The Search for Philip K. Dick
Page 27
For the spring semester of 1938, Phil decided to change his name, and Dorothy let him. He registered at the Hillside School as Jim Dick. Report cards from the Hillside School say about Phil, a.k.a. Jim: “Jim does fine work, his work shows good organization of thought and considerable maturity of expression…. Quite popular with his playmates. A fine sense of right … self reliant … a reliable boy … efficient … business-like … courteous when given a position of leadership. He has a great degree of poise and self-possession for a boy of his age…. It has been a great pleasure to teach Jim. He is original and has added much to the group…. [H]e has a fine future ahead.”
Thirteen
BOYHOOD IN BERKELEY
At thirteen, Phil had already taught himself to type and was contributing to Berkeley’s daily newspaper. His mother saved every article that he had written. At fourteen he wrote his first novel, Return to Lilliput
—from a conversation between Anne Dick and Philip K. Dick in the early 1960s
Phil and Dorothy lived in a small cottage in the backyard of a house at 1214 Walnut Street, a pleasant neighborhood a few blocks northwest of the University of California campus. Phil’s friends entered from the rear of the lot that bordered on Live Oak Park. George Koehler told me, “The household was minimal, but adequate, cluttered, but the bed was made.”
Dick Daniels was Phil’s best Berkeley High School friend. When I interviewed him, he told me I should contact another one of Phil’s best friends from junior high school days, George Koehler. I was able to locate George in Orange County through the California State Medical Board. George and his wife drove up from Los Angeles to Point Reyes in their motor home, and we spent an enjoyable afternoon picnicking and talking on my patio. George was a tall man who walked with a cane, the effect of the polio he’d had as a boy. He had studied psychiatry, medicine, and dentistry and ran an investment business. He had carefully thought about what he would say in the interview. His memories of Phil were organized and detailed.
Dorothy didn’t come home from work until six o’clock; Phil was out of school at 3:30 and completely on his own. Even when home, Phil’s mother, “didn’t seem to direct him at all. She gave Phil the freedom to go his own way and do what he wanted. She was not bossy or mean. If Phil wanted to stay out somewhere to dinner he would call home; he was very considerate. Phil was an independent person but I noticed that he felt abused—about what, I couldn’t make out.”
Leon Rimov, a friend from junior high school, phoned me after Phil’s death. Leon, an architect, businessman, and mountain climber, had an incredible memory for the events of forty years ago.
Leon perceived a somewhat different scene than George did: “Phil’s mother was very young looking and ill a lot of the time. Phil was depressed because of his mother’s illness. He was very close to Dorothy. She would never say “son”; Phil was the man of the house; he was like her little husband. There was a lot of friction between Phil and his mother. She was always telling him what to do and he would argue with her. He was in the way of her writing, too. Phil talked about going to see his dad; he talked of him with respect and enjoyed spending time with his dad.”
Edgar had remarried and become the administrator and principal lobbyist for the California Cattlemen’s Association, a prestigious job that paid well. A workaholic, he didn’t find time to see his son often.
Phil had a lot of friends, but he didn’t go around in a crowd. His relations were one on one. In junior high school, Phil already knew about Rigoletto, and was playing ping-pong and chess with George at the neighborhood boy’s club. George said, “I wanted Phil to go swimming with me at the YMCA pool, but Phil told me that he had almost drowned when he was nine and since then had a terrible fear of water.”
Phil attended nearby Garfield Junior High like other Berkeley college-prep kids and did very well. He was an avid reader, liked H. G. Wells, and was already collecting science fiction magazines. He received all A’s and in Advanced English wrote “fascinating stories.” The stories he wrote for class were not at all science fiction or fantasy stories. One was about how World War II would end. Another was about a summer trip on which he fished with his father at a river up north. George told me, “He enjoyed his father so much. They talked and cleaned fish but it was only for a day.”
