developments that are now crumbling away and covered with weeds. By the time I got near Woodacre I was beginning to wonder if I could go back to Point Reyes Station and spend the 13 days. Anyhow, I did get back and I intend to live through the 13 days, which proves that an ordinary human being can do almost anything if he puts his mind to it—which is your theory…. Here’s how you can represent me to your rustic but well-placed family and friends. “He’s well known in Russia and England … in fact, in Germany & Italy and France—also in South Africa and in Argentina (in translation of course) … and he’s just beginning to become known here in the U.S. Lippincott is bringing out a novel of his next spring.”

  In a second letter he wrote:

  You have no idea how much your phone call affected me. For an hour (more like two) afterward I was in a state of what I would in all honesty call bliss—unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Actually the walls of the house seemed to melt away, and I felt as if I were seeing out into time and space for an unlimited distance. It was a physical sense, not a mere intellectual thought. A genuine state of existence new to me. Evidently my not having heard from you for a couple of days had had the effect of starting into motion a sense of separation from you—quite natural, but all I was conscious of was that I felt gloomy and lonely and at loose ends. As a reality you had begun to recede—not that my feelings toward you had changed, but that as an actual fact in my life you had in an obvious physical sense receded quite a distance. Then when you called, this distance was abolished, and the return of you as a physical reality caused a genuine transformation in me, as if I had stepped from one world to another…. There is a direct relationship between my hearing you, and the religious person, who, after the traditional isolation and fasting and meditation, “hears” the voice of “God.” The difference is that you exist, and I have some deep doubts about that fellow God.

  As soon as the girls and I returned to Point Reyes, Phil moved in with us, bringing his possessions with him. All his clothes, cheap to begin with, were old and shapeless. Phil didn’t care about visual appearances or household objects at all. The only things he treasured were his Royal Electric typewriter, his Magnavox record player, his books and records, and his set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Among his favorite books were A Crock of Gold, by James Stevens, and Miss Lonely hearts, by Nathanael West. His library included complete files of Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazines. He had a large collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories and novels, and other horror tales. He also had a collection of literary works, and at the time was especially interested in Camus, Kafka, Beckett, and Ionesco.

  Hatte loved Phil’s collection of old comic books, especially Mandrake the Magician and his complete file of Mad Magazine. She went from reading fairy tales to reading Phil’s Cosmic Puppets and the other science fiction stories and novels in his collection.

  Phil brought his two-drawer file cabinet, stuffed with papers. He’d kept a carbon copy of every letter he’d ever written.

  “I suppose you’re saving all those letters for your future biographers,” I kidded him. He smiled his pleasant smile but didn’t reply.

  I gathered all of Phil’s own novels and stories together, and in the evenings after the girls had been tucked in their beds, I sat in our bed reading them while eating an artichoke, dipping the leaves in hollandaise sauce and turning the pages. Phil kept coming in the bedroom to watch me read his books.

  He said, “You remind me of Samuel Johnson; you drip hollandaise on your nightgown like Johnson spilled egg on his vest, and you have an acerbic wit like Johnson’s.” Then he added, “If you’re Johnson, I guess I’m Boswell.”

  I smiled at him and went back to my book, thinking, “Everyone knows science fiction writers don’t write biographies.” As I read all his novels and stories during the next few days, I commented delightedly on each story and novel. I especially loved “Human Is” and told him, “‘Human Is’ is your best story.”

  Our reading tastes were eclectic. Phil and I both owned copies of Winnie the Pooh and When We Were Young. Both of us knew the texts well enough to quote whole sections and poems, to the children’s delight. I tried to get Phil to read Murder in the Cathedral, but instead he dived into Richard’s three volumes of Sandburg’s Lincoln.

  “I’m a Civil War buff,” he said. “The Centennial’s coming up and there’s going to be a lot of interest in the Civil War.” He thought he might write a novel based on that war. He also began reading intently the many volumes of Freudian psychology I had collected, as well as my Treasury of Jewish Folklore.

  After he unpacked and shelved his books, he set up his personal apothecary in a closet next to the study. He had a large collection of pills and medicines and loved to prescribe for the girls’ runny noses or bandage their skinned knees. He showed Jayne all his medicines, told her what each one was for, and said, “Adults are sick almost all the time.” Phil couldn’t believe that my medicine cabinet didn’t even have aspirin in it. “It’s beyond belief,” he said, “that you can have a medicine cabinet with nothing in it.”

  I had been brought up by my Christian Science mother, didn’t take any pills of any kind and seldom went to a doctor. “I never get sick so why should I?” I told him.

  Phil took two Semoxydrine pills a day. “These were prescribed for me years ago,” he said. He didn’t tell me what for and I wasn’t interested enough to ask. He got an attack of tachycardia not long after he had moved in. He told me, “My heart can beat rapidly for days and I run the risk of dropping dead unless I take quinidine.” Then he added, “Quinidine is dangerous. I might drop dead from taking quinidine.” I felt he was overly nervous about these sorts of things. He looked fine to me.

