As my pregnancy came near its end, twice, because of false labor pains, we had to drive at breakneck speed to Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, a thirty-five-mile drive. After the second trip, Phil, emotionally exhausted, insisted that I stay with his mother in Berkeley, where I would be closer to the hospital. Reluctantly, I agreed and stayed with Dorothy and Joe for the next ten days. They were lovely to me. Their home was peaceful but somewhat melancholy. When I left, Dorothy was sad. She told me seriously that she wished I could continue to live with them in Berkeley. This was a nice thing for her to say, but a little odd, too. What about Phil and my three daughters?
On February 25, 1960, Phil and I had an eight-pound baby who popped out into the world like a cork out of a champagne bottle, a beautiful, blonde baby girl. Waiting at the hospital was hard on Phil. After the baby was born he told me, “I was terribly afraid something would be wrong.” I laughed at him, “Oh, Phil, you’re so morbid. Look, isn’t the baby darling?”
He leaned over the hospital bed and looked into the baby’s face, and said, “Now my sister is made up for.” Well, that was Phil, always saying off-beat things.
We decided that Phil could name the baby, and he decided on Laura, Laura Archer Dick. Phil and the three girls came to pick me up the day after Laura was born. Phil was in a state of utter enchantment. When we got home he sat entranced, watching me nurse the baby. Joe and Dorothy drove up from Berkeley to see their first grandchild, but Phil would only let them look at her for one minute. Literally one minute. Then he rushed them out of the room. I couldn’t believe it. “Maybe he’s afraid of infection,” I thought. I was too busy with the baby to worry about this, however.
After Laura was born my weight sank to 135 pounds and stayed there. Phil said sadly, “All my wives get fat.” He let on that he really liked thin, dark-haired women, but that I was an exception.
At that period Phil stopped writing every day and helped me with the house, the other children, and the baby although he didn’t have the rapport with the baby that he had with the older girls. A few weeks after Laura was born, Phil started having terrible pains in his chest. We were afraid that he was having a heart attack. I left the baby with Hatte and rushed him to Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco. Phil was put in bed in an emergency room and a doctor ran in with an electrocardiogram machine. My heart sank. I thought, “Oh no. Not another husband dying.”
Phil said cheerfully, “I think I’m either going to die or else I’m going to have a baby.” It turned out that he was having pyloric spasms. The doctor told him to drink less coffee and read and meditate more to stimulate his parasympathetic nervous system, which was out of balance with his other two nervous systems.
Taking care of the new baby didn’t keep us busy enough. We managed to get involved with a project that was to cost us a lot of money and a lot of conflict. The Peugeot Phil had bought wasn’t performing well, so we jumped from the frying pan into the fire and bought a 1953 Jaguar Mark VII saloon, a beautiful curvy white car with a mahogany dashboard, complicated instruments, tucked gray leather upholstery, and a sun roof. We paid $2,000 to the owner, the head mechanic at British Motors, for it. Phil looked elegant driving this car. It was in beautiful shape except for the carpeting, so we bought the best-quality royal blue plush wool carpeting that we could find. We took it out and drove it ninety-six miles an hour on the Nicasio highway. Later we found it still had its original tires, retreaded seven times. They were so soft we could almost poke our fingers through the sidewalls.
We’d only had it for two months when the mechanic at our small, local garage made an adjustment to the idle mechanism. Later that day on White’s Hill, the car, full of children, blew a valve. No sooner had we had the valve fixed than the axle broke. After we had a new axle installed, something else happened, and something else, and something else. We needed a British mechanic under the hood to keep that car running. When it started raining that fall, a steady heavy rain that went on for days, the sunroof leaked and the blue carpet started to grow small white mushrooms. I wanted Phil to help me build a shelter for the car but he wouldn’t, so I took the car into San Rafael and traded it in on a new Volvo. Phil was furious. He was still talking about this twenty years later. I think he really liked that Jaguar, but wouldn’t admit it. He probably liked the mushrooms growing on the carpet, too.
