But wasn’t he smart enough to realize that if you can’t believe in these ancient events literally you can still believe in them as metaphors?
Nancy never saw Maren again after that last visit. Maren committed suicide a few weeks later. She had a recurrence of a cancer that she had suffered many years earlier and, in addition, her relationship with Pike was threatened by his interest in other women. Bishop Pike partially destroyed her suicide note. That story was on the front page of San Francisco newspapers, too.
Two years later, in 1969, Pike died in the Judean desert when he turned off a road, without extra water or gas, in an area where surface temperatures can rise to 140°F. He had gone to Israel with his new wife to prove that Jesus really wasn’t an important part of the Christian tradition. At that same time, my oldest daughter, Hatte, was in Jerusalem studying for a Ph.D. in Arabic and linguistics and coincidentally was a friend of Scott, Pike’s new young brother-in-law, who was also in Israel. They had met at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
When Phil and Nancy were living in Santa Venetia, Lynne Hudner became very good friends with Nancy. Lynne, who had become a psychiatric social worker, observed, “Phil and Nancy’s relationship was not a marriage between two adults. Phil did not take any typical male role. There was little involvement and little fulfillment in that marriage. Phil was preoccupied with Nancy’s symptoms and her illness. He played the role of ‘all-knowing psychiatrist’ with her, analyzing her actions, dreams, and speech in terms of her illness—confirming her illness. It wasn’t comfortable for Nancy. She didn’t like it.”
Nancy described her marriage: “There was only a short happy period at the beginning. It wasn’t really like a marriage; it was more like a couple of people rooming together.”
Although Phil never made it out to Point Reyes to visit the children, he continued to phone me about every other month. He talked about REM sleep, which he had become very interested in. He told me about his problems with the IRS. He talked about his writing. He never mentioned his home life. Were those the phone calls portrayed in Ubik when Glen Runciter has a fading communication with his dead wife, Ella? I think they were.
Then, suddenly, Phil accused me of not letting the children visit him, although he had never invited them to visit. He wrote me an unbelievably hateful letter. Up until this time we had been conversing in a civilized way. There had been no change in our relationship that could explain this sudden change of mood.
I picked up a copy of Counter-Clock World at a book stand in 1967 and read it halfway through. I wondered if Phil had wanted time to go backward when he wrote that book. As I read, I realized that I didn’t want to learn about Phil’s new life and his relationship with Nancy and Anne. I threw the novel into the wastebasket and never read another novel of Phil’s until after his death.
Alys Graveson came to my home in Point Reyes Station for an interview. She still lived in Inverness on the other side of Tomales Bay.
Alys, whom Phil had portrayed so well in Martian Time-Slip, visited him in Santa Venetia. She told me Phil “took pills to wake up and he took pills to go to sleep; he took Dexedrine, Benzedrine, and antidepressants. He had three doctors prescribing for him and went to six drugstores to fill the prescriptions. One of the doctors, a prominent ear-nose-and-throat doctor in San Rafael, was later tried and convicted for misusing his license to supply drugs to addicts.”
Nancy said, “Philip took Stelazine, muscle relaxants, stomach relaxants, Valium, tranquilizers, and stimulants. He went to three doctors and six pharmacies. He took seventy pills a day. He was so personable and knew what symptoms to describe to get doctors to prescribe the pills he wanted. One of his doctors went to jail. When Philip left the area, he left huge unpaid pharmacy and doctor bills.”
Phil bought some contaminated amphetamines from a street dealer and was seriously poisoned. He went to Marin General Hospital with acute pancreatitis. He remained severely ill and in acute pain for a long period of time and could eat only cottage cheese and fruit.
In 1968, Joe and Dorothy Hudner put a down payment on a house on Hacienda Way in Santa Venetia for Phil and Nancy. The house was registered in Dorothy and Joe’s name. It was a well-kept small house with a nice lawn and garden. The interior was in beautiful condition. The house cost $19,000. Phil would make the $167 a month payment.
