A short time after Phil got home he answered the phone, but there was only silence and a click. Sean had recently moved out, and Phil told Sheila, “Sean is going to kill me tonight.” He got out a hatchet and hammer and told her, “Sean is going to kill you, too.” Both of them hid in the back bedroom, terrified at hearing noises, and ate “beans” to keep their spirits up. Phil said, “I’ve got to get help,” and called two black guys, Luke and Matthew, members of a paramilitary organization, and who lived in the neighborhood, to protect them. Luke and Matthew wanted $600 a day. Phil asked his lady friend to help him. She came over to Phil’s house with a “bunch” of gold coins and gave them to Phil. Phil gave Sheila one of the coins. When later she cashed it she found it was worth $20. Phil gave the rest of the gold coins to Luke and Matthew. They took them and went back to their own house, telling Phil, “Call us if you have any trouble.”
Sheila continued to resist Phil’s overtures. Once, Phil threw a chair. Sheila told him, “Go ahead and kill me.” Phil went in his room and cried. Then Phil began telling Sheila that she was addicted to heroin. “Yes,” Sheila replied, “I am addicted to heroin. I’m going to go and get treatment.” She went to Marin Open House, a treatment facility, and said that she was a heroin addict so that she could be admitted.
Phil phoned William Wolfson and asked him to come over. When he got there, William didn’t want to go in the house: “The shades were drawn, the grass was mostly mud, the house smelled musty. I felt uncomfortable there.” Phil gave Bill the manuscript of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said to keep for him. He was afraid it would be stolen or destroyed.
When Grania and Steve Davis came over to see Phil, he took them on a tour of his house. He told them, “This is my dead lawn. Do you want to see my garden?” He took them across the lawn and said, “This is my dead tree.” He took them to another spot in the yard “This is my dead bush. I’m afraid pretty soon the unwelcome wagon is coming for me.”
Phil didn’t make the payments on the house, and the Co-Op Credit Union called Joe Hudner and told him that they were foreclosing on the loan. Joe had a heart attack and died. The family felt that Phil had killed Joe. Dorothy prevented Neil from saying anything to Phil. She felt that such an accusation would finish Phil off, he was at such a low point.
Phil went to a clinic south of San Francisco for treatment for drug addiction. When he was released he was able to cut down significantly on the amount of methedrine he took.
That fall, Phil came to visit us in Point Reyes Station. As soon as he walked in the door, he went into my workshop to see if the workbench he had made for me was still there. He seemed relieved that it was. I assumed that he had come to see Laura, but Laura only stayed around for a few minutes, and then ran outside to play with a friend. Phil sat on the couch and burst into tears, and as usual I didn’t know what to say. I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room and said, “I’m terribly sorry that you’re so upset.”
Phil replied, “The fact that you care means more to me than anything in the world.” I continued standing there. Nothing more came to me to say or do than to say again, “I’m terribly sorry that you feel so upset.” At that point, Phil smiled, wiped his eyes, got up, and walked out of the house. I watched out the window as he got in his car and drove off.
I still loved him, but I didn’t know how to say, “Look, Phil, I wish you’d get your life together and who knows….” I was afraid, too—afraid to have him around the children, afraid of his lifestyle, afraid of his tendency to act in bizarre and unexpected ways.
In January, Phil received a letter inviting him to Vancouver, Canada, to be the keynote speaker at the V-Con, the science fiction convention held there in February 1972. He asked Cindy to go with him and bought her an airplane ticket. A few weeks before Cindy and Phil were to leave, Cindy came by to visit and found that “the whole study was torn apart, all the papers were out of the file cabinet and strewn all over the floor. Phil was striding around with a loaded shotgun as though someone else had done it. The window was broken; there was a hole in the wall.” Cindy said, “Clint told me, ‘Phil did it.’ But Clint could have done it, too.”
Ray Nelson had a strong belief that the safe had been bombed by drug dealers that Phil owed a great deal of money to. Rolling Stone later published a famous story about this incident.