  Phil’s cat came with him, an ear-torn, dingy grey-and-white tom from some Berkeley alley. He adored cats and had always had one or two. He doted on “Tumpey.” If this cat didn’t show up for a meal, Phil would say mournfully, “Tumpey’s dead again.” I preferred beautiful pedigreed animals but Tumpey reminded me of the stray cats I had brought home as a child, and I tolerated him. Besides, Phil loved him.

  We had hardly unpacked all of Phil’s belongings when it was time to celebrate the first birthday of the year, mine. Phil bought me a fossil hammer. I was enchanted. How could he have known that was exactly what I wanted? We drove to Drakes Beach and
collected fossil whale bones embedded in the cliffs there.

  Phil was just finishing Time Out of Joint, his first book to be published in hardcover. He gave my name to a minor character in the last part of the book. Sometimes he worked in the study at my house, sometimes he went over to his old house to write. He wrote until all hours, but finally I protested that his schedule didn’t fit in with family life. He immediately put himself on a nine-to-five schedule and came home every day for lunch. At lunchtime, we became so involved with our conversations that I usually burnt the first two melted cheese sandwiches that I was toasting in the broiler. We talked about Schopenhauer, Leibnitz, monads, and the nature of reality. Or Kant’s theories as applied by Durkheim to the culture of the Australian aborigines. Or Phil would hold forth on the Thirty Years’ War and Wallenstein—light topics like those.

  Germanic culture had a great attraction for Phil. He told me he was one-quarter German and a “sturm und drang” romantic. He adored Wagner, Goethe, Schubert, and Bach. He loved Pope John and hated the Berkeley Coop, Edward Teller, Alan Watts, Alan Temko, and radio station KPFA, which he said was filled with communists. He hated old men passionately, especially old men drivers. He told me about the Gegenearth, the hypothetical hidden planet on the exact other side of the sun from Earth. It was impossible for us to ever see it. He gave lectures on countertenors, the castrati of the Middle Ages, and dwarves in jars.

  One noon as we were eating lunch together, he said calmly, completely out of the context of our discussion, “I had a perfectly good wife that I traded in for you.”

  All my life I had been very direct and outspoken and never at a loss for words before, but this man could come out with statements that I couldn’t figure out how to answer. He was so sweet and calm that I couldn’t possibly get mad at him.

  In March, Phil went to court to get his interlocutory divorce decree. When he came back home, he was upset and a little angry. I was puzzled because up until then he’d told me continually about how happy he was regarding the change he had made in his life. The next day we took the children to the amusement park at Lake Merritt, Oakland. We bought tickets for the little train that ran through the park. The children and I got on one of the cars but there wasn’t enough room for Phil. The conductor put him in another car with a bunch of Cub Scouts.

  He wrote about his thoughts at the end of Confessions of a Crap Artist:

  Probably she will make me a good wife…. She will be loyal to me, and try to help me do what I want to do. Her passion toward controlling me will ultimately subside; all of this energy in her will fade. I will make substantial changes in her, too. We will alter each other. And someday it will be impossible to tell who has led who. And why.

  At the end of March, we drove to Mexico to get married. When we got to Tijuana I persuaded Phil that we should continue to Ensenada; Tijuana was too ugly to get married in. Phil was apprehensive on the lonely, mountainous ride down the Baja Peninsula. We stayed in a motel on the beach at Ensenada—I remember the large, rough-beamed room, the beautiful handmade blue-tiled floor, and the delicious, fresh-caught sea bass we had in the motel restaurant that night.

  I had wanted to wait until April 2 to be married, but Phil was anxious to get back to Point Reyes for Jayne’s birthday on April 8, so we hurriedly walked out on the streets of the town to find out what to do; we had no idea what the procedure for getting married was down there. Although I had taken five years of Spanish in college, I couldn’t communicate with anyone. We weren’t taught to converse in the forties, only to learn to grammar and how to read. Finally, we found an English-speaking marriage broker who would prepare the proper legal papers. The judge adjudicated in an ancient Spanish fort that looked like a small medieval castle with linoleum on the floor and chickens running here and there. Beautiful Mexican ladies with babies in their arms waited on the wooden benches placed around the walls to see the judge.

  The marriage ceremony sounded beautiful in Spanish, and Philip K. Dick and I were married on April Fool’s Day, 1959.

  We went shopping in the local bazaar for presents for the girls. As we drove north toward the California border, Phil said he had to tell me something terrible about himself. He was embarrassed about this matter and felt it would make me stop loving him. He was sure that it showed how inadequate and defective he was. It turned out that he had a hernia.

  “Why don’t you get it fixed?” I said.