That same fall we saw an advertisement in our local weekly newspaper, the Baywood Press, for a repossessed spinet. We decided to look for a musical instrument for our house, perhaps a piano, or Phil thought he might want one of the new electronic organs. Finally, we bought a Baldwin acoustic spinet and Phil went to Berkeley and bought a lot of sheet music. Phil used the spinet advertisement we had seen in the newspaper in the novel We Can Build You.
I started on a new project that was to have a big effect on Phil. While Laura was napping, I would visit our neighbor, Lorraine Hynes, and we would chat about this and that as we drank coffee. One day we decided that we were tired of just sitting around talking; we wanted to do something worthwhile.
I had been fascinated with all the accidental metal shapes and splashes that were produced while I was working on my welded sculpture. Lorraine and I thought we could turn them into an interesting form of jewelry. Phil encouraged us and bought me an anvil, a drill press, and a polishing motor. He built a well-constructed workbench in the utility room where I kept my welding tanks. He told me, “I don’t like to do carpentry. I made this bench extra strong so I won’t ever have to make it over again.”
Lorraine and I worked out wild new techniques for making jewelry using a tiny welding torch. We forged black iron bracelets with pearls set on them, made jewelry out of fire-glazed red copper and textured bronze, and learned to weld bronze rod into various shapes. About the same time I began to tile the master bathroom in our house. I bought different colored small tiles and made a mermaid, several fish, a cosmic eye right over the toilet, a boat, and a large sea serpent. It felt like you were under water when you were taking a bath. Phil wrote about this mural in We Can Build You. In that novel the bathroom tiling project is done by Pris Frauenzimmer, a horrible woman.
We had been having louder arguments. Phil claimed that he loved it. “We’re like a Mediterranean family, everyone waving their hands and yelling,” he said with great relish. A couple of times I threw a few dishes to punctuate my point. Later, I would be sorry that I had become so angry. But Phil said to me lovingly, “You can do anything you want, as long as you don’t bore me.”
Afterward I could never figure out what those fights had been about. In our everyday life we seemed to get along well, even have an exceptional understanding. The fights seemed to have no identifiable source. One day I threw many more than just two dishes. One crashed through a narrow window by the front door. I threw the penny bank, too. Tandy picked up the pennies as we continued to yell at each other. Afterward, I was very upset. I had scared myself with my very angry outburst.
I had an idea that would make everything better. We would all, except baby Laura, go to Disneyland. The next day we took the girls out of school, left Laura with our neighbors, and drove to Los Angeles. We walked around Disneyland all day, going on most of the rides. I loved the Rocket to the Moon. Phil was fascinated with the Lincoln robot. When we got back home the following day, we were exhausted and had forgotten all about the fight. Later, I made a stained-glass window of a monk raising his hand in blessing to replace the broken window by the front door. We never did deal with the unknown source of those fights. Years later Phil described himself as an emotional terrorist. He certainly knew how to push my buttons; I had many at that time.
Phil told me about his out-of-body experiences: “I walked in the living room and I saw myself already there.” Another time he said, “I was lying in bed and I saw myself standing by the bed getting dressed. Suddenly I was in the body that was getting dressed, looking down on the body that was in bed.” Another time he told me, “I saw a ghost walking around, an elderly Italian gentlem
an. It may have been the ghost of the man who used to live on the farm that was once here.” At night when the wind blew he thought he heard a train, the ghost of the narrow gauge train that came through Point Reyes Station in the early 1900s. But I could hear it, too. It was only the wind.
I’ll bet he wished he could have had an out-of-body experience when he had to knock the yellow-jacket nest off the eaves. At first it was just a little nest, and we watched it grow with interest. Suddenly it was as big as three basketballs. Hundreds of yellow jackets were zooming around our patio and we were afraid to go out of the house. Phil put on a long yellow raincoat, a strange hat, and boots and draped himself with mosquito netting. The girls and I nearly died laughing at his appearance. He knocked the nest down at night and sprayed it with insecticide. We all told him how brave he was. He loved this.
