Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

by Lawrence Sutin

  In the discussion group "attack-therapy games," X-Kalay residents and staff confronted each other no holds barred. In Phil's case, aside from the obvious drug problem, one issue raised repeatedly was his tropism for dark-haired girls. "It's a moving, incredible experience to feel and see the people here [...] insert themselves between me and the reality I seek out that kills me. They forcibly stop me from doing what I've been doing. `You fucking asshole,' they yell at me. `You dingbat. You like incest? You enjoy screwing your daughter?'

  Phil knew that a "self-destructive drive" lay within him, and was capable, for a time, of enduring extreme abuse (as did all residents) for the sake of coming to grips with it. In the meantime, he developed close friendships within the X-Kalay community. The agony of the young heroin addicts-who seemed to have aged by decades, with bleak pallors and glazed eyes-lingered nightmarishly in Phil's memory.

  But Phil's X-Kalay stay lasted only three weeks; its demands began to grate on him as he recovered from the lost weeks in Vancouver. In an April letter, Phil-who, after all, was not a heroin addict-focused on the limitations of X-Kalay life:

  The problem here, I think, is that there is so much aggression, so much hostility, sadism and general anti-social violence in these people-most of them have served term after term in Canadian federal prisons-that all emotional and physical expressions must be rigidly disciplined out of them during the normal course of the day, and then released verbally in the game [. ..] And, in the game, accusations really pathological in intensity and nature, are unleashed. [... ] They guess every possibility, scent out every twist imaginable. They can only score when you respond with the sort of sniv[e]ling freakout "You've got me" look. [... ] They have not guessed what you are; they have guessed what you fear. [...] He [the X-Kalay resident] is not broken down into nothing and then rebuilt; the new personality is erected on his fantasy worst self.

  Similar criticisms were leveled at Synanon during its heyday in the early seventies. To give X-Kalay (which went out of existence in 1976) its due, it succeeded in making Phil realize the deadly folly of his amphetamine usage. Never again did Phil take speed on a regular basis-this after nearly twenty years of steadily increasing doses.

  During Phil's X-Kalay stay, Professor McNelly at Cal State Fullerton read aloud to his class Phil's letters detailing his desire for a new home. This prompted two female students to write, offering to take Phil in as a roommate; a third, Linda Levy, wrote to offer her friendship. In addition, Professor McNelly suggested that the university library might serve as a repository for those of Phil's papers and SF pulp collections that had survived the break-in.

  Phil was on his way. In mid-April he flew from Canada to Fullerton, near Los Angeles, in the heart of Orange County, California-one of the most stolidly conservative areas in all of America. The airport greeting committee consisted of his two new roommates plus Linda Levy, a dark-haired-girl type, with whom Phil promptly fell in love, and Tim Powers, then a neophyte SF writer in his early twenties, who would remain one of Phil's closest friends. Phil arrived in Sam Spade trench coat with Bible in hand (in hopes of placating the ominous customs officials) and a suitcase tied shut with an extension cord. That first night, as Phil stared at Linda rapturously, they drove to Norman Spinrad's place in the Hollywood Hills and talked over his stay at X-Kalay.

  Phil spent only a short time with his initial two roommates. Life on a living-room couch and high-pitched squabbles over money and household chores led Phil to find a more conventional living arrangement, sharing an apartment with a young man named Joel Stein, with whom Phil enjoyed peaceful relations. Not that melodrama was lacking-Phil carried on wildly over a number of women he had just met, especially Linda. There were no street drugs in the apartment, but there was Dean Swift snuff aplenty. The household ran on a careful budget. They joked, when the money ran low, that they'd have to eat poor old Fred, the rat that lived under the sink (a joke Phil included in Scanner). But in Phil's more somber moods, as Tim Powers writes:

  [...] he was rootless, scared and in hiding. He was kept awake by the quiet sound of cars with ominously powerful engines prowling very slowly down his street in the middle of the night, he noticed two-way radios in parked cars and became alarmed if there was a greater-than-average number of them near his apartment, and he had to buy a fresh copy of the I Ching because his old copy was falling to bits under the stress of all the late nights when he'd be up shaking and throwing the three pennies, asking frightened questions and getting unreassuring answers; something big, something mysterious, had passed by close enough to put him in its shade, and he couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't stop trying to figure out exactly what had happened.