Professor Willis McNelly, a science fiction scholar and head of the English Department at California State University at Fullerton, came by to visit Phil a week later. Nothing had been cleaned up or repaired. Windows were broken and paper litter and bits of towel were everywhere. Phil told Professor McNelly that the house had been bombed. He said that a wet towel had been wrapped around his files to dull the effect of the plastic bomb. Phil believed that the FBI had done this because he had inadvertently written about a secret weapon in one of his novels. He had picked up the information telepathically.
Cindy’s parents were upset at the idea of Cindy leaving town with a man old enough to be her father. She decided that she didn’t want to go, turned in her ticket, and bought some clothes with the money. She told Phil, “Someday, I’m going to move north to Oregon and live in the snow. I’m going to shovel snow off the front walk every morning and have a little house and a garden with vegetables. Mr. Right will come along and get it for me.”
After Phil left for Canada, the house in Santa Venetia went into foreclosure. Phil’s mother came and packed up all the papers and what was left of Phil’s personal possessions and stored them for him.
Eight
THE VANCOUVER SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION
Suddenly I looked up and saw, through the glass side of the house, a horse coming at me, head on, driven by a rider; it was virtually on me, about to shatter the glass. I’ve never seen or dreamed such an animal before: its thin body, elongated, pumping legs, goggling eyes—like a racehorse, swift and furious and silent it came at me, and then it leaped up to hurdle the house.
—Philip K. Dick, letter to Dorothy Hudner, 1972
PHIL WENT OFF to Vancouver alone. Two days before the V-Con in February 1972, Phil gave a speech at the University of British Columbia. It was received with cheers and a standing ovation. Phil told his new friend Mike Bailey that the reception he received from this appreciative audience helped his mental state a great deal. He decided to stay in British Columbia.
It was hard to find anyone who had known Phil during his stay in Vancouver, January to March 1972. Phil’s letters to me from there were friendly and upbeat letters giving the impression that things were going well in his life, and to my chagrin, mentioning various new girlfriends. I didn’t answer. I knew nothing about his attempted suicide or his stay at X-Kalay, a rehab facility in Vancouver similar to Synanon.
It took a lot of phoning before I could find anyone who had known Phil during the two months he was there. Professor Willis McNelly of the California State University at Fullerton had given me a Xerox of a letter Phil had written him from X-Kalay. I called Vancouver information to see if I could find any of the people listed on the letterhead. Not a single one was in the phone company’s records and X-Kalay no longer existed. It seemed as if the people who had been involved in it had also vanished into thin air. I called science fiction writer Poul Anderson for a lead, knowing that he went to many sci-fi conventions. He gave me the name of a fan in Seattle who “may have gone to V-Con II.” I called F. M. Busby and, although he hadn’t gone to that particular convention, he thought he knew someone who had, a fan named Francine. Although Francine hadn’t gone to V-Con II either, she had heard the legendary stories about Phil’s visit and knew that a Mike Bailey, a newsman in Vancouver, had shown him around the town. I finally found Mike through information. We had a great talk. He gave me the name and phone number of Michael and Susan Walsh. The Walshes were a gold mine.
Mike observed that “Phil was very quick to answer people, and he turned a lot of people off, but he handled himself well, considering he was taking menthol nose drops wi
th amphetamines in them.” Phil told Mike, “I’m going to die.” He was forty-four years old at this time. Mike was concerned about a girl named Jamis, who was “hanging on Phil and bleeding him” and had another boyfriend. Mike and other new friends of Phil’s “got rid of her”—they thought.
Phil wrote his mother about his “mad love” for Jamis, this:
… little dark-haired hippy girl … who eats nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and wants to leave her body and fly to Mars…. She rapped to me for hours about Philosophy and God and flying saucers and the esoteric wisdom of the ancient Egyptians…. [Up in Vancouver] I was happy at first, as you know, and then I’ve gotten progressively more and more unhappy…. Everything everyone has done … didn’t fill in the void…. I decided to give up and go back to the States. I missed Cindy too much; it constellated around her…. It’s been a day-to-day struggle to keep from succumbing psychologically. But now, all at once, Jamis … is back…. I was just looking for a place to take her where we could sit and talk…. The image I have followed has been all my life the image of Jamis…. [O]n Friday night a beautiful dream came into existence; Jamis and I flashed on each other, and for the first time in my life I got it all together. But it is a beautiful dream that I wish would pass…. Despite the fact that, after I got home here Friday night after leaving Jamis off at her place, I knew I’d for the first time finally found what Faust found: that which he did not want to see pass in favor of something else. But God, what a tragedy. My pain ended. The void inside me, the ache, was gone. But—at what a price? Because it is going to kill little Jamis. It is all wrong for her.