That fall, we bought a bird book to identify the many species of birds that migrated through the West Marin area every year. The book listed only red-shafted and yellow-shafted flickers, but ours were orange-shafted. We watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Phil wrote in Martin Luther King’s name for president. Later he felt bad for Nixon, as much as he disliked him, when Nixon cried after he lost.
In spite of faithfully using birth-control techniques, I became pregnant again. I felt that I didn’t have the resources to raise a fifth child. In fact, I could barely manage with the four children and Phil. At first, Phil argued against my getting an abortion. But I was determined to do what was best for the family. It made me furious to be faced with two such bad choices. I fumed, dumb scientists. They could put a man in space but couldn’t figure out a reliable method of birth control.
After a great deal of carrying on with psychiatrists, trying to get a legal California abortion, we went up to Seattle to have an illegal operation. When we came back, I started taking the new oral contraceptive, Enovid, a pill that the newspapers said was going to change the world and revolutionize the relationship between the sexes.
I believe Phil’s extremely dark novel We Can Build You reflected his mood at the time of this abortion. He was far more disturbed than he let on. This novel was the last of his attempts to write a literary novel. He added a spaceport and a real-estate project on Mars for its publication in 1972 to make it into science fiction.
Bob Bundy was based on our neighbor Pete Stevens. Maury Frauenzimmer was based on Phil’s friend Maury Guy (who had begun to study the New Age belief system Subud and was soon to change his name to Iskandar Guy). Phil punned on Maury’s name change in the novel when Maury Frauenzimmer decides to change his name by consulting the encyclopedia volume indexed as “Rock to Subud.” Sam K. Barrows was based on William Wolfson, Phil’s attorney. Phil was Louis Rosen, Leo Rosen’s son. Leo was based on Maury Handelsman. Louis/Phil says in We Can Build You that he is exactly like Lincoln. They are as alike as two peas in a pod. He diagnoses Lincoln as a manic-depressive or schizophrenic, and one of the deepest, most complicated humans in human history.
We Can Build You is notable for the first appearance of Phil’s beckoning unfair one, the first “dark-haired girl,” Pris Frauenzimmer. Pris was a real rotter and schizophrenic to boot. I’m afraid Pris was at least partly based on me. (She was tiling my bathroom, anyway). He wrote:
Suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unbalanced, but also there was nothing alive. Only small time slots, schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand.
I told Phil how delighted I was with the Stanton simulacrum and how thrilled I was at the moment in the novel when the Lincoln simulacrum comes to life: “Why, Phil, he’s more real than most real people.”
Phil was at his most funny and his most serious when he wrote about Dr. Horstowsky giving Louis Rosen hubrizene, “a pill that hums the opening of Beethoven’s Sixteenth Quartet. A person can almost hum this drug.” Louis now wants a pill of Beethoven’s Ninth Chorale. “If God exists, the angels say ‘yes.’” The doctor offers an alternative, a lobotomy.
As Phil worked in the study in the mornings, I did housework. My natural habit was to be in either a comatose or a meditative state at this time of day. Phil would emerge from his study frequently to read newly written paragraphs to me or talk about something in the news or something he’d just read. He was delightful but it wore me out. I needed some time to myself in the morning. I said, “Maybe you should get a place to work away from the house.” Phil thought that this was a fine idea. We found a beat-up old wooden building, ten by thirty feet, down the road a quarter mile away. Phil named it “the Hovel” and it really was. The ground showed through the floorboards. We rented the Hovel from Sheriff Bill Christensen, who lived around the corner. The first of each month Phil took his $30 rent money to Bill’s house and stopped to chat with him. They were both great talkers and enjoyed each other’s company. Bill was an interesting man who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and had a silver plate in his head to prove it. He was the only law enforcement person in the large area of West Marin, and some of his stories were amazing.