  For his first few months in Fullerton, Phil kept his new address-3028 Quartz Lane-secret from even close Bay Area friends.

  Their apartment-building neighbors included two young women, Mary Wilson and Merry Lou Malone, with whom Phil struck up close friendships. Mary Wilson, like Powers, remained close to Phil for the rest of his life. This social whirl was just the thing for Phil, despite the twenty-year difference between himself and his new friends. He wasn't writing during this period. Simple rest and recuperation was what he needed, and contact with the young was always Phil's preferred mode of casting sorrows and worries aside.

  Not that his age didn't show itself in some respects. Phil was overweight and subject to coughing fits, and he wasn't always up to the pace of college kids. But, broke as he was at the time, Phil's economics did mesh with theirs nicely. Gas was cheap, and they could all go to the beach or for coffee and pie on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Merry Lou, then in her late teens, recalls that Phil "had a lost-puppy quality. But he was also very protective of me, and he was always looking for something new-the answer." Phil seemed always infatuated: "He loved being miserable about women. He was my mother's age, but he seemed younger than me in some ways."

  Phil was attracted to Mary Wilson and even asked her to marry him, but their relationship remained platonic. Phil could turn to her in the midst of days-long depressions. Mary recalls:

  Phil had depressed times, but I would say he was basically happy. He was a moody person, but I wouldn't put up with it. I'd say, "Knock this off or I'm going home," and he would. He fell in and out of love with women a lot. He was on the rebound from any one of us-pick one.

  Phil's one-sided love for Linda Levy was the strongest of all his infatuations during his early months in Fullerton. Her resemblance to Linda Ronstadt, whose looks and singing voice Phil adored (the singer Linda Fox in The Divine Invasion is in part a tribute to Ronstadt), must have contributed to her sway over him. Linda could never reciprocate his serious feelings, and they did not become lovers. Linda saw in Phil a strangely moody man old enough to be her father. But she was also fascinated by Phil's brilliant talk and relished the opportunity to mingle in his SF circles. And she recalls: "I was addicted to Phil's flattery. He was the first person who reinforced the things I hoped were true about myself."

  A glance at Phil's first love letter to Linda, preserved in The Dark Haired Girl, makes her addiction understandable. What rapturous flights! Phil's loved one becomes the Ubik that holds it all together. If something bad happened to Linda,

  My books would become more weird, more tired, more empty. [... ] I'd walk through the side of a building and it'd collapse into dust. Wheels would fall off cars, like in an old W. C. Fields movie. Finally my foot would sink through the sidewalk. Do you see what you mean to us, Linda? Can you dig it? Because if you can't, then I just don't the hell know what I'm going to do. I just can't stand the thought of you sitting somewhere alone with the notion that nobody cares about you. We LOVE you.

  The letter concludes with a proposal of marriage. Phil, who had known Linda only a few days, handed it to her as she was driving them to meet Harlan Ellison and his date for dinner. Linda didn't read it until they were in the restaurant. On the one hand, it was glorious praise. On the other: "It freaked me out-I did not know what to do wi
th myself." Ellison sensed the tension and baited them. An argument ensued. Linda recalls: "Phil scared the shit out of me-he was so intense. He thought I wasn't taking his proposal seriously. Later he said he didn't really want to marry me, he just asked because I'd told him nobody ever had before."

