There was a lot of misunderstanding between Phil and Dorothy. He would take things she would say and twist them around. One time she was over, and Phil and I used to wrestle and fool around, and she wrote to say she was afraid he'd hurt me. Not in a mean way-she had trouble communicating in a straightforward way; she had to write him a letter. He got so mad.
Phil and Dorothy's battles over drugs grew ever more heated. Before going into the details, it would be wise to recall that the sixties Zeitgeist lent to drugs a patina of glory and adventure lacking today even among avid users. When Phil took and talked drugs he thought he was being hip and was taken as such (Dr. Timothy Leary made a telephone fan call in spring 1969). Acid, pot, and hash held no special fascination. But pills ... ah, pills. He could mix, match, and fine-tune effects with Stelazine; muscle and stomach relaxants; Librium, Valium, and other tranks; Dexamil and all manner of speed-prescription quality preferred, white crosses (amphetamine pills) and street batches accepted. "It was," says Nancy, "like he was medicating himself-trying to get to a certain place."
One place he often tried to get to, with considerable success, was the state of inner focus required to write the way Phil nearly always wrote his novels-in streaks of two to three weeks. Says Nancy: "When we needed money, like when Isa was born and we were broke, he could just sit down and write a book and get money." Phil wrote nine full novels, parts of three others, and numerous stories and essays during his years with Nancy. It wasn't quite the rate of 1964, but at its heights it was awesome.
During the composition of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said in 1970, Phil poured out 140 pages in a forty-eight-hour session. Speed enabled him to work on little sleep and lifted him out of his searing depressions. Recalls Nancy: "His depressions just stopped him. He could go maybe three, four days without saying a word." Once he started a book, Phil's identification with his characters was extreme. During the writing of Androids, says Nancy, "Phil was working all night, and when he came to bed he was talking like a different person. He'd had some kind of experience while writing and thought he was someone else or somewhere else. "
Phil's primary source for pills were multiple prescriptions from a revolving group of doctors to whom he'd recite the requisite symptoms. This routine was and is a favorite method of users. Miriam Lloyd points out: "You could go to any meeting of Narcotics Anonymous and find out dope fiends are the cleverest people imaginable. Phil was way cleverer than most. In the world of drug abuse, prescription drugs are the most common." But Phil had further motivations for consulting psychiatrists. Recalls Nancy:
It seemed like he had this terrible fear of being crazy, so the psychiatrist would say you're not crazy. All the doctors would always tell him he was okay. He needed to hear that-he had a lot of anxiety. But he wasn't crazy. Even though he had crazy ideas sometimes, he knew what was going on all the time. He was never out of touch with reality.
Phil's fondness for speed led him to street dealers as well. These dealers tended to be in their teens and early twenties. They were a ubiquitous presence by 1967; Phil's stepdaughter Hatte, who attended San Rafael High School that year, heard through school friends that her father's house was a known locale for selling drugs.
From 1967 through the end of the decade, Phil and Nancy's life together became ever more difficult and desperate. Drugs were part of the problem, but only part. Entropic forces were shaking the once-placid household. First came the difficult adjustments that all parents face in caring for a new baby. Then Phil's two cats died. The ill tidings took on tragic proportions with the suicide of Maren Hackett in June 1967. In the next two years would come two more deaths-Anthony Boucher and Bishop James Pike, the two men who served most clearly as mentors to Phil, passed on. Now add in an IRS audit, economic instability, marital infidelity, the standard twisted weirdness of the California sixties, and the hairpin psychic risks of plotting SF novels that sought to mirror these realities. Loving couple though they were, Phil and Nancy were brought to their knees.
Weaving in and out of these crises were the mood pills-uppers, downers, and downright outers. Phil's pill consumption was marked by a near-blind confidence in the benefits the right drug at the right time could bestow. A typical example was his self-prescribed treatment of a "nervous breakdown" he suffered in July 1967. The primary catalyst here was Maren Hackett's suicide in June. Maren's woes had stemmed in part from the painful end of her affair with Bishop Pike; Phil and Nancy, who had seen it coming, were nonetheless shattered by her death. Maren had been a trusted source of encouragement to the younger couple.
