The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Dick Daniels gave me a lead to Gerry Ackerman, but the latter was no longer in the Art History department at Stanford, as Daniels had thought. I finally located him at Pomona College. He generously sent me a long excerpt from his work-in-progress, a biography of his friend composer Dick Maxfield. He thanked me for getting him started on the part that included Phil. He was very encouraging and told me I had to buy a computer to work on, so I did. I don’t think he liked the finished book, though; he never got back to me about it. I believe it must have upset him.

  Gerry Ackerman had come from Santa Cruz. He described teenage Phil as “rounded in all his forms, a little thick around the middle. This may have been moderate heaviness or even just a normal, unathletic body. [He had] rather straight hair that fell down over his face and ears, the start of a moustache and a vigorous peach-fuzz on his cheeks, just an occasional pimple. He didn’t care about his clothes, but simply wore the ordinary…. Good humored, full of enthusiasm for certain things, intellectual in that he was always posing questions, good ones. Always ready to take a walk or go on a trip into Oakland on the street car, or the bus, a good companion.”

  At school Phil had crushes from time to time on various girls. Dick Daniels noticed, “That winning openness made it possible for him to establish a relationship, although he would never go to a dance or any school activity; it would have been foreign for him. He also had a crush in a sophomore English class on a young new teacher, Mrs. Wolfson, a refreshing breeze of a teacher compared with others whose classes I had taken. Mrs. Wolfson was attractive, outgoing, and knew something about the world. Phil was greatly taken by her.”

  I interviewed Margaret Wolfson, Phil’s high school English teacher, over the telephone. Phil had told me about her years ago. She was the ex-wife of William Wolfson, Phil’s divorce attorney.

  In her English class at Berkeley High, Margaret Wolfson found that the results of the assignments that she gave Phil were not what she had asked for, but the stories he handed in were so extraordinary that she suggested that he send one of them off to Galaxy magazine: “They were very professional, astonishing for a boy in high school.”

  Phil learned to speak fluently in German, read German, and later used some German in his novels. He studied physics and many years later told his stepsister, Lynne, “In high school I had to take a complicated physics test, but I had studied all the wrong things and didn’t know the answers at all. I sat there in a total panic. All of a sudden I heard this clear, bell-like voice saying, ‘It’s really very simple.’ Then the voice proceeded to give me all the answers!”

  George Koehler developed polio and was in bed all summer. Phil came over to George’s house to help him with his studies and to play games. He worried aloud to George, “I wonder if I have a mild case of polio.”

  Gerry Ackerman was at Phil’s house frequently, too: “Since his mother lived, more or less, upstairs … Phil had the downstairs … to himself. He had his Magnavox, which he bought by working part-time at the record store, his stack of records, and his file of pulps. We had a freedom in this small front living room that I had never had any place else as a child.”

  Jerry’s account of his own adolescence in his unpublished manuscript also told about Phil: “For a high school boy of that era, Phil had an extensive record collection and good equipment. Phil listened to Toscanini on Saturday and the New York Philharmonic on Sunday. Since the available recordings at that time (all shellac) were not so expensive (it was wartime), it was quite possible for an avid listener to have a critical opinion on all five available recordings of, for example, the Pastoral Symphony, and Phil did.” Jerry remembered Phil’s excitement when Bruno Walter’s recording of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was released.

  Once Jerry lent Phil his album of the Beethoven Sixth Symphony done by the Minneapolis Orchestra, conducted by Mitropoulos. “There was a passage in the storm sequence where Mitropoulos had encouraged both the sound engineer and the piccolo player to make an entry on a very loud high note. Phil told me the next day, ‘Boy, I was enjoying that Beethoven you lent me, lying on the floor with my head inside the soundbox, when that piccolo came in and almost deafened me.’ He must have had the set out from the wall and put his head in through the back behind the speaker.”