  Phil and Linda's relationship continued on its difficult course for some weeks. Linda enjoyed going out on the town with Phil, who delighted in the company of a beautiful young woman. But Linda's flirtatiousness frustrated Phil, and she teased him by finding things in his beard. In late April the SF Nebula Awards were held in Los Angeles. Phil and Linda decided to visit Linda's family prior to the banquet. Phil fell silent with her mother, then played catch outdoors with her younger sister. In trying to demonstrate a major-league pitching style, he fell to the ground in howling pain, having dislocated the shoulder he had injured in his 1964 auto accident. With his arm in a sling for weeks thereafter, Phil worried over the figure he cut in her company. The couples counseling sessions Phil convinced Linda to attend with him helped little.

  Finally, one night as they were driving, Linda informed Phil that she had made a date with Norman Spinrad. Phil never bore any animosity toward Spinrad, who was unaware of the depth of Phil's feelings. But the news, that night, devastated him. Recalls Linda: "He went into a physical withdrawal, shoulders up, head down in crotch, knees up, didn't speak. I'd never seen anybody do that before-I was ill-equipped to deal with that." To make matters worse, they pulled into a gas station where the attendant was a guy with whom Linda also had an upcoming date. As they drove off, Phil grabbed the wheel with his good arm, swerving them into oncoming traffic. Linda regained control, pulled over, and ordered Phil out. In the shouting match, Phil employed what Linda remembers as "incredibly creative" invective and then began punching her in the face. The blows caused no great physical harm, but they ended the relationship.

  The bitterness lingered. When Tim Powers began dating Linda, Phil's implacable hostility led to a temporary breach of that friendship. Phil and Linda did at last reestablish relations, albeit guardedly. Some weeks later, Phil introduced Linda to a friend (possibly his fifth wife, Tessa) as "the girl I was in love with until she beat me up."

  Phil had always required a woman's love to make the world truly real. His courtship tactic of the past two years-a relentless romantic search-and-self-destroy mission-had left him frustrated and humiliated often enough, but it may also have kept him sane and whole. For the alternative, solitude, was literally unbearable to him. After four failed marriages, Phil had learned lessons aplenty, but none that could dissuade him from trying matrimony again, if only he was given the chance.

  Phil met Tessa Busby at a party in mid-July of 1972. Tessa was eighteen and planned to attend junior college in the fall to study electronics. Shy but intelligent, Tessa had her own writerly ambitions. And, like Phil, she had survived a difficult childhood, which included physical abuse.

  At the party, Tessa accepted a dare (issued by Phil's disinterested date of the evening) to sit on Phil's lap. Tessa writes that Phil "seemed more withdrawn than I was. He had sad, puppy-dog eyes, and seemed to have his tail tucked between his legs, like a dog after a scolding." Each was powerfully drawn to the other, though Phil later confided to Tessa that he had feared she was an agent for the organization behind the November 1971 break-in. His fears could not have been too great, however, for within a week, Phil had rented the apartment next door to serve as their new home.

  Tessa was delighted by the range and sparkle of Phil's talk. "In his own circle, his light shone like the sun." There were no ideas his imagination could not enliven. "Phil entertained me, so long as I kept the coffee and sandwiches coming." Their Quartz Lane apartment became Phil's first true home since Nancy's departure two years earlier. As the arm healed, as domesticity took hold, the writing would flow again.

  There came an early crisis-where else but-at Disneyland? They were on a date, accompanied by friends. Phil ran out of money and asked Tessa for a loan. Low on funds herself, Tessa gave him two of her seven dollars. Phil was humiliated when, later that evening, he couldn't afford to buy a hot chocolate for her. Tessa writes:

  He blamed me for not giving him the five. As soon as I finished my drink, Phil got up and trotted out to the parking lot. I followed him, with the rest of our group close behind.

  When I found Phil, he was sitting on the hood of the car (not his; he had no car). He looked dark. He refused to talk, and glared at me. I sat down beside him. The rest came up and started asking Phil what was wrong. Although I didn't fully understand, I knew enough to tell them to leave him alone. I took his hand and sat there quietly till he stood up.

  That brief, puzzling crisis provided the moment in which we bonded. [...] Instinctively, without any idea what was coming down, I had done the right thing.