In school, Phil was interested in science and in intellectual pursuits. He and George invented and constructed modest scientific apparatuses out of wood for experiments. George remembered that in the shop course, Phil became frustrated trying to tin solder a small metal box. He told George, “If I die and go to hell, this is what I’ll have to do for all eternity.”
Leon remembered that Phil made lie detector boxes, “which fooled a lot of people. He enjoyed fooling people. Phil also made some weird kind of electric boxes with which he scared the teachers. Phil was always driving the teachers crazy about the Nazis; he was always figuring out how the Nazis would’ve done things; he drove a couple of teachers wild. Phil loved to play Nazi roles. He had a good sense of humor and had fun. He was always figuring out how things could be more efficient.
“Phil formed the Rocky Creek Club because he didn’t like another group in junior high school. The Rocky Creek Club was supposed to ‘take care’ of this other group. Phil was always setting up good guys vs. bad guys situations. He was never satisfied with tranquil waters; he had to stir something up. Phil also formed a Bible club but he was not a religious fellow.”
Phil had a crush on a girl named June Barrett. He composed a poem for her and tried to print it on a toy printing press with rubber type. He didn’t talk about sex and girls with his friends, though. Once he and George saw a used condom in the street. Phil told George, “Don’t touch it, you’ll get a disease!”
Phil didn’t have a bike; he bought records with his money instead. He loved all forms of classical music, and as well as collecting records, he played the piano quite well. George came over one day when Phil was playing a funeral march; then he played a funeral march by Chopin. “Who composed the first one?” George asked. “I liked that one the best.” Phil said, “I did.”
Phil was sick and pale and out of school from time to time. He also was hyperactive. He ate a lot of cookies and chocolate and was overweight. For lunch he would eat several candy bars and some ice cream. At one point, he told me when we were married, he had juvenile diabetes but it cleared up. He had asthma attacks throughout his childhood. More than one school friend remembered that Phil was always taking ephedrine at his mother’s insistence—not very good for an adolescent brain.
George remembered: “Phil discussed a Rorschach test with me in seventh grade. Where did Phil learn about that when he was eleven? At that time, the average seventh grader didn’t know anything about Rorschach tests! Phil, in fact, made up his own, and he and I played Rorschach test. Phil knew all about the Thematic Apperception Test, too. He knew the names of various phobias. He told me, ‘I have some I can’t fight.’”
For the school season, 1942—43, Phil went to a music-oriented prep school, California Preparatory Academy, in Ojai. He learned to operate the PBX at the school switchboard. It fascinated him. The boys all smoked, and he thought that was pretty neat, too.
A list he sent his mother asking for some records that she might send him at school gives some indication of his musical tastes:
Records I would like in order of preference:
Jupiter Symphony; Mozart. (Sym. 41) Victor. $4.00
Symphony #1; Brahms. $3.34 (Music Appreciation Records only). With album $3.97 Beethoven, “Emperor” Concerto, Piano Concerto #5. Victor played by Schnabel. Manual Secq. $3.50
Beethoven Violin Concerto in D maj. Victor. $5.00
Schumann, Piano concerto in A min. $4.50. Victor only
Firebird Suite by Stravinsky. $3.50. Victor
Bach, K.P.E. Concerto for Orchestra in D major. Victor. $2.50
Barber of Seville, Rossini. Victor. $8.50
Song of the Flea, Moussorgsky. $1.00
Tschaikowsky, Symphone #3 (Polish). Victor. $5.50
Tschaikowsky, Symphony #2 (Little Russian). Victor, $4.50
Phil wrote many letters to Dorothy from Cal Prep, displaying varying moods: “I am perfectly miserable…. I’m so used to having all my things private and not to be touched…. I am getting sick and tired of knowing that the second I leave my room it will be messed up…. I just don’t fit into the group here. I am afraid that I may decide to leave….”