  At Christmas, Jerry gave Phil the Helen Traubel recording of the immolation scene from Die Gotterdammerung, which at $2.50 for a two-record album was an extravagant gift for a young boy. Jerry once lost a bet with Phil that a composer named Buxtehude really lived. “I remember we were crossing Shattuck Avenue at the time. He assured me he really had lived, and that Bach had walked fifty miles to hear him play. He demonstrated this to me in a book as soon as we got home.”

  Phil and Dick Daniels had long discussions about why Tchaikovsky wasn’t as good as Beethoven. Phil played Beethoven on the piano and could memorize a composition very quickly. He loved early Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schumann. Phil used to delight in getting Daniels to talk about what was wrong with Tchaikovsky. Daniels remembered that he could be gulled into something like that. “I thought well of myself, was pretty pompous. Phil would make me listen to a piece of music I was unfamiliar with, convince me it was by Tchaikovsky and get me to say all kinds of stupid things about it. And then, reveal, ‘Well, actually, this wasn’t Tchaikovsky at all.’ “All in front of other people. ‘This was a work of Berlioz.’ I had a tendency to be pretentious, and he would think of endless, inventive ways of nipping me in that tendency. A little sadism, a little putting himself up and me down, but mostly it was kidding. It was done with good humor and not really intended to be painful. He was constantly devising tricks and situations in which his friends could be embarrassed. That was simply part of his style and made life fun.”

  Dick Daniels convinced Phil to usher with him at the symphony. But Phil couldn’t stand it and would never go again. Years later when we were living together, Phil told me that he had a terrible vertigo attack; something irreversible happened to his psyche when he was ushering at the symphony with Dick. He said that his being had sunk down into itself—from then on, it was as if he could only see out into the world with a periscope, as if he were in a submarine. He felt that he had never recovered his ability to perceive the world directly. (Just another little conversation with Phil.)

  Phil told Dick Daniels that he had a morbid fear that he couldn’t get to the toilet in time, so he didn’t want to go to concerts. Daniels thought Phil made up strange reasons for not doing things he didn’t want to do, that this was just a convenient ploy: “He used the excuse about the toilet and copped out of situations he didn’t want to get into.”

  Daniels never saw Dorothy out of bed. She must have come home from work tired and gone up to her bedroom after fixing a simple dinner to read the books and magazines that she was addicted to. Daniels remembered that she was terribly thin and pale and had long black hair:

  Phil’s relationship to Dorothy was an odd one. He seemed kind of coldly distant, forth-rightly answering her back, sometimes impertinently. She seemed to be amused by it. I would say it rolled off her back like water off a duck’s. Phil was very sassy with her, more so with his parent than any other I knew. Phil came and went pretty much as he pleased. He kept regular hours, though; he was far from wild. He was quite well regulated from the standpoint of his habits, quite repressed, as most of us were at that time.

  Phil was a very complex person, impossible to predict. He could be offended by any kind of directness. Something you might say in jest or whimsy, he would interpret as an assault of some kind and turn it into an unintended slight. He had a great capability for manufacturing drama around him. He was very precipitous in his behavior. He jumped to conclusions. You had to be able to watch Phil both as a friend and a manipulator; he was both at the same time. Reclusive though he was, he had a great capacity to attract people to himself. When he decided to put himself out, he could scrape up acquaintances virtually out of thin air. If he wanted to make friends with someone, he did it w
ith great social ease, he moved right in. But he was usually standoffish.

  “At Berkeley High, Phil never joined everyone on the slope,” Leon Rimov told me, “where we all went to socialize and eat lunch and smoke. He kept to himself. The class at Berkeley High was very close and had lots of fun but Phil didn’t take part. Phil never played ball in high school or did any sports.”

  Dick Daniels also had mentioned Pat Flannery to me. After calling the Berkeley High Alumni Association, (they invited me to join and come to their annual banquet), I finally found Pat Flannery in the Berkeley telephone book, the last person of my search. I made many calls to his wife, who didn’t feel there was any way I would be able to see him in person; he was too busy. When I finally reached Pat on the phone he said that he was going to come out to Point Reyes to meet me, but it turned out that his wife was not in favor of this plan and we ended up talking on the phone. Even this phone appointment was hard to schedule. Finally, we did have a good phone conversation.

