The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Women who visited Phil’s place noted that it was rundown and seedy. The carpet, a hideous green shag, was cheap and soiled. There were papers all over, and the garbage needed taking out. The color TV only got shades of green. The furniture was from a secondhand store. Men friends termed Phil’s place “a typical bachelor pad.”

  Doris told me, “Phil wasn’t really into housekeeping, but then, I didn’t notice, because I was also a terrible housekeeper.” Phil chronicled Doris’s terrible housekeeping in The Divine Invasion. Rybys, the mother of God in The Divine Invasion, lived in an igloo filled with litter. Rybys was perhaps a combination of Doris and Phil’s later girlfriend, Joan Simpson.

  Phil had two cats at this period, Harvey Wallbanger and Mrs. Tubbs. He had Harvey blessed by proxy at the local Episcopal church where Doris worked. One time when there was a fire drill at the apartment house, Doris grabbed some possessions from her apartment, and Phil grabbed some from his place, and they hurried down the apartment stairs. Then Phil realized he had forgotten the cats. “He felt so bad,” Doris said.

  Doris remembered, “Phil was kind to me; he bought me a bed, gave me a car. However, when I had men friends over, Phil became jealous and angry. I didn’t consider it dating, though. Later on, he seemed to adjust.”

  In the fall of 1976, Doris lost her remission from cancer. Phil seemed happy for the first time in years. His blood pressure was down. He felt really needed.

  Phil wrote me on December 12, 1976, wanting to bring Doris to our place for Christmas: “[Laura] invited me up … but as I told her there is this woman living in the apartment next to me who has inoperable cancer … whom I’ve been shopping for…. She has no family she can be with at Christmas. Laura suggested I bring her up. I wonder, though, if that is a good idea. I’d like your thoughts about it….”

  I didn’t answer. In the next month or so, Phil called and told me delightedly,

  “I’m writing an autobiography about both of my personalities…. I’m calling it

  VALIS.” VALIS was a completely new version of Valisystem A. His editors had rejected the former; it was too autobiographical.

  All during 1977, Doris was in chemotherapy. She told me, “Phil helped take care of me. I remember how kind he was and how good he was in emergencies. Once I had to go to the hospital because of a bad reaction to the anti-cancer drugs. Phil was level-headed and knew just what to do.”

  Meanwhile, Phil’s novels had become an enormous success in Europe and suddenly he was rolling in money; he had a six-figure income but he was uncomfortable with all this money. He seemed to feel better if he could get rid of it and he began giving it away. He sponsored three children through the Christian Children’s Fund and wrote to them for two years. He was terrified, though, that he’d end up poor again.

  Some of this money even came our way. I had no idea that Phil was now a big financial success. He didn’t tell me about this. Our daughter, Laura, had passed the high school proficiency test and needed transportation to junior college courses during her last year of high school. When she wrote Phil about this he offered to send her money for a car. Phil made out the check to me and wrote me: “Enclosed is my check to you for $1,400. I told Laura on the phone I’d reconcile my checkbook and see just how much I had, and, if possible, send more than the thousand I promised. It really gives me enormous pleasure to send this to you. I hope she can get a car with it, and one she likes.” We took the money for the car, and with half of it we bought an old clunker and with the other half made a down payment on a lovely thoroughbred mare.

  On February 18, 1977, Phil wrote Laura:

  It was sure neat talking to you on the phone last night, and to your mother. As I told you, my friend [Doris] and I are out of money right now, and so we have to postpone our trip up there…. I am alone in my apartment, with my cats, Harvey and Mrs. Tubbs, eating frozen TV dinners and watching tacky TV situation comedy programs. That’s about all I do, except to get together with my buddies every day or so. I really am enjoying the car I bought, the ‘73 Capri, except that it needs work. How is your car doing?

  I told everybody down here about your prowess … in [horse] vaulting, and they are indeed impressed. As they should be…. You can see from this letter that about all I have going for me right now is my professional-intellectual-creative life, but it is a life, except that I get lonely. The other morning, forgetting how I now live, I asked Mrs. Tubbs (seriously) if she wanted a cup of coffee. Oh well.