Dorothy must have advised him to quit the school and come home, since he writes: “Gee whiz, I guess that I had just better not write unless everything I say is strictly cheerful. I AM NOT COMING HOME. I have no wish to, and I don’t think that what I said in that letter could be interpreted to mean that I wished to come home…. I think that you and Meemaw are too ready to have me come home…. For goodness sake, don’t tell me that I can come home, because it is just like when you would say, ‘All right, you don’t have to go to school today.’ … When I get a letter like you sent me it REALLY makes me homesick…. You have hurt my feelings by suggesting that I am such a sissy that I can’t stand a little work!”
And in another letter:
Now don’t get the idea again that just because I am homesick I want to come home. I am just not that kind of a man, who would run away from something that was difficult to get used to….
If you write the Doctor say (instead of saying that I am not able to work, which I am) that I am behind in my studies anyway, and that working in the kitchen is making it almost impossible for me to keep up with my classes. Of course I CAN get my work done, by doing it when I should be at gym…. My asthma has been bothering me slightly…. I’m losing weight (my belt is too loose). I attribute it to the fact that 2 times a day we have potatoes, I do without, and so do not get much to eat….
I suppose that you can see by my letters that I am very changeable, but I can’t help it. Sometimes I am sure I want to go home, sometimes I am doubtful, sometimes I am sure that I want to stay. I just don’t know what to do, but I’m not doing anything for a while. I am without funds now, not even enough for a postage stamp. (I had to borrow for this.)
In another letter his mood changes:
I’ll try to write as often as possible, and if I don’t write very much, it is not because I am not thinking of you, but because I haven’t time…. It is compulsory to go to church, besides going to chapel every day and vespers on Sunday. I’ll be a lot different when I get home, I know that. I’m picking up good study habits, and am changing my character every day. To the better, I believe….
I think that I am doing pretty well here, leaving a soft and easy home to enter a boarding school and working for my education. I am very proud of myself, because I am homesick only every now and then…. Month end, 23 to 27, every one goes home. I will feel pretty lonely then, thinking of everyone with their families…. I don’t mind working. Write Dr. Brush and find out how much more he wants to have me not do work, and then I’ll work anyway, because I don’t mind working…. However, if you could INCREASE MY ALLOWANCE, then I would not mind working at all….
Phil only went to this school for one year. He went back to Garfield Junior High School in the fall of 1943. During the last half of ninth grade, when he was fifteen, he had recurrent attacks of vertigo; the classroom would spin around him. After one of these attacks he couldn’t get up out of bed for several days.
Earlier, in the summer of 1943, he had started to work part-time at University Radio, a job he would hold for the next eight years. University Radio did radio repairs and sold refrigerators, phonographs, washers, dryers, heaters, and television sets. Herb Hollis, the owner, was like a father to Phil. Later, Herb added an extensive record department and also opened Art Music, a very successful store on Telegraph Avenue near the university that sold only records. The people at University Radio and Art Music were like Phil’s family and appear in book after book, even his last book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, written forty years later.
I went down the stairs into the basement of the Pellucidar bookstore in Berkeley where the science fiction was located to look for secondhand copies of Phil’s published novels. I bought all his science fiction novels after his death. Even in 1982, they were already hard to find. The salesman, Jerry Kleier, turned out to be a knowledgeable Phil Dick fan. He loved the early novels but didn’t care for the ones written in the seventies. I told him about my project and he told me that he knew the wife of Phil’s old employer, Pat Hollis, who occasionally came into the bookstore and talked with him about Phil. He even knew her telephone number. I phoned “Perky Pat” Hollis and she met me at a charming little coffee shop in Oakland, just over the Oakland-Berkeley line. We sat and drank coffee while she told me about Phil and University Radio:
Phil was a darling, very intelligent, very quiet, very kind, and a hard worker. He loved Beethoven. Beethoven was his hero. Phil and Beethoven had the same birthday, December 16. Phil really liked Herb. Phil had a wonderful sense of humor. He picked it up from Herb. Herb was a live wire, very positive, and always right. He was a good husband, a wonderful father.