  At Berkeley High, Pat was known as “Phil’s shadow.” He was a very quiet guy. He never spoke; he smiled. He was the same height as Phil with similar hair. He was in the same class, the same room. Pat met Phil in 1943:

  Phil was fourteen and very erudite, very intellectual. He expressed himself extremely well. He was also very opinionated and temperamental. He didn’t care about his personal appearance. He liked simple things. He liked jigsaw puzzles; we spent hours putting them together. Phil and his mother were very close. Phil was thinking about changing his name to Philip Kindred, his mother’s name. I observed a little bit of friction between Phil and his mother, but nothing out of the ordinary. Phil wasn’t well in high school. He took ephedrine all the time for his asthma. He withdrew at these times. His mother was very involved with his illnesses.

  Phil had a subdued temper, which expressed itself in “So long! I’m leaving.” He was a loner who didn’t mind mixing when it was time to do so. I remember how Phil hated the Nazis and gave Walter Lanferman, who was from a German background, a really hard time.

  I taught Phil how to play chess. By the third game, Phil was winning every time. Phil liked new things and I was always finding new things for Phil to get in to. Phil and I both took an aptitude test in a magazine. Phil’s test showed that he had scientific aptitude and my test showed that I had business aptitude. Phil told me, “Pat, you can come over and look through my microscope,” and we made a bet as to who would be making more money ten years after college.

  Phil showed Pat a story he had written based on the Faust legend but in a modern setting.

  Pat continued, “Phil had a small circle of friends in which he was very influential. He was certainly very influential over me at that time. One time Phil pushed me into a bramble bush. Another time he threw a dart and hit me in the hand and drew blood. I remember going with Phil to a movie, a frothy little movie called Knickerbocker Holiday. Phil got up in the middle, saying, ‘I just can’t take it. I’m leaving!’ I left too, trailing along behind, although I happened to be enjoying the movie.”

  Gerry Ackerman was the only one among Phil’s friends who had an idea that he, Jerry, was gay. Jerry used to occasionally, daringly, take “one of their hands in mine while walking. That, of course, only at night and usually on the always dark Allston Way. Once Phil told me that his mother had complained about the practice, so either she or someone else saw us walking hand in hand. He told me rather matter of factly about this, without scandal or admonition, as if it had no special import even in the interpretation his mother might have given the incident. This was not a regular occurrence with Phil, I believed it happened only this once. It didn’t appeal to him and he submitted only out of friendship, perhaps a little curious and a little flattered as well.”

  Phil dropped out of high school in his senior year. His friend Pat Flannery thought “he was sick or something.” Phil’s picture doesn’t appear in the Berkeley High Senior Yearbook.

  Phil told me, “I dropped out of my last year of high school. I had a nervous breakdown and had to have a home teacher. I was walking down an aisle in a class and the floor tilted away under my feet.”

  Once a week, after this, Phil made the long bus trip to San Francisco’s Langley Porter Clinic for psychotherapy. He told his friends at University Radio, where he continued to work part-time, that he went to Langley Porter because he was being studied as a gifted person, a continuation of studies that had been done since he was a young child. Did they tell him at Langley Porter to move away from his mother? This advice would have been consistent with the beliefs in vogue that most psychological maladies were of psychogenic origin and mainly the mother’s fault. Phil told me that it was difficult for him to get away from Dorothy.

  He rented a room in a boardinghouse that Gerry Ackerman had found, a house on Milvia Street in which some gay poets of that era lived: Jack Spicer; Robert Duncan; Philip Lamantia, who had a girlfriend; and Gerry Ackerman, Duncan’s friend of the moment. Dorothy was upset about Phil moving to the Milvia Street house. She was worried that he was becoming a homosexual.

  In the small world of San Francisco Bay Area intellectuals, my first husband, poet Richard Rubenstein, had also known Robert Duncan when Richard was auditing classes at Berkeley. In the late 1940s, when we were first married and had just moved to San Francisco, Philip Lamantia, who had become a well-known San Francisco poet at the age of seventeen, was an occasional visitor to our San Francisco apartment.