That night, Friday night, about 5 a.m., I had a dream not like any other I’d ever had. I was back in West Marin, in the big glass-walled living room, with friends and animals and children. Suddenly I looked up and saw, through the glass side of the house, a horse coming at me, head on, driven by a rider; it was virtually on me, about to shatter the glass. I’ve never seen or dreamed such an animal before: its thin body, elongated, pumping legs, goggling eyes—like a racehorse, swift and furious and silent it came at me, and then it leaped up to hurdle the house. I ducked. Too late to escape; I crouch down, waiting for it to crash onto the roof above me and collapse the house. Impossible for it to clear. But it did. No crash. No collapse. The horse had cleared. I ran out front, knowing it must have hit dirt cataclysmically. There it was, thrashing in the mud and foliage, broken and mutilated, horrible … it would have to be destroyed…. I was okay. Intact. Safe. It, the great soaring, pulsing life-force, had expended itself in one mighty last effort, and perished in chaos and ruin and thrashing debris…. It was like the dream said this: the moment of Truth you have waited for all your life, the great ultimate contest or test or day of revelation, came just now; you got by, you survived. Everything else perished, though…. True, the horse did not try to vault the house in order to spare me; it did not even notice me. I just happened to be there. The house, not me—that was what the horse tried to—and succeeded in—leaping…. I am that broken horse.
Phil was the giant destructive horse about to run into the glass-walled house and also the man inside. The horse jumped over the house instead of crashing into it, saving the house but destroying itself.
While staying at the Biltmore Hotel where V-Con II was being held, Phil met Michael and Susan Walsh. They invited him to stay with them at their apartment. Susan “couldn’t help but immediately notice the massive mood shifts that Phil exhibited—hideous troughs of feeling—he told me that his body manufactured drugs that affected his mind the same way as amphetamines.”
Michael, Susan’s husband, thought that Phil was playing for effect, that Phil wanted to test out how gullible people were. Michael, a phlegmatic person, “valued personal privacy and intended to give others a great deal of it. I didn’t pry into Phil’s affairs. I didn’t even ask further when Phil said that he had been in fear of his life in San Rafael.” Phil couldn’t needle Michael, either. Michael saw that there was a lot of testing behavior going on. Phil was afraid of revealing too much of himself—Phil saw conspiracy all around him.
Susan found Phil to be intense, needing to be the center of everything. He was exhausting: “I recall him as a bearlike presence hunched into a ratty trench coat, sort of like Sam Spade. He took menthol snuff continually. I couldn’t tell when he was telling the truth—even when I knew it was truth, it had so much else mixed in with it. Often his conversation seemed to be based on finding the other person’s weak spot. He could have a person in a screaming rage within ten minutes. He would save up information on a person’s weak spots to needle him with later on. A friend of ours, Mary, got into a van that Phil happened to be riding in. Out of the blue, Phil started telling her bad things about us. Later, Mary asked me about the matters Phil had told her about. Nothing like what he’d described had happened at all. His version of events was often quite different from those of other participants.”
Susan remembered Jamis, all right. Phil gave Jamis Susan’s copy of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Susan began laughing as she told a story about Phil and a Kirby vacuum-cleaner demonstrator who had made an appointment to come to her apartment. “You’re not having a demonstration by one of those high-pressure salesman,” Phil said. “Yes,” Susan said, “it will be a three-hour demonstration.” “Okay,” Phil told the Walshes, “let’s have some fun. Michael, I’m your brother-in-law, a writer who is sponging off you and Susan. You, Michael, are Mickey, a husband too cheap to buy the vacuum cleaner. That’s the scenario. I’ll try to draw you into a family argument, because I think you should buy my sister this vacuum cleaner. We’ll get the salesman into the argument.”