  He said, “I’d have to go to the hospital and I couldn’t do that.”

  This didn’t seem like a good decision to me but, after all, we were on our honeymoon, so I didn’t say anything.

  In Ensenada we had bought a gallon of tequila (for thirty cents, I recall), and Phil decided that he wasn’t going to pay duty on it at the border. I was quite apprehensive when he hid it under our luggage. He looked right at the border guard, smiled, and said we had nothing to declare. Twenty miles into the United States we heard a siren. It was the U.S. Customs police. Phil turned pale. I thought he might faint. He thought they were after him for the tequila. However, they passed our car and went on. He was extremely relieved.

  When we got back to Point Reyes, we had been gone only three days. The announcement of our marriage was in the local weekly newspaper, the Baywood Press, on April 16, along with such news items as “Lavinia Adams Motored Sunday to Novato” and “Giant Mushroom Found by Warren Merritt.” There were also mentions of the Ladies’ Garden Club Primrose Tea Flowered-Hat Contest, along with the usual drownings, people falling off the cliffs, etc.

  On the drive back we had decided that the girls should call Phil “Daddy.” The children had no problems with this. When they spoke of Richard they called him their “first father.” They were happy with Phil. Besides reading to them and playing monster, he let them eat hot dogs in bed. I wanted Phil to adopt the girls, but he felt he would then have to be totally financially responsible for them and he didn’t have enough earning power. I was disappointed, but he pointed out to me that if he were to adopt the children he would be, to some extent, cutting them off from their paternal grandparents and he didn’t feel that this would be in the children’s best interest. After he explained this I could appreciate his position. After all, he was a good father and we had a great sense of family unity. These were the important things.

  Now that we were married I felt comfortable introducing Phil to my friends. Once in a while I introduced him as “Richard.” “One husband is the same as another,” I kidded him. We went to dinner at the Okos. Adolph Oko was the local realtor. In 1948 he had been captain of an Israeli ship during the War of Liberation and ran the British blockade, taking seven thousand refugees from Bessarabia to Israel. Oko’s wife, Gladys, was a sweet, pretty, somewhat vague woman who drank a lot. Phil created a not-very-sympathetic picture of them as the Runcibles in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, and in this book he recounted some of the terrible, sacrilegious “Easter jokes” that Captain Oko liked to tell.

  Captain Oko was a friend of Admiral Nimitz and a moving spirit of the Drake Navigator’s Guild, which sought to prove that Sir Francis Drake had landed not in Tiburon, but on the shores of West Marin, where the “plate of brasse” had been found in the 1930s. Oko had reproductions of it made and gave us one to hang on our wall. (Years later the plate was proved to be a fake.) Phil wove all this lore into The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.

  We became friends with our next-door neighbors, Pete and Joan Stevens, and they often came over for drinks and dinner.

  In 1983 when I was working on this book, I contacted Joan by phone in a town in Arizona. Chris Stevens, one of her grown children who still lived in Point Reyes Station, told me that she didn’t have a phone but that she could be reached at the local bar Wednesday evenings. I did reach her and we had a great talk. She remembered Phil with great affection and nostalgia and was rereading all his books.

  Pete and Joan no longer lived together at that time (although they did again later on); Pete lived somewhere in t
he Bay Area. I was lucky to run into him in front of the Palace Market meat counter when he was visiting in the area and to be able to talk with him briefly. Pete enjoyed hearing that he was the model for the inventor in several of Phil’s books and stories, among them The Zap Gun and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.

  Pete was a brilliant inventor and technician who worked for Walter Landor, a well-known San Francisco product designer. He commuted daily to a remodeled warehouse on the San Francisco waterfront. Phil and Pete became quite fond of each other.

  I introduced Phil to Bob Allen, the slightly plump, five-foot, four-inch popular science teacher at the West Marin School. He took the two of us on a dig at Limantour Beach to excavate a fire lens, the remnants of hundreds of years of Indian campfires. We found obsidian arrowheads, bird points, pieces of an Indian pipe, and shards of Ming pottery that had been washed up from a shipwreck from Spanish Colonial times. Bob donated all our finds to a museum in Sausalito. Phil put Bob Allen and these events in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. Bob was a prominent figure in Dr. Bloodmoney, also.

  After Phil met Bill Thompson, the president of the Lions Club and the local butcher, he put him in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike as Jack E. Vepp. Dr. Plattes became Dr. Terance, and Joe Gomez, a local contractor, became John Flores. Flores was the name of an old Berkeley friend of Phil’s who had died some years ago, so perhaps both of them occupied this character. Phil often melded two or more people into one character.

  Lois Mini, the bouncy red-headed gym teacher at the West Marin Elementary School, had known Phil in Berkeley. Her ex-husband was Norman Mini, a close friend of Phil’s. She became a good friend of mine, too.