Phil hauled his Magnavox, some of his novels, his typewriter, and his desk over to the Hovel. He bought a stock of chocolate bars to give to the children when they came by on their way home from school. The minute he had finished moving, I was sorry that he was gone. But although I urged him to, he wouldn’t move back.
He said, “My mother taught me to take the consequences of my actions. I never chew my cud twice. Never look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
Three
FAMILY LIFE IN THE COUNTRY
In her hillside home in West Marin County, Bonny Keller … emerged from the bedroom, wiping the water color paint from her hands…. And then through the window she saw against the sky to the south a stout trunk of smoke, as dense and brown as a living stump. She gaped at it, and then the window burst; it pulverized and she crashed back and slid across the floor along with the powdery fragments of it. Every object in the house tumbled, fell and shattered and then skidded with her, as if the house had tilted on end.
—Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney
BY 1961, MY small inheritance and the money from the sale of Phil’s house were gone. I worried, “How are we going to manage?” Phil was concerned about money too and didn’t want to write any more literary novels. The five he had written in the past two years had been rejected by every publisher in New York. One day his New York agent sent them, plus six Berkeley literary novels, in a large box. When Phil opened it, I was impressed. “Some day these will all be published,” I told him as he put the manuscripts in the top of a closet in his study.
He thought for several weeks and came up with several different ideas for his career. Fascinated with the Eichmann trial, which was going on then in Jerusalem, he thought he might write a novel about another Nazi, Martin Bormann, who was thought to be hiding in South America. He made a brief outline and then abandoned the idea. Then he thought of writing a historical novel about the Middle Ages, a period when, he said, the port of Marseilles had been closed for a hundred years. He did some research but soon abandoned this idea, too.
About this time I started reading some of Carl Jung’s writings. Dorothy Hudner had been deeply influenced by Jung’s works, and when she heard about my interest she sent us one of the beautiful Bollingen editions. Both Phil and I read it and soon we acquired and read the whole set. I thought of going to Zurich to study with Jung. I dreamed about cooking dinner for him. In the dream, I opened the refrigerator but it was filled with rotten meat. I guess it’s just as well I didn’t go. We listened when BBC interviewed Jung arriving in England for a visit. They asked, “Dr. Jung, do you believe in God?” We were awed by his answer: “I do not believe. I know.”
Phil studied Jung’s volumes Alchemy and Transformation Symbols in the Mass. He was interested in Jung’s idea that a New World religion would soon arise, a religion based upon a quaternity instead of a trinity. The fourth force will be, Jung s
aid, the force now regarded as demonic. This statement had a big influence on Phil.
I read Jung’s introductions to the I Ching, The Book of the Golden Flower, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead and bought these three books and some others: a book about the Hindu vedas, The Bhagavadgita, and some volumes about Zen Buddhism.
Phil became interested in the I Ching and Linus Pauling’s theory of synchronicity, which Jung describes in his introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Phil began to use the I Ching as an oracle several times a day. Once he asked it if we should sell our old Ford station wagon. The oracle replied, “The wagon is full of devils,” so we sold it and bought that Peugeot, which also turned out to be full of devils. Phil was quite chagrined when one day the oracle told him, “The learning of the self-taught is cumbersome.” He dreamed about an elderly Chinese sage with many outlines. He believed that this dream represented the many sages who, over the centuries, had written the I Ching. He thought the I Ching was alive, like the Bible, and that the I Ching had sent this dream to him.
I disagreed. I saw the I Ching as a sort of super “Dear Abby” with an Asian flavor. Finally, one day I asked the I Ching, “Is there a better oracle than you?” It replied something like this, “You yourself are a better oracle for your time, because I am very old and was written a long, long time ago. You are part of your own times, and with sufficient intuition, you can make out the seeds of the future better than I.” So I closed the I Ching and never consulted it again. Phil used it to the end of his life, although at times he became angry with its advice. Eventually he began using yarrow sticks instead of coins.
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 7