  During the period when Doris was living in the apartment next door, K. W. Jeter and Phil reestablished a relationship and became close friends. K. W. told me, “Phil couldn’t stand to be alone, he had to create some sort of family situation. He asked Tim to share the apartment after Doris had moved out. Tim told him that he liked the place where he was; then Phil turned to me and said, ‘How about you?’”

  K. W. was working on the night shift at juvenile hall. Phil would phone him and the two of them would talk all night long. Both men, recently divorced, felt they had a lot in common. Sometimes, on his days off, K. W. would drop in at Phil’s to listen to the six o’clock news. They’d have dinner together and talk until 4 or 5 a.m. the next morning. K. W. told me, “Wonderful conversations, I wish I had tapes of them. One week Phil would say, ‘I’m a Buddhist.’ A week later he’d have a different idea—he’d be a Taoist. Phil had to test everything from the inside. He’d adopt a religion like an experiment, like he did his marriages. Phil and I spent the whole night taking the universe apart. We were glad that we could put it back together before people woke up.” K. W. noticed huge piles of paper for The Exegesis accumulating in boxes in Phil’s apartment.

  Phil told K. W. that Tessa and Linda were the worst things that ever happened to him. He told K. W. that he tried to get custody of Christopher, but, because of his suicide attempt, his attorney said that there was no hope of this. Phil told K. W. that all his female friends were trying to get money from him all the time.

  Jim Blaylock became friendlier with Phil at this time, and the two got together for conversations also. Sometimes Tim Powers was there. Jim said:

  I would rather spend an evening with Phil Dick than anyone else. Phil always saw the humor behind what he was…. He lamented about having been married to a number of women and not being able to make any of the marriages work. In spite of this, he told me and Tim, he was monogamous…. He didn’t speak well of his mother…. Regardless of how many friends he had, he always struck me as being solitary. He went out on a limb for his friends. He was in ill health to a degree; he recognized that he’d ruined his health in the sixties and early seventies. He took a lot of prescription drugs.

  We talked about everything from spirituality to world affairs. Phil would peer at matters from every conceivable angle. He had the power to convince anybody in the world of anything. One night he convinced Powers and me that gravity was diminishing. Another time, he told us that he had come into the possession of two-thousand-year-old information, the knowledge of which had led to the disappearance of many famous people throughout history. He told us that we three, sitting in that room in Santa Ana late that night, were within an ace of being murdered. The KGB was outside, and as he said, “And do you know what this information is?” Tim leaped out of his chair and yelled, “No. No. Don’t tell us.” Was Phil pulling our leg? Was it true? Was he crazy? Or all three?

  JOAN

  Joan Simpson, a lively, intelligent person, was very enjoyable to spend time with. We visited back and forth between Point Reyes and her new, owner-designed home in Sonoma County. She was enthusiastic and helpful with my project. I thought we were going to be friends, that we were friends, but suddenly she dropped me. I never knew why. I felt a little like Phil must have felt. Years have passed and just recently we have been e-mailing and talking about getting together for lunch, but she has become ill, and I don’t think it will happen.

  In the middle of his relationship with Doris Sauter, Phil had his last serious romance, his swan song, h
e called it, with Joan Simpson. Joan, a small attractive brunette in her mid-thirties, had worked as a psychiatric social worker at the state hospital for the mentally ill at Napa. At the time she met Phil, in 1977, she was a client’s rights advocate for the retarded patients at Sonoma State Hospital.

  Joan had read Phil’s novels in college. She had loved Confessions of a Crap Artist. She told me, “It blew my socks away. Then I read Ubik. I looked for everything Philip K. Dick had written. I read everything he’d published two or three times over. I thought he was the closest thing to a genius writer in the USA. He stretched your mind and delighted you. A philosopher, a poet, just tremendous.”

  An old flame of Joan’s, Ray Torrence, also a science fiction writer, said to Joan one day in late spring 1977, “Who would you most like to meet in the world? Bill Graham, the rock music promoter, or Philip K. Dick?”