The vacuum-cleaner salesman, whose name was Frank Noseworthy, proceeded to demonstrate the vacuum cleaner. Phil chatted with Frank, “South Pasadena is my favorite city,” while Frank dumped little papers of dust throughout the apartment and proceeded to vacuum them up. Phil chatted on, “I wanted my other brother, Bill, who drives a bus, to drive me out from Chicago, but those city buses can’t make the trip.” Picking up the sweeper and examining it, he remarked, “My ex-wife used to have one of these. She insisted that she get it in the divorce settlement.”
By this time the Walshes were smothering apoplectic laughter and couldn’t even stay in the room. Meanwhile, Frank Noseworthy was vacuuming the mattress, exhibiting the vacuum cleaner with a bench grinder and polisher attachment, and polishing Susan’s wedding ring.
“How much is this vacuum cleaner?” Phil asked. “$ 800,” Frank Noseworthy replied. Phil couldn’t get Frank into a family argument, although he kept needling Michael about buying this vacuum for “Sis.” Then he said, “Isn’t it wonderful to think that in hundreds of years we’ll all be dust, but that this Kirby will still be in working condition?” Then he said something about vacuuming up a can of eight-legged bugs.
Frank Noseworthy became more and more disaffected. Finally, when Michael said that he would not buy the vacuum cleaner, Frank huffily packed up all of his equipment and left, saying, “Well, if you want to continue living in these conditions….”
Michael had a record of Marshall McLuhan’s, The Medium Is the Message, with multiple sound channels. On it McLuhan presents his material with illustrations: music, sex, little girl’s voices, etc. It’s a James Joycean sort of thing, an incoherent cacophony of sound. When Michael played it for Phil, Phil clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Turn it off. Turn it off. It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go to the hospital.”
After Phil had stayed with the Walshes for two weeks, he started picking on Michael in an area where Michael was sensitive. He told Michael that he was a bad husband and that he, Phil, was going to take Susan away and make her happy. After listening to this for a couple of days, Michael became angry and kicked Phil out of the apartment.
Phil found another place to live. Then he phoned Susan and said, “I’m going to turn out the lights.” Susan couldn’t imagine what Phil was ta
lking about and soon hung up on him. But Phil had taken a lethal dose of some kind of pill and actually was on his way out. However, he had written the number of the suicide prevention squad on a small piece of paper and put it in front of the phone in case he changed his mind. He did change his mind and called them, and they came and took him to the hospital and saved his life. When Michael and Susan Walsh came to see him, he told them, “I was committing suicide, you didn’t care, you didn’t come over, you didn’t do anything about it.”
Phil signed himself into X-Kalay, a self-help organization inspired by Synanon and inhabited by ex-convicts and ex-drug addicts. Michael Walsh later wondered cynically, “Was the suicide attempt only to get into X-Kalay for material to write a novel?”
Susan and Michael visited Phil in X-Kalay. Phil was wearing a ski jacket and looked strange to them, after his trench-coat persona. The doors were locked and some X-Kalay people stayed in the room during the entire visit. Phil, still of the opinion that the Walshes had failed him, was cold.
Michael Walsh found the ex-head of X-Kalay, Dave Berner, for me. Dave had a talk program on Station CJOR across the street from the Province, the newspaper where Michael Walsh worked. I interviewed Dave Berner by telephone. In exchange he interviewed me, live, the next day for his program.
David Berner told me, “X-Kalay means ‘the unknown path.’ Phil came out of nowhere and went back to nowhere. When I first saw him, he looked like a burnt-out middle-age drunk. He shook, he was thin, his skin was blotchy. He told me that he was a writer. ‘You’re not a writer,’ I told him. ‘Whatever you did before to get yourself in here, you’re not going to do again. You’re going to wash dishes and mop floors.’ Phil’s imagination was wild. In the games, he was bugged and haunted by monsters he’d made a long time ago. After he had been with us thirty days, he came to me again and said, ‘I really am a writer,’ and volunteered to write for X-Kalay. Altogether, he stayed at X-Kalay for three months. Later, I saw his novels at a bookstand. ‘Is that that nut burger?’ I thought.”
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 18