  Phil's joy in the relationship is evident in this passage from The Dark-Haired Girl:

  Tess is a little black-haired chick, exactly like I'm not supposed to get involved with (according to X-Kalay), eighteen, who writes (she's sold an article already), pretty and bright, very tomboyish but sexy, small, talks weird, sort of straight, politically uncommitted, rides horses, has never traveled, wants to see Canada. [...] My friends call me "Mr. Domestic." It's cool. The thing that's so great about Tess is that she doesn't lay any trips on me that aren't my own. And yet we're quite close. She's the most empathic person I've ever encountered: wise and gentle, but independent. And tactful.

  But, as Tessa says, "Life with Phil was a roller coaster." There were, for example, the ongoing revelations: Phil was in his forties, not his late thirties; Nancy had been his fourth, not first, wife; a twin sister had died in infancy (this revelation prompted by Phil's shock upon learning that Tessa had almost been named Jane). And on November 17, 1972 (the first anniversary of the break-in), "Phil went bonkers, and made sure every door and window was locked, and would not leave the house, or let me leave."

  There were also Phil's moods. Tessa notes: "One moment he was calm, happy, the next he was frantic. [... ] His mood swings were more like a child's temper tantrums than the wild ravings of a lunatic. He became childlike during manic episodes, and he needed motherly nursing when he was depressed." Phil's agoraphobia often confined him to the house, and even to the bedroom. Comforted by the security of marriage, Phil did manage to resume regular writing efforts. But his daily schedule challenged them both. "He slept very little. He stayed up well past midnight, and insisted that I serve breakfast no later than 7:30 A. M. I had to be asleep by 11:00 in order to get up that early, while Phil would stay up till 2:00 A. M. and even longer. He usually woke up before 6:00 A. M. " Tessa was supportive but did not lack an assertive nature of her own:

  Phil, when he could not convince me by argument, would sometimes stamp his feet, tear open his shirt-buttons flying everywhere-or stomp off and throw himself on the bed. Sometimes he needed to be held, even rocked, and talked to soothingly. He often demanded all his meals in bed. He had to show me everything he wrote, and I had to read it NOW, not a minute from now.

  He had no patience. Often, he would snap his fingers to get my attention; this infuriated me. NOBODY snaps his fingers at me.

  Unfortunately, Phil did more, at times, than snap his fingers. There were episodes of physical violence that left Tessa bruised and emotionally shaken. Linda Levy, herself the victim of an assault by Phil, writes that, early on in the relationship, "Tessa showed up at my apartment one day, covered with bruises, crying and very upset. She described a situation in which, she said, Phil locked the front door, turned up the stereo, turned on the air conditioning, and beat her. She managed to get out after I don't know what period of time, and came to us, she said for help." Linda recommended that Tessa "get out," but this advice was not taken. "Instead," Linda continues, "according to Phil because I never heard anything about this from Tessa, she came home and told him that she had visited us and shared with us her love for him, and we had spontaneously, for some reason, decided to
try and turn her against him. Of course, no mention of her obvious physical condition."

  Now and then Phil and Tessa went out into the world. Together they attended the Los Angeles Worldcon in September 1972; Phil took part in panel discussions on the state of SF. In October, a former girlfriend brought her new boyfriend by-an honest-to-God narc! Phil, already conceiving the plot of Scanner, was both thrilled and terrified by the meeting. The narc, camouflaged by long hair and a flowered shirt, took the four of them for a wild drive and warned that he could bust any of them anytime he wanted. At evening's end he gave Phil his card.

  That same October, Phil and Tessa flew to San Francisco for four days to finalize his divorce from Nancy. Custody of Isa was awarded to Nancy, and, given the geographical distance, Isa's young age, and recurrent tensions between the former spouses, Phil saw little of Isa until the late seventies, a situation that anguished him. Unlike in his dealings with Anne, Phil did make regular child-support payments to Nancy, at the $100-per-month rate specified by the court.