It was Pat Hollis who had given me the name of Dick Daniels. She told me that he was the administrator of a large San Francisco Peninsula hospital and lived in Belmont, one of San Francisco’s suburban cities. I looked through several phone books, called a number of Danielses, and finally located the right one. Several months later we met at Dick’s hillside home.
We sat near his record player and his extensive record collection in the living room and drank coffee. I was using my new tape recorder for the first time. There was a little microphone on a wire attached to it. We talked for a long time, and Dick gave me wonderful information about Phil. I checked the tape recorder and none of it had come through. That treacherous little microphone had needed a battery. Some wonderful material had been lost. Dick had a battery, and we picked ourselves up and went on. I was happy to discover my Phil again in Daniels’ memories. In fact, Daniels himself, who seemed to be a very nice man, reminded me a lot of Phil. I wondered, had Phil taken on some of Daniels’ personality traits? Phil did this as he went though life. Dick Daniels had also worked at University Radio with Phil and gave me his thoughts about Herb Hollis and the other people there.
Dick said, “Most saw Herb as a decent, warm, charitable man who treated everyone well and had a wonderful sense of humor, yet Herb was very independent, had pet peeves, pet ideas, and didn’t like authority. No one could tell him anything! He had a tremendous amount of energy and was a man of all trades: carpentry, plumbing, electricity, etc. He worked both Saturdays and Sundays.”
Dick Daniels told me that one of the early contacts that Phil made at University Radio was Eldon Nicholls, the dwarf bookkeeper. Phil was very fond of Eldon. He became the model for Hoppy Harrington, the malignant repairman in Dr. Bloodmoney, although Eldon was afflicted by dwarfism, not phocomelia like Hoppy. Homer Thespian, one of the stream of “mad” radio repairmen working at University Radio, was part of the concept of Hoppy Harrington, too, and also perhaps the model for the schizophrenic boy in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Homer walked barefoot through the streets of Berkeley and went off to Napa occasionally to get shock treatments. He was extremely rude to Herb, who was very kind and tolerant toward him. Phil was in awe of Homer’s impertinence. Then there was Jose Flores, a homosexual, a lovely young man who killed himself. Phil cried when he heard about Jose’s death.
Phil started his sophomore year at Berkeley High School in January 1944. At this time, Dorothy and Phil lived in a small, modestly furnished two-story house, three or four blocks west of Grove Street, on Allston Way.
The house was somewhat messy, and Dick Daniels said it was “an eccentric household, even for Berkeley.” Meemaw, who doted on Phil, lived with them at intervals between trips to Colorado or times when she lived with Dorothy’s sister, Marion, in Richmond, an East Bay city nort
h of Berkeley. Marion was hospitalized on several occasions with schizophrenia. Dorothy had always been close to Marion, and along with Marion’s husband, Joe Hudner, was closely involved with her illness and treatment. Phil grew up in a household where a close relative was periodically committed to a mental hospital. It was an everyday experience.
Phil became best friends with Dick Daniels the first day the two attended Berkeley High School. Dick told me, “I walked into Fraulein Altona’s class on the attic floor of Berkeley High School and Phil motioned emphatically for me to come over and sit down next to him. This began a relationship which was very close, a deep and important friendship, one of the most significant I’ve ever had in my life.”
Daniels visited Phil’s house: “Phil had an old Royal typewriter in his bedroom and was doing some experimental writing at that period, but he didn’t show it around. He typed with the same kind of coordination that he used in piano playing. Phil was interested in literature and was reading science fiction extensively; he loved Heinlein. He had an enormous collection of science fiction magazines and books and haunted the secondhand stores looking for back copies of Astounding and Amazing magazines. I was always amazed that he could acquire such an immense pile of stuff and read it so quickly, cover to cover. There was no question he couldn’t answer about the material that he had read.”