In the weeks just prior to his "breakdown" Phil had been "mildly paranoid and very hostile," and then "what my psychiatrist called 'borderline psychotic symptoms' became the full and overt thing." The full breakdown lasted half a day and consisted "of vast distortions in per- ception"-horrible tastes, loss of memory and time sense, physical helplessness, acute terror while feeding Isa, suicidal urges. In addition, Phil misplaced "important IRS documents." So vivid were the distortions that Phil asked Nancy to hide his .22 pistol. But he battled through-"I took a good big dose of phenothiazines (sp) and made it over to see the Dr." (Stelazine, a phenothiazine, was the depressant Phil had urged on Anne in 1963.) Phil emerged "feeling active and vigorous and even elated-because I reasoned, I had met it head-on and licked it (however temporarily)." Now comes the paradoxical twist that marks so many of Phil's accounts of crisis:
The interesting thing, now that I look back on that day, is the amount I got done. At nine 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. [... ] 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.
Phil had good reason to fear the IRS. Whatever settlement he thought he had worked out soon fell apart. Continued audits of Phil's 1964 and 1965 returns (in which he reported twelve thousand and five thousand, respectively) led to ever-greater penalty demands. In a September 1967 letter Phil pleaded: "How can it go on and on? I have almost no money left." But Phil moved courageously from the frying pan into the fire when he signed (along with five hundred others) a "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" petition that appeared in the February 1968 Ramparts magazine. The signatories, in oposition to the Vietnam War, pledged: "1) None of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or any war-designated tax increase. 2) Many of us will not pay that 23% of our current income tax which is being used to finance the war in Vietnam." Phil's stance, which enabled him to influence public opinion without facing the psychological ordeal of leaving the house, nonetheless exacted high personal costs-an IRS seizure of his car in 1969, as well as an intense, lingering fear. In a 1979 Exegesis entry, Phil reflected: "Looking all this over I realize that the 'Ramparts' petition & then my failure to file until the war ended was not just an anti-war act, a dissenting, or even civil disobedience but an outright sacrifice of my freedom and career: the punishment was inevitable, as was Jesus' when he entered Jerusalem. & I knew it. By '74 I lived in terror of them arresting me [... ]"
• Phil at age eleven months.
• Phil and his father, Joseph Edgar Dick.
♦ Phil and his mother, Dorothy Kindred.
• Dorothy, circa 1927, just prior to becoming a mother.
• Phil at approximately age six, the time of his parents' divorce.
• Cowboy Phil.
• Phil (in foreground) with grandmother Edna Matilda Archer Kindred ("Meemaw"), aunt Marion Kindred, and grandfather Earl Kindred.
♦ Phil, with cat, outside the Francisco Street house in Berkeley. Photo by Kleo Mini
• Kleo Mini (then Apostolides) in 1948 high-school graduation photo.
• Phil and Anne Dick; Phil was pleased that Anne let him grow a beard.
• Phil with his cat, circa 1960.
• Klco with Norman Mini, early sixties. Kleo terns this a "fair representation" of her look
through the fifties.
• Phil, Nancy, and isa Dick, San Rafael, California, September 1968. Photo by William Sarill
• Phil in 1979. Photo by Doris Sauter
• Phil and Tessa Dick, 1973. Photo by Linda Hartinian
• Phil and Isa, circa 1977.
♦ Phil with cat in February 1982, just three days before the first of the fatal strokes. Photo by Gwen Lee
• The gravesite, in Fort Morgan, Colorado, of Phil and Jane.