  Gerry Ackerman remembered that one day, Phil and Jack Spicer were listening to the Kipnis recording of Boris Gudunov. Jerry waited for the music to end to knock on the door of Phil’s room because he didn’t want to interrupt them. When the music stopped and he finally knocked, they lamented, “You just wrecked our mood. Boris has just died.”

  Fourteen

  A YOUNG MAN

  By 1947, Berkeley was “as avant-garde a place as there was. Artists and writers were coming from New York to break into the life there. Every group had a black member and a homosexual member. People were involved with free love. Marriage was like musical chairs. Life was fun, stimulating, exciting.”

  —Vince Lusby

  Berkeley was divided between the students and some of the faculty versus the old inhabitants. The former were deeply involved with left-wing politics and the McCarthy investigations. Both liberals and radicals were fearful of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which was secretly observing all the political activity and the radical bookstores. The Progressive Party office was just around the corner from University Radio where Phil worked. All Phil’s friends were leftist. In the 1948 election, Phil voted for Henry Wallace.

  Lois Mini and I corresponded after she moved to Bogota, Columbia. Lois had been married to one of Phil’s best friends at University Radio, Norman Mini. I phoned her to see what she remembered about Phil’s life. Lois suggested that I contact Vince Lusby. “He loves to gossip,” she told me. She, herself, couldn’t recall much, although she believed, “Phil was ‘a naïf’ [a person marked by a lack of worldly experience].”

  Vince Lusby and his wife, Virginia, were easy to find. Vince and Virginia were still living in Richmond in the same house where Phil and I had visited them twenty years earlier. I hadn’t realized how important Vince had been in Phil’s early life. Vince, now in his sixties, had just had a triple bypass and a cataract operation. Virginia hardly seemed to have changed at all. Vince was very encouraging about my project and anxious for me to be the one to do a biography of Phil. He gave me the names of more of Phil’s friends from the University Radio crowd: Bill Trieste, John Gildersleeve, and Betty Jo Rivers. I made the trek to Richmond several times to interview him and Virginia. After I met Pat Hollis in Oakland and told her I had seen Vince, the two of them got together and exchanged reminiscences.

  Vince had met Phil in November 1947, when Phil was eighteen years old. He was still living at home and taking high school classes from a home teacher. Herb Hollis, the owner of University Radio, had brought Vince, a jazz expert,
down from Sacramento to run Art Music, Herb’s new record store on Telegraph Avenue. Art Music became enormously successful. Vince was soon running two radio jazz programs, one on KPFA and one on KRE. Vince and Phil became best friends, although Phil had some reservations because Vince had already been through several wives and a number of girlfriends. Vince soon became Phil’s mentor.

  Phil invited Vince to his home for Thanksgiving dinner. Vince noted, “Dorothy, Phil’s mother, wasn’t particularly sexy—I thought she was somewhat colorless. She served a fine dinner, though. Phil seemed to be boss of the situation—maybe it was just a pose. Kay Linde, who also worked at University Radio, was at this dinner, too. Phil thought Kay was the greatest thing on Earth. He was in love with her, but later I became her boyfriend.”

  Vince remembered that Phil was charming when his mood was right. He described Phil as a mild-mannered person, pleasant to be around, “and he could talk…. [H]e had a line of b.s. that wouldn’t quit. He was a strange combination of wisdom and naïveté, but he wrote great graffiti in the bathroom—original, full of wit, some in verse.”

  Phil made a whole new group of friends at University Radio and Art Music. By then, he was a well-constructed, clean-shaven, active young man who got along well with his fellow workers. In a photograph of that period he is quite good-looking.

  I phoned Bill Trieste, a premier Bay Area announcer, and was impressed with his rich baritone voice—the perfect voice for a radio announcer.

  When he met Phil in 1948, Bill had just become an unpaid announcer on KPFA, the new educational radio station, one of the first in the nation. He worked at University Radio to earn a living, marking time while the transmitter for KPFA was being completed. Later, he became an announcer for the reputedly Communist radio station.