When Kirsten and Ray Nelson visited Phil and Nancy, Ray thought everything was lovely and everyone was in love with everyone else as he walked along the water of the bay with Nancy, wearing his muumuu (later he wore a propeller beanie). He would have liked to have an “intellectual romance” with Nancy as Phil had with Kirsten.
Phil told Kirsten that Irmgard and Pris, two of the android females in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? were based on her, and the android, Roy, was based on Ray.
“In fact,” Ray told me in 1983, smoothing his hair, “the actor playing the part of Roy … in Blade Runner looked just like me.”
Kirsten told Phil about a dog attacking her rabbit and he put this episode in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. He told Kirsten she was Emily, the lady in the bar and the owner of the rabbit.
Phil was having the same up-and-down mood swings that he had had earlier in Oakland. He fought with Nancy. At times he said he wanted to have all the young people hanging around committed. He often called the police.
Phil wrote to his old friend Carol Carr, wife of science fiction editor Terry Carr, on July 7, 1967:
I have many apologies to make to both you and Terry for some of the things I’ve said in recent letters. What has happened is that I (finally) have had a nervous breakdown…. I was mildly paranoid and hostile for several weeks … and then on Wednesday … my “borderline psychotic symptoms” became the real thing. The actual period of the full break lasted only half a day, because I took a good big dose of phenothiazines and made it over to see the Dr. It was an amazing experience. I came out of it feeling active and vigorous and even elated—because, I reasoned, I had met it head-on and licked it…. Want to hear about it? Good … I’ll quote my notes made during the period:
“Saw the baby as a horrid vegetable—pulpy, like a mushroom growing up and then sinking back, again and again. Vivid horrible tastes and pain of a tri-geminal sort. Inability to spell words or to type. Loss of memory—found snuff tin mysteriously in kitchen cupboard. Lost important IRS documents which I had previously carefully assembled (they still haven’t turned up). Had Nancy hide my gun. Bees in head. Helplessness. I couldn’t cross the room; it was at this point much as if I had gotten thoroughly drunk … which is an acutely alarming experience if you haven’t drunk anything.
I thoroughly enjoyed a dish of ice cream. My prolepsis factor (time sense) went out completely. Had no idea how long I had been doing something (this also like LSD).
Delusion that an alien outside force was controlling my mind and directing me to commit suicide. Hence I was not motivated to do so; in fact I was motivated to resist any suicidal urge … which may be nuttier than my previous suicidal depressions, but possibly from a pragmatic standpoint could be considered an improvement.
Couldn’t tell from which direction sounds were coming, or how loud they were. Also like LSD. Acute terror while feeding the baby. Fluctuations throughout the day of terror, anger, and (deep) sexual yearning. The interesting thing, now that I look back on that day, is the amount I got done. At 9 a.m. a T-man [i.e., a cop from the Treasury Department] showed up and demanded the back taxes I owe. I reached a settlement with him. Later on, Sears Roebuck delivered our new air conditioner. In company with Nancy’s brother, I uncrated it and installed it. I wrote to Bishop Pike. I visited the Dr. I got manic; I could read a whole newspaper article in one or two seconds. I managed to stay cheerful, for the most part, even though I felt demoralized at becoming overtly psychotic—without any idea how long it would last or how much worse it could get. The Dr. thought it was remarkable that in such a state I could deal with the T-man, since I fear them above all other life
forms, Terran or otherwise….”
When Phil described these severe mental symptoms, was he kidding? Were they real? Or both? Later that year Phil threatened to sue Terry Carr for $75,000 because of a letter that Carr had printed in his fanzine, Lighthouse, that Phil thought was defamatory.
Lynne Hudner noted that Phil was depressed most of the time. Although, initially, Phil had taken care of Nancy, now she had come out of her withdrawal and depression and was taking care of him. Nancy called him “Fuzzy.” It was like a mother-child relationship.
Old friends from Point Reyes visited Phil in Santa Venetia. Jerry Kresy went once; he could get no feeling of Nancy’s personality. Pete Stevens said sadly, “It wasn’t our Phil anymore,” and never went again.
Phil continued seeing Dr. A during his marriage. Nancy remembered, “Dr. A was always telling Philip that there was nothing the matter with him.”