The Ramparts petition was not Phil's only source of anxiety. He would speculate that somehow, by accident, he had depicted a vital, classified secret in his SF-and had aroused the government's suspicion. The two works Phil most often suspected, in this regard, were The Penultimate Truth (1964) (see Chronological Survey) and "Faith of Our Fathers," a story written for Harlan Ellison's SF anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which portrays a Chairman Mao-like totalitarian leader who conceals his true form by dosing the water supply with hallucinogens. Phil would later charge that Ellison's "Introduction" to "Faith of contained misstatements that had threatened his reputation and security. Ellison's piece included the following:
Philip K. Dick has been lighting up his own landscape for years, casting illumination by the klieg lights of his imagination on a terra incognita of staggering dimensions. I asked for Phil Dick and I got him. A story to be written about, and under the influence of (if possible), LSD. What follows, like his excellent offbeat novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, is the result of such a hallucinogenic journey.
Ellison recalls that Phil assured him that both "Faith of" and Palmer Eldritch were LSD-inspired; further, letters from that time by Doubleday editor Lawrence Ashmead-who supervised the Dangerous Visions project-confirm that Phil made no changes to the "Introduction" galleys. Phil's 1967 "Afterword" to the story itself stresses the LSD theme (though he did not say he had written under its influence). But in all editions of Dangerous Visions from 1975 on, there is an expanded "Afterword" in which Phil rebuts the acid-inspiration claim. It seems likely that Phil's 1975 denial is truthful and that the 1967 version sounded fun at the time.
Despite the later furor, Phil's friendship with Ellison, fueled by phone calls and occasional parties at Cons, continued. Ellison, who was at this time one of the most dominant figures in SF, saw Phil as one of the few writers in the field whose fervor and talent exceeded his own:
Phil, it seemed to me, was an outsider who was on one of those holy missions. Held by the madness and the demon. That's what drew me to him. I knew how painful it was for me, but I'm a tough little fucker and I knew how to handle it-I know how to fight back. Phil, I thought, was a flounderer in that area. He didn't know how to handle the business or life side of it. When he sat at the typewriter he was pure and clean and could do it, motivated by his madness that inspired his work. Beyond that, he kept getting shit upon. Mostly because of his own social ineptitudes. It was a strange feeling on my part in that he was more than my equal, probably a superior writer . . . the sort of writer I wanted to know. In that way I was parallel to Salieri looking to Mozart.
With fellow writers such as Ellison, Phil more than held his own as a dedicated professional. But in his strictly private life, the drugs were taking hold to the point where he looked to them for both solace and inspiration. Phil would go so far as to plan little festive occasions around pills. For example, Phil had managed to obtain a prescription for Ritalin, an upper intended for the relief of mild depression. (Its major side effects: high and low blood pressure, mood changes, heart irregularities.) Ritalin is contraindicated for persons with marked anxiety. Phil would save up a month's worth and down it all while close friends were over; the energy burst would fuel blue streak ideas and wild humor. The paradoxical truth is that drugs both estranged Phil from the world and intensified his sociability among fellow drug users.
One day in 1968, when Miriam Lloyd decided to throw away her pill stash, Phil rushed over to help (and salvage what he wanted):
So he helped me flush them. The last bottle, I said, "I don't even know what these are." Phil said, "Oh, these pills-you don't ever want to take these pills. I took these once and I ended up in Union City, which is a place you never want to be, especially on these pills." He hung out awhile, took some pills, drank some beer. He was a funny man.
Miriam points out that the sixties drug culture had an accepting, sharing ethic that contributed to Phil's fascination with it:
One of the things about the drug scene is that it creates instant intimacy. You have a gang, you have all this communal thing because, you know, joints are passed, trays of lines are passed, someone wants wine and we don't have any-quick, go get wine. Everyone's needs are taken care of.
Phil was really into being gracious-he loved it. He was incredibly egalitarian. Everything he liked, he just loved. He wasn't naive-he was very sophisticated and egalitarian. His politics were good, very humanistic. He really cared about people.
Phil seemed to be in his glory while attending the September 1968 SF Baycon, referred to as the "Drug Con" by many who attended. Several conventioneers, including Phil, ingested what they thought was THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) but proved to be PCP, a horse tranquilizer later known as angel dust. Nonetheless, Phil kept up active social rounds, socializing with Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, Philip Jose Farmer, Norman Spinrad, and-for the first time Roger Zelazny, with whom Phil had agreed, the previous October, to collaborate on Deus Irae.