  “Philip K. Dick,” she responded. Ray told her, “I’m going to make that happen.” And he wrote Phil, told him about Joan, and gave him Joan’s phone number. About a week later, the phone rang at Joan’s place. A voice said, “Hello, Joan, this is Philip K. Dick.”

  Joan said sarcastically, “Oh, sure.”

  But it was Philip K. Dick. He invited her to come down to Santa Ana and see him. She had a vacation coming, and two weeks later, she drove down to Santa Ana in her Honda Civic.

  As Joan approached the huge white stucco apartment complex locked away by its wrought-iron gate, she thought of The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. She was awed. She felt as if she were walking into a Philip K. Dick novel.

  She rang the bell, and, as she walked up the stairs a bearded face peeked over the railing. “Hello,” it said, and disappeared. Joan continued walking up to the open doorway. She saw a big, bearded man with a pot belly, built like a bull, jumping from one foot to another like a little kid.

  “You’re a fox, you’re a fox. Come in, come in,” he said as he grabbed her by the wrist. “I have to call up Jeter.” He called up Jeter: “She’s a fox.”

  Joan was flattered, but thought it was unusually adolescent behavior for a grown man. They sat down to talk. She was nervous, but Phil’s humble manner soon put her at ease. Phil invited Joan to stay in the extra bedroom and she accepted, staying three weeks. She gave Doris, who was living in the adjacent apartment, some of her chemotherapy shots. She met Tessa, who was often there with little Christopher. Phil played on the floor with Christopher like another child. Joan noticed that Tessa was tolerant of Phil and kidded him a lot. She met Phil’s friends, an adoring young crowd. She was the oldest person there. All Phil’s friends told her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to Phil.

  “Phil talked to me for hours and hours,” Joan told me, “about life, ideas, novels, writing, The Exegesis, acid trips, Nancy, Anne, Kleo. He was open about everything. He told me about his entire past, his books—that certain anti-heroines were Anne, certain anti-heroines were Nancy. Those books were real.”

  Phil was magnanimous with Joan. “I’ll take care of everything,” he said. “Let’s get married.” But Joan refused:

  We talked, we hugged, we kissed a little, but mostly I seemed to do a lot of mothering. Phil was so tentative, it’s as if I would have to stand him on his head and do the dance of the seven veils around him. What would it take to get this guy to perk up sexually? He would hug me, but it was more like a child. He didn’t seem to know that he was a sexual being.

  At that point in time, Phil was really and truly kissing it all good-bye—he was checking out on life. He was extremely smart, amazing—but if I had met him at Napa State Hospital, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was nuts, paranoid, tremendously suspicious, afraid to have people in. He had great difficulty in leaving the apartment, great difficulty in dealing with money. He was taken care of by his agent, his banker. Tessa and Doris were there telling him, “Don’t take too many drugs,” and going to the grocery store for him. I felt he was damaged, that he had given up on certain areas of his life that had been too difficult. Things were going physiologically wrong. He would get excited and run around for three hours and then collapse with physical and mental exhaustion. At other times, he would get into a state of almost catatonia. He would say, “I have the flu.”

  He wasn’t taking recreational drugs, but he had many prescriptions and several doctors prescribing for him; by this time the drugs had, of necessity, all become prescribed. He could afford to have people take care of him legally, financially, psychologically. He stayed home and petted the cat, talked to me, and listened to the record player.

  Joan’s feeling was that Phil had never been a healthy person.

  Joan had to go home. Her vacation time was up. She invited Phil to come up to her place. She thought it was amazing that he came. While she had been in Santa Ana, it had been a major project for him to get the car out of the garage and go to the store. “Okay, it’s time for me to go north,” he said, and got in Joan’s Honda. After they had been in Sonoma two weeks, he told Joan he wanted to go over to Point Reyes and see Anne, Laura, and Jayne, although, he told Joan, he was frightened of Anne. She had used and abused him and treated him like a servant.