Over the phone, Phil told me about a group-therapy session arranged by Dr. A that he had gone to. He had tried to express his hostility and anger at this session. After he got started he couldn’t stop and went on and on for forty-five minutes. When he was through there was dead silence. No one said anything. Phil thought that everyone was too horrified by his hostility to be able to speak. He got up and left the room and never went back. Alys Graveson, who was also a member of this group, said, “No one ever said anything—it was a boring group.”
One day Phil suddenly phoned and said that I had been vindictive and cruel toward him when I didn’t give him the Baldwin Acrosonic spinet when we divorced.
“But you never asked for it,” I said, matter-of-factly. I listened to him carry on about how I had deprived him of the spinet until finally when I could get a word in edgewise I said, “Give me your address and I’ll send it over.” He was astonished and quickly backed down. “No, no,” he said.
Nancy told me, “He never stopped talking about you and the children. He really loved those children. I always thought that Philip and you would get together again some day. One day I told him angrily, ‘Why don’t you and Anne get back together? ‘” It became obvious to Nancy that I wanted Phil to come and see the children, although he would say I wouldn’t allow him to. “But he was too emotionally ill to leave the house,” she reflected.
Phil’s depression, added to her own problems, created a burden of guilt and concern too great for Nancy to bear. Phil wouldn’t leave the house and would feel incredibly anxious if she did. If she wanted to go to her sister, Anne’s, for dinner she would feel she had to call him as soon as she got there and ask, “Fuzzy, are you all right?” He would say, “No,” and she’d have to rush back home. She wanted to get a job at the post office but Phil couldn’t bear to be alone during the day either.
Nancy had a nervous breakdown in 1969. She knew that she needed to go to the hospital. She kept asking Phil to take her but he waited and waited, “until it was almost too late.” In the hospital she didn’t want Phil to come and see her. She had a feeling of evil, not that Phil was evil, but that there was evil somewhere in the situation.
All this time I still had hopes that Phil would someday come back. I still thought about him and kept trying to figure out what had happened. I didn’t know much about his way of life. I didn’t realize that he had changed so much. But I finally realized that I couldn’t go on like this. Although I was a typical church-going agnostic, I started calling on the name of God every time I started running the script about Phil through my mind again. When I tried to sleep at night and, instead, started thinking about Phil, I said, “God-God-God-God-God”—on and on and on. I didn’t realize it at the time but I had created a mantra for myself. I did this for three months. Suddenly God answered. It was awesome. More real than anything I had ever experienced. Everything in my personal universe shifted. My whole life changed. Although my love for Phil didn’t end, it went into some back compartment of my psyche. It was no longer an anguishing burden for me, no longer a part of my daily life. The next time Phil called me I told him, of course, all about it. He made fun of this experience of mine in one of his novels.
It wasn’t much later, in the early fall of 1970, when Phil called me up and said, “Nancy’s run off with the black guy who lives across the street.”
“Oh?” I said. If he’d called me a few weeks earlier, I probably would have said something that would have started an exchange between us about resuming our relationship. As it was, I left the initiative up to him.
At any rate, Phil’s fourth wife had left him and he began a new and even worse life.
Philip K. Dick, sitting on patio bench, 1963.
Anne R. Dick, sitting on fench, back yard, Point Reyes Station, 1959.
Hatte, Jayne, and Tandy Rubenstein reading pop-up book, 1960.
Tandy and Hatte Rubenstein, patio, Point Reyes Station, 1961.
Phil and Jayne, 1959.
Laura, 1963.
Phil with sheep, 1960.
Phil with cat, 1961.
Seven
THE SCANNER DARKLY YEARS
… and let me know how you like my new book, A Scanner Darkly. It is an autobiographical novel, and so I thought you might want to read it, since it describes a bad and sad time in your father’s life … but it sure is one hell of a novel.