At the Con there was considerable debate swirling around the SF "New Wave" that had been masterfully hyped by Ellison in conjunction with Dangerous Visions. Phil had his doubts about the substance of much "New Wave" writing. Still, he'd feared-as a fifties SF veteran-being regarded as passe (even though he had recently sold his first film option, on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). It was with relief that he wrote to his editor at Doubleday, Larry Ashmead, that his status had climbed since the '64 Con, due to the popularity of Palmer Eldritch.
Phil seems, at this time, to have been wracked by greater insecurities as to the worth of his writing than at any point since his Berkeley neophyte days. He would systematically underrate the novels he had produced since Palmer Eldritch. To stepdaughter Tandy he wrote in May 1969: "I haven't been able to do an important book since 1964, and I feel very unhappy about it." Phil later came to regard Ubik as a highly significant work, as has been discussed. As to "important" writing, mention should also be made of "The Electric Ant," a late-1968 story that is the finest of Phil's career. Protagonist Carson Poole thinks that he is a human being. But inadvertently he learns that he is really an "electric ant" (organic robot). Within him, a plastic punched tape roll serves as a "reality-supply construct." What happens, Poole asks, "if no tape passes under the scanner? No tape-nothing at all. The photocell shining upward without impedance?" Technicians inform him that he will merely "short out." But Poole is undeterred. "What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one microsecond. After that it doesn't matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to'under- stand or see." Poole opens himself up with a microtool and gets his wish. Read the story to learn the ending, which Phil said always frightened him.
But 1969 was a year of wheel-spinning by Phil's standards; the only novel he completed that year was a potboiler, Our Friends from Frolix 8, for Don Wollheim at Ace. In a March 1969 letter he explained his slump this way: "I have a theory: I can't sit and write one novel following another; between each I have to emerge from my shell and be with people; otherwise my novels resemble each other too much." But Phil was reading everything he could find concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls; the theological concerns fueled by his encounters with Pike were burning brightly.
In another March 1969 letter, Phil emphasized the slow gestation of a novel idea within him. His early holographic notes would include minor details on the technology and culture of the SF future world. He would then type up and revise these notes in the order in which they had occurred to hi
m. Character creation was the most difficult step. The male protagonist would be a "composite" of actual persons. Female characters were to be "expertly developed, with many complications, contradictions-in other words, real women." Plot comes last:
I would go so far as to say that I plot in advance only the first chapter or so of the novel, and the further I go into it the more I tend to depend on the inspiration of the moment (which sometimes never arrives, or arrives too late, say after the novel is in print). [...] For me, knowing the characters comes only when I am actually writing the novel; I need to hear them actually speak, actually do things, react, etc. [...] Thus I frequently find myself arriving at a point in the novel where, for example, the notes (and if there is an outline, then the outline) calls for the protagonist to say "Yes," where in fact he, being what he is, would say "No," so "No" he says, and I must go on from there, stuck with the fact that that is the way he is . . . which fouls up the plot-line terribly. But I think a better novel comes out of this. Other writers would not only disagree with me; they would be horrified.
Phil's "inspiration of the moment" approach required a fervor that just wasn't there at this time. Too many people dear to him were dying.
In April 1968, longtime mentor Anthony Boucher died of cancer. Phil would write two essays in tribute to Boucher, and also dedicated Ubik to him. To the end of Phil's life, memories of Boucher lingered. For it was Boucher who had tapped young Phil on the shoulder and told him that he could be a writer. And Boucher's urbanity and intelligence had bolstered Phil at those times in the bleak fifties when it seemed that the SF field was populated exclusively by "trolls and wackos." Then, in September 1969, Bishop Pike died in the Judean desert while in quest of the truth as to the historical Jesus. The Bishop's influence upon Phil had been immense-Pike exemplified the passionate, no-holds-barred quest for ultimate knowledge that fueled Phil's best work. In a later interview, Phil recalled this dual loss: "It was terrible, man, they were croaking like-they were falling around me like World War One, you know, just like in the end of 'All Quiet on the Western Front.'
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 24