  When Joan and Phil came to Point Reyes on a pleasant summer afternoon, the visit wasn’t all that meaningful to me, even though I hadn’t seen Phil for seven years. I never enjoyed hearing about Phil’s girlfriends, much less meeting one. But I politely gave them tea. I thought Joan was Phil’s Episcopal nun friend who had cancer. Laura and Jayne and I were readying our horse-vaulting team to go to the national meet (where we would win the “B” Team Championship of the United States), and my energy was focused on this imminent competition.

  Laura, now a tall platinum blonde beauty of seventeen years, vaulted over the car for Phil and showed him her horse. Phil was amazed. He had expected to see a little girl—the ten-year-old he had seen last—not a grown young woman.

  Joan said that Phil had been very apprehensive about coming to see me that day, but afterward it was as if a great weight had been lifted from him: “The horror image of you, Anne, had been dispelled.” But Phil told Joan that he was terribly disappointed that he hadn’t found the skinny young blonde mother of little girls that he’d expected to find. Anne didn’t “emote” the way he’d remembered. But, Joan said, “A kind of peace seemed to settle on him after this visit.”

  Then he told Joan that, of the older girls, he’d always loved Jayne the best. It was Jayne that he should’ve married, not Hatte. When Joan told me this in 1983, we both looked at each other in a kind of amazed horror. We agreed that it was a bizarre utterance.

  Phil told Joan that he was too afraid of Nancy to visit her—Nancy, the most fragile and nonthreatening person I have ever met.

  After Phil had been in Sonoma a few weeks, he asked Joan to come back to Santa Ana with him. She decided to quit her job and go. After the couple returned to Santa Ana, they started planning a permanent relationship. “We decided to set up house together in Sonoma. In July, Phil bought furniture for the apartment we found and we shared the cost of a washer and dryer.”

  In September 1977, Phil had been invited to Metz, France for the Festival International de la Science-Fiction. He would be the Guest of Honor, provide the keynote speech, and accept the Grand Prix du Festival (the Graoully d’Or), for A Scanner Darkly. He invited Joan to go with him. Phil was excited to be going to the country that appreciated his work so much. When he arrived there, he found beautiful hardcover editions of his novels in every bookstore. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize by some of his French followers.

  But for Joan, “The trip was horrible. The main thing I did was take care of Phil, wash his undies, make him eat, put him to bed, and tell him, ‘Don’t worry, Phil, I am here, and I will protect you from the dark powers of the universe.’ Phil was brave to go to France.”

  During the stay in Metz, Joan was sick in bed, off and on, for two weeks, although she also went out with Phil between bouts of flu. But Phil told acq
uaintances that Joan had had a nervous breakdown, that’s why she was staying in bed. He described her rocking back and forth, refusing to go out because her hairdresser hadn’t done her hair right. He continued to tell this story after he returned to Santa Ana. To this day, Phil’s friends in southern California believe that Joan had a nervous breakdown on that trip.

  “When we returned,” Joan told me, “the relationship had started to fall apart and I was ready to come home to Sonoma. I said, in effect, to Phil, ‘The house is ready. Come on up.’ Phil would say, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow, I’ll be there next week.’ I had made it clear that I needed to continue to lead my own life and could not run down to Santa Ana with him all the time. But he wasn’t going to move up to Sonoma and I wasn’t going to move down to Santa Ana. He was involved with Doris and her cancer before, during, and after his relationship with me.”

  Phil told all his friends that Joan had dumped him after he bought furniture for her and that there was another man involved with her at the same time she was offering to share her apartment with him. Every friend of Phil’s knew about the stove and refrigerator that Joan, faithlessly, let Phil buy for her. Phil told Tim that Joan had assigned him a windowless room in their house, that he had paid more than his fair share, that when they split up, she wouldn’t let him take the hi-fi speakers, that he felt stifled by Joan, and that they were at odds over the decor of the house.

  Joan’s views were quite different: “I would’ve had to sustain me and Phil both. I would’ve tried this if I had been younger and dumber. I loved Phil, but was not in love with him. I viewed him as an Einstein-like person, who was so lost in his own brilliance that he couldn’t tie his own shoelaces. I didn’t want to be the one to do it for him, as much as I admired his genius.”