—Philip K. Dick, letter to our daughter, Laura, 1977
AS I LEARNED about this period of Phil’s life, I seriously contemplated abandoning my whole project. But then Phil had already written about it in his novel about the drug world from within, A Scanner Darkly, supposedly fiction. The names of the real participants in Phil’s Scanner world have been changed in this chapter. After writing this book, I would see Cindy occasionally at her husband’s convenience food store in Petaluma; then they divorced and I lost track of her. Sheila came down to Point Reyes Station to visit me once with her new baby and her pleasant husband. I was happy to see she had made a good life for herself.
In A Scanner Darkly, policeman Bob Arctor poses as a hard-core drug junkie. In the course of his undercover police investigations, he lives in a house with a bunch of junkies. At times he is back at the police station, observing the house through a police scanner, which is attached to the house. He observes his own gradual absorption into the drug world and his total deterioration from the large amounts of heavy drugs he is taking. Finally, his brain totally burned out, he becomes a vegetable, and is committed to New-Path, a rehabilitation center for ex-cons and junkies.
When Phil lived in Santa Venetia after Nancy left him, there was no longer any order in his household. He didn’t take care of his mental or physical health and had only a panicky last-minute concern for financial matters. He couldn’t stand to be alone and invited anyone who would to move in with him. Some pretty rough people, heavily involved with drugs, came. Phil phoned his stepsister Lynne to come over and shop and cook for him. He told her, “I can’t go out, the CIA is after me.”
For a while Lynne brought food and cooked for Phil, “But, as much as I wanted to help him, the scene there was just too much for me. I just couldn’t go anymore, no matter how much he needed me. Phil was not himself. He was bizarre. He hit rock bottom at this time. I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. He wrote some nasty letters to Mom. The letters were so bad that Dorothy and Joe changed their wills and cut Phil out.”
Kirsten and Ray Nelson didn’t see much of Phil at this time either. Kirsten felt uncomfortable around the “motorcycle types” who were hanging around: “In the disturbed period of 1964—65, the people were science fiction people, they were groupies and did ridiculous things, but these people projected, ‘I’d just as soon not know you.’ One group of Phil’s friends who lived nearby dealt in stolen goods: motorcycles, TV sets, and radios. If the hangers-around were there when Ray and I came to visit, we would leave.”
Kirsten remembered that Phil called the police “three times a day.” Phil told Kirsten melodramatic things about the people hanging around his place. Kirsten had no idea if what he said was true or
not. Phil would call the Nelsons and Ray would drive over to Santa Venetia, pick Phil up, and bring him over to the Nelsons’ house in Albany and then later take him back to Santa Venetia. Ray believed that the drugs Phil took didn’t affect him much, that Phil was always on top of his drug situation.
Phil was still phoning me in Point Reyes, but he painted a picture of his life nothing like what the Nelsons were observing. I remember one phone call especially. While I was having a party at Christmas time, Phil called, and neglecting my guests, I talked with him for almost an hour. The conversation was warm and friendly. It never occurred to me to invite him over. I thought that if he wanted to see me he would let me know. Phil describes a conversation at Christmas time with a disagreeable ex-wife, Kathy, in Galactic Pot-Healer. His protagonist was very resentful that Kathy didn’t invite him over on Christmas Day.
Grania Davis, formerly Grania Davidson, was in touch with Phil after Nancy left him. Grania had married a doctor, Steve Davis, and lived nearby in Sausalito. Grania remembered, “Phil liked Steve; Steve’s a doctor, Phil’s a hypochondriac.”
Phil often called or came by at odd hours with an emergency, an anxiety attack, or a horrible personal or medical problem. But he told about them in a hilariously funny way—funny, but not cheerful. “He looked terrible, puffy, bleary-eyed.”
Grania and Steve remained supportive when Phil started hanging around “with all those leather-jacketed hoodlum types in their late teens.” But the Davises didn’t want to go over to Phil’s house in Santa Venetia. What disturbed Grania most was that all those “creepy-looking people were sitting around doing nothing. They weren’t even having a party. They were just there in separate rooms.” Phil told Grania that his hi-fi had been stolen, all his belongings rifled through. His Omega watch was taken. He told her that he thought the CIA was ripping him off.
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 16